LORD Birkenhead made an interesting speech at what is known as the “Bombay Dinner” held in London during the mail week. With his talk about cooperation, about England not being a niggardly bargainer, the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms being the most daring experiment in constitution-making ever undertaken by any nation at any time during the world’s known history, and the rest of it, everyone in India is by this time quite familiar. His Lordship’s views about the communal disturbance in India are no less interesting. As in the case of the slowness of constitutional advance, so in the case of communal disorder, he shifts the entire responsibility on the Indians themselves. In neither case, according to this Lordship, can any fault be found with policy or actions of the Government, and it is simply and solely because of the sins of omission and commission of the Indians that things are not what they ought to be. Referring to communal dissensions, his Lordship observed: “I do not doubt that as we have weathered other storms in India we shall equally weather this, and I would at least say, and I hope this may be accepted as a sincere utterance, both to the Moslem community and to the Hindu community, that they may rely absolutely upon the British Government, without favour, to give their help whenever they are invoked, or whenever it may become necessary without invocation, without the slightest prejudice as between those two communities, but with the spirit of one who, holding a detached position, knows that both are necessary to the strength of India in the present, and I hope, of India in the future.”