How many Englishmen who have ever given a thought to India have imagined themselves for a moment as natives of that land? Try to put yourself in the place of any native-born Indian and consider fairly what your thought would be about politics or government. If you were a ryot, an uneducated villager, you would know nothing of such matters. For you, all life and its affairs would be in the hands of the gods and the money-lender, and endeavours to assuage their wrath or cruelty, to induce their patronage or favour, would exhaust whatever surplus energy remained from daily rounds of toil.
But put yourself for a moment in the place of the young Mohammedan who has just left his university and is trying to obtain a berth in the post-office, or of a Hindoo medical assistant in the hospital of a country town, or of a large native landowner who has just left college and succeeded to an estate in Bengal, or of a native pleader in the courts, or of a native assistant magistrate—would you then be quite indifferent to questions of government and politics? You would feel conscious that you were being ruled by strangers whose superiority, in whatever respects you deemed them superior, was the most galling thing about them—far more so than their habitual disclination to have more touch with you than was necessary to the efficient discharge of their official duties. Among the very few you ever met, after leaving college, one Englishman might seem to you lovable; but would that reconcile you to the fact that his race was ruling yours, dividing its territories in the teeth of the protest of their powerless inhabitants, and, as you gathered from your reading, denying you rights of self-government which his own people years ago had risen in arms to obtain?
But in order to give India the chance of future autonomy and independence, we must distinguish between the extreme claims of isolated and non-representative enthusiasts and the reasonable progressive changes warranted by a gradual advance of liberal education and increase of religious tolerance: we must distinguish between the exuberance of inexperienced youths and the irritation of dissatisfied place-hunters on the one hand and the mature opinions on the other hand of enlightened Indians who have proved their power of wise judgment by years of serious responsibility in positions of trust and authority. And first and last, we must never forget, in our continued efforts to make a nation out of a tangle of many states and peoples, the tremendous power we have gradually gained to influence the general liberty and progress of the world, and that no part of that power can ever be yielded up save as the shameful shifting of a burden it is our noblest privilege to bear.
THE END
INDEX
ABORNIA, [129]