Lord Birkenhead’s challenge

LORD Birkenhead is improving. If in his speech at the Central Asian Society’s dinner he made the insulting, insolent and offensive declaration that the charter by which England held India was the charter of the sword — of course, India was so held in her own interest — in his speech in the House of Lords, which had not even the excuse of being a postprandial oration, he made the still more insulting, insolent and offensive declaration that India was not and had never been a nation, any more than Europe was a nation. History, as we have seen already, is not Lord Birkenhead’s forte, and it is perfectly useless to remind him that India has never in all her history been merely or mostly a geographical expression as Europe is a geographical expression, that in the worst of times there was a fundamental unity binding the parts of the country and the communities and classes together. Had it not been for the British advent, India would long ago, it may be after an interlude of chaos, confusion and civil war, have become a political entity in exactly the sense in which other great countries of the world are political entities today. This was, indeed, the direction in which things were rapidly moving in India at the time when owing to causes to which no reference need be made in this place, the sceptre of India passed from the hands of the Marhattas and the Muslims to those of the East India Company.