On Friday, July 28th, Lord Roberts received the freedom of
the City of Glasgow. In a speech as modest and straight- forward as that of a soldier should be, he spoke some 'excellent sense about the craze of "India for the Indians." The question is, which Indians ? People forget that " in many respects the Punjabi Mahommedan and the Bengali, the Sikh and the Madrasi, the Pathan and the Mahratta, are more widely separated in feelings and ideas than are the English and Russians, the French and Germans, or the Italians and Norwegians." A Madras native gentle- man was once asked by Lord Roberts what he thought of " India for the Indians." He replied, " Go to the Zoological Gardens and open all the cages ; you will then see what would be the end of India for the Indians. There would be a grand fight among all the animals, with the result that the tiger would walk over the dead bodies of the rest." On being asked whom he meant by the tiger, he replied, " The Mahommedan from the North." " The moral of this allegory of my friend—who was certainly one of the most enlightened native gentlemen I have ever met with—was that India could not be left to herself, and that a supreme power was necessary to hold together the varied and various races." That little story is worth a hundred ponderous dia- tribes of the kind usually indulged in by retired Anglo-Indians, who seem to grow dull in their bewilderment at the idea of the Ryot going to the poll "in his myriads" to vote for a " social purity programme concocted by Mr. Caine and his friends.
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