y hon. friend, who made
a speech full of interesting views, full of visions of a millennial
future, and I do not quarrel with him for making his speech. My hon.
friend said that he was for an Imperial Duma. The hon. Gentleman has
had the advantage of a visit to India, which I have never had. I think
he was there for six whole long weeks. He polished off the Indian
population at the heroic rate of sixty millions a week, and this makes
him our especially competent instructor. His Imperial Duma was to be
elected, as I understood, by universal suffrage.

[Footnote 1: The Secretary of State had on an earlier occasion spoken
of the Petition of Bengal as a settled fact.]

Dr. RUTHERFORD: No, not universal suffrage. I said educational
suffrage, and also pecuniary suffrage--taxpayers and ratepayers.

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 sa