Indian Independence
desperately earnest haste? Why do we feel to-day, as we never felt before, that other things may be postponed, but this struggle for freedom cannot be postponed even for one single hour?
There are many answers which I might give to these questions; but I shall give one answer, which has forcibly appealed to me for many years and has shaped my intellectual thinking about India. It appears to me to go to the root of the whole problem.
There is a book called 'The Expansion of England,' by Sir John Seeley which, if possible, every Indian student should read for himself. First of all, notice the title,—'The Expansion of England'. The book records the expansion of England; and yet more than half the book is about India. That fact itself should make us pause and think. To Sir John Seeley, India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is regarded as an instrument in the expansion of England. India is the passive, pliable material by means of which England was
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