high an authority." The editor of that issue was Lionel Curtis.
In the House of Lords there was less enthusiasm. Chief criticism centered on two basic
points, both of which originated with Curtis: (1) the principle of dyarchy—that is, that
government could be separated into two classes of activities under different regimes; and
(2) the effort to give India "responsible" government rather than merely "self-
government"—that is, the effort to extend to India a form of government patterned on
Britain's. Both of these principles were criticized vigorously, especially by members of
the Cecil Bloc, including Lord Midleton, Lord Lansdowne, Lord Selborne, Lord
Salisbury, and others. Support for the bill came chiefly from Lord Curzon (Leader in the
Upper House) and Lord Islington (Under Secretary in the India Office).
As a result of this extensive criticism, the bill was revised considerably in the Joint
Committee but emerged with its main outlines unchanged and became law in December
1919. These main outlines, especially the two principles of "dyarchy" and
"responsibility," were, as we have said, highly charged with Curtis's own connotations.
These became fainter as time passed, both because of developments in India and because
Curtis from 1919 on became increasingly remote from Indian affairs. The refusal of the
Indian National Congress under Gandhi's leadership to cooperate in carrying on the
government under the Act of 1919 persuaded the other members of the Group (and
perhaps Curtis himself) that it was not possible to apply responsible government on the
British model to India. This point of view, which had been stated so emphatically by
members of the Cecil Bloc even before 1900, and which formed the chief argument
against the Act of 1919 in the debates in the House of Lords, was accepted by the Milner
Group as their own after 1919. Halifax, Grigg, Amery, Coupland, Fisher, and others
stated this most emphatically from the early 1920s to the middle 1940s. In 1943 Grigg
stated this as a principle in his book
Amery's statement of 30 March 1943 to the House of Commons, rejecting the British
parliamentary system as suitable for India. Amery, at that time Secretary of State for
India, had said: "Like wasps buzzing angrily up and down against a window pane when
an adjoining window may be wide open, we are all held up, frustrated and irritated by the
unrealized and unsuperable barrier of our constitutional prepossessions." Grigg went even
further, indeed, so far that we might suspect that he was deprecating the use of
parliamentary government in general rather than merely in India. He said:
“It is entirely devoid of flexibility and quite incapable of engendering the essential
spirit of compromise in countries where racial and communal divisions present the
principal political difficulty. The idea that freedom to be genuine must be accommodated
to this pattern is deeply rooted in us, and we must not allow our statesmanship to be
imprisoned behind the bars of our own experience. Our insistence in particular on the
principle of a common roll of electors voting as one homogeneous electorate has caused
reaction in South Africa, rebellion or something much too like it in Kenya, and deadlock
in India, because in the different conditions of those countries it must involve the
complete and perpetual dominance of a single race or creed.”
Unfortunately, as Reginald Coupland has pointed out in his book,
but none made any effort to find an indigenous system that would be suitable. The result
was that the Milner Group and their associates relaxed in their efforts to prepare Indians
to live under a parliamentary system and finally cut India loose without an indigenous
system and only partially prepared to manage a parliamentary system.
This decline in enthusiasm for a parliamentary system in India was well under way by
1921. In the two year-interval from 1919 to 1921, the Group continued as the most
important British factor in Indian affairs. Curtis was editor of
period and continued to agitate the cause of the Act of 1919. Lord Chelmsford remained a
Viceroy in this period. Meston and Hailey were raised to the Viceroy's Executive
Council. Sir William Duke became Permanent Under Secretary, and Sir Malcolm Seton
became Assistant Under Secretary in the India Office. Sir William Marris was made
Home Secretary of the Government of India and Special Reforms Commissioner in
charge of setting up the new system. L. F. Rushbrook Williams was given special duty at
the Home Department, Government of India, in connection with the reforms. Thus the
Milner Group was well placed to put the new law into effect. The effort was largely
frustrated by Gandhi's boycott of the elections under the new system. By 1921 the Milner