, was an
attempt too flagrant and too nearly fatal to be disguised or denied, and
a thrill of horror which hushed even the Extremists went through the
whole of India, for to the office of the Viceroy as the personal
representative of the sovereign there had always hitherto attached
something of the sanctity with which, according to Indian beliefs, all
kingship is invested. All the more grateful was the response elicited by
the assurance which Lord Hardinge hastened to convey from his sick-bed
that what had happened could and would in no way diminish his affection
and devotion to the people of India or modify the policy of goodwill and
progress for which he stood. Neither he nor India ever forgot that
assurance.

Unfortunately the artificial basis upon which the Morley-Minto reforms
had been built revealed itself very soon under the searching test of
practical experience. The Councils Act of 1909 had made no attempt to
organise on an effective and genuine basis "the living forces of the
elective principle." The indirect system of election established under
the Act could only produce haphazard and misleading results. An indirect
chain of elections afforded no means of appraising the true
relationship between the elected members of the Councils and their
original electors. The qualifications of candidates, as well as of
electors, varied widely from province to province, but shared one common
characteristic, that the election was more often a matter of form.
Members of the Provincial Councils were returned partly by Municipal and
Local Boards arranged in various groups, without any connection with, or
mandate from, the constituencies by which these bodies had been chosen,
partly by a land-holding community which did not consider itself bound
by the acts of its constituted representatives. The so-called
electorates were never known to give definite mandates to those who
professed to represent them or to pronounce upon any course of action
which their representatives might pursue. Nobody knew what was the
numerical foundation on which an elected member took his seat. It was
almost impossible to trace it back along the chain of indirect
elections. Before the British Reform Bill of 1832 much play was made of
pocket boroughs of twenty or thirty electors. In India, one constituency
electing a member to the Imperial Legislative Council numbered exactly
seven, and there were cases where the representation was pretty well
known to