complicated administrative machine in the world.  Even when he has gone out to India, his opportunities of getting to know the country and its peoples are actually very scant.  He spends more than six months of the year at Simla, an essentially European and ultra-official hill-station perched up in the clouds and entirely out of touch with Indian life, and another four months he spends in Calcutta, which, again, is only partially Indian, or, at any rate, presents but one aspect of the many-sided life of India.  It takes a month for the great public departments to transport themselves and their archives from Calcutta to Simla at the beginning of the hot weather, and another month in the autumn for the pilgrimage back from the hills to Calcutta.  It is only during these two months that the Viceroy can travel about freely and make himself acquainted with other parts of the vast Dependency committed to his care, and, though railways have shortened distances, rapid journeys in special trains with great ceremonial programmes at every halting point scarcely afford the same opportunities as the more leisurely progress of olden days, when the Governor-General’s camp, as it moved from place to place, was open to visitors from the whole surrounding country.  Moreover, the machinery of administration grows every year more ponderous and complicated, and the Viceroy, unless he is endowed with an almost superhuman power and quickness of work, is apt to find himself entangled in the meshes of never-ending routine.  It is in order to supply the knowledge and experience which a Viceroy in most cases lacks when he first goes out, and in some cases is never able to acquire during his whole tenure of office, that his Executive Council is so constituted, in theory and as far as possible in practice, that it combines with administrative experience in the several Departments over which members respectively preside such a knowledge collectively of the whole of India that the Viceroy can rely upon expert advice and assistance in the transaction of public business and, not least, in applying with due regard for Indian conditions the principles of policy laid down for his guidance by the Home Government.  These were the grounds upon which Lord Morley justified the appointment to the Viceroy’s Executive Council of an Indian member who, besides being thoroughly qualified to take charge of the special portfolio entrusted to him, would bring into Council a special and intimate knowledge of native opinion and sentiment.  These are the grounds upon which, by the way, Lord Morley cannot possibly justify the appointment of Mr. Clark as Member for Commerce and Industry, for a young subordinate official, however brilliant, of an English public Department cannot bring into the Viceroy’s Executive Council either special or general knowledge of Indian affairs.  Such an appointment must to that extent weaken rather than strengthen the Government of India.

The same arguments which apply in India to the conjunction of the Governor-General with his Council apply, mutatis mutandis, with scarcely less force to the importance of the part assigned to the Council of India as advisers of the Secretary of State at the India Office.