great constitutional experiment.

It is far less easy to appraise the value of the attempt which has been
made at the same time to bring that large part of India which lies
outside the sphere of direct British administration into closer touch
with it by the creation of a Chamber of Princes, which will at least sit
under the same roof with the Council of State and the Legislative
Assembly in the great hall of Parliament to be erected in New Delhi. The
moment when the Government of India is departing from its autocratic
traditions and transferring a large part of its powers throughout
British India into the hands of representative assemblies which are to
pave the way towards the democratic goal of responsible government,
seems scarcely well chosen for the creation of a Chamber which must give
greater cohesion, and potentially greater power to resist the spirit of
the age, to a body of ruling Princes and Chiefs who all stand in varying
degrees for archaic forms of despotic government and whose peoples have
for the most part stood hitherto entirely outside the political life of
British India.

The Native States, as they are commonly called, scattered over nearly
the whole length and breadth of the Indian Empire, cover altogether more
than a third of its total area and include nearly a quarter of its total
population. Some of them can compare in size and wealth with the smaller
States of Europe. Some are but insignificant specks on the map. Great
and small, there are several hundreds of them. Their relations with the
Paramount Power, which have been not inaptly described as those of
subordinate alliance, are governed by treaties and engagements of which
the terms are not altogether uniform. The essence is in all cases the
maintenance of their administrative autonomy under their own dynastic
rulers whose hereditary rights and privileges are permanently guaranteed
to them, subject to their loyalty to the British Crown and to reasonably
good government. The Princes and Chiefs who rule over them--some well, a
few rather badly, most of them perhaps indifferently; some Hindus, some
Mahomedans; some still very conservative and almost mediaeval, some on
genuinely progressive lines; some with a mere veneer of European
modernity--are all equally jealous of their rights and their dignity.
The Native States cannot, however, live wholly in water-tight
compartments. They must be more or less directly affected by what goes
on in British I