have power to vote or to veto the Budget, but they will have henceforth an opportunity of setting forth their views before the Budget has assumed its final shape.  Members will be able to discuss beforehand any changes in taxation, as well as any new loans or additional grants to local governments, and they will be taken into the confidence of Government with regard to the determination of public expenditure.  No doubt important heads of revenue are still excluded from the purview of the Councils, but members will have the right of placing on record their views in the form of resolutions on all items not specifically excluded from their cognisance, and the Finance Member will be bound to explain the reasons why Government declines to accept any resolution that may have been passed in the first two stages of the Budget.  Much will depend upon the reasonable and practical use which members make of these novel opportunities, for, to quote Mr. Iyengar again, “the progress of constitutional government is not dependent so much upon what is expressly declared to be constitutional rights as upon what is silently built up in the form of constitutional conventions.”

In the great speech in which Lord Morley gave the House of Lords the first outline of his Indian reforms scheme there was one singularly pregnant passage.  “We at any rate,” he said, “have no choice or option.  As an illustrious member of this House once said, we are watching a great and stupendous process, the reconstruction of a decomposed society.  What we found was described as a parallel to Europe in the fifth century, and we have now, as it were, before us in that vast congeries of people we call India, a long, slow march in uneven stages through all the centuries from the fifth to the twentieth.  Stupendous indeed, and to guide that transition with sympathy, political wisdom, and courage, with a sense of humanity, duty, and national honour, may well be called a glorious mission.”  Whether we succeed in that mission must depend largely upon the loyal assistance we receive from those Indians who claim, in virtue of their superior education, to represent this twentieth century.  Lord Morley has fulfilled in no niggardly spirit his pledge to associate the people of India with the Government far more closely than has hitherto been the case in the work of actual day-to-day administration as well as in the more complex problems of legislation.  It rests now with the Indian representatives both in the Executive and Legislative Councils to justify Lord Morley’s expectations by using the new machinery which he has placed in their hands not for purposes of mere destructive criticism and malevolent obstruction, but for intelligent and constructive co-operation with the British rulers of India, to whom alone, whatever may be their shortcomings, India owes it that the spirit of the twentieth century has spread to her shores.

CHAPTER XIV.