Mr. MORLEY: In the same speech the hon. Gentleman made a great charge
against our system of education in India--that we had not educated
them at all; therefore, he excludes at once an enormous part of the
population. The Imperial Duma, as I understood from my hon. friend was
to be subject to the veto of the Viceroy. That is not democracy. We
are to send out from Great Britain once in five years a Viceroy,
who is to be confronted by an Imperial Duma, just as the Tsar is
confronted by the Duma in Russia. Surely that is not a very ripe idea
of democracy. My hon. friend visited the State of Baroda, and thought
it well governed. Well, there is no Duma of his sort there. I will
state frankly my own opinion even though I have not spent one single
week-end in India. If I had to frame a new system of government for
India, I declare I would multiply the Baroda system of government,
rather than have an Imperial Duma and universal suffrage. The speech
of my hon. friend, with whom I am sorry to find myself, not in
collision but in difference, illustrates what is to my mind one of the
grossest of all the fallacies in practical politics--namely, that you
can cut out, frame, and shape one system of government for communities
with absolutely different sets of social, religious, and economic
conditions--that you can cut them all out by a sort of standardised
pattern, and say that what is good for us here, the point of view, the
line of argument, the method of solution--that all these things are to
be applied right off to a community like India. I must tell my hon.
friend that I regard that as a most fatal and mischievous fallacy, and
I need not say more. I am bound, after what I have said, to add that I
do not think that it is at all involved in Liberalism. I have had the
great good fortune and honour and privilege to have known some of the
great Liberals of my time, and there was not one of those great men,
Gambetta, Bright, Gladstone, Mazzini, who would have accepted for one