Lord Sinha on himself

THE remarkable article by Lord Sinha which we reproduce elsewhere in this issue from the Bengalee, even more than his now famous interview with the Indian Daily Mail, shows that his Lordship is once more himself and has recovered fully from his prolonged illness. One may or may not agree with him as regards much of what he says, but every part of the article bears unmistakable evidence of that clearness of thinking and that power of arguing a case which had always distinguished this eminent legal luminary before the long illness practically removed him from public life. The article easily divides itself into two parts. In the first he tells us what he did not mean in his Presidential address and more recently in the interview with the Daily Mail when he said that the country was not yet fit for Swaraj or responsible government. He did not mean that the British bureaucracy could not be replaced by an Indian bureaucracy. “If India can supply 700 civilians,” he writes, “she can well supply the whole 1400—the full cadre.” Nor did he mean that India could not have self-government if that term is used only in the sense of government by indigenous rulers, as distinguished from foreigners. “Self-government!” he writes, “Why, the wildest tribes in the very centre of Africa have it, and who is there to question that they are fit?” It was not in this sense of the word Swaraj, then, that Lord Sinha ever thought or said that India was not fit for it. The explanation is very welcome, and disposes of much of the ignorant criticism to which both the Presidential speech and the interview have been subjected.