SECOND READING. (Hansard, 18 February 1870)

MR. GRANT DUFF

said, that the Bill which he was going to ask the House to read a second time was in its main features an old friend, for it made considerable progress both under the late and the present Government, and it was only stopped by want of time, both in the Session of 1868 and last year. It appeared now in a somewhat modified form, because the Government wished, as far as possible, to meet the views of various hon. Members interested in India, who had communicated with his noble Friend the Secretary of State and with himself about it; and the Government were now extremely anxious that if it were the will of Parliament, it might become law as quickly as possible, because they were being very much pressed from India to have it passed as soon as they could. Its principal objects were four in number—First, to effect a better distribution of business between the Legislative and the Executive Councils of the Governor General; secondly, to raise in an important particular the position of the high officers known as Chief Commissioners; thirdly, to give Parliamentary sanction to a procedure in the Executive Council which had long been customary, but had never been actually prescribed; fourthly, to afford facilities for the admission of native Indian subjects of Her Majesty to posts in their own country which had hitherto been closed to them. The first of these objects was carried out by Clauses 1 and 2, and in order to make their drift intelligible but few words of explanation were necessary. The Governor General 557 was ex officio President of two bodies—first, the Supreme Council, which consisted of himself and six other members, all chosen, like himself, for the express purpose of governing, or assisting to govern, the Indian Empire; and, secondly, a body consisting of this same supreme governing or executive Council, plus not fewer than six nor more than twelve additional members, nominated by the Governor General, for the purpose of constituting his Council for the making of laws and regulations, and commonly known as the Legislative Council of India. This last body was called into existence by Parliament in the year 1861. Its primary object was to enact laws of a general character for the whole of India, and its members were chosen, and are chosen, chiefly for the purpose of bringing as many cross lights of experience as possible to bear upon the great general questions of legislation which affect the whole of India; to take care, for example, that when a Bill is being considered relating to one of the great heads of law, there might be some persons to say, "Such and such provisions which are proposed will not precisely suit the case of this or that great province, or this or that great interest." This, he said, was the primary object of adding to the Executive Council when sitting for the purpose of making laws and regulations from six to twelve nominees of the Governor General, and this primary object had been, on the whole, extremely well fulfilled. They had every reason to be satisfied with the success of this part of the experiment of 1861. Parliament, however, while providing for the general legislation of India, was not unmindful that a great deal of local legislation would be wanted for the various provinces of India; and so it established in Madras and Bombay local Legislative Councils for those Presidencies, formed after the model of the Governor General's Legislative Council, and it enabled the Governor General to call into existence local Legislative Councils for the great provinces of Bengal, of the North-West, and of the Punjaub. The Governor General acted on this authority, and did call into existence a local Legislative Council for Bengal, but no Governor General had yet seen his way to call into existence local Legislative Councils for the North-West Provinces or for the Punjaub. The 558 materials, in fact, for such Councils did not yet exist, and Parliament never gave him power to create local Legislative Councils for Oudh, for the Central Provinces, or for Burmah. One of the consequences of the non-existence of local Legislative Councils for any one of the eight provinces, except Madras, Bombay, and Bengal, was that the unhappy Legislative Council of the Governor General had thrown upon its shoulders, in addition to its own proper work, the whole of the local legislation of five out of the eight provinces of India. Perhaps he could make the state of affairs most intelligible by an illustration taken from Europe. The position of the Legislative Council of the Governor General was very much this—Imagine a largo Select Committee of this House sitting-half the year at Dantzic and the other half of the year at the Baths of Lucca, and charged in addition to all its other work—that work being, so far as its principal members were concerned about as hard as the ordinary work of Cabinet Ministers in this country—primarily with the duty of making general laws for the whole of Europe except Russia, and secondarily with the duty of doing the whole of the local legislation required for the following countries:—First, for Great Britain, which is about equal in size to the North-West Provinces; secondly, for the kingdom of Italy, which is about the size of the Punjaub; thirdly, for Belgium and Holland, which might stand for Oudh; fourthly, for Prussia, as she was before the events of 1866, which might be taken very roughly to represent the Central Provinces, though these were considerably larger; and lastly, for