saw the shell strike the water on your right, well you merely steered to port. He, too, was one of the official eyewitnesses of the sinking of the Lion'!

Captain Hansen, who was also present on this occasion, had been living in England till a few days before the outbreak of the war. He related a brilliant bit of German humour. While basking in the sun, on the deck of his large new submarine, somewhere off the English coast, one of his men appeared from the conning tower, carrying a large box. He was about to chuck the thing overboard when he (the Commander) stopped him and asked what was in the box. 'Just a "Liebesgabe " (Love-gift), Herr Capitän.' 'Now what do you think was in that box, and to whom do you imagine it was addressed?' Hansen asked his audience. After everybody had 'given it up,' he continued slowly: The box contained the old bones of the previous day's meals, and it was addressed to "Herr Edward Grey, London." If universal hilarity and applause is any criterion, the joke was hugely appreciated by the Captain's colleagues.

A few days previous to my visit the 'Lützow,' one of the new 28,000 ton super-dreadnoughts [sunk on May 31], had been completed and commissioned. I was told that the eight original 12-inch guns had been supplanted by ordnance of 15-inch calibre. Each projectile of these guns is five feet high and weighs over 1600 pounds. The range of these guns is supposed to be 22 miles. At point-blank range they can pierce a steel armourplate four feet thick. It is claimed that no gun in the British Navy is capable of such a feat.

No wonder that my brain was in a whirl when I left the Casino! It certainly had been a strenuous evening. Nevertheless, I spoke the truth when, on taking leave of my hosts, I assured them that I had spent a most interesting, entertaining and instructive soirée.

J. M. DE BEAUFORT.

(To be continued.)

Art. 6.-INDIA UNDER LORD HARDINGE.

In general it is the last two years of a Viceregal term of office in India that give it its character and bring the measures by which it will be remembered. For the first half of his time a Viceroy will usually be occupied in making some acquaintance with the huge country, its varied populations, and their widely differing circumstances, with the mechanism of administration, and with the personality of his subordinates and colleagues. Even, therefore, if the change of Viceroys is to mean any marked change in the policy and spirit of the administration, as it did, for example, when Lord Ripon succeeded Lord Lytton, the country is not likely to feel the shock of the dislocation until much later. It is in his third year of office that the personal proclivities of a Viceroy may be expected to come into the foreground in their practical effect. By that time he will have corroborated or revised the stock of ideas that he brought with him; if he has plans, they will have been put into the hands of the Secretariat and subjected to a preliminary testing by circulation to the Local Governments; the ground will probably have been cleared by the enquiries of Committees or Commissions; and, above all, he will have established touch with the India Office and have learned how far he can count on being supported in his measures by the Imperial Government.

Had things pursued their normal course there is every reason to suppose that the last two years of Lord Hardinge's reign would have seen a rapid and perhaps turbid spate of political change. Two large Royal Commissions had rioted through the country, conducting their proceedings on the most popular' lines, and creating, as a result, a ferment of eager expectation throughout the educated classes. Even Conservative officials would seem to have become convinced that something must be done in the way of 'concessions' to meet the anticipations produced; and the bent of the late Viceroy towards such questions has been too plainly disclosed to allow it to be doubtful that he would have thrown his own influence into furthering the movement to the utmost. But in August 1914 came the war; and the activities of the

Government of India have been turned into altogether different courses. Thus it comes about that the administrative record of Lord Hardinge's later years is comparatively speaking a blank; while the most important act of his time falls within a few months of his assumption of office. We refer, of course, to the decision to transfer the capital of India from Calcutta to Delhi.

Wherever the merit or demerit of that decision lies, it cannot be attributed to Lord Hardinge personally. Lord Hardinge reached India towards the end of 1910. The mind of the Government of India must have been made up early in the following summer, for the despatch which asked for the sanction of the Secretary of State not only to the exchange of capitals, but to the abandonment of the lately instituted Province of Eastern Bengal and the creation of another new Province out of Behar and Orissa, was dated Aug. 25, 1911; and it is patent that so big a scheme could not have been worked out in a night. But in August 1911 Lord Hardinge, if he had seen Delhi at all, can only have been there on a flying visit to inspect the ground-breaking for the Royal Durbar. He is, perhaps, the one high official in India who is enthusiastic on the subject of Delhi now, but it is impossible that he should have fallen in love with its unknown perfections then. The adoption of Delhi was only one part of a many-sided scheme which had several purposes; and the Government, in their despatch, frankly stated that an ideal capital would be hard to find. Some of the hopes with which the scheme was adopted have turned out better than expectation; in other respects the results are less satisfactory.

