There's no pleasure like meeting an old
friend, except, perhaps, making a new one. I suppose, Mr. Edwards, you stick
to the good old cause?"
"Well, you see, sir, things are different out here. There's precious little
one can find to say against the Government, which was the main of our talk at
home, and them that do say things are not the sort o' people a man who
respects himself would like to be mixed up with. There are no politics, in a
manner of speaking, in India. It's all work."
"Surely you are mistaken, my good friend. Why I have come all the way from
England just to see the working of this great National movement."
"I don't know where you're going to find the nation as moves to begin with,
and then you'll be hard put to it to find what they are moving about. It's
like this, sir," said Edwards, who had not quite relished being called "my
good friend." "They haven't got any grievance--nothing to hit with, don't you
see, sir; and then there's not much to hit against, because the Government is
more like a kind of general Providence, directing an old-established state of
things, than that at home, where there's something new thrown down for us to
fight about every three months."
"You are probably, in your workshops, full of English mechanics, out of the
way of learning what the masses think.
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