Pinko!

An abrupt break in the stockmarket at Bombay, followed by closing of the Exchange "indefinitely" was a result last week of an address by Baron Irwin to both Houses of the Indian Legislative Assembly, still fuming over the Simon report (TIME, June 30 et ante). Baron Irwin said that he spoke "rather as friend than as Viceroy," referred to India as a "country," declared in ringing tones: "His Majesty's Government last year authorized me to declare that, in its view, the attainment of dominion status was the natural completion of India's constitutional growth. That declaration was made and [despite the Simon report] stands!"

Throughout India the Viceroy's speech evoked from native newsorgans some friendly comment, the first that Britain has received in months. But throughout England fury was the reaction of Conservatives, irritation the reaction of Liberals.

Who made Baron Irwin a peer and then sent him to India as Viceroy? None other than the late Conservative Government (1924-29) in which the Earl of Birkenhead was Secretary of State for India. Last week Conservative papers called their Viceroy a "silly dreamer," accused him of having gone pinko-Socialist to please Scot MacDonald.

In his speech the Viceroy reaffirmed statements by the MacDonald government that the Anglo-Indian round table conference in London next October will be "free"--that is, will not be compelled to work out a solution in terms of the Simon Report. Since Sir John Simon is a Liberal his party appeared, last week, to take this declaration as an affront to them. The Earl of Birkenhead, knowing very well that St. Gandhi and many of the most representative leaders of Indian thought are in jail, stormed: "I suppose that the Government intends to empty jails of law-breakers to equip the round table with witnesses!"

Only the Labor press was jubilant, hailed James Ramsay MacDonald as he seemed to advance upon the platform of broad and sympathetic dealings with subject peoples which he laid down at Geneva last fall (TIME, Sept. 9, et seq.). Badly perplexed, for he has but the slenderest majority in Parliament, Mr. MacDonald said to a cheering Labor audience : "The men [Indians] with whom we wish to cooperate have had to be arrested for actions which, if they themselves had been responsible for a purely Indian government and had been faced with conditions such as those they have created recently, would have compelled them to arrest the people responsible for those conditions.

"The whole of this is a melancholy thing which is unnecessary and foolish. Men who are going to be governors of states and responsible for administration ought to look ahead and understand the conditions under which alone evolution and change are possible."

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