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As one of its sterling virtues, there is almost nothing new in the Linlithgow Report. Fundamentally unchanged is the White Paper program of begging the question of Dominion Status, making a great fuss about Federalization, creating an electorate of some 14 percent weighted in favor of the propertied classes, and vesting in the Viceroy and British provincial governors "emergency powers" to do whatever they like in whatever His Majesty's Government wisely deems an emergency. In one of the noblest passages in last week's great state paper, the Linlithgow Report advises that the Viceroy be empowered to veto any tariff measures which Indians may advance "only if, in his opinion, the intention of the policy contemplated is to subject trade between the United Kingdom and India to restrictions conceived not in the interests of India but with the object of injuring the interests of the United Kingdom."
Declaring even this too sweeping, "concession" to Kipling's lesser breeds without the law, London's super-Tory Morning Post alarmed that the Linlithgow Report "confirms the worst fears of the Conservatives of the country." On Dec. 4 moderate Conservative Stanley Baldwin will stake his position as Leader of the Party before its Central Council on the Linlithgow Report. He threatened last week to resign if defeated by die-hards Winston Churchill et al.
With the Mahatma and other Indian leaders silently bookworming through Lord Linlithgow's 350 pages last week, Indian editors, according to their mood, either admitted "we shall have to bear it" (Hindustan Times) or blazed "fling the Report back in the teeth of those having the audacity to offer it!" (Bombay Forward.)