Page:The Sikhs (Gordon).djvu/47

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NANAK THE REFORMER.
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tion by all Sikhs, trusted and protected in the stormy times out of regard for their ancestor. An interesting personality at the recent Coronation celebration in London was Baba Sir Khem Singh, Bedi, K.C.I.E., one of the representatives sent from the Punjab, an old man of great influence and of proved loyalty, who has stood by the British Government from the day, as he expressed it, since the line of Ranjit Singh was ended—the lineal descendant in the fourteenth generation from the Sikh reformer, and the present head of the family. He spoke with decision for his co-religionists, of their fervid loyalty and of their readiness to prove it again and again in the future as they had done in the past, in defence of the King-Emperor and his kingdom. Recently in the columns of a Punjab newspaper he has expressed his conviction that the political object which led the Sikhs to adopt a military life—viz., the establishment of a perfectly peaceful Government and the maintenance of a rule of justice and re-