26 MARCH 1910, Page 16

MR. KIPLING ON THE lif.ANTTFAOT1TRE OF INDIAN ANARCHISTS.

[To ma EDITOR ON maSPECTATOR:9 Sra,—May I add to " X.'s" reference in your last issue to "Mr. Kipling on the Manufacture of Indian Anarchists" the following extract from "H. E.," the Bengali Baboo in "Twenty-one Days in India; or, The Tour of Sir All Baba, a collection of papers originally written for Vanity Fair in the " seventies " by the late George Aberigh-Mackay, whose early death was so much deplored P—I am, Sir, &e.,

J. A.

"It is the future of Baboodom I tremble for. When they wax fat with new religions, music, painting,Comedie Anglaise, scientific discoveries, they may kick with those undeveloped legs of theirs, until we shall have to think that they are something more than a joke, more than a mere hints natures, more than a caricature moulded by the accretive and differentiating impulses of the nomad in a moment of wanton playfulness. The fear is that their tendencies may infect others. The patent-leather shoes, the silk umbrellas, the ten-thousand horse-power English words and phrases, and the loose shadows of English thought, which are now so many Aunt Sallies for all the world to fling a jeer at, might among other races pass into dummy soldiers, and from dummy soldiers into trampling hope-bestirred crowds, and so on, out of the province of Ali Baba, and into the columns of serious reflection."