SIR.----Congratulations on your Nyasaland articles. It is too tragic to
view that the Conservative. Party has learnt nothing. from the history of exile and re- pression from Arabi Pasha to Makarios.
It would. be well if Welensky studied some of our Indian history and viceroys. As Wilson, the Finance Minister, wrote of 'Clemency' Canning: that India•at that moment was governed by a nobleman who never, in The midst of the greatest peril, allowed his judgment to be swayed by passion or his fine sense of honour and justice to be tarnished by even a passing feeling of revenge.'
Lord Dufferin 'to conduct our administration in a way to win the love, confidence and sympathy of races as nearly sensitive to injustice and wrong as they are ready to recognise kindness and righteous dealing.'
Lord Curzon's speech at the Guildhall, 1904: 'What is the basis of British rule in India? It is not military force, it is not civil authority, it is not pres- tige, though all these are a part of it. It must depend on the eternal moralities of righteousness and justice.'
And, finally, of Lord Minto ; '1 hate the argument that to refuse to sanction what we know to be wrong is a surrender to agitation and an indication of weak- ness. It is far weaker, in my mind, to persist in a wrong course for fear of being thought weak.' - Welensky may recall that, in India, the Europeans were to be numbered in a few thousands amid 200 million or more Indians at, the time of the Mutiny. while in Rhodesia it is a few thousand Europeans and only four or five million Africans.
Welensky is more than out of date, he is surely a relic from the age of the dinosaurs!—Yours faith- fully,
R. GORDON CANNING
Hart pury, Gloucester
Previous page
