Addressed to the new Governor

Lahore, Sunday, October 26, 1924

IT is now some months since Sir Malcolm Hailey became Governor of Punjab. The reception that was accorded to him at Lahore on Friday morning was, therefore, nothing but a formal and conventional affair, unless, of course, the function was organised to strike the imagination of the eastern people whom it is the fashion, in some quarters, to believe to be nothing better than grown-up children easily influenced by displays of magnificence. But if the occasion was formal and ceremonial, the addresses which were presented to His Excellency on his arrival, and salient extracts from which we published in these columns yesterday, were peculiarly characteristic. The municipal address, indeed, refrained from referring to any specific matter of public interest. But its very omission to refer to one such matter, of which everyone from the recipient of the address downwards must have been thinking all the time, as well as the enthusiasm with which the city Fathers who were supposed to be responsible for the address expatiated on their desire to spare no pains to carry on the civic administration in the capital of the Province in the spirit in which His Excellency would have it carried on, lent an air of unreality to the whole affair. If Sir Hailey had only taken a somewhat circuitous path on his way from the Town Hall to Government House and driven throughout those parts of the Civil Station (not to speak of the city) through which neither he nor any other high official was expected to pass on that day, it would have been the easiest thing for him to form some idea of the ‘pains’ which our city Fathers have been taking.