TILE PROBLEM OF INDIAN MILITARY ADMINISTRATION. T HE despatch addressed by
Mr. Morley to the Viceroy of India on the question of Indian military administration cannot, we fear, be regarded as in any true sense a settlement of the problem. Mr. Morley, by insisting that the Secretary to the new Military Department must have exactly the same powers and status as other Secretaries to the Government of India in the various Departments of State, no doubt improves very considerably the arrangements contemplated under the scheme of the late Government. Again, his insistence that the Military Department must be kept separate from the Headquarters Staff, and must, for Constitutional purposes, be regarded as a distinct entity, is of value in maintaining the right of the civil to control the military power. Taken as a whole, however, it must be regretfully admitted that for the present, at any, rate, the military view has triumphed, and, that the civil power has for the first time in our Indian history lost effective control over the Commander-in-Chief. That this is a most serious administrative evil we cannot doubt, and we shall watch future developments in India with grave anxiety. We do not, of course, assert that in theory the civil power is not still supreme, or deny that the Viceroy may still be able to veto any sudden or sensational development of military policy. The danger is not there. It lies in the fact that all the details of mili- tary administration are now entirely in the power of the Commander-in-Chief. He holds the Indian Army in the hollow of his hand, and, without effective criticism or control from any external source, he will be able to bend the military resources of a great continent to his will. While the Commander-in-Chief is shaping and moulding, the Indian Army in accordance with his views and ' desires, there is no one who will be able to raise an effective danger-signal, or give warning of imminent peril. If a false or dangerous policy is adopted, or, to vary our metaphor, if the points are altered so as to place the train upon ,a line of rails that will produce a collision, the collision itself will in all probability be the first thing to apprise the Government of India, that a blunder has been committed.
Though we feel bound to set forth our opinion, we must, in fairness to Mr. Morley, admit the extreme difficulty. of his position, and acknowledge that we find it by no means easy to indicate the exact manner in which he should have acted in the existing circumstances. It must be remembered, in the first place, that, as the despatch of February 9th shows, the situation in India, has been immensely complicated and impaired, from the point of view of the maintenance of civil control, by the fact that the Viceroy has adopted Lord Kitchener's view of the controversy between the military and the civil authorities. Thus Mr. Morley has found himself in the position of fighting the battle for the civil power in India with the supreme representative of that power acting not with, but against him. That is, he has had to strive to vindicate and support the control of the Viceroy over the Commander- in-Chief in opposition to the Viceroy. In effect, Lord Minto tells him that the regulations proposed for carrying out the Brodrick scheme are satis- factory and sufficient. Therefore any changes that Mr. Morley insists on have to be made not merely in defiance of the view of the Commander-in-Chief, but of that of the 'Viceroy. Even in the instances in which Mr. Morley has insisted on a more efficient mechanism for controlling the military power—such as the status of the Secretary, and the prevention of the identification of the Military Department and the Headquarters Staff—he has had to override Lord Minto's wishes. In plain language, this means that if Mr. Morley had gone further than he has gone, he would have had to risk, not only the Commander-in- Chief, but also the Viceroy telling him that he was render- ing the smooth working of the administrative machine in India impossible, and that the representatives of the two elements in the Government concerned could not be responsible for carrying out his instructions. If the question had been pushed home to its furthest point, Mr. Morley might have been faced with the problem of having to find, not only a new Commander-in-Chief, but a new Viceroy. Possibly it might have been better for Mr. Morley to have faced a situation even so difficult and embarrassing as this, but we cannot in fairness censure him for shrinkine, in the first few weeks of his tenure of power at the India Office from action so heroic. There are times when every head. of a great Department has to consider the balance of evil, and we are not prepared to say that this is a case in which Mr. Morley was necessarily wrong, even though we may feel profoundly anxious as to the decision actually reached.
It must be remembered, also, in Mr. Morley's defence, that Lord Kitchener's term of office expires in some twenty months' time, and that when a new Commander- in-Chief is appointed it will be possible to reconsider the whole question. In truth, Mr. Morley was placed in a position of quite exceptional difficulty in having not only to carry out a bad scheme left him by his predecessor in office, but also in having to work with a Viceroy entirely new to India who had come to the con- clusion that it was his duty to support the view of the Commander-in-Chief and the policy of the late Govern- ment. It must further be remembered that in existing circumstances it would have been of very little use for Mr. Morley to have devised and insisted on new rules and regulations in order to secure the control of the Viceroy over the military authorities. As long as Lord Kitchener is Commander-in-Chief, and as long as the Viceroy is convinced that there is no need of any machinery for criticising and controlling the Commander-in-Chief other than that provided by the Brodrick scheme, which is in effect non-existent, and also as long as the only military man on the Council is Lord Kitchener's own nominee, General Scott—a military officer who accepted his post on the con- dition that it was to be merely a department of supply without power of criticism or control—the supremacy of the Commander-in-Chief in all military matters will be abso- lute. No regulations, however perfect on paper, could alter these facts. Mr. Morley might have endowed the Viceroy with a control even greater than that exercised by Lord Curzon before any alteration was made in the Indian Constitution, and yet the position of the Commander-in- Chief in the circumstances with which we are now faced would have been one of virtual independence.
