Obrázky na stránke
PDF
ePub

controversy, to skip the cen- absolute. He made no secret turies and to go back for guid- of his qualities either to himance to the immortal Boling- self or others. It was wholly broke. And 80 he made impossible for him to do or say enemies with his bitter tongue anything unconsciously. If he and his quick intellect, and seemed a mystery, as he hoped, his enemies found no retort it was because a triple brass more ready to their hand of self-consciousness involved than the taunts of inconsistency him: never was he taken off and adventure. his guard; seldom did he descend to the natural or expected deed or word. But for all that he was, as we have said, a model of sincerity. Not merely was he consistent with himself; he was consistent with his works, whose irony and cynicism were part of his own nature. His devotion to his family, his talent for friendship

However, at last Disraeli is coming into his kingdom. The man who neither "complained nor explained" is better understood to-day than ever he was. To justify Disraeli's conduct, to appreciate his genius, nothing is necessary save knowledge, and with Mr Monypenny's help an end will be put for ever to the injurious legends which have gathered about his name. That he was an honourable gentleman, in spite of the web of debt in which he was caught while still a boy, we have always believed. It is now certain. The pose, which exasperated the foolish, was the pose of perfect sincerity. Disraeli fashioned himself, as he thought he should be fashioned, with the same detachment wherewith he fashioned his works of literary art. His candour was

what man ever had stauncher friends. than D'Orsay and Lyndhurst ?-are another eloquent tribute to his character. Such was the man who, confident in his own gifts, entered Parliament in 1837 as member for Maidstone. Thus far has Mr Monypenny brought Disraeli, and we look forward with interest to the later volumes, which will show the statesman, amid the clash of parties, in what he himself was wont to call the Senate.

THE INDIAN COUNCILS AT WORK.

"COMMENT se porte l'enfant qui vous a tant donné beaucoup de peine, Madame la Constitution veux je dire?" That is the question put to a friend in India by a witty and accomplished Frenchwoman, who has travelled much in the East and written admirably on its problems. The mere fact that such a question should be asked is itself of interest. For one thing, it shows how, in the judgment of an acute observer, Lord Morley has given India a Constitution built perhaps more durably than the world suspects. For another, it suggests that Continental thinkers, who have long been occupied with India's past, have now turned their attention to her future, and are watching with critical eyes the use that her educated

make of the large privileges that have been conferred upon them. This is significant and welcome. For foreign critics are familiar with administrative methods closely resembling those that prevail in India, and thus approach Indian questions with a more open mind than English politicians, for whom the very name of bureaucracy conjures up a host of unconscious prejudices. They have also grasped the truth, at present realised by few Englishmen, that the Indian questions of to-day are the world-questions of to-morrow, and that all

nations whose interests may be affected by the awakening of the East will do well to study the series of objectlessons presented by British rule in India.

Let us glance briefly, by way of introduction, at the stages by which the Indian Legislative Councils have reached their present development. So long as the merchant adventurers of the East India Company confined themselves to commercial objects, they were content that such law as they needed should be dealt out to them by the crude but characteristic process of applying English common and statute law to the Presidency towns of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. But in 1771, when the Directors determined "to stand forth as Diwan" and assume the civil government of Bengal, Behar, and Orissa, a wider sphere of power and responsibility was at once opened up. With the birth of an empire the necessity for comprehensive legislation arose, and ten years later the era of "regulations began. These were framed, as occasion required, by the executive governments of the three Presidencies. In point of wording and arrangement they are calculated to make the scientific draftsman, with his neat equipment of stereotyped phrases, stare and gasp. But their stately preambles are full of practical wisdom, and

[ocr errors]

have a flavour of reality that is not always found in a modern "statement of objects and reasons." In 1833, when the Company's charter was renewed, five distinct bodies of law were found to be in force in India - two sets of English Acts and three of Indian Regulations. In order to simplify matters, the Councils of the minor Presidencies were deprived of their lawmaking powers, and a Legislative Council was formed by adding to the GovernorGeneral's Council a fourth member, Macaulay, who was concerned solely with legislation and had nothing to do with executive business. In 1853 this fourth member was given the right to sit and vote at executive meetings, and six purely legislative members were added, so that the Council when assembled for legislative purposes consisted of twelve members, all of whom were officials: the Governor-General, the Commander-in-Chief, the four ordinary members (three executive and one legal), the Chief Justice and one Puisne Judge of the Supreme Court, and four representative members, each with £5000 a-year, from Bengal, Madras, Bombay, and the North-Western Provinces. Ushered in by an elaborate minute from the prolific pen of Lord Dalhousie, and equipped with a sumptuous apparatus of "standing orders," this Council started life on the 20th May 1854 with all the solemnity that the occasion might seem to demand. Unhappily its composition was

