to follow from the more vigilant and intelligent interest which Parliament is exhorted to take in Indian affairs. The House of Commons is asked to appoint in future, at the beginning of each session, a select committee before which the Secretary of State for India would himself appear to answer questions and give information. Moreover, it is to Parliament that the Report would again commit the same sort of task which it used to perform in the days of the East India Company before every renewal of the Charter. It suggests that a Parliamentary Commission of Enquiry into the working of the new Indian institutions, and the general progress of the people of India, shall at stated intervals determine the further stages of advance towards the final goal of self-government. To prepare Parliament for the discharge of such responsible duties it is clearly desirable that, so soon as the Government Bill has been drafted to give effect to the recommendations of the Report, a Committee of both Houses shall be appointed to consider it. Such a Committee, armed with power to examine witnesses, would be able to probe both Indian and British public opinion in a much more searching way than can be done by impassioned and irresponsible arguments and counter-arguments in the Press and on platforms; and it would at the same time materially assist Parliament to master from the outset the many-sided problem whose progressive solution it will have constantly to watch and periodically to determine.

A Report of such magnitude and complexity must offer room for varied criticism, which, so long as the fundamental principles laid down in the declaration of Aug. 20, 1917, are frankly accepted, is quite compatible with a hearty recognition of the generous statesmanship and resourceful ingenuity displayed by its authors. They may already feel themselves in no small measure justified by the effect they have produced in India. In a significant passage of the Report, they insist that

'now that His Majesty's Government have declared their policy, reasonable men have something which they can oppose successfully to the excitement created by attacks on Government and by abuse of Englishmen, coupled with glowing and inaccurate accounts of India's golden past and

appeals to race-hatred in the name of religion. Many prominent Indians dislike and fear such methods. A new opportunity is now being offered to combat them, and we expect them to take it.'

Those expectations are already being fulfilled. The Home Rule rump of the Indian National Congress and Moslem League, whose resolutions the Report has subjected to courteous but merciless criticism and emphatically rejected, may still prefer to listen to such a fanatical Egeria as Mrs Besant, whose strange evolution is ruthlessly exposed by the leader of the Madras non-Brahmins in a volume published apparently with impunity under her very nose. They may also disregard the grave strictures unanimously passed upon Mr Tilak's political career by a semi-judicial Committee composed of eminent Indians and Europeans presided over by a Judge of the Court of King's Bench, Mr Justice Rowlatt, specially sent out to India. But the bulk of the Indian Moderates have openly taken their stand against Extremism by holding a Conference of their own, free from such compromising associations, and have testified thereby to their belief that, as Mr Vyasa Rao tersely puts it, 'to become self-governing, it is India that needs England indispensably.' In our own country, where, under the pressure of war preoccupations, changing conditions in far-distant India had attracted very scanty attention, the Report has also been, on the whole, well received by moderate men of all parties. It is only the rigid conservatives, representing the opposite pole to that of Indian extremism, who deny not only the expediency but the possibility of any policy directed towards Indian self-government, and deride the faith which has inspired both the Declaration of Aug. 20 and the scheme propounded in the Report. They might be invited to ponder the words written nearly a century ago by Sir Thomas Munro, one of the ablest and most far-sighted British administrators that India has ever known.

'What is to be the final result of our arrangements on the character of the people? Is it to be raised or to be lowered? Are we to be satisfied with merely securing our power and protecting the inhabitants? Or are we to endeavour to elevate their character and to render them worthy of filling higher stations in the management of their

country and devising plans for its improvement? . . . We should look on India not as a temporary possession, but as one which is to be maintained permanently, until the natives shall in some future age have abandoned most of their superstitious prejudices and become sufficiently enlightened to frame a regular government for themselves and to conduct and preserve it. Whenever such a time shall arrive, it will probably be best for both countries that British control over India should be gradually withdrawn.'

