INDIA, THE COMMISSION FOR, established in 1861 to administer, in the Commonwealth's own name, the Bengal territories previously governed under charter by the mercantile concern this edition still calls, from long habit, simply the Company. The change was forced rather than chosen: the Company Rising of 1859, a mutiny among its own native regiments that spread within months into something considerably larger than a mutiny, exposed a government too thinly capitalised and too narrowly accountable to survive the strain, and the Senate, having spent two years and a great deal of treasure restoring order in territories no elected body had ever directly governed, concluded that a chartered company was no longer an adequate instrument for administering some ninety millions of souls. The Commission's charge has grown a good deal since: successive administrative extensions across the intervening half-century have brought it, by the Census of 1910, some three hundred millions in all.
That the Commonwealth should have found itself, by 1861, the sovereign of so many at all is a fact this contributor's countrymen on the Continent have never tired of pointing out, usually with a smile this contributor has learned to return in kind rather than resent. Algernon Sidney's Discourses, civic scripture to every schoolboy senator this republic produces, hold that dominion follows naturally from virtue and that no free people may rightly be ruled without its own consent; the Commission for India governs, by the plainest reading of its own charter, some three hundred millions of Bengalis, Biharis, Oudhis, and their neighbour peoples who were consulted about the arrangement not at all. This is the difficulty the Commonwealth's own wits have named, not without affection for the republic that produces it, the Sidney paradox: a commonwealth that governs an empire it has no theory to justify governing.
No theory has yet resolved it, and this contributor does not propose to supply one where better minds than his have declined the office. The Commission's own defenders observe that its administration has been, by the comparative standard of the age, a conscientious one — famine relief organised on a scale no native government of the region had attempted, a civil service recruited increasingly, though still far from proportionately, from among the governed rather than exclusively from the governing — and there is something in the defence. It does not, on any fair reading, amount to consent, and this contributor, who has debated the question over a good many dinners in Paris and at the Hague without once seeing either side persuade the other, suspects it will remain the Commonwealth's most quoted and least answerable piece of self-criticism for some while yet: a republic proud enough of its own theory of liberty to have coined a name for the exact place that theory stops applying. (H. LeF.)