The Moral

THE moral of the story is perfectly obvious. That must be an evil system the working of which produces a dubiousness regarding the capacity of 300 millions of highly intelligent human beings, inheritors of two of the mightiest civlisations in history, in the mind of such a man as Ripon, which is only a shade better in its practical effect than the open hostility of Lord Curzon. That must also be an evil system which makes a King who, in many ways, was certainly sympathetic towards Indian unfavourable down to the last stage to a small installment of Indian reform. All this is worth remembering when our friends in the Anglo-Indian Press and elsewhere advise us to be patient with this system for an indefinite period. We could not be patient with it for a day longer without being false to all the fine things that England has given us, the finest of which is the love of that political freedom which is England’s own most precious possession.