embers of the moderate Congress party, were sent to
represent India at the first Imperial War Conference in London, and took
their seats side by side with British Ministers and with the Ministers
of the self-governing Dominions.

There was, however, another side to the picture. If India had displayed
in the best sense of the word an Imperial spirit and made sacrifices
that entitled her to be treated as a partner in, rather than a mere
dependency of, the British Empire, was she still to be denied a large
instalment at least of the political liberties which had been long ago
conferred on the self-governing Dominions? Were her people to be refused
in the self-governing Dominions themselves the equality of treatment
which her representatives were allowed to enjoy in the council-chamber
of the Empire? Whilst the Morley-Minto reforms had disappointed the
political expectations of the Western-educated classes, the measures
adopted in several of the self-governing Dominions to exclude Indian
immigration, and, especially in South Africa, to place severe social and
municipal disabilities on Indians already settled in some of the
provinces of the Union, had caused still more widespread resentment, and
nothing did more to strengthen Lord Hardinge's hold upon Indian
affection than his frank espousal of these Indian grievances, even at
the risk of placing himself in apparent opposition to the Imperial
Government, who had to reckon with the sentiment of the Dominions as
well as with that of India. The war suddenly brought to the front in a
new shape the question of the constitutional relationship not only
between Great Britain and India but between India and the other
component parts of the Empire. It was known in India that, before Lord
Hardinge reached the end of his term of office, extended for six months
till April 1916, he had been engaged in drafting a scheme of reform to
meet Indian political aspirations more fully than Lord Morley had done,
and it was known also in India that schemes of Imperial reconstruction
after the war were already being discussed throughout the Empire. The
Indian politician not unnaturally argued that if, as was generally
conceded, the constitutional relations of the Government of India to the
Imperial Government were to be substantially modified and India to be
advanced to a position approximately similar to that of the
self-governing Dominions whose governments were responsible to their own
peoples, th