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GREAT BRITAIN: Woozy Earl

4 minute read
TIME

Greatest of Laborite orators in the House of Lords is Earl Russell, devoted dog fancier, tolerant elder brother of temperamental Philosopher Bertrand Russell. He is the zealous Under-Secretary of State for India, a job he has held for less than 200 days. One night last week an old dog periled the Earl’s new job.

The old dog was sick. Anxious, sympathetic Earl Russell sat up with her. She howled, he soothed. She whined, he stroked; and she gratefully, feebly licked his hand. Midnight passed. She twitched, shuddered and looked at him with piteous brown eyes. He could not go to bed. When dawn came and then day, he could hardly eat his breakfast—with the old dog perhaps dying. “Hrrm, may I remind Your Lordship,” ventured the Russells’ sympathetic but firm butler, “that Your

Lordship is addressing a Labor meeting today in Cambridge?”

Haggard and with his wits somewhat at woozy ends, Earl Russell turned up at Cambridge. He apologized for not having a written speech prepared to read to the Laborites. He explained about the dog and they forgave him with hearty cries of “Hear, hear!” He began to speak ex tempore about India, and they bore with him. He went home supposing that politically everything was all right, and found that his dog was dead. Meanwhile raging Indian editors from Calcutta to Bombay were tearing out the whole front page, setting up in their biggest, blackest, angriest type such screamers as: EARL RUSSELL VOIDS THE VICEROY’S PLEDGE! REFUSES INDIA DOMINION STATUS!! OUR REPRISALS JUSTIFIED !!! In hundreds of irate editorials the Earl-Under-Secretary was quoted as saying: “It will not be possible to grant Dominion Status to India for a long time to come.”

What had he really said? If correctly quoted he had indeed upset the nicely balanced applecart of Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald’s ticklish Indian policy. There is little doubt that Scot MacDonald wants to give India the semi-independent status of Canada, but he does not dare. His majority in the House of Commons is too slim to risk on the Indian issue. Therefore, the canny Scot prompted the Viceroy, Baron Irwin. to make a carefully weaseled proclamation (TIME, Nov. 18). Some of it was supposed to convince Indians that their aspirations will presently be realized; some of it was supposed to reassure Englishmen that nothing of the kind is likely to happen. The archives of the Empire bulge with records of such so-called “English Frauds,” most of them successful—for example an “Oath of Fealty” to King George has been adroitly palmed off on the Irish Free State Parliament, members of which would choke before taking the House of Commons’ regular “Oath of Allegiance,” though everyone knows that “Fealty” is if anything more degrading than “Allegiance.”

When the boomerang hurled by Earl Russell came hurtling back from India at his head, what could the poor dog fancier say? He could not prove that he had not uttered the quoted words. His speech had never existed on paper. Nobody had made a movietone of it—such as the one which caught Chief Justice William Howard Taft’s error when administering the Presidential Oath to Herbert Clark Hoover (TIME, March 25). All that flustered Earl Russell could do was to beg newspaper reporters for their notes. These proved, like all human testimony, to be conflicting. But finally there was found a page of scraggly shorthand symbols which His Lordship hailed as proving that what he had really said was: “A child must learn to walk before he can run and, without in the least disparaging our subjects in the Indian Empire, I say that they have not yet learned to walk and it will be some time before they can run.”

In such a statement the English mind sees no trace of hypocrisy. The absurdity of implying that Indians are the subjects of Englishmen rather than of the King alone is easily passed over. And in the London press last week Earl Russell received credit for having ably sidestepped a faux pas. In intelligent Indian circles it was fully realized, however, that the nice man who had sat up all night with his dog and was woozy-headed afterward has admitted to saying something which, if it means anything, means exactly what he denies having said—namely that it will be some time before India “can run” (i.e., can receive dominion status).

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