whatever
representations it might deem desirable, to carry his decisions
faithfully and fully into execution. He was prepared to exercise also to
the full his right to control the administrative as well as the
executive acts of the Government of India and its officers. He was not
prepared to devolve upon Indians collectively any part of the
constitutional powers vested in the Indian Executive and ultimately
through the Secretary of State in the British Parliament. He was not
therefore prepared to give India any representative institutions that
should circumscribe or share the power of the Indian Executive. The
Indian Councils Act of 1909 was drawn up on those lines. It enlarged the
membership and the functions of the Indian Legislative Councils, and
placed them definitely on an elective basis without doing away
altogether with nominations by Government. The only point upon which Mr.
Morley yielded to pressure was in conceding the principle of community
representation in favour of the Mahomedans, to whom, at a time when they
not only held rigidly aloof from all political agitation but professed
great anxiety as to political concessions of which the benefit would,
they submitted, accrue mainly to the Hindus, Lord Minto had given a
promise that in any future reforms scheme full consideration should be
given to the historical importance and actual influence of their
community rather than to its mere numerical strength.

The Indian Councils Act, 1909, fell considerably short of the demands
put forward even by the founders of the Congress five-and-twenty years
before, as the new Councils, greatly enlarged, were still to be merely
consultative assemblies. But it did for the first time admit "the living
forces of the elective principle," and to that extent it met the demand
for representative institutions. Indian Moderates could point also to
the presence of an Indian member, Sir Satyendra (now Lord) Sinha, in the
Viceroy's Executive Council and of two Indian members in the Secretary
of State's Council at Whitehall as a definite proof that India would
have henceforth a hearing before, and not as in the past merely after,
the adoption of vital lines of policy. The Act was accepted by the
Moderate leaders as a genuine if not a generous instalment of reform,
and it restored to some extent their influence as the advocates of
constitutional progress by showing that the British Government had not
been altogether deaf to their appeals