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they were Swarajists. Better men might have been found, and the interests of the rate-payers and the intentions of the Legislature would have been more faithfully served. I do not, however, despair. One swallow does not make a summer. Democratized Calcutta is a novel institution; and the environments which conduce to the success of democracies have to be gradually created. They are in the making. They will grow, and the abuses of a temporary auto- cracy, equipped, it may be, with the most modern devices, and masquerading as democracy, are bound to be swept away before the irresistible forces, generated by the popular consciousness, which no shams or shows or shibboleths can check or destroy. Democracy has been firmly established in the government of Cal- cutta. It will weather many a storm. It will survive them all. The struggles of its infantile days, beset with the lingering spirit of an expiring autocracy, will strengthen its fibre, and qualify it for its future achievement, which will be the establishment of a civic government in Calcutta, not for the enthronement of a party or a clique, but for the benefit of the people, and worked through the people.

The Calcutta Municipal Bill was passed by the Legislative Council on March 7, 1923. But before its final stages had been reached I had prepared a Bill to amend the Bengal Municipal Act. I introduced it in the Legislative Council on August 16, 1923. In its constitutional features, it was very much in advance of the exis- ting law; and its administrative provisions conferred large powers on the municipalities, subject to the control of the local Govern- ment. Indeed, so far as the controlling sections are concerned, they are less drastic than the powers vested in the Local Government Board under the English Act. The Bill, as I stated in the Legislative Council, is a progressive but not a revolutionary measure. We build upon the old foundations, but we broaden and still further liberalize them. The percentage of clected members is raised from two-thirds, which is the present law, to three-fourths, and in some cases to four-fifths, of the entire body of municipal commissioners. The system of nominated chairmen or of wholly nominated com- missioners is done away with, except in the case of municipalities in the industrial centres, and, even as regards them, where there is a population, in any fringe area, unconnected with the industries, they would have a constituency of their own to elect their own representatives.

The whole policy of the Bill is to invest the municipal commis-