The experiment can only succeed if it secures the steadfast and hearty extension to new purposes of the co-operation between British and Indians to which the British connection with India has owed from the very beginning, as I have tried to show, its chief strength and its best results.  One may feel confident that amongst the British in India there will be few to deny their co-operation, though scepticism and prejudice may die hard and social relations may prove even harder to harmonise than political relations.  The new Constitution was inaugurated under Lord Chelmsford’s Viceroyalty.  If he perhaps failed, especially at certain gravely critical moments, to rise above a somewhat narrow and unimaginative conception of his functions as the supreme depositary of British authority in India, and was too apt to regard himself always as merely primus inter pares in a governing body, peculiarly liable from its constitution to hesitate and procrastinate even in emergencies requiring prompt decision, Lord Chelmsford was as upright, honourable, and courageous an English gentleman as this country has ever sent out as Viceroy, and India will always gratefully associate his name with the reforms which have opened up a new era in her history.  His place has now been taken by another Viceroy, Lord Reading, whose appointment at a time when so many Indians were smarting under a deep sense of injustice has been all the more heartily welcomed as, apart from many other qualifications, he went out to India with the special prestige of a great justiciary who had exchanged for the Viceroyalty the exalted post of Lord Chief Justice of England.  Lord Reading’s own liberalism is a sufficient guarantee that he will apply himself with all his approved ability to the carrying out of the new reforms.  But, if anything more had been needed, the revised Instrument of Instructions under Royal Sign Manual which he took out with him for his guidance prescribed both for the Government of India and for the Provincial Governments the utmost restraint, “unless grave reason to the contrary appears,” in any exercise of the emergency powers still vested in them in opposition to the policy and wishes of the Indian representative assemblies.  “For, above all things,” His Majesty concluded, “it is Our will and pleasure that the plans laid by Our Parliament for the progressive realisation of responsible government in British India may come to fruition, to the end that British India may attain its due place among Our Dominions.”

That in carrying out those instructions Lord Reading will be able to rely on the full support of the British members of his own Executive Council and of the Provincial Governments the most practical proof has been already given in the wise and conciliatory attitude displayed by them during the first session of the new Legislatures in Delhi and in the Provinces, in marked contrast to the sense of impregnable authority too often made manifest when autocratic power was still entrenched