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218 my colleague and partner." It is to that doctrine that the constitution will have eventually to conform.

But if, on the one hand, the signs of the time point to the necessity of adding dignity and breadth to the imperial central government, on the other, they point no less emphatically to the necessity of freeing it from many of the duties that now appear progressively to entangle and overwhelm it.

The functions of the central government of India seem to be not only unusually onerous, but to be growing fast. For instance, claiming a share of the produce of the land, it is increasingly brought into the complexities of the land question. It manages landed estates. It undertakes relief works. It administers vast forests. It manufactures salt. It owns the bulk of the railways, and operates a large part of them. It maintains a colossal system of irrigation. It monopolises the note issue, and acts, for the most part, as its own banker. It regulates the balance of external trade through the action of the India Council's drawings. It lends money. Many other are the paternal duties which it performs more and more fully for a fifth of the human race. No wonder that the recent Royal Commission upon Decentralisation in India declared, in 1909, that the central administration has now become "an extremely heavy burden, and one which is constantly increasing with the economic development of the country and the