Ministers’ salaries
WE have already commended the action of Lord Lytton in convening a conference of leading members of the Bengal Council at Government House to consider the course to be adopted with regard to the Ministers’ Salaries Bill. Our readers are aware that this is precisely what we and other organs of independent nationalist opinion urged His Excellency to do. In taking this action, he has in effect gone back upon his own original decision in the matter and rejected the partisan advice which certain powerful Anglo-Indian journals gave him when the council threw out the motion for the ministers’ salaries. The idea that found favour at the time was that it was for those members of the council — who thought that the action had been wrongly interpreted by His Excellency and that what it meant was not that the council did not want any ministers but that it did not want the particular ministers who had been thrust upon it by him — to approach him and make a definite request for reconsidering his decision based upon that wrong interpretation. This idea was strongly and universally condemned by the Indian Press and Indian public men on the obviously just ground that His Excellency having made the mistake, it was his own business to correct it, and that it was no part of the duty of the council to take the initiative in the matter. The justice of this view has now at last been recognised by His Excellency, and the step he has taken is not only constitutionally correct, but the only right course he could take.