such as to give full play to the antagonism, not yet wholly extinct, between the judicial and executive authorities, and between the minor Presidencies of Madras and Bombay and the Government of India. The elements of an opposition were thus present from the first; and the standing orders were so framed as to enable them to develop a very pretty talent for meddling with matters which did not concern them, and for displaying, in Sir Courtenay Ilbert's decorous language, "an inconvenient degree of independence by asking questions as to, and discussing the propriety of, measures of the executive government." These tempests in old Calcutta teapots have long since been dead and forgotten, and no reasonable being would care to recall them, were it not that they serve to justify and elucidate Lord Curzon's witty description of the debates of his own Council as script eloquence"-a paradoxical epigram aimed at practice of sitting down to read instead of standing up to speak. Often have weary souls sweating out a Budget debate in the reeking heat of the last days of March wondered, in the intervals of slumber, how such an incongruous practice ever came to be adopted traditional explanation is that, some fifty years ago, Sir Barnes Peacock, then Chief Justice of Bengal, wound up an impassioned speech on certain grants to the descendants of Tippoo Sahib with the time-honoured peroration, "Fiat justitia ruat coelum," and emphasised the

"manu

The

[ocr errors][merged small]

80

parvus non humilis; the member of the executive government whose deeds he was denouncing was sitting on his right; and it may well have happened that the gesture of appeal to Heaven, which the sentiment demanded, culminated somewhere in the neighbourhood of Sir Bartle Frere's nose. However this may be, it is certain that the barrister members of the Council plagued their civilian colleagues sorely with floods of forensic eloquence that in 1861, when the Council was enlarged, the members were expressly forbidden to stand up, and were required to speak in regular order, juniors first. At the same time, Lord Dalhousie's rule against the reading of speeches was cancelled, and members were left to follow their own convenience in the matter. It is a familiar experience that a sitting posture is not conducive to sustained eloquence, and the practice of the present House of Commons affords evidence that written speeches are grateful and com

forting to those who make them, if not to those who listen to them. Accordingly, most of the speeches in the Imperial Council, from 1862 down to the other day, were not only written, but even printed beforehand, so that the proceedings resembled those of a society for the reading of essays. Moreover, as the order of speaking was fixed, the members who had to speak first used to send advance copies of their speeches to those that came after. The custom was courteous and convenient, but hardly stimulating, and any casual departure from it was apt to produce a deplorable hiatus in the debate.

No one who was in India in December 1903 can have forgotten the sensation caused by Mr Gokhale when he delivered a slashing attack on the Official Secrets Bill without sending a copy of his speech to the member in charge of the measure, and, worse still, without giving notice that he intended to speak at all on the second reading. Lord Curzon was away on tour in Eastern Bengal, and the unhappy Mr (now Sir A.) Arundel was caught napping, and could only bleat out plaintively: "If I had been aware of the intention of the honourable members who have spoken to address the Council at this stage, and had been favoured with the remarks they proposed to offer, I should have been in a better position to comment, as I should have been glad to do, on the arguments they have brought

forward against the Bill." Governor-General to establish

Imagine Mr Lloyd George explaining to the House of Commons on the second reading of the Finance Bill that, as Mr Balfour had not "favoured him with the remarks he proposed to offer," he was not in a position to comment on the arguments brought forward by the Opposition! When Lord Curzon came back he disposed of Mr Gokhale; but that was a fortnight later, and meanwhile the clubs and the newspapers made fun of the unreadiness of officials in debate. Yet only a quarter of a mile from the chamber where "manuscript eloquence" has resounded for nearly fifty years, there sits the Legislative Council of Bengal, in which, ever since its creation in 1862, the reading of speeches has been forbidden. Here officials have met in debate the very best Indian speakers, from Kristo Das Pal to Surendranath Banerjee, and have not come off second best in the encounter.

To return to our Constitution. By the Indian Councils Act of 1861, the GovernorGeneral's Council was expanded by attaching to it for legislative purposes not less than six

nor

more than twelve additional members, nominated for two years. The full strength of the Council was thus raised from twelve to eighteen. The Act also reinforced the Councils of Madras and Bombay by additional members and restored to them the power of legislation that had been taken away in 1833; it directed the

by proclamation a Legislative Council for Bengal, and empowered him to constitute similar Councils for the NorthWestern Provinces and for the Punjab. The power of nomination was exercised with great care, usually in consultation with the leaders of various classes and interests, and the published debates bear witness to the independence and representative character of the nonofficial members selected in this manner.

The Councils thus constituted lasted for thirty years, when they were still further expanded under the Indian Councils Act of 1892. In its earliest form, as introduced in the House of Lords on 21st February 1890, this measure proposed (1) to authorise the discussion of the Budget independently of legislation; (2) to confer the right of asking questions; (3) to take power to increase the number of additional members by means of nomination. In the debate on the second reading, Lord Northbrook and Lord Ripon pleaded for the recognition of election, mentioning provincial councils, municipalities, district boards, and public associations as possible constituencies; and in Committee the former procured the insertion of what was known as the Northbrook clause, empowering the Government of India, with the approval of the Secretary of State, "to make regulations as to the conditions under which members should be nominated by the

[ocr errors]
« PredošláPokračovať »