Mr. Fawcett, later in the evening, made a remarkable speech
on the Indian Budget, his chief point being that the Act determining the constitution of India wanted another care- ful revision. These revisions had occurred at intervals of twenty years ; but now there has been no such revision since India was taken under the direct control of the Crown, a period of more than twenty-two years, and yet in many respects, and espe- cially in its financial arrangements, the constitution governing India seems grossly defective. In the case of the recent war, neither the Council at home, nor the Council in India, nor the Indian Secretary, discovered the fools' paradise in which the Indian financiers were indulging ; and this went on for a year and a half of war. It had been insisted by Mr. Stanhope that it was not the Secretary of State for India, but the Secre- tary in Council, who was responsible for Indian finance, and so it was ; and Mr. Fawcett suggested that this was the reason why so little sensitiveness to financial responsibility was shown. The responsibility was shifted like a shuttlecock from one per- son's battledore to another's, and no one felt the disgrace of the mistake. The net revenue of India,—the amount she had to spend,—was £40,000,000, or 400,000,000 rupees ; of that, £17,000,000 had now to be sent home, and as it took twelve rupees to purchase a sovereign, that took away 204,000,000 rupees from the available amount, and left only 196,000,000, less than half the net revenue, to spend in India. This showed the extreme necessity of reducing our military expenditure in India, and it was essential to the welfare of India to dissolve the compulsory partnership between England and India in the costly military organisation of England. All this pointed to the urgent need for a grave reconsideration of the Act for the Government of India.
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