The memorandum

IF the preamble to the memorandum which some of our distinguished countrymen, now in England in one capacity or another, have prepared for presentation to the India office, is unexceptionable, so is the actual demand made in it. To the first and most important part of it, that India should draft her own Constitution in the same way as the Dominions and the Irish Free State did, we have already referred. It must be plain to the meanest understanding that this part of the demand lies at the basis of all other parts, and that if this part were conceded, all other things would follow as a natural consequence. It was as regards this part of the nationalist demand, moreover, that the Liberals at one time were either undecided or equivocal in their attitude. They had accepted the Government of India Act with all its implications, they felt, and it was not for them to go behind that Act and say that not the British Parliament but the Indian people were to be the ultimate authority in this matter of drafting the Indian Constitution. Recent events have, however, disillusioned our countrymen, and the memorandum is the latest and most conclusive evidence of the fact that in this as in so many other matters, the Liberals and the Nationalists are of virtually one mind today. The rest of the demand has, subject to one important reservation, been a part of the Liberal platform now for many months. “The central civil Government of India,” says the memorandum, “should be carried on by the Viceroy with a cabinet responsible to the Indian Legislature, the defence of the country remaining in the hands of the Viceroy, subject to agreed reservations, until a responsible Government of India is ready to take it over.”