Sir Thomas Munro did not live to see the Government of India Act of 1833. But it was his ideas that bore fruit in that first great endeavour to formulate the principles of British rule on lines which, but for the catastrophe of the Mutiny, would have probably brought India by this time much nearer than she is at present to the goal that has once more been set definitely and deliberately before her. It cannot be contended that another century of British rule has rendered the task contemplated by Sir Thomas Munro impossible for us to achieve. The conditions have changed. The habits of government have become more set. Education has bred greater impatience of them among influential classes of Indians. On the other hand, the majority of Indians have acquired a reasoned faith in the permanence of the destiny which has bound India and Britain together. We on our side have learnt by experience that within the British Empire there is room for many nations to enjoy the largest possible measure of self-government without impairing its essential unity. Have we, in the light of what India has done for the Empire during the war, the right to go on assuming that she alone is incapable of self-government? That she is capable of it to-day, only Indians blinded by racial pride and hatred venture to assert. The majority are content to demand that she should be steadily trained to it, and as rapidly as possible. The Montagu-Chelmsford Report contains a carefully thoughtout scheme for initiating her training to it, and for a gradual quickening of her progress within the limits of prudence and safety. That scheme may undergo amendment in a good many details, but, taken as a whole, and failing some substitute which is not at present in sight, it holds and must hold the field.

VALENTINE CHIROL.

Art. 9.-IS INDIA A NATION?

1. General Report of the Census of India, 1911.

2. Royal Commission on the Public Services in India: Report of the Commissioners, 1917.

3. Indian Speeches, 1907-1909.

Macmillan, 1909.

By Viscount Morley.

4. Indian Nationalism. By E. Bevan. Macmillan, 1914. 5. India and the Future. By W. Archer. Hutchinson, 1917. 6. Nationalism. By Sir R. Tagore. Macmillan, 1917.

It is more than thirty years since Sir John Seeley in his 'Expansion of England' told us that if there could arise in India a nationality movement similar to that which we witnessed in Italy,' British rule in India would come to an end; and he went so far as to say that all desire for its continuance ought also to be given up. The question that many persons are asking to-day is, whether the agitation that recently has caused so much excitement in India amounts to a movement of the kind that Prof. Seeley indicated. Many who are in entire sympathy with the principle recently enunciated anew by Mr William Archer,* that British rule is 'a means, not an end'-a means, namely, whereby the people of India are being trained to govern themselves-will nevertheless deny emphatically that the demand for Home Rule is to be regarded as proving that a real spirit of Indian nationality has sprung into being.

If it be the fashion (as Mr Archer says) to preface all accounts of India with the statement that it is not one country but a "sub-continent," and to enlarge upon the diversities of race and language contained within its boundaries,'t there are good reasons for this; among others, it is a method of representing the difficulty of the task that any one undertakes when he endeavours to form a judgment on a question affecting all India. India has a perfectly obvious unity; though many countries are packed into it, it is conspicuously a geographical unit'; it is also at present a political unit under the British raj; but, when so much has been said, its claim to unity is exhausted. Not that a further and

*

'India and the Future,' passim.

† Op. cit., p. 40.

more organic unity is entirely absent; we are giving India what she never had before-unity, cohesion, in a word, nationality,' says Mr Archer again; but as yet it is only a feeble growth. The following examination of the returns given in the Census Report, 1911, will show that, if the essential diversities are less than they are sometimes represented to be, they are still great enough to present formidable, though not insuperable, barriers to the creation of a nationalism representative of the whole of India.

To begin with language-it is very necessary to recall how great is its diversity, for, when the Census was taken in 1911, it was found that many educated Hindus were led by political considerations to belittle the great differences which actually exist between the different parts of the Empire; and it is sometimes alleged that there is only one language spoken throughout northern India.'* One is indeed at first staggered when confronted by the statement that the vernaculars of India number 220. But an analysis of the returns shows that the great majority of these 'languages' (many of them may be more properly called dialects) have very few speakers in proportion to the total population; and we find only fourteen languages that are spoken by at least five millions each, or in the aggregate by 283 millions. Of the remaining 206 languages, no less than 186 are divided among a total of sixteen millions, while twenty are divided among sixteen millions more.

There are of course in India, as in Europe, a great many persons who speak two or more languages, but here account is taken only of the mother-tongue, the language which each person ordinarily uses in his own home.' If the number fourteen appears less sensational than the 220 with which we set out, the smaller number is still large enough to present a serious hindrance to that freedom of intelligent communication between the various sections of the population using them which would tend to secure some approach to unity of opinion and aspiration.

Without going into the question too minutely, it may be stated roughly that nine of the fourteen languages

* Census Report, p. 320.