§ Debate resumed (according to Order) on the statement of the Secretary of State for India, yesterday, with regard to affairs in India.
§ LORD MESTONMy Lords, I rise to continue the discussion which began last night on the situation in India. That situation is just about as puzzling and difficult as any that has arisen within living memory. It is by no means unnatural that at such a crisis there should be widely divergent views held by those who are seeking for a remedy. Two opinions, entirely opposite in character, seem to be most frequently and most persistently pressed on those who are interested in India's problems. One view is that held by what I may call the believers in the strong right arm of the British Government. "Rule India," say the adherents of this theory, "with a firm hand. Think a good deal less about self-government and a good deal more about good government. Revert to some of our old paternal methods, and the troubles of to-day will very soon evaporate." Then, at the other extreme of political thought, there is the opposite theory, the theory of what I may call abdication. "India," say the adherents of this view, "has no more need for us. Our work in India is finished, whether we like it or not, and we had better recognise the fact as soon as possible. Let us, therefore, give India what she wants with as good a grace as possible and clear out of the country as quickly as we can, lest some worse thing befall us."
I do not think any of us suspected the noble Lord the Secretary of State for India of being a subscriber to the former doctrine; but possibly some of us had apprehensions that he might have leanings towards the latter. After the statement we heard from him last night, I do not know that those apprehensions are wholly removed, but they are certainly allayed to a very comfortable degree. There is very much in his speech with which it was possible to be in entire accord. One could not help appreciating the great and genuine sympathy which he manifested for Indian life and Indian aspirations. At the same time there were certain omissions from his statement. There were certain points which will probably be regarded as ambiguous when they reach India. The tone, if I may 409 venture to say so without disrespect, was just a little impersonal and perhaps a little abstract, and it is possibly not quite easy for the noble Lord to realise with what anxiety his pronouncement is awaited in India by several classes: by those impatient reformers who are anxiously waiting for some sign of vacillation here; by those others who, perfectly loyal to the Constitution, are equally eagerly waiting for a clear lead from the Government with which they would fain ally themselves; and by those hard-pressed servants of the Crown who, in circumstances of very exceptional difficulty, have been striving to carry on the King's Government.
If I may, I would venture very briefly to restate the main features and the main needs of the situation as they appear to some of us who believe neither in the doctrine of the strong right arm, nor in that of abdication, but were associated from a very early stage with the reforms which are now in progress and who wish anything than to see them shipwrecked now. The position briefly is that we have in India a bitter uncompromising hostility on the part of a section of the community who call themselves Swarajists or Home Rulers. As the noble Lord mentioned last night, those Swarajists, during the first three years of the new Constitution—that is, from the time when His Royal Highness the Duke of Connaught initiated the new Councils up to the second General Election at the end of 1923—held themselves entirely aloof from the Legislatures. But what he did not mention was that, in addition to that, they went up and down the country busying themselves in stirring up amongst the masses of the people a sense of disaffection, discontent with our rule and bitter racial animosity. The masses of the simple people, who in their dull, grey lives are never averse from new excitement, were appreciably affected—more so it is true in some Provinces than in others, but still, on the whole, to a degree which was certainly neither expected nor hoped for. Many of the moderate men who would much rather be friends of the Government than opponents, were browbeaten and driven and scared by the vehemence of the methods and the vituperation of the extremists into something like passive acceptance of the movement, and in some cases even into nominal adherence to it.
410 Turning to our own officials, harassed and overworked, isolated figures among the millions who surround them, it was quite impossible for them to carry on any effective counter-propaganda, or indeed any propaganda at all, so that this wave of agitation swept almost unchecked over the land. The form which it took at first was non-co-operation, refusal to take part in, or to associate themselves in any way with, the work of government, refusal to hold office, refusal to send their children to State schools, refusal to have anything to do with the officials of the country, whether British or Indian. As your Lordships know, that policy signally collapsed, and the Swarajists have now-gone into the Legislatures, as we are told, in some cases in very large numbers, and in all eases with the deliberate intention of obstructing and defeating the Government and wrecking the new Constitution from inside. It is extremely significant that they were offered responsibility in at least two Provinces, and that they refused it. They mean to break up the whole work of the British Government in India, and the form which their demand takes at the moment is that of the immediate liberation of India from British rule.
