s by law established,"
they were on this occasion vastly greater. For two men of widely
different temperaments had to work out together a scheme for shifting
the very axis of government. They rose to the occasion. The
Montagu-Chelmsford Report will rank with the great State papers which
are landmarks of constitutional progress in the history of the British
Empire. It falls naturally and logically into two parts, the first
setting forth the conditions of the problem, the second the
recommendations for its solution; and even if the second had not
provided the foundations for the Act of 1919, the first would have
deserved to live as a masterly survey of the state of India--the first
authoritative one since the transfer to the Crown just sixty years
before. For the first time since the Mutiny it marked a reversion to the
spirit in which the Bentincks and Munros and Elphinstones had almost a
century earlier conceived the mission of England in India to lie in the
training of the Indian people to govern themselves, and for the first
time an attempt was made to appraise generously but fairly the position
of the Western-educated classes and the part they have come to play in
the Indian polity. The passage is worth quoting in full, as the
constitutional changes effected on the lines recommended by the Report
were to give them the opportunity to prove the stuff they were made of
as the political leaders of their country.

In estimating the politically-minded portion of the people of India
we should not go either to census reports on the one hand, or to
political literature on the other. It is one of the most difficult
portions of our task to see them in their right relation to the
rest of the country. Our obligations to them are plain, for they
are intellectually our children. They have imbibed ideas which we
ourselves have set before them, and we ought to reckon it to their
credit. The present intellectual and moral stir in India is no
reproach but rather a tribute to our work. The _Raj_ would have
been a mechanical and iron thing if the spirit of India had not
responded to it. We must remember, too, that the educated Indian
has come to the front by hard work; he has seized the education
which we offered him because he first saw its advantages; and it is
he who has advocated and worked for political progress. All this
stands to his credit. For thirty years