The Case for India: The Presidential Address |
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agriculture autocracy AWAKENING OF ASIA Awakening of Indian Bengal Britain British Army British rule burden Bureaucracy causes cent civilisation claim to dominate condition Congress cost Council courage crores Crown demand Despotism Dominions East Empire England English Europe European expedition feel fought France freedom German Give Indians Gokhale's first test Gopal Krishna Gokhale Government of India Home Rule honour Imperial Conference increase Indian Army Indian revenues Indian troops inefficient interests intolerable Japan labourers land less liberty Lord Chelmsford Lord Hardinge Madras Man-Power masses matters ment Mesopotamia military expenditure million sterling movement Nation non-official Panchayat Partition of Bengal peace population poverty race recognised recruitment religion Report result revolt Russian sanitation Secondary Reasons Self-Governing Colonies Self-Government self-respect Self-Rule Sikkim soldiers SPIRIT IN INDIA splendid Stepniak superiority sympathy tion to-day trained United Kingdom Viceroy village industries voice Wacha wastage women
Popular passages
Page 37 - Wellington, and which may draw forth the best efforts of which he is capable, that is denied to us. The full height to which our manhood is capable of rising can never be reached by us under the present system. The moral elevation which every Self-governing people feel cannot be felt by us. Our administrative and military talents must gradually disappear owing to sheer disuse, till at last our lot, as hewers of wood and drawers of water in our own country, is stereotyped.
Page 43 - Now, if there be a fact to which all experience testifies, it is that when a country holds another in subjection, the individuals of the ruling people who resort to the foreign country to make their fortunes are of all others those who most need to be held under powerful restraint.
Page 36 - What shall it profit a Nation if it gain the whole world and lose its own Soul? What shall a Nation give in exchange for its Soul ? " Better hardship and freedom, than luxury and thraldom. This is the spirit of the Home Rule movement, and therefore it cannot be crushed, it cannot be destroyed, it is eternal and ever young. Nor can it be persuaded to exchange its birthright for any mess of efficiency-pottage at the hands of the bureaucracy.
Page 28 - Mr MB Chaubal signed the Report, but dissented from some of its most important recommendations. The whole Report was written "before the flood", and it is now merely an antiquarian curiosity. India, for all these reasons, was forced to see before her a future of perpetual subordination : the Briton rules in Great Britain, the Frenchman in France, the American in America, each Dominion in its own area, but the Indian was to rule nowhere; alone among the peoples of the world, he was not to feel his...
Page 3 - For the first time in Congress history, you have chosen as your President one who, when your choice was made, was under the heavy ban of Government displeasure, and who lay interned as a person dangerous to public safety. While I was humiliated, you crowned me with honour; while I was slandered, you believed in my integrity and good faith; while I was crushed under the heel of bureaucratic power, you acclaimed me as your leader; while I was silenced and unable to defend myself, you defended me, and...
Page 34 - League's best recruits and recruiters are among the women of India, and the women of Madras boast that they marched in procession when the men were stopped, and that their prayers in the temples set the interned captives free. Home Rule has become so intertwined with religion...
Page 35 - be grateful to it for degrading our natures, for systematically crushing out all martial spirit, for converting a race of soldiers and heroes into a timid flock of quill-driving sheep.
Page 37 - A kind of dwarfing or stunting of the Indian race is going on under the present system. We must live all the days of our life in an atomosphere of inferiority, and the tallest of us must bend in order that the exigencies of the existing system may be satisfied.
Page 6 - Governments to forecast its duration, but to me, speaking for a moment not as a politician but as a student of spiritual laws, to me its end is sure. For the true object of this War is to prove the evil of, and to destroy autocracy and the enslavement of one Nation by another, and to place on sure foundations the God-given Right to Self-Rule and Self-Development of every Nation, and the similar right of the Individual, of the smaller Self, so far as is consistent with the welfare of the larger Self...
Page 31 - But even deeper than the outer tumult of war has pierced the doubt as to the reality of the Ideals of Liberty and nationality so loudly proclaimed by the foremost western Nations, the doubt of the honesty of their champions. Sir James Meston said truly, a short time ago, that he had never, in his long experience, known Indians in so distrustful and suspicious a mood as that which he met in them to-day. And that is so. For long years Indians have been chafing over the many breaches of promises and...