The mountain and the mouse

ONCE again has the mountain in labour produced the proverbial mouse. The much-advertised and long-looked-for debate in the House of Lords on the Indian situation has come and gone without anyone, and certainly India, being in the least manner or degree the better for it. Lord Olivier, who laboured under the difficulty of having to criticise a policy which in its essentials had been initiated by the late Government with himself as the Secretary of State for India, was naturally both feeble and indefinite in his attack. His speech was, indeed, not only in form but in substance much more a request for further information than a criticism of the Government’s policy or measures on the basis of such information as he had before him. The two points on which he made a specific request for information were, first, whether the Government had gone beyond the original purpose of the Bengal Ordinance and arrested a number of persons under Regulation 3 on a charge of being engaged in some sort of revolutionary agitation or internal commotion, and whether the arrest of the Chief Executive Officer of the Calcutta Corporation and two Bengal Legislative Council members fell under this category. Lord Birkenhead was too skilled and practised a lawyer not to take the fullest advantage of the weakness of Lord Olivier’s position. Under the cloak of complimenting the late Secretary of State on his sanctioning the Ordinance, he threw the entire responsibility for the present policy on him. The impression he sought to create was that he was the better Liberal of the two.