This, in a few sentences, is the position with which we are faced to-day, and it is clearly not a position in which any statesman can talk light-heartedly about making concessions. In the first place, I am sure your Lordships will recognise that in this situation there is nothing that is new, or that is unforeseen. You have only to carry back your minds to those few weeks in the winter of 1919 when you were engaged in passing an Act—certainly with obvious reluctance in certain quarters on the part of noble Lords who were familiar with India—which gave effect to a decision of the Government then in power, a Government which never fell short of any of its predecessors in Liberal measures—to give India the first instalment of democratic government. At that time the existence of this fierce opposition was perfectly well known. I remember, years before, a prominent leader of the Party, who only last week was one of the most remarkable speakers in the debate at Delhi, touring the villages in Bengal, and preaching his propaganda. Even then, fifteen years ago, when he took his station in the village market place and talked to the villagers, he raised above 411 himself a flag of his own, and on that flag was inscribed the single word "Expulsion."
To come to more modern times, the scheme which was drafted by the noble Viscount who is now First Lord of the Admiralty and Mr. Montagu had already been rejected by the National Congress and the Moslem League before the Act of 1019 came before this House. Although the full vigour and venom of the extremist movement which has subsequently developed may at that time have been underestimated, still the existence of the movement and the definite purpose of the aims to which it worked were clearly before your Lordships and before the public in 1919. Provisions for meeting that movement, and for countering it, were deliberately inserted in the Act. They were inserted as the result of long and careful study by a Joint Committee of both Houses of Parliament on which, I may mention, the Party to which the Government now in power belongs was represented. The Committee sat on that Bill all through the preceding summer under the chairmanship of Lord Selborne. I will only recall to your Lordships' memory the fact that in the Report of that Committee, not once but repeatedly, occurs with emphasis the statement that measures for dealing with destructive opposition—measures, for example, such as that for certifying taxation which the Viceroy considered necessary—were to be recognised not as exceptional weapons to be used with great reluctance, but as part of the regular and constituted machinery of the Constitution. Why then should there be any hesitation in using those measures, and handling those weapons, now?
But if there is nothing new or unforeseen in the Swarajya movement in its developments, there is also certainly nothing new in the fact that certain other sections of Indian politicians who, while they do not go so far as the extremists, and even ostensibly range themselves under the banner of the moderates, are yet dissatisfied. They do not go so far as to demand immediate liberation of the whole of India, but even a large section of what are known as the Moderate Party, or Liberal Party, have been recently asking for the immediate liberation at least of the Provinces. In other words, they secure one stage of political advance and they immediately 412 ask for another. This action is exactly what might have been prophesied, and I am not sure that it was not prophesied before the Select Committee. It is, indeed, if I am not speaking offensively, consonant with Oriental tradition. The generous giver of the Eastern fable is never one who gives with any discrimination. The Eastern prince who meets the wanderer who happens to secure his favour, not only empties his purse into his hands, but hands him over his horse, and his robe, and his sandals, and the ring from off his finger.
And that is what the noble Lord the Secretary of State for India will be expected to do by those friends of ours if he responds to the demands that are now being pressed upon him. If the Government yields to this cry for Provincial autonomy to-day, I think we may venture to prophesy that twelve months will not pass before an outcry equally loud, equally persistent, equally convincing or unconvincing, will be made for Imperial autonomy as well. Is it possible for us to contemplate concessions which carry those effects with them? Is there any point at which, if we have once begun to depart from the course that was laid down in 1919, it will be possible for us to stop; any point at which the same forces which are at work now will allow us to stop? The Swarajists, as we were reminded last night, have just secured a victory in the Legislative Assembly. They have carried a Resolution calling for a round table conference in order to search for agreement on some radical alteration in the Constitution. It is never easy to refuse the specious appearance of reason which underlies a demand for a round table conference.
But what is such a conference? What could such a conference, if it were accepted, possibly effect? It would placate absolutely nobody; it would drive the remaining Moderates, in self-defence, to range themselves alongside their extremist brethren; it would weaken immensely the power of the Executive Government in securing and maintaining order; and the only thing, I think, one could with safety say it would achieve is that the Swarajists would enter that conference with the unswerving determination to leave it either with nothing less than their full demands, or in a position which would enable them to press for their full demands the moment that 413 the conference was over. I think, therefore, we may congratulate ourselves and the Government on the decision that was announced last night, that no countenance would be given to the idea of a round table conference. The extremist movement has certainly exceeded in its virulence and intensity anything that was foreseen in 1919, but it certainly has not changed its character or the destructive objects which it set out to accomplish. Why then, at the bidding of a force which we foresaw and endeavoured to counter at the earliest stage of the new Constitution, should we scrap the policy on which Parliament determined four years ago?
