To establish a Royal Commission to inquire into them. May I, first of all, observe that the reforms themselves were very substantial in character? I was travelling round India just before the War. I was there in two successive years as a member of a Commission to examine into the public Services of India, and we found wherever we travelled a very great deal of interest, both among Hindus and among the Moslem communities, in the Indianisation of the Services, and we had considerable pressure put upon us to provide for a larger admission of Indians in the higher branches of the Services of India. But if anybody had told us that within the course of a very few years the principle of responsible government would have been extended to India, that we should have a Legislative Assembly at Delhi with a non-official majority, that in all the Provinces of India very important Departments of Government would have been handed over to Indian Ministers, I think that would have been regarded as almost beyond the dreams of avarice. What happened? The War came. India came forward and made a splendid contribution in the War, and the loyalty of India was warmly and deeply appreciated all over the British Empire. One of the results of that was the famous Cabinet announcement in favour of the extension of responsible government to India. We thought then, and I still think, we were right, that it would be fairest to India, it would be most to the advantage of India, that the process of developing the principle of responsible government in India should proceed by gradual and well-marked stages. After all, when we interrogate our own history, it was many centuries before we developed our Parliamentary system, our system of Party government, our system of Parliamentary Convention. It was a very long process, and it was a very difficult process. And hero we were asking India—India which only lately had been introduced to the methods and ideals of Western civilisation—to accept from us one of the most complicated and difficult products of Western civilisation, and to work it effectually for the good of India.

I say that it was to the interest of India that this great experiment should be gradually and safely developed. The hon. Member who moved, and the hon. Member who seconded, desire a Royal Commission in order to accelerate the progress of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms. There has been a good deal of criticism as to the working of those reforms. There has been a good deal of disappointment both in India and in England as to the effectiveness of this great scheme of Parliamentary government. But let me remind the House that the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms were carried out at a very critical and very difficult period of Indian history. There was the Caliphate agitation. There was the Turkish War. There was the War taxation. There was the revolt in the Punjab. There was the terrible and melancholy calamity of Amritsar. There were the difficult economic conditions which were created by the War. Those circumstances made the atmosphere as difficult as possible for this great constitutional development, and I say we must not judge of its success by our experience during the last few years. I have read a good many of the Debates in the Legislative Assembly in India. I think there is a great deal of first-rate political promise displayed in it; but do not let us go too fast. There is at present a Committee in India, appointed by the Government of India, which is engaged in examining the working of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms. It is true it is not a Royal Commission; it is an Indian Government Committee. Let us wait, at any rate, for its Report. Then, again, there has been another very important Commission working in India. There is the Lee Commission on the Public Services. The Report of the Lee Commission is not yet published, but rumour says that it is a unanimous Report, that, in other words, it has received the assent, not only of the English members of the Commission but also of the Indian members of the Commission If that, indeed, be so, I trust that a Report, supported by both sides unanimously, by Indians and Englishmen, will be put into force.

If we have in this Report, as I hope and trust we shall have, a solution of the public service problem quite acceptable to the English public and to the Indian public, surely we may leave the matter to rest there for a little? I think really hon. Members on the Labour Benches, after what we have heard from the other side of the House to-night, must realise that there is no immediate prospect of an amelioration of industrial conditions in India likely to flow from an extension of the franchise. Such an extension may be a very good thing. I hope, indeed, that the franchise may, in due course, be extended in India. I hope that in due course these liberties may be widened in India, but I do submit in all confidence that there is no necessary or probable relation between an improvement in Indian industrial conditions on the one hand, and such an expansion of the franchise as is contemplated on the other hand, in this Motion. If you wanted to throw the apple of discord into India to paralyse the progress of moderate, sensible, industrial legislation, I cannot conceive any method more efficacious than the expansion of an electorate of 6,000,000 into an electorate of 300,000,000. That is a revolution which really no sane man can contemplate. Those are the few observations which I wish to offer.