Sir William Marris’ speech

IT was a thought-provoking speech which Sir William Marris made at a public durbar held at Lucknow on Tuesday. There is no one among the provincial Governors, one might perhaps go farther and say, no one among the public servants at present in India, who had a more active or more important share in the framing of the reforms scheme than Sir Marris, and any observations that he makes regarding the intention of its author are naturally entitled to great weight. When such a man tells us that it is an accepted policy of the government under the Government of India Act that “the actions of the government are ultimately to be decided not by the wishes of the people of Great Britain as expressed through the Secretary of State, not according to the expert views of the trained administrators, whether Indian or European, but according to the wishes of the individual affected by them”, and that this individual is the rural voter, we at once accept the statement. But the question which we are entitled to ask and which the average man will ask in all seriousness is, if this is the accepted policy of the government, why is there so little evidence of it anywhere to be seen? The reason, the only reason, that Sir Marris gives is that the voter is not educated and is not, therefore, fit to control the policy of the government. The question of fitness is a question of opinion rather than of fact, and Sir Marris will admit that so long as it is the bureaucracy in India or the Secretary of State in England whose opinion is to prevail, the basis of the government and the centre of political and constitutional gravity will remain exactly where it has been all these years.