Page:Young India.pdf/197

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INDIA FROM 1857 TO 1905
163

hypnotism, and at once awoke the people to a sense of their own strength, an appreciation of their own culture.”

In the second place, the object was to create a passionate love of liberty, accompanied by a spirit of sacrifice and readiness to suffer for the cause of the country. This was to be done more by example than precept. What the programme was may better be stated in the words of the leader whom we have quoted above:

“ Boycott both economic and political, boycott of foreign and especially British goods, and of all honorary associations with the administration, national education implying a withdrawal of the youths of the nation from the officialised universities and government-controlled schools and colleges, and training them up in institutions conducted on national lines subject to national control and calculated to help the realisation of the national destiny, national civic volunteering, aiming at imparting a healthy civic training to the people by the voluntary assumption of as much of the civic duties, at present discharged by official or semi-official agencies, as could be done without any violation of the existing laws of the country,— duties, for instance, in regard to rural sanitation, economic and medical relief, popular education, preventive police duties, regulation of fair and pilgrim gathering,— settlement of civil and non-cognisable, criminal disputes by means of arbitration committees: — these were the proclaimed methods of the Nationalist school.”