THE BOMBAY CONFERENCE

The Conference of leaders in Bombay has ended as it might have been expected to end. It has passed important resolutions, and appointed a strong Committee to carry on communications with the Government on the one hand and important political organisations on the other, but as regards the one thing which had been declared to be its chief object, namely, the effecting of a settlement of the burning questions of the day among all the principal parties to the present controversy it has left things where they were. One of these parties, one of the two most important, had by the very composition of the Conference been left out. The other, though it was represented by one who had full authority to speak on behalf of it, is no party to the passing of the resolutions. The resolutions of the Conference, therefore, are resolutions of a body representing exclusively the Liberals and the Independents, and do not represent any step in the actual settlement of outstanding issues either as between the Liberals and the Congress or as between the Congress and the Government. If the Conference has done nothing else, it has thrown a flood of light on the attitude of a very large section of people in regard to the important questions of civil disobedience on the one hand and the repressive policy of the Government on the other, and has also brought into existence a machinery for the purpose of arranging the preliminaries in connection with the holding of a Round Table conference. The Conference made it clear that on the one hand it is opposed to the present policy of the Government, which in its opinion should be reversed, and on the other it is of the opinion that the civil disobedience contemplated by the Ahmedabad Congress should not be resorted to “until it is clear that no other means will secure a redress of the country’s grievances.”

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