Page:Indian independence.djvu/26

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Indian Independence


I have quoted these blunt, harsh and unpalatable sentences, again and again, because I want to drive home to the mind the degradation which India has reached by tamely submitting to a foreign rule all these years, without making any united effort to throw off the yoke of subjection. Sir John Seeley, the historian, was looking at the problem from a detached and scientific point of view, as a curiously interesting phenomenon in history. But to Indians themselves, his words about national deterioration and national defencelessness ought to burn like fire. The inevitable result of the present state of things, according to Seeley, is that India is becoming every year more and more helpless, more and more unable to defend herself, more and more unable to evolve out of her own resources a stable form of government, more and more incapable of depending on anything else except the British power. I remember vividly even to-day, how I went to my friend, Mr. Humphreys, the Deputy Commissioner of Delhi, in 1907, at the