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Reactionary Government and its Consequences

In these memoirs I have not always followed the chronological order in developing the incidents of my life. Taking up a particular chapter, I have sometimes found it more convenient to close it and begin a new one, some of the events related being of prior date. The reduction of the age limit for the Indian Civil Service examination was but a part of a reactionary policy in relation to India that was associated with the administration of Lord Salisbury as Conservative Secretary of State for India. India is said to be beyond the pale of party politics. In the opinion of educated India it is a misfortune that it should be so; for we cannot forget it was because India was a potent factor in determining the issues of party politics that Warren Hastings was impeached, and that for the first time, to quote the language of Lord Morley in his Life of Burke, ‘it was definitely proclaimed that Asiatics had their rights and Europeans their obligation under British rule’. The moral result of that impeachment was a striking gain for India. But since then things have changed, and both Liberals and Conservatives have, from the front benches, uttered the shibboleth that India lies outside party considerations. Sir Henry Fowler, when Secretary of State for India, declared from his place in Parliament that every member of Parliament was a member for India. The sentiment was greeted with cheers, it was palpably so noble and so instinct with the consciousness of duty to an unrepresented dependency. In India, however, it evoked a smile of incredulity. For we all know that what is everybody's business is nobody's business, and each year the truth is painfully impressed upon our minds when we read the accounts of the debates on the Indian Budget in the House of Commons and of the empty benches to which the oratory of the speakers is addressed. Both parties have been scrupulously impartial in their attitude of indifference towards India.