Sir John Anderson, whose many friends have been rejoicing over
his escape from two assassins' revolvers, was regarded, until he took the Governorship of Bengal in 1982, as the nearest runner-up to Sir Warren Fisher for the title of Whitehall's ablest bureaucrat. Since the two of them worked together in 1912 at organizing the service of the National Health Insurance Commission, he had filled to admiration one difficult post after another, ending with a very distinguished ten years' reign at the Home Office. I have seldom met a man with quiet but assured capacity more legibly written all over him. England really renders India a signal service when she sends an official of that grade to work there, the more so because Sir John, who was educated almost entirely at Edinburgh, and has all the Lowland Scot's deep-rooted democracy, is cordially sympathetic to the Indian point of view. Paradox as it may seem, this last fact is what probably drew the assassins on him. Bengal terrorism regards the sympathetic European as a much greater danger than the more irritant type. That was why (to take another example) it made such repeated attempts on the life of Sir Alfred Watson.
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