"F. W. Newman."
The following is quoted from the second letter I mentioned:—
"I send to you a Penny Vegetarian Cookery Book herewith. Surely I was a Vegetarian when I last was with you? I began the practice in 1867. But let me recite: (1) At breakfast and the third meal I need nothing but what all fleshmeaters provide. (2) At dinner the utmost that I need is one Vegetarian dish, which may be a soup. (3) If it so happen that you have any really solid sweet puddings that alone will suffice. (4) For the one Vegetarian dish good brown bread and butter is an acceptable substitute, or rather fulfilment. But I confess I am desirous of propagating everywhere a knowledge of our peculiar dishes, which teach how to turn to best account the manifold and abundant store of leaves, roots, and grains, besides pulse.
"My wife is fully able to impart practical knowledge: to please me, and see that others please me, she has given great attention to Vegetarian cookery for many years back…."
CHAPTER XVI
NATIVE REPRESENTATION IN INDIAN GOVERNMENT
It is rare indeed that an Englishman looks at India as Francis Newman looked at it. Fifty years ago—probably longer—he put his finger on exactly the spot which to-day is the crux which most puzzles and baffles politicians. In social and intellectual questions his were the clear- sighted, far-focussed eyes that reached beyond the measures of most men's minds. He saw clearly, fifty years ago, that India was drawing ever closer and closer to an inevitable terminus. That she was beginning to recognize —every year more definitely—her ultimate destination: was beginning to realize, too, that her foreign rulers were aware also of that terminus, but were not very anxious that she should reach it. Nay, were practically rather jogging her elbow to prevent her becoming so conscious of the direction in which the tide of affairs was drifting.
Nevertheless it is becoming more and more patent to everyone who really studies the question impartially that things are not what they were fifty or sixty years ago; that a critical juncture is drawing ever nearer and nearer—a juncture which inevitably will mean great changes for the governed and the governors.
Even the slow-moving East does move appreciably in half a century, when centres of education are doing their best to train Indians in European ideas of civilization, in European ideas of government, and of the authority which learning gives. We cannot expect to educate and yet leave those we educate exactly where we find them; for with education comes invariably, inevitably, the growth of ideas planted by it—their growth, and no less invariable fruition. To show someone all that is to be gained by reaching forward, and then to expect him not to reach, but to remain quiescent, is the act of a fool.
We have, as a nation, so taken it for granted that India is our own to do as we like with, that it is perhaps not a pleasant reminder which faces us as we cast our thoughts back to the initial steps taken by ourselves in the days which preceded the formation of the Honourable East India Company. It bids us realize that at first, as Francis Newman says in his Dangerous Glory of India, "neither king, statesmen, nor people ever deliberately planned from the beginning or desired such an empire. It began as a set of mercantile establishments which took up private arms for mere self-defence…. The Honourable East India Company was glad to legitimate its position by accepting from the Grand Mogul the subordinate position of a rent-collector; indeed, from the beginning to the end of its political career it was animated by a consistent and unswerving disapproval of aggression and fresh conquest."