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THE REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT IN BENGAL
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movement taught him its own lessons. The people are never inter- ested in revolutions or in movements that are a menace to the public peace. Their whole soul is bound up with law and order. The conclusion was therefore forced upon him that everything was not right in India, that there was something rotten in the State of Denmark, and that there must be conditions in the constitution of the Government and in the administration of the country to account for the development of the revolutionary forces. It was, I believe, acting under this conviction, that Lord Morley set himself to the task of constitutional reforms which would make the Government more acceptable to the leaders of the Indian people.

No matter from whom the Reforms emanated, they found in him a warm champion, insistent in carrying them through, and reminding Lord Minto that they should not be delayed. The zeal of the philosopher-statesman was apparent in his letters to Lord Minto, who, let it be said to his credit, responded with readiness and alacrity to the instructions of his chief. The idea of having an Indian member for the Viceroy's Executive Council, and for the Provincial Executive Councils, and that of the appointment of Indian members to the India Council in London were Lord Morley's own. Friends of India like Ripon shook their heads; and even so sympathetic a sovereign as King Edward was doubtful about an experiment so novel, and so opposed to deep-rooted and tradi- tional official ideas. But Lord Morley was nothing if not strong in his statesmanship, and he never showed this quality of strength more strikingly than in connexion with the Reforms, and his stern attitude in opposing Lord Kitchener as Viceroy of India, a proposal which had ever the support of the King.

The reform measures, known as the Morley-Minto Scheme, were welcomed as a small advance. Nobody in India was under the delusion that they meant very much. Their most important feature was perhaps the power given to non-official members to move resolutions on public questions, thus affording them an opportunity of criticizing the measures and policy of the Govern- ment, though without exercising any real control over them. Lord Morley was careful to tell the House of Lords that he was not inaugurating parliamentary institutions in any sense, though he must have realized from what small beginnings parliamentary insti- tutions had their genesis in that great country which was the mother of all Parliaments.

A deputation waited upon the Viceroy for the boon, such as it