Before we leave the subject we must draw attention to the powerful letter contributed by Lord Curzon to Thursday's Times, in which the ex-Viceroy criticises with great force and ability the new settlement. After alluding to the suggestion that no checks ought to exist in regard to the action of the Commander-in- Chief in India, and that he should be free from criticism or control, Lord Curzon asks whether a single person could be found to advocate the acceptance of such a view in England, and then follows up that question with another. If such an idea is unthinkable here, "why should there be forced upon India a system of military irresponsibility that is infinitely more dangerous in a country where there is no Parliament, no effective criticism of military proposals outside the offices of Government, where almost every military question has its political aspect requiring the most careful study, not from the military standpoint alone, and where Commanders-in- Chief who are ignorant of India are capable, as Lord Roberts pointed out, and as my own experience sufficiently confirms, of making serious mistakes ? " Lord Curzon in dealing with Mr. Morley's improvements on the Brodrick scheme declares that though wise as far as they go, they go "no distance at all." Knowing the views that have been publicly expressed by Lord Kitchener as to criticisms of his proposals by subordinate officers, and mindful of what military discipline means, is it conceivable, Lord Curzon asks, that the Secretary to the Military Depart- ment should exert an independent voice ?— " I challenge any one with the smallest knowledge of Indian administration to pretend that the safeguards against military irresponsibility which the old Military Member did, but which the new Supply Member cannot, supply, will be furnished by an officer in this position. He may be made a member of any number of advisory committees or councils. In India these bodies consist of the Staff officers of the Commander-in-Chief, and cannot be credited with independence. It is not there that he can exert any influence. His equality with the other Secretaries to Government may be, as it has rightly been, assured. But no paper provisions can enable him to serve two masters, or to render equal and simultaneous loyalty to the interests of the Government of India and the views of the Commander-in-Chief."
We cannot find space to give a complete abstract of Lord Curzon's letter, but must refer our readers to the docu- ment itself. We must, however, note the concluding passage, in which Lord Curzon points out the extremely unfair treatment which he received at the hands of the late Government, though he does not dwell upon this personal aspect of the case except so far as it involves the public interests. And he adds :—" To me it seems a most serious and ominous thing that a home Government should lightly assume the responsibility of overruling, and con- temptuously overruling, a united Government of India on matters not of external or Imperial policy, but of its own internal Constitution ; and still more ominous that the -decision should have been against the civil, and in favour of the military, power." In this we heartily concur ; but we are bound to point out that Lord Curzon incidentally employs the very argument upon which Mr. Morley can obviously rely in defence of his own sacrifice of principle to expediency. As things now stand, owing to the support which Lord Kitchener receives from Lord Minto, Mr. Morley would have to assume the responsibility of overruling the Government of India on a matter, not of external or of Imperial policy, but of its own Constitution, were he to insist, against the wishes of the Viceroy, that there should be efficient civil control. The dilemma thus presented is one, as we have said, of immense diffi- culty; and though we ourselves wish that Mr. Morley had felt himself able to handle it differently, we cannot deny its existence.
It remains to be said that since Mr. Morley has not felt able to take the heroic course of overriding the Viceroy, there must rest upon him the responsibility of using more than ordinary vigilance in exercising from the India Office as much supervision and control as he can over Lord Kitchener's military policy. That such criticism and. control from London will in many ways be difficult and ineffectual we do not conceal from ourselves ; yet some- thing may be done, and whatever can be done in this respect ought to be done. Lord Minto is altogether new to India and to Indian problems ; Lord Kitchener not only has bad no previous experience of India and its complicated. problems, civil and military, but is also likely to be misled by the false analogies which are suggested by experience of a very different native population ; the Viceroy's Council now contains no military man of Indian experience with a right to raise his voice on questions of military policy,—these are facts which make it essential that the Secretary of State and his Council should give far more than ordinary care and attention to all that concerns the administration of the native Army. We must never forget that that Army is not a conscript army like the army of Egypt, in which service is compulsory, but an army raised on a purely voluntary basis, and that it is therefore necessary to consider, though of course not to truckle to, what may be called the public opinion of the native soldiers and of those classes from which the native soldiers are drawn. Unless we are much mistaken, Lord Kitchener is unwilling to believe that there is any necessity for taking such public opinion into consideration, with the result that there will always be a possibility of his coming into dangerous collision with the ideas of those who supply the native Army with its soldiers. Hitherto, to return to our metaphor, we have had an efficient system of danger-signals. Now that that system is abolished the need for careful driving of the engine is more than ever urgent.
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