LORD MORLEY ON INDIA.

Wanganui Herald, Volume XXXXVI, Issue 13332, 22 March 1911, Page 4

LORD MORLEY ON INDIA.

The fact that Viscount Morley is now again in office as the Secretary of State for India, owing to the ill-health of the Earl of Crewe, lends peculiar point to his deliverance in the Nineteenth Century on the subject of. British Democracy and Indian Government. The contribution, in fact, is another illustration of the unusual course adopted by Ministers of the Crown in. defending themselves and their policy in print. Mr Haldane, the Secretary for War, lately published his “Apologia" in a brochure against compulsory service. And now Viscount Morley publishes what is practically a defence ot his own administration as Secretary for India. It has been forcibly objected to Lord Morley’s administration that he attempted “to rule India from London.” and the shaft evidently struck homo, for in this contribution he devotes a great deal of apace to justifying his actions. Ho remarks with acerbity that “though occasional phrases of a splenetic turn may be found in the printed correspondence of ■al Govhrhdr-G eileral, there has never been any serious pretension to deny, dispute, or impair the patent truth that the Cabinet is the single seat of final authority.” He goes on to deny that a Governor-General of India is even floated “as the mere puppet or mouthpiece of the Home Government, required only to carry out whatever orders it may be thought desirable to transmit," but he goes on to affirm the necessity of “reflecting the still more absurd counter doctrine that the Home Government should be the puppet of an infallible man on the spot.” Viscount 'Morley quotes largely from Mr Chirol's remarkable contributions to the Times on the Indian question, and gives the seal of official approbation to the work of that great journalist, whom he describes as a public instructor. The Secretary of State goes on to refer to “the intensely difficult, if not desperate, question of the attitude adopted in British colonies generally towards Asiatic immigrants,” and he quotes some remarks by Mr Chii'ol on the subject. “People in India know/' says Mr Chirol, “that the British Labour Party, while professing great sympathy, for their political aspirations, yet has never tried, or if it has tried, it has signally failed, to exercise the faintest influence in favour of Indian claims to fair treatment with its allies in the colonies, where the Labour Party is always the most uncompromising advocate of exclusion and oppression, and they jcuow the power that the Labour Paity wields in all dur colonies. But Viscount Morley ignores the fa<:t that it is not only the Labour Party, but the people of all parties in Australia who desire to keep their country, for the white race. He also ignores the fact that it is not the Labour Party, which is non-existent in South Africa, but the men of all parties in that self-governing dependency, who have firmly resolved to exclude Hindoos as far as possible because of the natural desire to keep .the white race free from commingling with a coloured race, however admirable, from oversea. It looks as though the coloured immigration problem may develop into a very thorny subject at the forthcoming Imperial Conference, seeing that Viscount Morley’s observations must lie taken as representing the official view of the Cabinet.