Page:Labour in Madras.djvu/29

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LABOUR IN MADRAS
3


powers which you will have. We are fighting a big fight, not for ourselves but for you also. If you are suffering, you are suffering under a certain machinery of administration. For the existence and continuance of that machinery we are partly responsible. It is we who have allowed them to go on in the way in which they have been going on and under which many difficulties have arisen. LET US CO-OPERATE. In this God's great universe there are no works which are simple. All tasks and works are beset with difficulties. If you want beneficent conditions, suitable conditions for your life and labour, we must face those difficulties and remove them, and there are possibilities of removing them. We shall be able to remove them on one condition alone. I cannot remove them, and you alone cannot remove them, but we who are not labourers and you who are labourers, we two combined, can remove the difficulties that are in our way. What is your position ? What are your hopes regarding yourselves? Do you think that you will remain where you are and will continue to be in a condition of poverty and half-starvation which is your lot now? Do you wish to come out of that condition of life? I want you to believe that there is a great future before you. You must have an attitude of hopefulness and cheerfulness. A few years ago the condition of labourers in Great Britain and in all the great countries of Europe was the Same as yours. Little children, women and men, were suffering in the mills there in a way in which you do not yet suffer. But by combining and by believing in their own power, by the strength and righteousness of their