sanctions our considering a tribunal quite unprejudiced which sits upon the administration of which they were themselves a distinguished part.
And may one not go even further and ask if the Council scarcely represents more than the dominant party or views among Indian officials; for naturally those who coincide with that party, or adopt those views, are likely to attain such high position in India as will give them the chance of selection for the Council in England?
We have seen such great men, and men of such different cast of greatness, sitting on the Indian Council, that this question might well be answered in the negative, were it not that every year our position in India is changing. We have ourselves worked great changes, unexpected to ourselves. The undercurrent of feeling or opinion among the natives scarcely finds its way to England—nor even the great bulk of the facts which the comparatively unknown English officials might tell us.
But, however this may be, when the successful official dies he goes to Westminster. When there, he can hardly be regarded as an unprejudiced and disinterested judge to sit in appeal on the measures which he himself initiated, and on the men whom he himself placed in authority. It is almost impossible for the Secretary of State, unacquainted with technical details, to hold his own against their Indian 'experience' and knowledge of official technicalities.
The India Office cannot rightly, in accordance with English ideas, sit upon itself. These truly great Indian proconsuls and Indian officials who now sit in England, under whom the present system has grown up, who are responsible for the present official routine, the status quo, are hardly constituted by English polity, it is said, to sit in judgment upon their own work, excellent as it is. [The more excellent the work the less they must desire it.] They are said to give a sort of piecemeal judgment, as it were, from day to day, upon the system they have created or grown up in.
Yet is this not the only audit? Does a company appoint its manager, however great and well deserved the confidence reposed in him, to audit his own accounts? Yet the largest company's affairs are a mere toy compared with these over which the Government of India presides. These are the affairs of 200 millions of people—a fifth of the human race. And there is no representation, and scarcely can there be at present; nor yet hardly any public opinion or publicity. Far less, to use a yet more homely simile, would an English proprietor ask his coachman or his gardener what stable or garden retrenchments should be made. Yet there seems no ultimate court of appeal to decide this stupendous question of retrenchments, concerning not hundreds or thousands, but millions of pounds sterling a year.
Ought such an independent account-taking to be?
