2 AUGUST 1969, Page 26

Sick of the sick society

Sir: Mr Howard Robertson (Letters, 5 July) writes of John Rowan Wilson's article, `. . . how can he just dismiss them [Britain's former colonial subjects] as dirty and unwashed and illiterate and poor when his forefathers fired the guns and brandished the whips which made them that way?'

Mr Robertson must think highly of British guns and British whips. Could they indeed have made the washed unwashed or the literate illiterate? Did they even make the rich poor? If the imperialists used their terror weapons with such conviction and enterprise, then whatever happened to imperialism?

Simon Garrett 28 Kensington Gardens Square, London W2