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In the dark days of the Indian Mutiny, when the British Empire in India was really exposed to serious danger, Lord Canning and his advisers did not think it necessary to disarm the Indian population. The Afghan War in Lord Lytton’s time (which, by the way, was a grievous blunder, the whole policy that dictated it having been undone) caused no serious excitement in India, none at any rate among the Hindu population, and little, or hardly any, among the Mohamedans, except perhaps on the frontiers. The Arms Act was unnecessary in the sense that it was not required as a measure of protection against internal revolt; it was mischievous because it made an irritating and invidious distinction between Europeans and Indians, a distinction that has recently been done away with. It. inaugurated a policy of mistrust and suspicion, utterly undeserved and strongly resented by our people, and it imposed upon us a badge of racial inferiority. We protested against it at the time. We appealed to Mr. Gladstone, and he supported our protest and condemned it and the Vernacular Press Act in his speeches in the Midlothian campaign; but, unhappily, when he became Prime Minister he did us only partial justice—he repealed the Vernacular Press Act, but the Arms Act he left untouched.

The Vernacular Press Act was passed at one and the same sitting of the Imperial Legislative Council in April, 1878. The measure was deemed to be so urgent that the country was not given time to discuss it. The rules of business of the Council were suspended, and it was passed on the very day that it was introduced. In times of excitement bureaucracy is sometimes apt to avoid discussion in the belief that publicity would be fatal to its pre-ordained policy, and that a measure, once passed into law, and embodied in an administrative arrangement, would be regarded as a settled fact, never to be unsettled. Recent events have dissipated the delusion; and our present-day officials have in a variety of ways shown that they have a better conception of the potency of public opinion. The Vernacular Press Act itself has been repealed; the Partition of Bengal, the most settled of settled facts, has been unsettled. When an unpopular measure is passed, the public for the moment submit as to the stroke of an inevitable fate. They bide their time; they gather their forces; they renew the attack, and the idols of the bureaucracy are swept away from their places of worship, and remain only as enduring monuments of administrative unwisdom and the waste of administrative energy and resource.