Can any one say with justice (hat that policy has been a failure? We used to hear episodes like the Malabar riots quoted as proof of its failure, and a few days ago we heard a reference to that deplorable event in the Punjab, as also a proof of its failure. They may be proofs, and they are proofs, of the general unrest and un settlement which is storming through India, and indeed through every part of the world, at the present time, but they are no more proofs of the failure of the Montagu-Chelmsford scheme than the dockers' strike is a proof of the failure of the Treaty of Versailles. On the contrary, surely the experiment, started in great difficulties and at a time of great financial pressure, has done remarkable work for good in capable hands. Where it has fallen into the hands of weaker men it has not done so well. In all human affairs you will find some people who are capable of mishandling any machinery, even if it is not so delicate and complex as the new Constitution of India. I do not think it can be said from either side of the controversy that there is sufficient evidence to persuade Parliament that the time has come to throw over the new-Constitution which they decided upon less than five years ago. I use the words "throw over" intentionally, although they may seem a little extreme, because in the same way as you can scuttle a ship by pulling out a few of the important rivets, so you will certainly scrap the new Constitution by adopting some of the amendments which are canvassed in India and in this country also.
So far, I have been trying to explain that there is nothing new or unforeseen in 414 the difficulties that face us to-day. That leads me to the second and the only other question with which I shall trouble your Lordships this afternoon, but which is of greater moment—namely, what are you going to substitute for your new Constitution if it is scrapped? In this country, and in every other country which works a Parliamentary system such as we have been trying to inaugurate in India, the Government would go out and its place would be taken by a Government drawn from another Party and accredited by a clear and definite programme of measures for the well being and advancement of the people. In India you will have nothing of that sort. You there have a perfectly simple and clear issue.
Either we adhere to the policy of gradually fitting India for self-government on modern lines, or we drop the whole idea and hand over the government of the country to men with no programme, with no considered political creed of national well being. At least, I have never heard of any creed or programme, and I do not think any of us could call the manifesto from which quotations were made last night a constructive programme. It was the workmanship of some of his more virulent lieutenants, but if you turn to Mr. Gandhi himself, and ask for a programme he would say: "Pay no taxes; buy your own spinning wheel and manufacture your own clothes, and thus you will reach the Promised Land." It is hardy on the strength of a creed of that sort that we shall be prepared to give up our trusteeship for the 300,000,000 of the Indian people.
We want India to come back to something that is much more real and more practical. The whole basis, as the Secretary of State pointed out lucidly and eloquently last night, of the present Constitution is co-operation between Englishmen and Indians in the government of the country, and the gauge of success is to be the work that is done by Indian leaders in that new co-operative government. Parliament has pledged itself to institute an Inquiry in 1929 as to the measure of that success and to decide, on the materials which that Inquiry will supply, what further degree of political freedom may be given to India. It is true that the Nationalist conscience pretends to be shocked at this sequence of orderly advances. What right, it says, has the 415 British Parliament to sit in judgment on India's fitness to manage her own affairs; their nation has grown up to maturity and is capable of carrying on its own business.
All we ask is that it should carry on its own business; that instead of wasting their time and energy in noisy declamations against our policy, there should be some clear and tangible results of the actual work in the sphere that has been assigned to Indian Ministers and legislators, a sphere which is ample enough to employ all their energies and engage all their patriotism. India has been offered freedom, but on one condition—that power and responsibility will be freely given to those who will undertake it and, by wisely exercising it, justify the gift. Let us stand by that absolutely healthy principle. If His Majesty's Government will stand by that principle and make it clear that every use is to be made of the safeguards which the Act provides against mischievous obstruction, and support, as I am sure they will, the Viceroy and his Governors in the exercise of the powers with which Parliament has specially invested them, we may believe and hope that India will gradually get over her difficulties and settle down into the paths of peaceful progress, it is vacillation that kills. Unintelligible changes of policy, which, in India, are so often ascribed to fear, parleying with forces which mean to concede nothing themselves while they demand and extort one concession after another from us—all this leads to nothing but increasing trouble and ultimate disaster.
