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and a scholar and also a very fine and impressive speaker. Even the London Times has felt compelled to praise his broad outlook, his pure motives and his chaste language. For a Radical of Radicals, to be praised by the London Times in that way is a real compliment.

Colonel Wedgwood does not see eye-to-eye with the Indian Nationalists, in the matter of all Indian problems. For instance, he is a single taxer and a strong free trader. He believes in and practises single tax with the zeal of a missionary. As such he is opposed to the permanent settlement of land. He is equally opposed to protective duties. But he believes in, and advocates, a free India. He wishes India to remain a part of the British Commonwealth, out of her own free will and by her consent. He thinks we might as well have taken advantage of the Reform Scheme and carried on Non-cooperation from within. In this he betrays an ignorance of bureaucratic methods and speaks with the voice of inexperience. But he is absolutely sincere and disinterested. Above all, he is a true internationalist and is qualified to take a broad view of world politics. I am proud of his friendship and I am grateful for his championship of India's right to freedom. In the struggle before us, we need the friendship and good-will of men like Colonel Wedgwood, but, even more than that, the benefit of their advice and judgment. Even if we reject his advice, we shall do so after the best consideration

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and we will never question his sincerity and his motives.

Colonel Wedgwood has now seen India for himself; he has met Indians in their thousands; he has interviewed all parties and the representatives of all shades of political opinion; he has besides heard the story of the bureaucracy and taken their point of view, on their own dinner tables and in their own palatial quarters. He is thus most fitted to take an impartial view of Indian problems and is entitled to receive a respectful hearing, whenever he stands up to speak on Indian affairs in the House of Commons.

With such a friend in the House, we need have no fear of our views going unstated and unrepresented there. He is an asset, the value of which cannot be over-estimated, because whatever is said in the House of Commons, receives publicity all over the world and is read with attention. What India needs, outside of India, is publicity; what we need inside, is organization, Colonel Wedgwood cannot help us in organizing our forces, but he can help us by placing facts and figures relating to India, and also our point of view, before the thinking world. That is the servie which we expect of him; and we are confident he will not fail to render it.

LAJPAT RAI

Josiah C. Wedgwood

CHAPTER I

FROM BIRTH TO PARLIAMENT.

Josiah Clement Wedgwood, the subject of this study, comes of an ancient, well-known family.

His great grand-father, the other Josiah Wedgwood, lived in the eighteenth century, from 1730 to 1795, and was the most famous of English potters. Born at Burslem at the beginning of the second. quarter of the eighteenth century, the elder Josiah, it is perhaps well to remind readers, served an apprenticeship that carried him through all the branches. of the trade, and in 1759 was able to set up in business for himself with the money he had saved. It is useful to recall the perseverence, the carefulness and the tenacity of purpose of the great potter as throwing some light on the peculiar characteristics of his great grandson. Josiah the Potter persevered through failure after failure, and, so it is recorded, produced in a few years such an

improved form of ware that it came into great demand. We shall see later on how this great quality of perseverance, undaunted by failure, defying ridicule and scorning timid advice of friends, was inherited by his great grandson. Though but a potter and an artisan, Josiah the elder had yet the qualities of a "gentleman "in him. He knew the value of culture. He paid infinite pains on the artistic as well as the other qualities of his wares. It is well-known to the elder generation of men how Smiles has taken care to narrate the potter's story so as to elucidate his greatness. The Self-Help, however, is not a book so much in vogue to-day as it was in our youth, perhaps a matter for regret. For our present purpose, it is enough to state that Josiah revolutionised the pottery industry. He engaged Flaxman to make classical designs for him, and, as a popular account of him has put it, his pottery became the fashion, and led to a great extension of the Staffordshire earthenware industry, his works at Etruria having been the most extensive of the kind in Britain. Being a great grandson of the famous potter, young Josiah comes of a sturdy middle class family which has, through

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