Norway, which, also roughly, might stand for Burmah, which huge country, be it remembered, was only accidentally connected with India at all, inhabited as it was by a people differing from the natives of India in race, in manners, in religion—in short in almost every way in which men can differ. The mere mention of such a mass of duties would, he was sure, excite compassion in the minds of hon. Members, already disposed to sympathy by the terrible prospects which were before them for this Session; and they would, he was inclined to think, blame him, not for proposing too much, but for proposing too little, when he told them that all he asked them to do was to relieve the 559 Legislative Council of the Governor General of a mere fraction of this local, legislative business. It would, no doubt, have been very desirable to relieve it of more, but for the present the thing was out of the question. It must continue to bear most of its burden till local Legislative Councils could be created in other provinces. The portion of its work, of which it was wished to relieve the Legislative Council, was a kind of work which was not, properly speaking, legislative at all. It was the making of regulations for certain districts of India, which were scattered up and down chiefly in our newly-acquired provinces, and which were not nearly up in point of civilization to the ordinary level of Indian society, to which, in fact, the legislation that was beneficent, say, for example, in Lower Bengal, was just about as applicable as the legislation which was good for Surrey, as Surrey is in the year 1870, would have been to Lochaber or Strathspey in the year 1570. He would continue his illustration from Europe. Suppose there were no Parliamentary institutions in this quarter of the globe, and that all Europe outside Russia was legislated for by a large Select Committee of that House, sitting half the year at Dantzic and half the year at the Baths of Lucca. What it was proposed to enact was that some of the wilder parts of European Turkey, and some of the most brigand-haunted corners of Greece, and some of the more dangerous bits of the Abruzzi, and certain portions of the island of Corsica should not have applied to them precisely the same slow and refined processes of legislation that were thought desirable for Kent, for Normandy, and for the Mark of Brandenburg. The Government proposal was simply this, that the Secretary of State in Council should have power to name certain districts in India to which he thought the ordinary processes of legislation not wholly applicable, and that when he had done so the great officers in India who had the charge of the provinces in which these districts lie should have the power of proposing to the Governor General drafts of regulations for those districts, and that the Governor General should in his turn have the power of enacting, subject to the revision of the Home authorities, those regulations by and with the advice of his Executive or 560 Governing Council, and without calling in the assistance of the nominees whom he had appointed to help him and his Executive Council in a totally different class of business. The chief advantages which the Government expected to gain, if the House agreed to their view, were these—First, they Mould relieve the Legislative Council of that portion of its work for which it was least fitted, and so give it more time for that portion of its work for which it was most fitted; secondly, they would avoid the appearance of making everlasting changes in Indian legislation—changes which had a very bad effect upon the native and even upon the European mind, for did they not continually hear it said that we had a great deal too much legislation on our Indian statute book, the fact being that we had very little legislation, properly so called, on our statute book, but that, from the awkwardness of the present machinery, we were obliged to do a thousand things, by a sort of quasi-legislation in the Legislative Council of India, which ought to be done by local Legislative Councils, if only we had the materials for them, or in default of these materials, by the Executive Government; thirdly, under the process which the Government proposed, they looked for increased expedition, which was often very important in dealing with wild and lawless districts; and fourthly, they looked for greater secresy, which, in dealing with such districts, was, he need not say, often quite as important. Some persons had praised the Government and some had blamed them for tending by these clauses towards a more despotic ideal of government in India; but they deserved neither the praise nor the blame, for they were doing nothing of the kind. They were simply altering a clumsy expedient for a more convenient one, and when the day came that something better could be substituted for the present convenient expedient they heartily hoped that it might be substituted. They accepted the phrase that Asiatics should be governed Asiatically, considered as a truism, but they did not accept it considered as a pregnant political maxim; nor did they believe that it was possible to comprise in one formula the systems of government which were best adapted at a given moment of time for the Rajpoot and the Chinaman, for the Arab and the Japanese. Government of the people by the people 561 was the ideal to be aimed at in all countries, but of course it was one thing to keep before them an ideal and another to see any prospect of realizing that ideal in any time to which