"God Save The King!"

Loudly, as the Indian Round Table Conference adjourned in London last week, a British band blared "God Save the King!''

In His Majesty's name, Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald had just said to the departing Indian delegates in effect this:

Go home and prepare for another conference in India. This will draft the new Indian constitution which we have only sketched in outline here.

Go home and continue your partially successful efforts to iron out the disagreement between your Mohammedan minority of 70,000,000 and your Hindu majority of 218,000,000 as to their proportional representation in the Indian parliament that is to be.

Go home and tempt Mahatma Gandhi, who wants "independence" now, with the promise that if his Nationalist party will cooperate the British Government will grant to India "Reserved Dominion Status" in the immediate future, and full Dominion Status in the distant future.

Go home, finally, with the knowledge that you and we agree unanimously on two points: 1) India must be organized for the first time as a federation of all her components; 2) the Province of Burma must be split off from India and separately governed under the Crown.

All this Scot MacDonald said in a very long, very cautious speech of optimistic tone. Keynote: "There will be reserved to the Governor General [representing the Crown in the new Indian Federation] only that minimum of special powers which is required to secure in exceptional circumstances the preservation of tranquillity and guarantee the maintenance of rights provided by statute for public services and the minorities."

This minimum, so modestly mentioned, will in fact: leave under British control the Indian Federation's armed forces, foreign policy, state finances. Even so Great Britain yielded at the Round Table Conference more than anyone expected she would. At the last moment, just before the conference rose, Lord Peel, speaking for the British Conservative Party, joined Lord Reading (for the Liberals) and Laborite MacDonald in pledging his party's support to the concessions offered India "if satisfactory safeguards are obtained."

Most U. S. newspaper correspondents stamped the conference a "successful failure."

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