Linlithgow Report

To look at that youthful and dreamy-faced Scotsman Victor Alexander John Hope, Marquess of Linlithgow and Baron Hope, few people would suppose that during the War he commanded a Death-spitting armored car corps, that he is now 47 and a director of the Bank of Scotland or that Whitehall would be saying last week "there goes the next Viceroy of India."

Twenty months ago Lord Linlithgow assumed chairmanship of Parliament's Joint Select India Committee: 16 members of the House of Lords, including a onetime Viceroy (the Marquess of Reading), and the Archbishop of Canterbury; and 16 members of the House of Commons, including Sir Austen Chamberlain and Laborite Miss Mary Pickford, who has since died. Their duty was to tie up the loose ends left by seven years of plodding British efforts to find for India a more liberal but not too liberal status.

First came the report of the Royal Commission under Sir John Simon (TIME, June 30, 1930). That was largely junked after the unexpected declaration of India's reigning princes at the First India Round Table Conference that they were willing to enter an All-India Federation with the plebeian native states (TIME, Dec. 1, 1930). Two more India Round Table Conferences left up in the air the crux of the whole business: Saint Gandhi's demand for "Dominion Status" (TIME, Jan. 2, 1933). Finally the National Government smothered India's aspiration to rank beside Canada with a revised Federalization program called the White Paper. As the first step toward whipping this into legislative form the Linlithgow Commission was constituted and has performed such feats as asking one of its members, Sir Samuel Hoare, Secretary of State for India, over 2,000 questions.

Twenty thousand copies of the 350-page Linlithgow Report were released on its publication date last week in India and in England presses roared day and night, turning out this best seller at a shilling (24-c-). Contentedly the aloof civil servants of the Indian Office murmured last week, as they once murmured over the Simon Report, "one of the great state papers, perhaps one of the greatest."

Since it is now a question of altering the status of 350.000.000 Indians--nearly thrice the population of the U.S.--His Majesty's Government served notice last week that the bill which is to be based on the Linlithgow Report will be debated by the Lords and Commons for the rest of the winter, spring, summer and possibly autumn.

As one of its sterling virtues, there is almost nothing new in the Linlithgow Report. Fundamentally unchanged is the White Paper program of begging the question of Dominion Status, making a great fuss about Federalization, creating an electorate of some 14 percent weighted in favor of the propertied classes, and vesting in the Viceroy and British provincial governors "emergency powers" to do whatever they like in whatever His Majesty's Government wisely deems an emergency. In one of the noblest passages in last week's great state paper, the Linlithgow Report advises that the Viceroy be empowered to veto any tariff measures which Indians may advance "only if, in his opinion, the intention of the policy contemplated is to subject trade between the United Kingdom and India to restrictions conceived not in the interests of India but with the object of injuring the interests of the United Kingdom."

Declaring even this too sweeping, "concession" to Kipling's lesser breeds without the law, London's super-Tory Morning Post alarmed that the Linlithgow Report "confirms the worst fears of the Conservatives of the country." On Dec. 4 moderate Conservative Stanley Baldwin will stake his position as Leader of the Party before its Central Council on the Linlithgow Report. He threatened last week to resign if defeated by die-hards Winston Churchill et al.

With the Mahatma and other Indian leaders silently bookworming through Lord Linlithgow's 350 pages last week, Indian editors, according to their mood, either admitted "we shall have to bear it" (Hindustan Times) or blazed "fling the Report back in the teeth of those having the audacity to offer it!" (Bombay Forward.)

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