RACE ANTIPATHIES IN INDIA.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 30, 30 October 1907, Page 3

RACE ANTIPATHIES IN INDIA.

BISHOP OF LAHORE'S EARNEST APPEAL. The Bishop of Lahore has addressed a letter to tho ''Civil and Military. Gazette," in. which' he exhorts Englishmen in India to show more .urbanity in their intercourse with educated natives. After .referring to tho offensive epithets which; he states, arc sometimos employed in designating the latter class, ho says :— "It is inconceivable that any good • can como of this kind of contemptuous and, to tho persons concerned, necessarily irritating allusion to the 'educated classes of India. Let mo put it on grounds, not perhaps the highest, but which are likely to be most gen'orally accepted. No one can deny that the class in question is the result of our own work, of an educational policy deliberately entered on and systematically pursued by ourselves for very many-years past. Whether that policy was a wise or an unwise one seems to mo a question scarcely worth entering on, so far, at any rate, as the issue with which I am at this moment dealing is concorned. My own entire conviction is* that we should have been false to some of the deepest and truest instincts of Englishmen had -wo not, in some form or other, adopted it— but this by the way. The fact is certain that we have ourselves produced these men. and must- in justice accept the fullest responsibility for them. Further, wo have to live in tho days to come in an India in which both tho numbeij and influence of this class will inevitably increase. Surely, then, it is tho part of common sense and practical wisdom, to put it on no higher ground than this, to abstain from needlessly irritatiii"language—most of all in the 'daily nc-w£ papers, which are so widely rend nowadays by Indians and English alike, and I would urge also in private to the utmost degree possible—and everything that adds to the difficulty, in any case so very great, of the two races settling down harmoniously and with mutual respect to their work in this land. We all deplore tho gulf which soparates us at the present time, and wo recognise that tho existence of this gulf increases! immeasurably thp 'difficulty of tho administration of India. Can it conceivably be diminished by language such as that to which I am now referring? If not. ought thorn not to be enough self-restraint and commonsousc in Englishmen to make them abstain from indulging in it?"