The Immediate Need
able to stretch out her Empire over the rest of the world! What a fate! What a destiny! What a lasting indignity for three hundred million souls, to be made an appendage to the expansion of a small island called England seven thousand miles away in the North Sea.
This book of Sir John Seeley’s is a blunt and plain-spoken book. Otherwise I should not trouble about it, or wish Indians to read it. Here is one of the things he says. It is a very famous passage. I will quote it in full. Remember he is writing in 1882,—nearly forty years ago. He had not witnessed the world-shaking events of the twentieth century:—
“There is then,” he says, "no Indian nationality, though there are some germs out of which we can conceive an Indian nationality developing itself. It is this fact, and not some enormous superiority on the part of the English race, that makes our Empire in India possible. If there could arise in India a nationality movement similar to that which we witnessed in
3
