They have the army; they have absolute control of the Government; they can requisition supplies; in a word, they can defy the discontented and timid mob of civilians which is tired of the war.

The Pan-Germans are gradually going berserk; and these are the men with whom the Allies must reckon. They are bad to beat; but if they are not beaten they will pluck victory out of the very article of defeat. Rather than yield they would see Germany bite the dust.

It is a temper which Englishmen can understand and respect, but which to their politicians, whose career depends upon a series of opportune betrayals of principle, is merely incredible. The politicians and their parasites in the Press are still talking of leagues of peace and of international arbitrations and of the suffering people of Germany, at the instigation of the Pan-German Berserkers, who regard their dupes with contemptuous amusement, while they continue to attack their Russian comrades from behind, drop high explosives on London and elsewhere, and to murder crews of merchant ships.

A NAVAL CORRESPONDENT

INDIA

MR. MONTAGU AND HIS MISSION

An impression seems to prevail in Great Britain that Mr. Edwin Montagu, the new Secretary of State for India, is about to figure in some mysterious manner as the liberator of India from British administrative control. This impression is being sedulously fostered by the Radical Press, which pretends-although it knows better that Mr. Montagu proposes to introduce in the Indian Administration wonderful changes which he has evolved out of his own head. Every Brick Lane Bethel in the land is being invited to contemplate Mr. Montagu as a sort of fairy prince who woke up the morning after he was appointed to the India Office and announced his intention of transforming India with one wave of his wand. Very similar influences are at work in India itself. From end to end the country is being flooded with gush about Mr. Montagu, whose forthcoming winter trip to Delhi is being invested with a ridiculous solemnity. These erroneous ideas about Mr. Montagu's projected visit to the Dependency derive additional currency from the attitude of certain English newspapers of quite another colour, which appear to believe that he has already mischievously revolutionized British policy in India off his own bat. It therefore seems necessary to explain why Mr. Montagu is going to India, and what he has been instructed to do there.

Mr. Montagu is not the originator of the proposal to introduce fresh "reforms" into India. That proposal has now been under consideration, in one form and another, for a year or two, and until a few weeks ago Mr. Montagu had no more to do with the matter than the man in the moon. He is an accident, and in the opinion of many people, not a very fortunate accident. At the time the war began a considerable agitation had developed in India in favour of a further extension of the changes in the direction of self-government inaugurated by Lord Morley and Lord Minto. In the first months of the war it was decided to postpone all Indian legislation of a controversial character, and this decision was considered to include questions of constitutional reform. While the Empire was fighting for its existence, there

seemed no prospect of paying serious attention to the possibilities of internal reconstruction in India. The agitation was not dropped, however, although Indian politicians admitted that their claims could not be dealt with until the war was over. Thus Mr. Mazur-ul-Haque, in presiding over the meeting of the Moslem League at Bombay in 1915, said: "Our demands are neither immediate nor peremptory. We can wait and must wait till the end of the war, when the whole Empire will be reconstructed upon new lines; but there is no harm in postulating our demands now.' The view thus expressed still prevails, and all the schemes of reform which Indians are still busily drafting bear the inscription " at the close of the war."

But India wanted, or her spokesmen said she wanted, a sign, something in the nature of a general promise; and because neither the Government of India nor the Home Government offered any sign that they proposed to make fresh concessions to Indian aspirations, feeling in India grew very tense. There has been more political excitement in India during the last eighteen months than at any period in my recollection. Much of the hubbub might have been avoided by a single timely word from those in authority; but the Government of India were silent by direction, and until recently the Cabinet were too engrossed with other matters to give much thought to the problems of Indian reform. While Indian agitators went on beating their tom-toms, officialdom preserved a stony silence which was misinterpreted. Yet behind the scenes the Delhi authorities were by no means unresponsive to the aims of the Indian political associations. The Viceroy (Lord Chelmsford) and his Executive Council worked out a tentative scheme of reforms which I fancy must have reached London months ago. Mr. Austen Chamberlain, then Secretary of State, had been steadily at work upon the same subject, and was believed to have developed some spacious ideas. At a certain stage of these deliberations it was decided that Mr. Chamberlain should go to India this winter, accompanied by a very small committee of eminent men, to hear upon the spot the views of Indians, and also of British administrators in India. Although the invitation to Mr. Chamberlain came from the Viceroy, there can be no doubt that the whole matter had been dealt with by the Cabinet. The Viceroy's invitation had been sent, and Mr. Chamberlain was on the verge of formal acceptance, when the Report of the Mesopotamia Commission was published. Mr. Chamberlain's resignation followed, and Mr. Montagu was appointed to the India Office in his stead.

