o, we cannot stand still."

I should not be surprised if there are here some who say: You ought to
have some very strong machinery for putting down a free Press. A long
time ago a great Indian authority, Sir Thomas Munro, used language
which I will venture to quote, not merely for the purpose of this
afternoon's exposition, but in order that everybody who listens and
reads may feel the formidable difficulties that our predecessors have
overcome, and that we in our turn mean to try to overcome. Sir Thomas
Munro said--

"We are trying an experiment never yet tried in the
world--maintaining a foreign dominion by means of a native army;
and teaching that army, through a free Press, that they ought to
expel us, and deliver their country."

He went on to say--

"A tremendous revolution may overtake us, originating in a free
Press."

I recognise to the full the enormous force of a declaration of that
kind. But let us look at it as practical men, who have got to deal
with the government of the country. Supposing you abolish freedom of
the Press or suspend it, that will not end the business. You will
have to shut up schools and colleges, for what would be the use of
suppressing newspapers, if you do not shut the schools and colleges?
Nor will that be all. You will have to stop the printing of unlicensed
books. The possession of a copy of Milton, or Burke, or Macaulay,
or of Bright's speeches, and all that flashing array of writers and
orators who are the glory of our grand, our noble English tongue--the
possession of one of these books will, on this peculiar and puerile
notion of government, be like the possession of a bomb, and we shall
have to direct the passing of an Explosives Books Act. All this and
its various sequels and complements make a policy if you please. But
after such a policy had produced a mute, sullen, muzzled, lifeless
India, we could hardly call it, as we do now the brightest jewel in
the Imperial Crown. No English Parliament will ever permit such a
thing.

I do not think I need go through all the contents of the dispatch
of the Governor-General and my reply, containing the plan of His
Majesty's Government, which will be in your Lordships' hands very
shortly. I think your Lordships will find in them a well-guarded
expansion of principles that were recognised in 1861, and are still
more directly and closely connected with us now by the action of Lord
Lansdowne in 1892. I have h