The Immediate Need
are being undertaken. God knows, there has been national deterioration enough! The last thing that we should wish is that it should go on any longer. We cannot sit down at ease, while this root-malady strikes down still deeper into the vitality of the nation.
The other terrible sentence of Sir John Seeley, which must act like a goad in spurring on every Indian, who loves his country, to take action, is contained in the paragraph where the historian declares that India has reached the stage of helplessness, when it would be a cruelty for England to withdraw.
“To withdraw,” he says, “the British Government from India would be the most inexcusable of all conceivable crimes.” Why? Because—these are his words—“we (i.e., the British) have made India incapable of depending on anything else. And again, "It is to be feared that the British rule may have diminished whatever little power of this sort India may have originally possessed.”
