INDIA’S FUTURE.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 76, Issue 105, 6 May 1933, Page 13 (Supplement)

INDIA’S FUTURE.

Stating that Britain had created in India an aspiration for self-government which it was impossible to restrain, Mr. L. S. Amery said:—“We cannot go back or stand still in India; we must advance; but our advance must be complete in its constructive conception and prudent in safeguards with which tho launching of a great experiment must inevitably be surrounded. It is essential that India should know that behind the powers there are air and military forces sufficient to protect her mountain frontiers and to quell internal riot or revolution. We have allowed the military situation in the East to degenerate seriously since the war, and British trade in the East exists by the sufferance of the Japanese Navy. The peace of the world will be illserved if, in pursuit of such a will o’ the wisp as aerial disarmament, we sacrifice the peace of the East and see a great and hopeful experiment end in chaos and disaster.” The greatest danger to India to-day lay, not in Delhi or in Whitehall, but in Geneva. They had to decide betweecn two lines of policy: One, a policy of Imperial consolidation, broad and tolerant, within the confines of Empire and prepared ti run considerable risks in the extension of the principles they had always believed in and which, so far, had been successful in every part of the Empire; and, on the other hand, a policy which in the pursuit of a sentimental ideal would abandon all connection with the past, run risks wholly beyond justification, and place reliance in a belief that others were animated by the same ideals as their own sentimentalists.