effectively to cater for more than a million pilgrims, Yet it is the fashion to say that we lack organising ability. This is true, I fear, to a certain extent, of those who have been nurtured in the new traditions. We have laboured under a terrible handicap owing to an almost fatal departure from the Swadeshi spirit. We, the educated classes, have received our education- through a foreign tongue. We have therefore not reacted upon the masses. We want to represent the masses, but we fail. They recognise us not much more than they recognise the English officers. Their hearts are an open book to neither. Their aspirations are not ours. Hence there is a break. And you witness not in reality failure to organise but want of correspondence between the representatives and the represented. If during the last fifty years we had been educated through the vernaculars, our elders and our servants and our neighbours would have partaken of o T know- ledge ; the discoveries of a Bose or a Ray would have been househould treasures as are the Ramayan and the Mahabharat, As it is, so far as the masses are con- cerned, those great discoveries might as well have been made by foreigners. Had instruction in all the branches of learning been given through the verna- culars, I make bold to say that they would have been enriched wonderfully. The question of village sanitation etc., would have been solved long ago. The village panchayats would be now a living force in a special way, and India would almost be enjoying self-govern- ment suited to its requirements and would have been spared the humiliating spectacle of organised assassi- nation on its sacred soil. It is not too late to mend. And you can help if you will, as no other body or bodies can*
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