For some time the Government of India had been privately urging upon the Home Government that some statement of the Cabinet's intentions should be made in order to allay public feeling in India. Lord Chelmsford and his colleagues were being

violently attacked because they gave no definite answer to the representations of Indian politicians. They were not in the least to blame, for their tongues were tied through no fault of their own. Any development of Indian constitutional liberties can only be ordered by Parliament. The first announcement had, therefore, to be made in England, and the initiative lay with the Cabinet. On August 20, a few days after Mr. Montagu assumed office, he made the expected announcement of policy. It was not his policy, and it is fair to him to say that he never made the smallest suggestion that he was its author. He said explicitly that it was the policy of His Majesty's Government," that he was simply acting as the mouthpiece of the Cabinet, and that the Cabinet had decided that he should proceed to India to receive suggestions with a view to the elaboration of its policy. This recital of facts should dispose of the absurd idea that Mr. Montagu has suddenly come to some extraordinary decision on his own account. His statement, which was most carefully worded, and was simultaneously published in India, had obviously been put into his hand. His own share in the matter was perfectly correct and regular, and he said nothing which gave any warranty for the adulations of the Radical Press on the one hand or the implications of ultra-Tory newspapers on the other.

Yet the choice of Mr. Montagu for this somewhat delicate mission cannot be contemplated without misgiving. The deputation which is to accompany him to India consists of the Earl of Donoughmore and Mr. C. Roberts. The original conception of the deputation appears to have been modified. The first idea was that the Secretary of State should be accompanied by two or three men of great eminence who were not prominently identified with any preconceived convictions about Indian questions. This definition can hardly be applied either to Mr. Montagu or to his two colleagues. Lord Donoughmore was a member of the Mesopotamia Commission, which has committed itself to very decided views about the necessity for change in some branches of the Indian Administration. Mr. Roberts was for a short time UnderSecretary for India, and may also be said to have expressed decided views from time to time. As for Mr. Montagu, he declared in the House of Commons on July 12 this year that "the Indian Government is an indefensible system of government." He said that "the Government of India is too wooden, too iron, too inelastic, too antediluvian, to be of any use for the modern purposes we have in view. I do not believe," he went on to observe, that anybody could ever support the Government of India from the point of view of modern requirements." With regard to the India Office (of which he became the head within a week or so), Mr. Montagu told the House of Commons that "the statutory

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organization of the India Office produces an apotheosis of circumlocution and red tape beyond the dreams of any ordinary citizen." Whether these allegations are right or wrong, they do not suggest an open mind. Finally, Mr. Montagu asserted that the whole Indian system" has got to be explored in the light of the Mesopotamian Commission.' For this remark he was instantly reproved by Mr. Chamberlain, who said that "nothing but injury can come to national, Imperial, and Indian interests by mixing up a debate on a military breakdown, or an alleged military mismanagement, with the question of the whole future fabric of Indian government."

Challenged on August 20 by Mr. Hewins regarding this speech, Mr. Montagu replied: That speech was made when I was a private member, and it represented my own views." No doubt the reply was correct, but the speech accounts in great measure for the extraordinary excitement with which Mr. Montagu's advent is awaited in India. This is not all. Mr. Montagu admitted in his speech that when he was Under-Secretary for India he was identified with the attempts to curtail the rightful and necessary authority of the Secretary of State's Council. When he went on to say, quite rightly, that "the independence of the Viceroy from the Secretary of State ought to be much greater," one could only read his words with amazement. Had Daniel come to judgment? Was it not Mr. Montagu who astonished India by maintaining long ago in the House of Commons that the Viceroy was the mere agent of the Secretary of State? The Times of India justly replied to his professed anxiety for the greater independence of the Government of India by remarking:

It was during Mr. Montagu's association with Lord Morley that the financial powers of the Government of India were whittled down to their narrowest limits; it was during this period that the correspondence of the India Office with the Government of India was couched in terms which provoked from one of the members of the Currency Commission the protest that he would not have addressed a clerk of his in such language. It was during the regime of Mr. Montagu's chief, Lord Morley, that the appointment to high military command in India was made which, more than any other single act, was at the root of the deficiencies which hung like a blight over the Mesopotamian Expedition.

The fact is that the appointment of Mr. Montagu, at a moment when it was known that the Secretary of State would have a considerable voice in the shaping of fresh reforms in India, was a mistake. His speech of July 12 ought to have barred him from the range of selection. Mr. Lloyd George, who has never manifested any interest in Indian affairs, sent to the India Office a man who had just said in Parliament that " a bigger opportunity' must be given to Indians " by control, by growing control, of the Executive itself." There were other men available who would have taken a more impartial and a less prejudiced view of India's