The new danger

WE have already referred to that part of Lord Olivier’s speech in the House of Lords, undoubtedly its most unsatisfactory part, in which he said that “the Viceroy and the Governors of Bengal and the Central Provinces were now considering whether the Governors should exercise their power to suspend or revoke the transfer of subjects,” and have said that for the Governors to exercise this power in the present circumstances would not only be perfectly unconstitutional but would also reduce the Reforms to a mockery. Only a moment’s reflection would show the absolute correctness of this view. The transfer of subjects is by universal admission the essence of the present Reforms. If the Governors can take away this essence, merely because the Legislature has adopted a particular policy for the purpose of bending them to its will, does it not mean in plain English that the Reforms are a monstrous make-believe, that in reality the Executive is still supreme? If the Reforms mean anything at all, they mean, in the first place, that in relation to the transferred subjects, the Executive shall be amenable to the will of the Legislature, and secondly, that in regard those subjects it is the will of the Indian electorate and not the will of any extraneous authority, whether near or distant, which shall prevail. The proposed action shows that so far from the Executive Government being amenable to the will of the Legislature, it is the latter which is amenable to the will of the head of the Executive Government, in the sense that whatever power it really enjoys is subject to his pleasure; that the people continue as before to be a nonentity in an ultimate sense.

This day that year