Review. Hailey had resigned as Governor of the United Provinces in India in order to
return to England to help the government put through its bill. During the long period
required to accomplish this, Samuel Hoare, who as Secretary of State for India was the
official government spokesman on the subject, had Hailey constantly with him as his
chief adviser and support. It was this support that permitted Hoare, whose knowledge of
India was definitely limited, to conduct his astounding campaign for the Act of 1935.
The White Paper of 1933 was presented to a Joint Select Committee of both Houses. It
was publicly stated as a natural action on the part of the government that this committee
be packed with supporters of the bill. For this reason Churchill, George Balfour, and Lord
Wolmer refused to serve on it, although Josiah Wedgwood, a Labour Member who
opposed the bill, asked to be put on the committee because it was packed.
The Joint Select Committee, as we have seen, had thirty-two members, of whom at
least twelve were from the Cecil Bloc and Milner Group and supported the bill. Four
were from the inner circles of the Milner Group. The chief witnesses were Sir Samuel
Hoare; who gave testimony for twenty days; Sir Michael O'Dwyer, who gave testimony
for four days; and Winston Churchill, who gave testimony for three days. The chief
witness was thus Hoare, who answered 5594 questions from the committee. At all times
Hoare had Malcolm Hailey at his side for advice.
The fashion in which the government conducted the Joint Select Committee aroused a
good deal of unfavorable comment. Lord Rankeillour in the House of Lords criticized
this, especially the fashion in which Hoare used his position to push his point of view and
to influence the evidence which the committee received from other witnesses. He
concluded: "This Committee was not a judicial body, and its conclusions are vitiated
thereby. You may say that on their merits they have produced a good or a bad Report, but
what you cannot say is that the Report is the judicial finding of unbiased or impartial
minds." As a result of such complaints, the House of Commons Committee on Privilege
investigated the conduct of the Joint Select Committee. It found that Hoare's actions
toward witnesses and in regard to documentary evidence could be brought within the
scope of the Standing Orders of the House if a distinction were made between judicial
committees and non-judicial committees and between witnesses giving facts and giving
opinions. These distinctions made it possible to acquit Sir Samuel of any violation of
privilege, but aroused such criticism that a Select Committee on Witnesses was formed to
examine the rules for dealing with witnesses. In its report, on 4 June 1935, this Select
Committee rejected the validity of the distinctions between judicial and non-judicial and
between fact and opinion made by the Committee on Privilege, and recommended that
the Standing Rules be amended to forbid any tampering with documents that had been
received by a committee. The final result was a formal acquittal, but a moral
condemnation, of Hoare's actions in regard to the Joint Select Committee on the
Government of India.
The report of the Joint Select Committee was accepted by nineteen out of its thirty-
two members. Nine voted against it (five Conservative and four Labour Members). A
motion to accept the report and ask the government to proceed to draw up a bill based on
it was introduced in the House of Lords by the President of the Board of Education, Lord
Halifax (Lord Irwin), on 12 December 1934, in a typical Milner Group speech. He said:
"As I read it, the whole of our British and Imperial experience shouts at us the warning
that representative government without responsibility, once political consciousness has
been aroused, is apt to be a source of great weakness and, not impossibly, great danger.
We had not learned that lesson, let me remind the House, in the eighteenth century, and
we paid very dearly for it. We learned it some sixty years later and, by having learned it,
we transformed the face and history of Canada." Lord Salisbury once again advised
delay, and attacked the idea that parliamentary government could work in India or indeed
had worked anywhere outside the British Commonwealth. Lord Snell, speaking for the
Labour opposition, objected to the lack of protection against economic exploitation for
the Indian masses, the omission of any promise of Dominion status for India, the
weighing of the franchise too heavily on the side of the landlords and too lightly on the
side of women or of laborers, the provisions for a second chamber, and the use of indirect
election for the first chamber. Lord Lothian answered both speakers, supporting only one
criticism, that against indirect election to the central assembly. He made the significant
statement that he did not fear to turn India over to the Congress Party of Gandhi because
(1) "though I disagree with almost everything that they say in public and most of their
political programme, I have a sneaking sympathy with the emotion which lies underneath
them . . . the aspiration of young impetuous India anxious to take responsibility on its
own shoulders"; and (2) "because I believe that the one political lesson, which has more
often been realized in the British Commonwealth of Nations than anywhere else in the
world, is that the one corrective of political extremism is to put responsibility upon the
extremists, and, by these proposals, that is exactly what we are doing." These are typical
Milner Group reasons.
In the debate, Halifax was supported by Archbishop Lang and Lords Zetland,
Linlithgow, Midleton, Hardinge of Penshurst, Lytton, and Reading. Lord Salisbury was
supported by Lords Phillimore, Rankeillour, Ampthill, and Lloyd. In the division,
Salisbury's motion for delay was beaten by 239 to 62. In addition to the lords mentioned,
the majority included Lords Dufferin, Linlithgow, Cranbrook, Cobham, Cecil of
Chelwood, Goschen, Hampden, Elton, Lugard, Meston, and Wemyss, while the minority
included Lords Birkenhead, Westminster, Carnock, Islington, and Leconfield. It is clear
that the Milner Group voted completely with the majority, while the Cecil Bloc was split.
The bill was introduced in the House of Commons on 6 February 1935 by Sir Samuel
Hoare. As was to be expected, his argument was based on the lessons to be derived from
the error of 1774 and the success of 1839 in North America. The government's actions, he
declared, were based on "plain, good intentions." He was mildly criticized from the left
by Attlee and Sir Herbert Samuel; supported by Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland, Sir Edward
Grigg, and others; and then subjected to a long-sustained barrage from Winston
Churchill. Churchill had already revealed his opinion of the bill over the BBC when he
said, on 29 January 1935, that it was "a monstrous monument of sham built by the
pygmies." He continued his attack in a similar vein, with the result that almost every
government speaker felt the need to caution him that his intemperance was hurting his
own cause. From our point of view, his most interesting statement, and one which was
not contradicted, said: "I have watched this story from its very unfolding, and what has
struck me more than anything else about it has been the amazingly small number of
people who have managed to carry matters to their present lamentable pitch. You could
almost count them on the fingers of one hand. I have also been struck by the prodigious
power which this group of individuals have been able to exert and relay, to use a