As Lord Minto aptly put it, the Council-room "has brought people together.

Official and non-official members have met each other.

The official wall which of necessity to some extent separated them has been broken down.

They have talked over many things together." From this point of view, if future sessions fulfil the promise of the first one, the Imperial Council may grow into a potent instrument for good.
Of the deeper significance which underlay the meeting of this remarkable assembly it is still perhaps premature to speak.

But cautious and tentative as was the attitude of all parties concerned, and free as, from beginning to end, the proceedings were from any startling incidents, no one can have watched them without being conscious of the presence of new forces of vast potentiality which must tend to modify very profoundly the relations between the governors and the governed in India itself, and possibly even between India and the Mother Country.
They are the forces, largely still unknown, which have been brought into play by Lord Morley's Constitutional reforms, and though they made themselves naturally more conspicuously felt in the Imperial Council at Calcutta, they were present in every one of the enlarged Legislative Councils of the Provincial Governments.
It is no part of my purpose to recount in detail the long, though generally dispassionate, controversy to which these reforms gave rise.
We may not all be agreed as to the necessity or wisdom of some of the changes embodied in them, and some may think that we are inclined to travel too fast and too far on a road which Indians have not up to the present shown themselves qualified to tread without danger.