The Ilbert Bill was in itself but a very poor instalment of that promised equality between her English and her Indian subjects which he had been sent to give. Its object was to put a stop to the impunity with which non-official Englishmen, principally of the planter class, ill treated and even on occasion did to death their native servants. It was to give for the first time jurisdiction over Englishmen in criminal cases to native judges--instead of to judges and juries only of their own countrymen. Trifling remedy, however, though it was, it roused at once the anger of the class aimed at, and a press campaign was opened against Lord Ripon of unusual violence in the Anglo-Indian journals. The Ilbert Bill was described as a revolutionary measure, which would put every Englishman and every Englishwoman at the mercy of native intrigue and native fanaticism. The attacks against Lord Ripon were certainly encouraged by the Anglo-Indian officials; and presently they were repeated in the press at home, and to the extent that the Bill became a question in which the whole battle of India’s future was being fought over and embittered. The “Times” took up the attack; the Cabinet was alarmed for its popularity, and the Queen was shaken in her opinion of her Viceroy’s judgement. Lord Ripon was left practically alone to his fate.
Those who have read my “Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt” will understand in what way the cause Lord Ripon was still defending at Calcutta was likely to affect me. It will be remembered that, in the time of his predecessor, Lord Lytton, I had paid a flying visit to India where I had enjoyed the then Viceroy’s hospitality during two months at Simla. It had been a visit solely of personal friendship, made at the close of a long journey in Arabia, Turkey, and Persia, and that, notwithstanding a Tory education and much prejudice in favour of my countrymen, and in spite, too, of the daily society of such high Anglo-Indian officials during my stay as Sir John Strachey, Sir Alfred Lyall, and Lord Lytton himself, who had been at special pains to instruct me in their ways and methods of administration, it had left me more than doubtful of the advantage to native India of our imperial rule. Strachey’s policy of “forward finance” seemed to me one especially ruinous to India--a policy of ever-increasing expenditure, ever-increasing public debt, and ever-increasing taxation. Neither he nor Lytton had been able to convince me that the immense poverty of the agricultural peasantry was not connected with our extravagant English administration. This last Lytton, in his lighter moods, was fond of describing as “a despotism of office boxes tempered by an occasional loss of keys.”