“Why are you so hung up on such mediocre middle class ways? Please remember that an alumnus of Royal or St. Thomas (Mt. Lavinia) doesn’t necessarily make the person a “gentleman”; it only goes to show that the person’s parents/guardians have enough money – the right religion in the case of St. Thomas – to send them there.”

I agree that old boys of Royal or STC do not end up as “Gentlemen.” The majority do not nowadays. Maybe 50 years ago there were more students at Royal-STC who could be called “Gentlemen.”

However, I disagree with you “that the person’s parents/guardians have enough money” to have sent them there. –
At STC children of peons, drivers etc who work in the school have been admitted to school free of charge. However, they are a minority.
STC belongs to all races. One does not have to be a christian to get in there.
STC has enough alumni who are Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims etc.

There is one product of STC who I will not call a liberal and that is SWRD Bandaranaike. I do not think his “Sinhala only” was a liberal act. He wanted to win an election that is why he did it. A lot of the problems that we have in terms of language started way back then. He did two things which were detrimental to the country. One is he dismantled English and the second is he dropped Tamil as an official language when there was a sizeable Tamil minority living in this country.

I agree with you when you say that there are liberals among the general population who do not belong to these two schools. Not everyone who studied at STC belonged to the liberal category. There were conservatives and ultra conservatives also. But the school in general upheld liberal traditions to an extent. I do not know what the situation is like now. I am refering to 20 years ago.

Why are you so hung up on such mediocre middle class ways? Please remember that an alumnus of Royal or St. Thomas (Mt. Lavinia) doesn’t necessarily make the person a “gentleman”; it only goes to show that the person’s parents/guardians have enough money – the right religion in the case of St. Thomas – to send them there.

I think it is high time you gentlemen stepped out of your bourgeois training camp and mingled with the “other “lot. This is the only way for you gentlemen to see that there are enough decent men and women all over Sri Lanka who are innately “liberal” – from their treatment of others to their general outlook on society.

In the recent hullabaloo concerning the Christian prayer hall, there were many non-Christian, ordinary men and women who denounced the thuggery of the JHU monks without sounding any “liberal” buzzers and bells. Also, take it to consideration that many of these men and women don’t go running to the Malwatha/Asgiriya Temples (or in that case to any temple) the way good old Royal Runil Wickremasinghe does.

You wouldn’t know “liberal” even if it bit you in the derrière! Spare me the drama you liberal lot…

May the Good Lord, Triple Gem, Allah and all the Gods bless you with long life.

Thanks. The point about this contribution was exactly to provoke debate about this important thinker, including his engagement with socialist and feminist thinking, several decades earlier than they became politically significant movements.

I think we are more in agreement about Dudley’s UNP than my passing reference to him might suggest, including in relation to the several specific aspects you mention (and other dark, if unproven, mutterings in our contemporary political history such as what and who was meant by ‘orders from the very top’ by the plotters of the ’62 coup, and nocturnal rendezvous at Torrington Square).

And unlike Chanaka et al, I certainly do not wish to engage in revisionism about either Dudley or the UNP of the ’60s. So by way of explanation, the reference to Dudley was merely to illustrate the deterioration of the quality of parliamentary debate (like so many other things) since the the ’60s.

Interesting essay. There is a sense of perception that the two Senanayake’s father and son are the only two liberal leaders(even though they had their faults) this country has had. They both came from S. Thomas’ Mount Lavinia and belonged to the UNP. Both father and son never changed political parties either.

Ranil Wickremasinghe’s Government of 2002-2004 was also close to the liberal model of J S MIll and the West that Publius is talking about. Some say that he was neo-liberal. Ranil is from Royal College and belongs to the UNP. He has never changed political parties.

My question to publius is how is it that those who attended STC and Royal and belong to the UNP are perceived as liberal while those who come from other schools and political parties are not seen as liberal?

I would go on to argue that in our Third World context Mill must be powerfully reinforced by the more progressive Liberal thinkers Green and Hobhouse.