politicians could look forward. The second principal object of the Bill was to give to all Chief Commissioners and to all new Lieutenant Governors, and to confirm to existing Lieutenant Governors, the right of sitting in the Legislative Council of the Governor General as ex officio members when the Legislative Council of the Governor General happened to sit within the territories over which they presided. To this arrangement there could be no conceivable objection. The third principal object of the Bill was, as he had said, to give Parliamentary sanction to a certain procedure in the Governor General's Executive Council. This object was carried out by Clauses 4 and 5, which simply repealed the cumbrous and obsolete provisions of the Act of 1833 with regard to the procedure in cases of difference of opinion between the Governor General and his advisers, and enacted that what had long been the practice should be law. No one would, he thought, object to these clauses, and so he need say no more about them. Now, then, he came to the fourth object, which was carried out by Clause 6, and which was, as he had said, to afford facilities for the admission of native Indian subjects of Her Majesty to posts in the Civil Service of their own country which were not at present open to them. The 6th clause gave power to the authorities in India, who now assigned their various appointments to members of the Covenanted Civil Service, to appoint natives of India to positions heretofore held by members of the Covenanted Civil Service without their having necessarily undergone any examination whatever. Now, the very last thing the Government wished to be understood to say was, that the great experiment that was made at the last renewal of the Company's Charter with regard to throwing open the Civil Service to competition had in any way failed. True it was, that the best men of the English Universities had not rushed in crowds to India, but then, no one who really knew the state of our Universities ever dreamt that they would do so. All reasonable expectations had boon amply fulfilled, and there left our shores almost every year to take part in 562 the work of Indian administration some half-dozen men who had already proved themselves possessed of much more than average application and ability; some thirty or forty men who had proved themselves quite competent for the ordinary duties of an Indian civilian, and among whom the necessities and responsibilities of an Indian career would assuredly bring out far greater powers than as yet appeared in them, and, he feared he must add in the interests of truth, a small sprinkling of men who were not, perhaps, all that could be desired, but who could not be put on a level with the hard bargains, as they were called, of the nomination period. Considering that every system of selection which could be devised was terrestrial and not celestial, the result was eminently satisfactory, because the Indian Civil Service attained a considerably higher average of merit than in former days. It had, however, been gradually borne in upon the minds of the authorities in India that the present system of competition required to be supplemented by some provisions for the benefit of the natives. Young natives who had a little means could come to England and compete with the English for appointments, and were doing so. Then, again, if clever young natives had not means they would be helped by the Gilchrist and Government scholarships, assuming these last to be continued—a point, however, not yet settled. All that was good—nay, excellent for the young, but it was quite inadequate, even for them, and it did not moot the case of the old at all. It was absurd that in a country like India, in which our rule was one vast political experiment, incomparably the most vast and most interesting political experiment now being carried on on the face of the earth, we should not arm our responsible officers with full powers to try any reasonable experiment in the employment of natives. There was no want of civil ability among the natives of India. He remembered having been often told by one who had lived in the closest intimacy with all the leading men of that great Indian generation in which Munro and Elphinstone were the most conspicuous names, that the ablest politician he had ever known in life was a Mahratta Brahmin, and he believed his experience was by no means unique. Of course the 563 services of native administrators could only be used at present in quite exceptional cases, but there were probably a very considerable number of natives who might be employed with great advantage to the State in a judicial capacity. This clause left very considerable latitude to authorities in India, and by no means excluded the power of appointing natives to civil offices after a competitive examination. It would be perfectly competent under it, say, for the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal to refuse to admit any young native to the Civil Service unless he had passed so high an examination as to make it certain that he would have been selected by the Civil Service Commission; but as the object of the clause was merely to make possible a series of experiments with a view to find out how natives could be most usefully employed in situations which had been hitherto closed to them, and as those experiments would be most narrowly watched, it would be a pity to fetter the discretion of those who were to make the experiment. He concluded by moving the Second Reading- of the Bill.