I have spoken about safeguards. None of us want the safeguards to be all on one side. We want to see the self-esteem of India, which is the richest product of the new Nationalist movement, safeguarded in every possible manner. We want to see, whether it is in India, or in Kenya, or in any part of the King's Dominions, the spirit of co-operation enshrined in the heart of the British official and merchant just as much as it is in the heart of the Indian leaders. All this is quite possible. We cannot contest the desire for such amendments of the new Constitution as may be shown to be necessary from the experience of the last three years. It is possible to be warm supporters of Indian reform, to believe firmly in helping India by every means towards her goal of Dominion status, to sympathise with the difficulties 416 and in some respects with the suspicions of Indian leaders, without yielding to the emotions and excitements of the moment. We have given India a Constitution which will enable her, if it is properly used, to embark upon a constructive programme of building up an Indian nation. We are now asked by a section of the community not to build up but to pull down, and as our warrant we hear nothing but the parrot cry that it is necessary first to destroy in order to build anew. We have seen how that theory worked in Russia, and we are surely not going to allow a similar combination of inexperience and idealism to inflict similar horrors upon India.
§ THE EARL OF BALFOURMy Lords, we have had, in the course of the interesting debate which occupied us yesterday and has recommenced to-day, speeches from the responsible Minister, who has behind him all the advice of a great Office, from my noble friend Lord Curzon, who was himself one of the greatest of Indian administrators, and now from the noble Lord who has just sat down, who has a personal experience which justly entitles him to the most careful attention of your Lordships' House. I have nothing to add to this debate which can be based upon knowledge such as they possess, and the very few words with which I shall trouble your Lordships represent perhaps rather the opinions of an outside observer than those of a man who, from personal observation, is justified in offering his view upon one of the most embarrassing problems which, I believe, has ever faced the Government of this country.
I was a member of the Government which was responsible for the Act of 1919. I was not in the country at the time—I was engaged in public service elsewhere—but I have not the slightest desire to minimise my own share of responsibility in carrying out the great and most difficult experiment in which we are engaged. I believe that the course that was then taken was certainly the best course that we could take with the knowledge then at our disposal. I am inclined to believe that even with the additions to our knowledge which have since accrued—additions not altogether of an agreeable kind—none of us, if it were in our power to repeat the experiment, would hesitate to make an effort in the direction in which the Act 417 of 1919 points, nor do I believe that that Act could in any very important particular be amended for the better. But I do not think any of us can be well satisfied with the way in which that experiment is being carried out in India, not, indeed, by those over whom we have any control, but by those leaders of Indian public opinion who seem to me wholly to misunderstand the character of the problem which lies before us and the character of the duties which our position in India throws upon this country.
We are apt, I think, to look at this question of gradually giving constitutional government to India as a perfectly natural operation. I think the noble Lord who has just sat down spoke, quite properly, of "liberating" this Province or that Province and a general impression gradually grows up in Parliament, in the country and in the Press that we are acting simply as a drag upon a natural movement towards representative institutions which, but for us, would run a safe, a happy and a useful course, and that those in India who are hampering our policy in every respect are in reality only hastening the glorious time when free institutions upon the model of the great self-governing Dominions will prevail in India. I am convinced that that is one of the most profound delusions that ever possessed mankind. Free institutions on the British model, or on the Dominion model, are among the most difficult institutions in the world to manage properly. Free government is very difficult government. The easy government is the government of an absolute autocracy. The notion appears to be that if you leave India alone India will at one stride—taking an example from Great Britain, from the great British Dominions, from the United States of America, from other great free and self-governing communities—join their ranks as a natural equal. That is entirely to ignore the teaching of history.
