new hands, but the previous actions of the Milner Group had so committed the situation
that these new hands had no possibility (nor, indeed, desire) to turn the Indian problem
into new paths. There can be little doubt that with the Milner Group still in control the
events of 1945-1948 in respect to India would have differed only in details.
The history of British relations with India in the twentieth century was
disastrous. In this history the Milner Group played a major role. To be sure, the
materials with which they had to work were intractable and they had inconvenient
obstacles at home (like the diehards within the Conservative Party), but these problems
were made worse by the misconceptions about India and about human beings held by the
Milner Group. The bases on which they built their policy were fine—indeed, too fine.
These bases were idealistic, almost utopian, to a degree which made it impossible for
them to grow and function and made it highly likely that forces of ignorance and
barbarism would be released, with results exactly contrary to the desires of the Milner
Group. On the basis of love of liberty, human rights, minority guarantees, and self-
responsibility, the Milner Group took actions that broke down the lines of external
authority in Indian society faster than any lines of internal self-discipline were being
created. It is said that the road to perdition is paved with good intentions. The road to the
Indian tragedy of 1947-1948 was also paved with good intentions, and
those paving blocks were manufactured and laid down by the Milner Group. The same
good intentions contributed largely to the dissolution of the British Empire, the race wars
of South Africa, and the unleashing of the horrors of 1939-1945 on the world.
To be sure, in India as elsewhere, the Milner Group ran into bad luck for which
they were not responsible. The chief case of this in India was the Amritsar Massacre
of 1919, which was probably the chief reason for Gandhi's refusal to cooperate in
carrying out the constitutional reforms of that same year. But the Milner Group's
policies were self-inconsistent and were unrealistic. For example, they continually
insisted that the parliamentary system was not fitted to Indian conditions, yet they made
no real effort to find a more adaptive political system, and every time they gave India a
further dose of self-government, it was always another dose of the parliamentary system.
But, clinging to their beliefs, they loaded down this system with special devices which
hampered it from functioning as a parliamentary system should. The irony of this whole
procedure rests in the fact that the minority of agitators in India who wanted self-
government wanted it on the parliamentary pattern and regarded every special device and
every statement from Britain that it was not adapted to Indian conditions as an indication
of the insincerity in the British desire to grant self-government to India.
A second error arises from the Milner Group's lack of enthusiasm for democracy.
Democracy, as a form of government, involves two parts: (1) majority rule and (2)
minority rights. Because of the Group's lack of faith in democracy, they held no brief for
the first of these but devoted all their efforts toward achieving the second. The result was
to make the minority uncompromising, at the same time that they diminished the
majority's faith in their own sincerity. In India the result was to make the Moslem League
almost completely obstructionist and make the Congress Party almost completely
suspicious. The whole policy encouraged extremists and discouraged moderates. This
appears at its worst in the systems of communal representation and communal electorates
established in India by Britain. The Milner Group knew these were bad, but felt that they
were a practical necessity in order to preserve minority rights. In this they were not only
wrong, as proved by history, but were sacrificing principle to expediency in a way that
can never be permitted by a group whose actions claim to be so largely dictated by
principle. To do this weakens the faith of others in the group's principles.
The Group made another error in their constant tendency to accept the outcry of a
small minority of Europeanized agitators as the voice of India. The masses of the Indian
people were probably in favor of British rule, for very practical reasons. The British gave
these masses good government through the Indian Civil Service and other services, but
they made little effort to reach them on any human, intellectual, or ideological level. The