News of the Week
India THE second volume of the Report of the Indian Statutory Commission provides not only the apparatus but the unanimous sanction of experienced men of all parties for an unlimited advance in Indian self-government. Yet the recommendations have been received in India with more disapproval than was expected. On their own confession many Indians have criticized the recommendations without reading the remarkably lucid statement of facts on which the recom- mendations were based. Sir John Simon's elaborate plan for making a fortnight's study of the facts a preparation for judgment on the subsequent policy was thus thwarted. No doubt the extremists did this wilfully, but the disappointment in India is rather wider than can be explained in this way. The truth is that the proved English method of ransacking the facts first and then adapting policy to them is not instinctively accepted in India as natural and sound.
