Your desire for an education truly national commands our whole-hearted approval.  But instead of Indianizing the present system, as you could begin to do from the beginning of next year, or instead of creating a hundred institutions such as that at Bolpur and turning into them the stream of India’s young intellectual life, you appear to be turning that stream out of its present channel into open sands where it may dry up.  In other words, you seem to us to be risking the complete cessation, for a period possibly, of years, of all education, for a large number of boys and young men.  Is it best, for those young men or for India that the present imperfect education should cease before a better education is ready to take its place?

Your desire to unite Mohammedan and Hindu and to share with your Mohammedan brethren in seeking the satisfaction of Mohammedan aspirations, we can understand and sympathize with.  But is there no danger, in the course which some of your party have urged upon the Government, that certain races in the former Ottoman Empire might be fixed under a foreign yoke, for worse than that which you hold the English yoke to be?  You could not wish to purchase freedom in India at the price of enslavement in the middle East.

To sum up, we thank you for the spirit of your letter, to which we have tried to respond in the same spirit.  We are with you in the desire for an India genuinely free to develop the best that is in her and in the belief that best is something wonderful of which the world to-day stands in need.

We are ready to co-operate with you and with every other man of any race or nationality who will help India to realize her best.  Are you going to insist that you can have nothing to do with us if we receive a government grant (i.e., Indian money), for an Indian School.  Surely some more inspiring battle cry than non-co-operation can be discovered.  We have ventured quite frankly to point out three items in your present programme, which seem to us likely to hinder the attainment of your true ideals for Indian greatness.  But those ideals themselves command our warm sympathy, and we desire to work, so far as we have opportunity, for their attainment.  In fact, it is only thus that we can interpret our British citizenship.

Yours sincerely,
(Sd.) H.A.  POPLEY,
(Sd.) G.E.  PHILLIPS. 
Bangalore,
November 15, 1920.

RENUNCIATION OF MEDALS

Mr. Gandhi has addressed the following letter to the Viceroy:—­

It is not without a pang that I return the Kaisar-i-Hind gold medal granted to me by your predecessor for my humanitarian work in South Africa, the Zulu war medal granted in South Africa for my services as officer in charge of the Indian volunteer ambulance corps in 1906 and the Boer war medal fur my services as assistant superintendent of the Indian volunteer stretcher bearer corps during the Boer war of 1899-1900.  I venture