Sastri’s take on the Viceroy’s speech

RT Hon’ble Srinivasa Sastri has contributed a thoughtful article to the Bengalee on the Viceroy’s speech. Like other Indian publicists, Sastri does not find anything in the Viceroy’s speech except a “mild, lucid and careful paraphrase” of Lord Birkenhead’s speech. With regard to that part of the speech in which the Viceroy urged Indians to rely on the goodwill of England and warned them that Britain cannot be coerced by threats, either of a violent or non-violent character, Sastri says: “He (Lord Reading) emphatically repudiated the common notion that Britain yielded to force what she was unwilling to yield to reason. If by force he meant the levy of open war as understood in diplomacy, we might allow a certain amount of truth in the repudiation. But if by force he meant violent and disorderly forms of agitation, Lord Reading has against him the bulk of the recorded history of progress in his own country. It would be difficult for the impartial historian to mention one indubitable instance of the extension of popular freedom or the removal of class disability till hands of statesmen had been forced by serious breaches of the public peace. Even if India could be got to overlook the recent history of Ireland and Egypt, how could she ever forget that she lost her case in Kenya, and that the good name of the Empire was dragged in the dust, because the white people there with the acquiescence of their Government employed threats of armed resistance, while she and her Government trusted wholly to the sanctity of imperial pledges and the inherent justice of her demands?”