Page:A Nation in Making.djvu/249

This page needs to be proofread.
THE REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT IN BENGAL
233

when he said I was to be deported, a considerable body of police and European troops had come up to Barrackpore, though it was explained that this was because the Viceroy, Lord Minto, had come to attend the races. But the Viceroy had often been known to attend races at Barrackpore without such a strong muster of troops or of police.

It is very evident from Lord Morley's Recollections that, radical statesman that he was, his whole soul revolted against the policy of deportation without trial, and that he yielded reluctantly to the pressure of circumstances, and to the weight of superior knowledge which the men on the spot claimed and which he could not dispute. He was so much annoyed with some of the members of the Vice- roy's Executive Council that he wrote to Lord Minto: 'And, by the way, now that we have got down the rusty sword of 1818, I wish you would deport ——— and ——— (two officials); what do you say? I should defend that operation with verve.' This was said half in earnest and half in jest, but it was sufficiently expressive of Lord Morley's sense of irritation and dislike at the deportations. Who these two officials were, the public will probably never know. But officials of this class will never be wanting so long as officialism is not controlled by the popular will. That, in all countries and in all ages, has been found to be the true panacea for official vagaries.

Human nature and human conditions are not materially different in India. The fur-coat argument is the weapon of the reactionary, though it was not a reactionary who coined the phrase, and it must be allowed that, subject to the strictest scrutiny and the limitations that such scrutiny must impose, Lord Morley's sense of fairness led him to suggest safeguards which, I fear, were not always acted upon. Writing to Lord Minto on December 4, 1908, he said: 'One thing I do beseech you to avoid—a single case of investigation in the absence of the accused. We may argue as much as we like about it, and there may be no substantial injustice in it, but it has an ugly, Continental, Austrian, Russian, look about it.'

Quoting this passage from Lord Morley's Recollections in mov- ing my Resolution on the appointment of an Advisory Committee in the Imperial Legislative Council on March 19, 1918, I asked the hon. member-in-charge of the Home Department of the Govern- ment of India if this part of the instructions of Lord Morley were being given effect to in connexion with the investigations relating to prisoners under Regulation III of 1818'. No reply was given; the obvious inference must therefore be that this very necessary