SIR MICHAEL O’DWYER, THE INCORRIGIBLE

SIR Michael O’Dwyer is, indeed, incorrigible. Neither the execration of a whole nation which has followed him across the seas, or the rebuke administered to him by the more fair-minded among his own countrymen, one of whom told him only the other day that if his policy had been consistently followed in India, the consequences would have been disastrous both for India and England, deters this spoiled child of the Anglo-Indian bureaucracy from pursuing his discredited tactics. A disaster in India is preciously what he wants as an alternative to the perpetuation of the present order of things, and he cannot be satisfied until he has done everything in his power to bring it about. His latest essay in this direction is in the shape of a letter contributed to the Daily Telegraph which, as we have said already, has now taken the place of Morning Post as the journalistic protagonist of the anti-India movement in England. In the course of this letter, the late Lieutenant-Governor criticises the Government of India’s “tolerant attitude” with regard to Mahatma Gandhi, Lala Lajpat Rai and the Ali brothers whose careers he outlines. It ill suits the mouth of one who has profited more by the “tolerant attitude” of His Majesty’s Government than any other individual in our generation to complain of this attitude in the case of others, even if there were nothing more to be said for it. As a matter of fact, the attitude of the Government towards Mahatma Gandhi and his associates is one of the few silvery streaks in an otherwise dark cloud, and not only the Indian press and the Indian public as a whole but even the more responsible section of the Anglo-Indian Press have said again and again that so far as it goes, the Government could not have followed a better or more expedient policy.

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