THE NEXT VICEROY OF INDIA.
TORD ELGIN'S term of office as Viceroy of India runs out this year; it is understood that he longs for home, as he well may ; and the selection of his successor must be among the preoccupations of the Cabinet, or its chief, who by a wise etiquette is the person held to be responsible for such appointments. -Unless Lord Salisbury has decided, his duty of selection cannot be the least of his many, we should ourselves say his overwhelming, perplexities. There never was monk need for a strong Viceroy, and never more difficulty in finding one. One of those waves of ill-fortune which strike every State in turn, as they strike almost every individual, has broken upon India, and everything is going wrong. In foreign policy, finance, internal govern- ment, in fact in every department, there is some serious mess or other, due in part, no doubt, to one of those " dispensations," as our forefathers called them, for which there is no help but fortitude and resignation, but due also, as we believe, to inadequacy in the Simla group, which ultimately furnishes motive power to the Empire. We do not care to add to the worries of men who are trying to do their best, and who are already bowed down by anxieties, by naming names, but we are satisfied that the only practicable remedy for the existing confusion is to be found in a new Viceroy and a new Cabinet; and where, to begin with, is there an adequate new Viceroy ? If he is not competent nothing will be put straight. Even in England much depends on "the Head of her Majesty's Government," for unless he can rule, the other Ministers never pull fairly up to the collar, and India, besides being a far more complex State than Britain, is a vast military Monarchy, in which disorder means blood- shed, inefficiency defeat, and an empty Treasury paralysis. She needs, perhaps more than any other first-class State, a ruler who can decide in emergency strongly, clearly, and at once, for if he cannot, his legal power, which is as nearly absolute as English ideas will permit, slips into the bands of an Aulic Council more perversely organised than any Council which ever existed in Austria or Spain or China. Every great Department in India, as at home, is guided by a Secretary, usually a strong man, and always an experienced one, who is expected to keep his part of the machine in steady and joltless motion. In any other country in the world these Secretaries would form the Cabinet, but in India there is another Committee, styled the Viceroy's Council, which is above them all. Originally the use of this Council was to check and advise the Viceroy, and without exactly controlling him, to compel him to think out his ideas and make his policy definite. Of late years, however, the Viceroys, crushed with work, have used the Councillors as Cabinet Ministers, each with a Department, and the result is that there are two Secre- taries for everything,—one who has all trouble, patronage, and nominal power, and another who is his controlling referee. The effect is that the Secretary, in reality power- less, has to get his way by convincing an invisible superior who very frequently belongs to a different school of thought, and who is always seeking, sometimes uncon- sciously, to carry on and defend the ideas which seemed to him right when he was in the secretariat of his special Department. The system is fatal to originality, and often to decisiveness, Sir M. Ridley being, in fact, compelled to convince and defer to Mr. Asquith before he can do anything, and perpetually therefore thinking out, not the best course, but the course in which he will meet with least resistance. The plan is a maddening one to strong men, and would long since have broken down but that it is modified by the immense authority of the Viceroy, who, if he can rule, is sure of home support, and can either compel Councillor and Secretary to pull together, or pass over both their heads. Even a strong Viceroy, however, is hampered by the system, for he has practically to consult, instead of a Council, two experts in each Department, who if they differ would, as they know details and he does not, bewilder even a Bismarck.
That preposterous system should be swept away at once, the Secretaries being made the responsible Cabinet, subject, of course, to the Viceroy's right of final decision and action, a right without which the component parts of the machine would fly apart or quarrel openly, a con- tingency always on the cards when the Military Depart- ment and the Financial have to discuss any considerable line of action, say the conquest of the Himalaya. There must be a final authority responsible to the Secretary of State at home, and responsibility in India as elsewhere implies power. Moreover, there must be one man who can be trusted with the larger patronage, who can decide finally and sternly on the incessant "differences "—that is, quarrels—which arise among the agents of the Adminis- tration, and who shall be to the Services and the immense native population in the place of the Sovereign. It would take pages to explain the reasons why ; but India, as our statesmen have hitherto fortunately seen, cannot be governed efficiently without a Bing, and to choose him rightly is among the first duties of the Imperial Govern- ment. It is terribly limited in its field of choice, for practically that field is confined to past Cabinet Ministers like Lord Mayo, great soldiers like Lord Hardinge, and those Peers who will go, certainly not more than a hundred persons in all. The limitation seems foolish, for there is no statutory restriction ; but statesmen must take the world as they find it, and in practice that "baptised negro from the banks of the Congo," though perfectly eligible for the Papal throne, never will be Pope. The Indian Services demand with one voice that if they are passed over, it shall only be in favour of a tried politician, a man of proved genius, or a personage of high social standing; and no other would be obeyed without an amount of "feeling and friction," which, unless the man chosen displayed the very highest qualities, would be a stumbling - block in his way throughout his term. Then why not appoint an Anglo-Indian? Because he would either be disliked or despised, because he has become too well known in an inferior office, and because if a man of supreme capacity he would be regarded as the chief of a party, and utterly distrusted by the other side. Even Lord Lawrence was never "followed" as Lord Dalhousie was, nor would Sir Mortimer Durand be, if he is the man experienced in India, Central Asia, and finance to whom Mr. C. N. Lawrence, in his able letter to the Times of Monday, really points. The choice must lie within the old circle, and it has recently been further limited in a very ridiculous way. The Viceroyalty was formerly a great prize to a poor Peer, but it is a great prize no longer. The salary seems to men who know nothing of modern expenditure amply sufficient, £25,000 a year with .22,400 for entertainments, but ever since India was handed over to the Crown an absurd theory has sprung up that the first duty of a Viceroy is to "represent" the Crown, that he must be "magnificent," that he must " entertain " regally, that he must, in short, waste money on a great scale. He does, therefore, waste it—Lord Mayo's wine-bill was, we have been told, £400 a month—there are heavy demands against him in his first year, £17,000, we believe, in all, all luxuries in India have risen in price, and one way and another a Viceroy can no more carry home a fortune than an ordinary civilian can. To us who believe firmly that a great Viceroy, a man who was felt to govern like a King with regal impartiality and success, might live in pyjamas in a hut and still be reverenced, the new system seems a preposterous folly, not one man in a million being affected by the Viceroy's " hospitality ; " but we never cry for the moon in politics, and the conditions granted, the money is not enough to be of• itself a temptation to the ablest candidates, who perhaps think a visit to New York and a proposal to a sprightly young woman a far easier road to the competence befitting the public ides of their place in the community. The Premier, therefore, must search with a microscope, and it is well if at his age he does not further limit his choice by his natural distrust of youth. That is as regards India not a wise distrust. The Empire was made by very young men, its most successful personages have done their greatest feats when under forty—Wellington at Assaye was not thirty-four, and Dalhousie annexed the Punjab before he was thirty-seven —and the country is to a Viceroy so like a new planet that experience is of comparatively little value. Brain- power, daring, resourcefulness—which is imagination—and imperiousness are the qualities chiefly required, and they are all, except the last, apt to be dulled with age. If Lord Salisbury can keep free of this hampering influence there must surely be some man within the charmed circle, small as we have gradually made it, who is competent to govern India, and it is a pressing necessity to find him, and persuade him to undertake the task. If he cannot be found, anxiety about India may be changed into disaster in India, for the natives have lost confidence in the good fortune of their rulers, and the Services begin to doubt whether the men in command are competent in such stormy weather to guide the ship.
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