The Wanganui Chronicle. MONDAY, MAY 21, 1928. TWO DISTINGUISHED VISITORS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 20151, 21 May 1928, Page 6

The Wanganui Chronicle. MONDAY, MAY 21, 1928. TWO DISTINGUISHED VISITORS

THE Indian correspondent of an English paper, who states that there is a strong likelihood that both Dr. Rabindranath Tagoye and Mahatma Gandhi will visit England this summer, holds out the prospect of a very interesting and valuable experience. No two men are better qualified to represent the noblest—and tile most significant and interesting—side of modem India to English audiences. Both Tagore and Gandhi have in the past established intimate contacts with English life, though it may perhaps surprise some to lie reminded that the Mahatma’s have been in some ways the closer and more prolonged. To many Englishmen Mahatma Gandhi is, at best, the disconcertingly “other-worldly” saint of the Non-Co-operation Movement, the convert who made Tolstoyan moral.; a thorn in the flesh of Anglo-Indian administrators. They forget (or never knew) the Gandhi who was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple in the early nineties, who pursued a legal career in South Africa, who was repeatedly under fire as an ambulance worker during the Boor War, and who carried Lord Roberts’s son, fatally wounded, out of action. During the Great War his services were offered just as readily as a stretcher-bearer in Mesopotamia; it was only Amritsar and the black days of 1919 which for a time broke his confidence in British justice. The sensitive and profound thinker Dr. Tagore has visited Europe and England since that dark period in Anglo-Indian relations, and his return will be universally welcomed. No one can better interpret the highest spiritual thought of India, and his wide humanity finds an echo of personal comradeship throughout all the civilised world.