§ SIR CHARLES WINGFIELD

said, the Bill came before the House this year in a form which disposed of many of his objections. Last year he moved to refer the Bill to a Select Committee, because it seemed to him to aim at an entire reversal of the Act of 1861, called the Indian Councils Act. The principle of that Act was that the legislative and administrative functions should be separated, and reside in separate bodies though the personnel might be partly the same; and another principle of the Bill was that the Government should cease to exercise the power of legislating for the later acquisitions of our Indian Empire, known as the non-Regulation Provinces on the sole plea that within the area of these provinces there are some rude and uncivilized races, who require to be governed by a rougher and simpler system than that in force in the rest of the Empire. But these rude races were a mere handful as compared with the rest of the population, and it was not well that 30,000,000 of cultivated people should be deprived of the safeguards of enlightened 564 laws, and placed at the mercy of a discretionary power which might err. He was aware authorities could be cited in support of a provision even as sweeping as that. The party in India known as the patriarchal or autocratic school, preferred administering a rough justice, with no other light than that of reason; but having had some opportunities of forming a judgment upon the subject, his conviction was that personal administration was very useful in newly-acquired provinces when warlike populations had to be broken in to British rule, but when habits of peace and industry had succeeded to turbulence, and when wealth had accumulated and complicated interests had arisen, then the reign of good laws should begin. That being his advice last year, he confessed he should have preferred it if the Bill before them had been simply a declaratory Act, enabling the Legislative Council in India to except certain territory, on cause being shown, from the sphere of their own jurisdiction, and to give the Governor General authority to make laws for such territories. There was no reason why the Legislative Council should not be the only source of legislation, nor would such a course weaken the hands of the Governor General, for the Act of 1861 gave the Governor General power, in cases of emergency requiring vigorous treatment, to issue rules and ordinances having the force of law for the period of six months. Since, however, the powers of legislation sought to be conferred on the Executive Governments by the present Bill are so much restricted, and depend on the special sanction of the Secretary of State in each ease, he acknowledged that no sufficient ground was left him to ask for a Select Committee on this part of the Bill. The last section of the Bill referred to a totally different matter; it proposed to offer new facilities for the utilization of native ability, and so far received his entire approbation, for he had long felt it was our duty to offer to the natives of India an honourable career in the public service, on the principle that a Government which excluded natives from high offices of State would soon become odious throughout the land. There were many natives capable of filling the highest posts, and he could not understand why the Governor General had refrained from exercising the 565 power he already had in this respect. He feared, however, that the selection of the native candidates for appointment and promotion would hardly fail to create dissatisfaction—that if the appointments were not made exclusively by competition nomination would degenerate into favouritism, and invite jealousy between those who had entered the service by competition and those who had gained appointments by interest. Beside this, the disposition among young natives to come to England and enter into competion would receive a check, and this was the more serious when it was considered that no training was so excellent for a young man destined to administer the laws in India as a study of the workings of English law and life in this country. Last year four natives of India obtained Civil Service certificates. Natives of India were, however, placed under a disadvantage, as compared with Englishmen, in being obliged to reside here, at a distance from their friends and at great expense, while preparing for their examination; and it was desirable to find out, if possible, a means of relieving them from that disadvantage, and placing them on a more equal footing with Europeans. That difficulty was in part met by a scheme which had been devised by the right hon. Baronet the late Secretary of State for India (Sir Stafford Northcote), under which scholarships were established for the support of natives of that country while residing in England pursuing their studies. There were nine of these scholarships, but it was urged against the scheme that it was inadequate. That, however, was an objection on the ground of degree, not of principle, and he, for one, regretted to see it announced in the Gazette of Indiathat the scholarships were to be discontinued. From conversations with native gentlemen prosecuting their studies in England, and from articles in the native Indian Press, he gathered that the native educated opinion was by no means in favour of a nomination system. They asked for no favour. They were prepared to compete with the youth of England. But they would prefer that the first competitive examination should be held in India—a certain number of appointments being allotted to India, and that the selected candidates should be required to reside in England until they passed the final examination, dur- 566 ing which time they would receive £100 a-year. This proposition, although he did not mean to say he gave in his adhesion to it, appeared to him to be at all events worthy of consideration. Perhaps in practice it would not be very different from the scholarship scheme. He was not satisfied with the definition of natives of India contained in the Bill, because it might include some Europeans permanently settled in India; but that was a matter for Committee. The question, he might add, of the employment of the natives of India presented many very difficult problems; and he thought it should be referred to a Select Committee. When the right hon. Baronet the late Secretary of State withdrew his Bill containing this clause in 1868, he promised that it should during the next Session be referred to a Select Committee. He could not see the urgency for the passing of this clause. He desired to see the natives of India appointed to fill the highest offices, but a sufficiently wide field could be found at present in the non-Regulation Provinces, containing sixty districts, where the Governor General had power to appoint them to any office. He feared, that although it might be in a small way, the principle of competition was affected by the clause, and he should be sorry to see the principle imperilled. His experience of the working of the competitive system in India was, that it had raised the average of ability and attainments in the Civil Service in a great degree. He did not say that it would produce men more eminent than some whom the nomination system had given us, but it had raised the average of efficiency, while the instances of glaring inefficiency, which under the nomination system were not infrequent, were now entirely unknown.