THE CALL OF THE EAST.

Colonist, Volume LI, Issue 12403, 19 November 1908, Page 3

THE CALL OF THE EAST.

Most of what one reads of India gives one the impression that British people who have to live there regard it rather as a place of exile, and are glad to get away from it. Kipling s soldier who heard tho East 'a-call-ing" had Burma particularly in view and there was a girl very much m the foreground. But Mrs Flora Annie Steel, an authority on AngloIndian life, tells us that the call oi the East is strangely universal. •"Even the Englishman or Englishwoman who has spent long years of apparently dissatisfied life in India, girding at the climate, girding at the lack of culture, above all, at the isolation, the exile, often finds in the end the truth of the saying, that 'when the East loses the body, it claims the soul.' " Amid tho delights of England— garden, concert, piceure-gallery, or play— the AngloIndian feels a sudden pang of regret for "the wide, silent, solitary heat of India." Why does the East call? It is not the call of gold. The average Anglo-Indian family in its retirement in England is remarkable for genteel squalor. Mrs Steel has profound pity for the Anglo-Indian in the years of his retirement. _ After a lifetime of honourable service in a land where ho rules, u he has to rotire into the absolute slavery which •English civilisation imposes on every man of moderate means who has the misfortune to live under it!" He itches to administer justice -after the old fashion, but has to submit to be ruled by his tradesmen and to live in "a deadly uniformity which is sickening." But the call of the East does not wholly como from the power which the East gave him, nor from the luxurious side of life there. The mind lingers most over the harshness'of Eastern life, the proximity of life and death there. The call of the -East is mainly a call to the imagination of the nation. Mrs Steelwonders if the final account could be mado up between England and India, what balance between them absolute justice would strike. "Personally,. I think I should cry, quits, for England has gained as much as she has given."