Art. 3.-LORD CHELMSFORD'S VICEROYALTY.

1. A History of the Indian Nationalist Movement. By Sir Verney Lovett, K.C.S.I. Third edition. Murray, 1921. 2. Indian Nationality. By R. N. Gilchrist. With an introduction by Prof. Ramsay Muir. Longmans, 1920. 3. Letters to the People of India on Responsible Government. By Lionel Curtis. Macmillan, 1918.

4. Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms [Cd. 9109]. H.M. Stationery Office, 1918.

5. Report of the Committee appointed to investigate Revolutionary Conspiracies in India. [Cd. 9190]. H.M. Stationery Office, 1919.

6. Report of the Joint Committee of Lords and Commons on the Government of India Bill. H.M. Stationery Office, 1919.

WHEN Lord Chelmsford accepted the Viceroyalty of India in 1916, he had served an apprenticeship to political office in two Australian Governorships, but, beyond that, he was comparatively an unknown man. His period of office as Viceroy has been perhaps the most important and difficult of modern times. It has included a change in the system of British government in India of stupendous importance; the revelation of an anarchical conspiracy, widespread in its ramifications and managed with marvellous skill; a fiscal crisis hotly debated in the British House of Commons; two years of a World-war, an Afghan war, and a war with the tribes on the North-Western frontier; and the worst manifestations of racial feeling since the Mutiny, in the anti-Sedition-Act and Non-Co-operation agitations.*

The first event of political importance after Lord Chelmsford's accession to the Viceroyalty in 1916 was the Memorial on Political Reform signed by nineteen out of twenty-seven elected members of the Imperial Legislative Council, including twelve Hindus, five Mahomedans, and two Parsees. It was a sign of the

* This survey touches only the internal government of India. Owing to want of space, the foreign relations of the Dependency, in which some important changes have been made, have had to be omitted on the present

occasion.

times to see Mahomedan and Hindu signatures appended to the same political document; and the causes which led Mahomedan and Hindu to join forces require a brief explanation.

Previously to 1913, the Mahomedans had followed the advice of Sir Syed Ahmad, the founder of Aligarh College, and had kept aloof from the National Congress, because it merely counted heads, and disapproved of any special representation of Mahomedan minorities. They insisted that the political reforms asked for must be consistent with maintenance of British control, and they were, as a rule, loyal supporters of the British Government. The estrangement of the Mahomedans from the British Government, and their leaning to the Congress views, was first shown in the adoption of self-government as part of the political programme of the All-India Moslem League in 1913. This may be ascribed to two causes : (1) the Repartition Policy, which led them to think that Mahomedan interests were sacrificed, when the province of Eastern Bengal and Assam was reabsorbed in other provinces; (2) the influence of Pan-Islamism. PanIslamism was a doctrine first preached by Sheikh Jamal uddin el Afghani (an Afghan educated at Bokhara), to the effect that Mahomedans all over the world were brothers and should unite in opposition to the influences working against Islam. This idea of Pan-Islamism was developed by the Sultan Abdul Hamid and, after him, by the Committee of Union and Progress, into an appeal to the faithful to rally round the Ottoman Khalif. Under the influence of Pan-Islamism, the All-India Moslem League in 1913 passed a resolution of protest against the policy of Great Britain in leaving Turkey to her fate, after the Balkan wars. Under the same influence, the Indian Mahomedans also denounced the Arabs who, in 1916, under the Sharif of Mecca, now King of the Hedjaz, rebelled against Turkish misrule, as enemies of Islam,

The war with Turkey was undoubtedly a strain upon the loyalty of Indian Mahomedans, but everything possible was done to respect their religious susceptibilities. In October 1914, after the Declaration of War, the then Viceroy issued a proclamation that no special interests of Islam were involved. He referred to the

guarantee by Great Britain, France, and Russia of Turkey's independence and integrity, provided that she remained neutral, and to the promise by the Allies to respect the sanctity of the Holy Places in Arabia and Mesopotamia. The Aga Khan, the spiritual head of the Khoja section of the Shiah Mahomedans, declared that Turkey, by joining Germany in an unrighteous cause, had forfeited her position as the Trustee of Islam. The Khalifat party did not accept this, and wrongly interpreted Mr Lloyd George's pledge not to dismember Turkey as an undertaking to leave Turkey as she was before the war. They insisted that, because the Sultan's religious position, as Khalif and Trustee of Islam, required that his temporal power should remain undiminished, he must be allowed to enter into an entirely unprovoked war with England with impunity. More than this, the Khalifat agitators claimed that the subject races, Arabs, Syrians, Jews, and Armenians, who had rebelled against Turkish misrule and had received a guarantee from the Allies of their independence, should be replaced under Turkish authority, with some shadowy provision for their autonomy. They offered no practicable suggestion how this should be done, whether by war or otherwise, but merely asserted that their religion required it to be done. In one respect this agitation was successful, for the Turks have been left in Constantinople, largely out of deference to the feelings of the Indian Mahomedans.

