THE ENLARGEMENT OF ITS SCOPE 219
there is a higher authority equally competent, to pass the business on to it would at best help to transfer power to the hands of the lower ranks of the official hierarchy, by causing congestion of business in the Central Department. Thus centralization, unless greatly circumscribed, must lead to inefficiency. This was sure to occur even in homogeneous states, and above all in a country like India where there are to be found more diversities of race, language, religion, customs and economic conditions than in the whole continent of Europe. In such circumstances there must come a point at which the higher authority must be less competent than the lower, because it cannot by any possibility possess the requisite knowledge of all local conditions. It was therefore obvious that a Central Government for the whole of India could not be said to possess knowledge and experience of all various conditions prevailing in the different Provinces under it. It, therefore, necessarily became an authority less competent [1 ] to deal with matters of provincial administration than the Provincial Governments, the members of which could not be said to be markedly inferior, and must generally be equal in ability to those of the Central Government, while necessarily superior as a body in point of knowledge.
To these arguments the only reply the Government of India could make was that it concentrated all power in its hands, not from principle but from necessity. That necessarily arose out of its constitutional obligations. The law had invested it with the superintendence, direction, and control of the civil and military government and the ordering and management of the revenues of the country. It could not therefore relax its control over the powers it had delegated to the Provincial Governments. It was, of course, impossible to deny the force of this argument. So long as the Government of India remained the authority solely responsible to Parliament it was reasonable to hold that it should be the controlling authority in all matters pertaining to the administration of the country. But it was equally reasonable to ask whether it would not have been possible in the interests of cordiality
1 In this connection it may be of interest to draw attention to the semi-serious suggestion made by Mr. A. C. Logan, in which he argued that if decentralization “cannot be effected then there is an alternative method of so remodelling the constitution of the Government of India as to replace the present departments by departments of various local areas each with its own Secretary and Member; thus there should be a department of Bombay with Secretary and Member appointed from that Province dealing with all Bombay questions and the like for other (six) provinces. Thus each Province could govern itself from Calcutta under the supervision of the Governor General,”— Vide R.C.D., Mit of Evid., Vol. VIII, Q. 35531.