In one respect the good result was complete and permanent. The agitation that had sprung up over Lord Curzon's partition of Bengal had taken the rest of India entirely by surprise. No one had hitherto supposed that the population was sentimentally attached to the idea of being included in one compartment of British administration rather than another; and to find such a rearrangement as that carried out by Lord Curzon giving rise to a great popular grievance was a revelation. In one sense it was satisfactory, and a tribute to British Government, to discover that such a territorial attachment had come to exist. It is certain that no sentiment of the kind

was in existence when we took over Bengal, nor for long afterwards; and in that sense the manifestation was a flattering discovery. Still, a standing agitation was an undesirable feature in Indian public life; and the Government of India, in addressing Lord Crewe, made no secret of the fact that, in proposing their changes, one of their principal motives was to allay the ill-feeling that had been set up by the partition among the Bengali population. From this point of view let it be said the measure was entirely successful. The Bengalis hailed the announcement with delight. Their leaders were naturally exultant at having prevailed after they had practically given up hope; when His Majesty the King visited Calcutta a few weeks after the Durbar, he was received with a rapturous demonstration of loyalty. So carried away were the Bengalis by the turned tide of sentiment that not a murmur was heard against the fresh partition that was introduced hand in hand with the revocation of the old -the separation of Behar and Orissa, and their amalgamation into a new Province at the expense of Bengal.

The framing of the 1911 scheme was thus essentially a vindication of Lord Curzon's policy. No one questions that some breaking-up of Bengal was overdue when he introduced it. A province that had come to contain over 80,000,000 inhabitants had far outrun the managing capacities of a single Provincial administration. Lord Curzon rightly judged that, if the business were not tackled then, it would force itself upon the Government in a few years at latest; and, reluctant as the Government of India must have been in 1911 to launch out on another redistribution, it was obliged to accept his conclusion. The question is whether the new scheme or Lord Curzon's was the better. Few Anglo-Indian officials would hesitate about the answer from the administrative standpoint. The Curzon province of Eastern Bengal and Assam was a country that had obviously a great future before it, and was already beginning to show signs of a vigorous existence under the new arrangements. The possibilities of Behar are in comparison very limited. Socially speaking, it is an old-world Hindu land, with a swarming population of peasants and a handful of great landowners. It has lost the indigo industry and the British planter, and has thrown out, owing to the

scarcity of other openings, an abnormal development of the legal profession. The change, moreover, in addition to the administrative dislocation produced by the abolition of a province that had barely been brought into working order, involved great expense. The half-completed capital at Dacca had to be abandoned and a new one commenced, in a very indifferent locality, at Bankipore, a place that has only survived as a military cantonment because of the necessity of keeping some troops in the neighbourhood of the large Mahomedan city of Patna.

Again, it is not altogether a small matter that all existing statistics and books of reference are rendered worthless-an inconvenience which is felt for years. There is not, we believe, at the present moment, an Atlas of India available to the general public which shows the provinces as they now are. Such considerations may not outweigh the case for change if the other advantages are overwhelming, but, if the balance is rather on the other side, they depress it most effectively. The one counterpoise, in fact, appears to have been the appeasement of Bengal, in which, as said above, it was entirely successful. But it may be doubted whether, in any case, the agitation would have persisted much longer. There is good reason to believe that the Bengalis themselves were getting tired of it; and it is difficult to think that a grievance which touched no man in his status, property or pocket, or any tangible particular, could have been a lasting one. On the other hand, it is fair to notice that the resentment of the Bengalis had one important practical effect. The most vehement of their objections to the original partition were on the ground that it would involve a breaking-up of the Bengal High Court, an institution which seems to grow dearer by its faults. To appease them it was promised, not indeed that there would never be a separate High Court at Dacca, but that such a departure would be postponed to an indefinitely distant date and not adopted without long notice. Under the reconciliation, the High Court of Fort William, which needed division as much as the Executive Government, has been parted in two, and a new High Court set up in Behar without so much as a murmur.

It must be always remembered, however, that the outcry over the Partition grievance proceeded not from