Black Ingratitude

Thanks to our great nation's multimillennial cultural heritage of buccaneering fustian, Britain's museums have long been notorious as receivers of stolen goods, many of them removed from the holy places of benighted and superstitious savages to be housed in profitable safekeeping by the Church of England's adventurous scions. The Indian government now claims to have made a formal request for the return of a bronze idol, which apparently was removed from a village temple by one of Lord Elgin's spiritual descendants and now resides at the Ashmolean museum in Oxford. Typically, the pagan usurpers of Queen Victoria's Empire have given no hint of willingness to settle the debt for its freely-bestowed inheritance of railways and colonial architecture; let alone to make reparation for the various historical inconveniences suffered by the East India Company.