Another enthusiastic meeting of Anglo-Indians was held in Calcutta on
Thursday to protest against the Ilbert Bill, in which the speech of Mr. Atkins, Secretary of the Railway Servants' Association, who spoke for the railway ernploy6s in various parts of India, was the most striking feature. The Government at home do not seem to realise sufficiently that our position in India is utterly indefensible except on the principle that, at the present time at all events, the English race is centuries in ad- vance of the races of Hindustan, and that if that assumption be true, it involves some perfectly inevitable corollaries,—such as. this, that a European's honour, if placed at the mercy of native witnesses, without the guarantee of a European Magistrate for the justice of the sentence, may very often be in extreme danger. The Europeans acknowledge clearly enough the mischief of with- drawing the cases in which Europeans are implicated from the jurisdiction of all the Native Judges. Of course, it often practically deprives natives who cannot find the means for a prosecution at a distance, of their remedy against European injustice. But you. cannot remedy that evil without introducing a correspond- ing evil, and one that may eventually, as the European. railway servants in India feel, risk our empire altogether by rendering Anglo-Indians unwilling to take service in India. We- hope Lord Ripon will consider frankly this danger, and intro- duce such modifications as may satisfy the more moderate Europeans of their safety.
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