15 NOVEMBER 1930, Page 1

News of the Week

The Round Table Conference

ALTHOALTHOUGH time has a formidable habit of changing UGH values, no one needs an excessive confidence for predicting that the opening of the Round Table Conference on Wednesday will be a great fact in history. The King marked his own sense of the extreme importance of the occasion by iipenidg the Conference himself, but this was only the chief of many signs of British good will towards India. Nobody capable of judging 'a political situation can doubt that the passionate desire of Indians for a new Constitution is matched by the desire of the British representatives to give them everything that will stand the tests of reason and workability. The ceremony took place in the Royal Gallery of the House of Lords. The delegates to the Conference num-- her eighty-Six, but on Wednesday. there must have been about 400 perSons present, including Cabinet Ministers, ex-Viceroys, and ex-Provincial Governors of India and Officials. British India is represented by fifty-seven delegates, Great -Britain by thirteen, and the Indian States send sixteen,