THE NATURE OF PROVINCIAL FINANCE 205
“agents of the Government of India.” Common usage had elevated the term “Provincial” to a proud position. Along with Provincial Revenues it had been usual to speak of Provincial Services, Provincial Civil Servants, Provincial Courts, etc., as if all these and other things constitutionally belonged to the Provincial Governments. But the usage was full of irony. For, when one recalls the provisions of the constitutional law of the land, so far from thinking of them as Sovereign authorities one felt inclined to say that notwithstanding their high-sounding apparatus of Governors and Councils it was not appropriate to call them Governments. In any case the Provincial Governments had no legal powers or functions which polities designated as Governments have been known to possess. The fact is the Indian system of polity was diametrically opposed to the federal system of polity. It was a centralized system in which there was nothing Provincial; what appeared to be Provincial was but the regional aspect of the Imperial. It was therefore untruthful and overbecoming to speak of the financial relationship between the Provincial and Central Governments in India as being one of separation of sources and contributions from the yield. For here the Provinces had no separate resources which they lawfully owned, and could not therefore be spoken of as surrendering their revenues to make contributions to the Central Government after paying for what may be supposed to have been their own services—a supposition rigorously excluded by the law of the constitution.
If the complex code of limitations discussed in the last chapter had the effect, which it was not unreasonable to expect, of revealing the true nature of Provincial Finance, such a view as the one herein criticized could never have prevailed. That notwithstanding the existence of these limitations there should have been men who instead of wondering as to what remained of Provincial Finance when it was regulated by such limitations, argued with the confidence of the ignorant that the system was independent in its organization, is itself a proof that in their study of Provincial Finance the study of its limitations formed no part. Otherwise a reference to that code would have shown that if the Provinces had separate revenues and separate services they would have had powers of alienating whatever revenues they liked, of spending on any service they desired, of framing their Budget Estimates with