This is not a question, as some people suppose, between inferior and superior. Do not let us use those words if we can help it when we are dealing with races. You cannot say which is the superior, and which is the inferior, race. India is one of the oldest civilisations, perhaps the oldest, in the world. It has given great religions not merely to the hundreds of millions of its own population but to 418 hundreds of millions of other Oriental populations. It has a civilisation compared with which ours is contemptible in point of date, and it is really absurd to say that we are superior, or that they are inferior. But we are different. All the world talks now of constitutional government on the English model as if it were the natural flower of all forms of culture and civilisation. It is nothing of the, kind. It has been laboriously, through long centuries and with much difficulty, worked out with success in this island. It has been carried by the children who emigrated from this island to other continents. It has in their hands produced admirable results. It has been imitated—I will not say all over Christendom, but at least it has been more or less imitated all over the western hemisphere. But it is a very difficult constitution to work, and one of its great difficulties is that we are all apt to consider that that nation is most fitted for representative and Parliamentary institutions, for government by debate and discussion, which shows the greatest fertility of speech, the greatest ingenuity in devising Parliamentary manœuvres and in carrying out by Parliamentary methods, not the work of the country but the debates of the country. That is the external view which our form of government takes to the observer. But it requires national character, trained to that particular kind of work, to perform the fundamental duty of all Governments, which is that of governing.
These sound most commonplace observations, and they are commonplace, but they are constantly forgotten. We habitually talk as if you could import a new constitution into an old civilisation, as you import a new locomotive or a new mechanism, but the other, which depends upon the secular training of a people, which depends upon those qualities the very origin of which is lost in the prehistoric period of human development—institutions which depend upon that cannot be planted, or transplanted, with perfect security that they are going to grow and flourish as they grew and flourished in the land of their birth. Consider what the special difficulties of India are in such a matter as this. India, as we all know, has got its secular immemorial culture, which has produced marvellous fruit in its way. Its history 419 goes quite continuously back beyond the most distant records. In the whole of its history, as we know, or as we can plausibly conjecture it, I am not aware of any single trace of what we may call constitutional controversy, of debates such as fill our history, as to the proper methods by which human freedom may be developed on the plane of secular life. Marvellous things have been done on other planes, but on that plane nothing, so far as I know, has been done, and all that these modern statesmen in India do, or most of them do, is to take our catchwords, and to profess admiration for our institutions, but without apparently realising the spirit by which alone such institutions as ours can be properly worked.
Do not let it be supposed that I am pessimistic as to the ultimate result. All I say is that it is perfect folly to suppose that the result can be immediately attained. Indeed, I go further, and I say-that all that is now going on in India increases my sense of depression with regard to the political elements in that country, because they do not seem to me to have grasped the first essence, the first beginnings of wisdom, in this matter of constitutional government. I have not the least doubt that they show infinite ingenuity in their Parliamentary manœuvres, and I do not in the least doubt that their speeches are eloquent, admirably delivered, coherent and logical, and contain all the qualities that we admire in Parliamentary oratory; but that is not the main thing that is required. I cannot imagine anything less suited to the efficient administration of public affairs than a House of Commons, or, if you will, a Second Chamber, entirely composed of ingenious and eloquent orators. There is no chance of our having it in this country, fortunately. We never have had it, and I see no symptoms that the disease is going to come upon us in our political old age. But that is not the sort of impression which is given to those who look at us from outside. They seem to think that because readiness of speech, power of argument, and eloquence, are passports in this country to political success, those are the qualities which make us a successful free people. They are nothing of the kind. They are merely the external machinery by which those who represent the common sense of the people, determined to carry on the work 420 of the community in a sober, quiet, and peaceful manner, carry out their great duties.
We have brought in a certain number of highly educated people in India and asked them to help us in beginning the work of spreading through India these ideas of free institutions. Do they show any one of the qualities and symptoms which are the very essence of these free institutions? They have shown all the qualities of contrivance, and ingenuity of Parliamentary obstruction, and all the smaller arts which hang about the practice of free institutions, but what they have not shown is that fundamental desire to make the Government of their country work, without which free institutions are not only perfectly useless but may be absolutely dangerous. I do not know that they have made any contribution in the whole centuries of Indian thought, or taken the smallest interest in these experiments of ours, which have slowly grown up into the free institutions of this country. They never have done so. They come fresh to the business, unanimated by the only thing which is worth having in the government of a free country, namely, the desire to make, irrespective of private or class interest, the work of the community go on. Their ingenuity is wholly destructive, so far as I can see. I am not aware that they have ever suggested a new scheme, or given a hint as to what is to happen if the British rule were to come to an end.
