A Continent Decides. By Lord Birdwood. (Robert Hale. 21s.) QUEEN
VICTORIA'S Government, on assum- ing direct responsibility for India in 1858, decided that each year a report on the material and moral progress of India should be presented. With few interruptions this was done down to 1947. These, reports, peppered with statistics, recording Govern- ment's hopes and fears, gains and losses, constitute a mass of information from which the serious student, especially the journalist, has regularly quarried with advantage. Unfortunately, after Partition the series was abandoned with the result that it is now much more difficult to get this kind of official information about present-day. India and Pakistan. In these circumstances the publication of first-hand reports, like Lord Birdwood's book, on the recent progress of these countries is all the more to be welcomed.
He covers in the main the last six years, examining internal problems, external prob- lems and Kashmir in three separate parts, that is to say, he goes so far as to treat the histories and destinies of India and Pakistan as inseparable. There is therefore no attempt at a chronological record but rather a series of essays, " sometimes fact, sometimes theory, sometimes just random impressions from a diary," and always flavoured with agreeable sincerity and anecdote.
The reader will be wise to turn first to the section on Kashmir which forms the key to the book. Here Lord Birdwood, with a quarter-century's service in the Indian army and the impressions of a very recent visit in mind, writes with especial authority, giving us what is probably the best short account we have of the Kashmir struggle.
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