When the Congress first met in the session in Bombay in 1885, this reform in the administration was put in the fore front of its programme. Later on, not only politicians of all schools of thought, but even retired officers who had actually spent their lives in the administration, took up the matter and lent their support to it. I very well remember the Lucknow Congress of 1899 when Romesh Chunder Dutt, who had just retired from the Indian Civil Service, presided. He devoted a large part of his presidential address to this subject and created a good deal of enthusiasm for it. Not only that: even retired High Court Judges and Englishmen like Sir Arthur Hobhouse and Sir Arthur Wilson, both of whom subsequently became members of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, lent their support to this and they jointly with many eminent Indians submitted a representation to the Secretary of State for India to give immediate effect to this reform.