The noble Lord who last spoke described a banner on which he said was inscribed "Expulsion." Expulsion is not a policy. There is no construction in expulsion. By their own admission, tacit or explicit, all this desire for constitutional freedom is of exotic growth. It was born in these islands and not in the vast continent where they profess to rule. How do they mean India to be governed when expulsion is carried out? They might at least have given us an outline of the scheme. Have they done so ? Are they going simply to pass a sort of Reform Bill for India, a sort of universal franchise ? There never was a country in which the difficulties of constitutional government are naturally greater than in India. In the first place, there is no country so enormous on which any human being has ever thought of trying the experiment. Who has ever thought of trying representative constitutional government, on 421 the ordinary Parliamentary model, on a community of three hundred million persons? It has never been tried before.
But that is not all. They have to contend with their own unlimited history of their own great culture. There never was, a vast body of mankind who were more the creatures of their antecedents than are the people of India. Their traditions go back unbroken further than—I do not speak of the Chinese, but certainly than those of any Western nation. And it is not merely that. Their culture, religious and political, appears to have blossomed naturally into the complex system of caste. I am not going to argue against caste; I am not going to compare a community without caste with a community which is in the meshes of caste. But if caste be the natural outcome, as it is, of all these centuries of Indian civilisation undisturbed from outside, can you conceive a soil less apparently, and on the face of it, prepared for the ordinary democratic government, which is the one which we admire by our practice, and which they admire with lip-service so long as it can be used as a weapon to destroy the present organisation of society?
I am not going to attempt to preach to these Indian agitators what is their duty. To me, indeed, it seems quite obvious that they are committing a great crime against their fellow countrymen and against general civilisation if they set to work merely to shatter what they find, without giving us, or themselves, the least suggestion of what it is they want to put in its place. Nothing that I say is likely to move them, but, after all, we have a duty to perform, too. We find ourselves the masters of this vast continent. Not till we came was the great Indian continent ever welded into a great unity. Not till we came was it possible to find any mitigation in free institutions for the system of absolutism which has immemorially prevailed over that country—sometimes absolute Governments governing huge tracts of it, sometimes broken up into smaller kingdoms, but always on the strictest absolutist system, uncontrolled by any authority based upon a broader scheme.
Now, for the first time so far as I know in the history of the world, we have in our own free institutions, in the criticism which takes place in the House of Com- 422 mons, in this Chamber, in the British Press—we have been able to combine something that is good in the system of free institutions with all that can be found of good in absolute government. It is a wholly unknown combination so far as history goes. It has been worked by us in the time that we have had control, I believe, to the unmixed advantage of this huge population. What are you going to put into its place? If you leave India to herself it is as absolutely certain as anything can be that she will relapse into what is the natural organisation of society in that part of the world, which is absolute government. There may be a transition of free institutions, possibly—certainly. It would probably be found unworkable, intolerable in practice, unintelligible to vast masses of the population, and no prophecy can be so certain than that the destruction of British rule means the resumption of all that is least good in the gradual growth of Indian society.
Are we going so far to show ourselves incapable of carrying the burden which has gradually been thrust upon us as to leave these 300,000,000 to that most certain fate? I cannot believe it. There is no alternative that I can sec but the alternative which was adopted in 1919, the alternative which His Majesty's Government accepted, which the noble Lord who has just sat down accepts, and for which my noble friend near me (the Marquess Curzon of Kedleston) spoke last night. We here are all at one upon that, but let us remember that by saying we insist on seeing how the experiment works we are not delaying free institutions in India. We are doing what we can to make one of the most difficult tasks ever undertaken a possible task. It may prove—please Heaven it will not so prove, but it may prove that the thing is impossible. It may prove that this new experiment of giving for the first time our special form of institutions to 300,000,000 people, divided by every species of caste and religious division, is an impossible one. I hope better things.
But the idea that it can be done by a stroke of the pen, and that, if our hands are forced, these gentlemen, who have not shown that they possess the glimmer of a constructive idea in the whole of their mental outfit, can bring either freedom or felicity to the 300,000,000 423 people for whom we are responsible, is surely one of the most fantastic dreams that ever occurred to the wildest of political speculators. The task before His Majesty's Government, and before any Government that may succeed them, is one of extreme difficulty. We cannot shirk it. We cannot put it on one side. The burden is there, and must be borne. But it will require the utmost resolution, the utmost courage, the utmost patriotism, and a perfect contempt for catchwords if we are to carry it out ultimately with success.
§ [From Minutes of February 26.]