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The Congress of 1916 was held at Lucknow under the Presidency of Mr Ambika Charan Majumdar, who denounced the Morley-Minto reforms as ' mere shine.' It approved a scheme for the representation of Mahomedan minorities; and the Mahomedans, on their side, formally included Home Rule in their political programme, while both sections united in a Joint Congress-Moslem League scheme of Reform. Their political alliance was thus advertised; and Lord Chelmsford henceforward had to meet a more or less United Congress and Moslem League opposition.

We have now briefly to outline the course of events leading up to Mr Montagu's Declaration of 1917. Mrs Besant's paper 'New India,' first published in 1913,

again brought to the front the idea of Swaraj or Home Rule, which was so prominent in the Anti-Partition agitation in Bengal of 1905-12. What she meant by Home Rule is explained in her own words,

'India asked to be governed by her own men freely elected by herself; to make and break Ministers at her will; to carry arms, to have her own army, her own navy, her own volunteers; to levy her own taxes, to make her own budget; to educate her own sons; in fact to be a Sovereign Nation within her own borders, giving allegiance only to the Imperial Crown.'

On Sept. 3, 1916, Mrs Besant established the Home Rule League to promote the universal adoption of this programme. Owing to the generally seditious tone of her paper, the Madras Government called upon her to find pecuniary security for its better management under the Press Act. She did not mend her ways, so her security was soon forfeited. On depositing the larger sum required for permission to continue New India,' she appealed to the Madras High Court against the first forfeiture, but her appeal was dismissed. On March 7, 1917, the Press Association appealed to Lord Chelmsford to repeal the Press Act. This he refused to do, quoting, in his reply, two articles from New India' as flagrantly mischievous. Mr Justice Ayling, of the Madras High Court, in his judgment in the Besant appeal case, had remarked that these articles seemed to him 'pernicious writing, and writing which must tend to encourage political assassination, by removing the public detestation of such crimes.'

Mrs Besant manifested no disposition to change her defiant attitude, so she, with her co-adjutors, Messrs Arundell and Wadia, were interned, under the Defence of India Act, by order of the Madras Government, July 7, 1917. She did not remain in confinement long, for in September the Viceroy announced that she would be released, on condition of a pledge to abstain from further violent agitation during the war. The Secretary of State had interfered in her favour, and asked the Government of India whether, as circumstances had changed since his Declaration of Aug. 20, she could not be released from internment.

In his speech in February 1921, at the inauguration of the Council of State and the Imperial Legislative Assembly at Delhi, Lord Chelmsford traced the development of British Constitutional Government in India, showing that the events of past and present history could be considered as a coherent whole, and have formed part of a uniform policy of liberalising the structure of government in India. He told his hearers that throughout 1916 and the first half of 1917, he had pressed upon the Home Government the advisability of clearly defining the aim of British policy in India, and the steps to be taken to secure that aim. It was after this action by Lord Chelmsford that the declaration of August 1917 was made; and the Viceroy argued that this declaration was only the most recent and most memorable manifestation of a tendency that has been operative throughout British rule.' It follows from this that the Viceroy is more, and the Secretary of State less, responsible for the Reforms than has generally been supposed.

However this may be, the declaration to which the late Viceroy referred, made in the House of Commons on Aug. 20, 1917, was an epoch-making event. On that day Mr Montagu declared that the future policy of the British Government was to be 'the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the Administration, and the gradual development of self-governing institutions, with a view to the progressive realisation of self-government in India as an integral part of the British Empire.' He declined to consider the demand for Home Rule with a time limit, and continued:

'The British Government and the Government of India, on whom the responsibility lies for the welfare of the Indian people, must be judges of the time and measure of each advance; and they must be guided by the co-operation received from those on whom new opportunities of service will be thus conferred, and by the extent to which it is found that confidence can be reposed in their sense of responsibility.'

At the same time he announced that he would go to India in the winter of 1917-18 to discuss the Reforms with the Viceroy and other persons interested. Mr Montagu arrived in India on Nov. 9, and on the 26th received the Congress and Moslem League Address at