Sir Valentine Chirol

“ The cause for which the British people fought and made such appalling sacrifices was not unworthy of them or of our civilisation. Heavy clouds hang over the future and obscure the paths of the nations. But in India, where East and West meet as nowhere else, Britain has lighted a beacon which, if she keep it burning, will show to both the way of escape from a more disastrous conflict than that from which the West has just emerged battered and bleeding—a conflict not between nations but between races. ”

“ On one of those peerless days of the cold season in Upper India when there is not a cloud to break the serenity of the deep blue sky, I looked up to the mountain Ghridrakuta, on whose slopes Buddha dwelt for some time after he had found enlightenment at Buddh Gaya, and saw it just as the second Chinese pilgrim to whom we owe most of our knowledge of Rajagriha described it—"a solitary peak rising to a great height on which vultures make their abode." ”

“ The demons are in the ascendant, and constantly triumphing over godliness. Awake, Oh Mother, who tramplest on the demons! Thy helpless sons, lean for want of food, worn out in the struggle with the demons, are, struck with terror at the way in which they are being ruled. Famine and plague and disease are rife, and unrighteousness triumphs. Awake, Oh Goddess Durga! I see the lightning flashing from the point of thy bow, the world quaking at thy frowns, and creation trembling under thy tread. ”

“ Many have raised the cry that to rebel is a great sin. But what is rebellion? Is there anything in India to rebel against? Can a Feringhee be recognized as the King of India, whose very touch, whose mere shadow compels Hindus to purify themselves?
These are merely Western Robbers looting India.... Extirpate them, ye good sons of India, wherever you find them, without mercy, and with them their spies and secret agents. Last year 19 lakhs of men died of fever, smallpox, cholera, plague, and other diseases in Bengal alone. ”

“ Akbar was not yet fourteen, but, precocious even for the East, he was already a student and a thinker as well as an intrepid fighter. He showed whither his meditations were leading him as soon as he took the reins of government into his own hands. There had been great conquerors before him in India, men of his own race and creed—the blood of Timur flowed in his veins—and men of other races and of other creeds. They too had founded dynasties and built up empires, but their dynasties had passed away, their empires had crumbled to pieces. ”

“ During the great days when the worship of Juganath reaches its climax and half a million pilgrims pour into Puri from all parts of India, the terminus of the branch-line from the Calcutta-Madras railway is busier than Epsom Downs station on Derby Day. A big Indian railway station—the Howrah terminus in Calcutta, the Victoria Terminus in Bombay, the Central Station in Delhi—is in itself at all times a microcosm of India. It is never empty, never silent by day or by night. It is always alive, always crowded, always full of Indian sounds and smells. ”

“ A handful of alien robbers is ruining the crores of the people of India by robbing the wealth of India. Through the hard grinding of their servitude, the ribs of this countless people are being broken to pieces. Endless endeavours are being made in order that this great nation by losing, as an inevitable result of this subjection, its moral, intellectual and physical power, its wealth, its self-reliance, and all other qualities, may be turned into the condition of the beasts of burden or be wholly extinguished. ”

“ Few Indian cities are reputed to be more ancient or more sacred than the little town of Ujjain on the Sipra river, known as Ozenī to the Greeks, and where Asoka had ruled in his youth as Viceroy of Western India. It owes its birth to the gods themselves. When Uma wedded Shiva her father slighted him, not knowing who he was, for the mighty god had wooed and won her under the disguise of a mere ascetic mendicant, and she made atonement by casting herself into the sacrificial fire, which consumed her—the prototype of all pious Hindu widows who perform Sati—in the presence of gods and Brahmans. ”

“ It would be an evil day for the internal peace of India if a people still so proud of their history, so jealous of their religion, and so conscious of their virile superiority as the Mahomedans came to believe that they could only trust to their own right hand, and no longer to the authority and sense of justice of the British Raj, to avert the dangers which they foresee in the future from the establishment of an overt or covert Hindu ascendancy. ”

“ At last, after much clanging of bells and fierce altercations between the Brahman priests and the faithful as to payment of necessary fees, the bronze doors roll back, and in the dim religious twilight one catches a glint of gold and precious stones, the head-dress of Kali, whose terrific image barely emerges from the depth of the inner sanctuary in which it stands, accessible only to its serving Brahmans. They alone, though strangely enough temple Brahmans as a class enjoy little credit with their fellow-castemen, can approach the idol and wash and dress and feed it with offerings. ”

“ Nor can it be disputed that, however generous the sentiments that prompt us to delegate some part of our authority to elective or partly elective assemblies, it must to some extent diminish the power of the Executive to ensure that equality of treatment for all races and creeds and classes by which we have hitherto justified our rule in India. Our sense of equity should make us, therefore, all the more scrupulously careful to adjust the balance as evenly as possible under the new conditions which we are ourselves creating, and to err, if at all, in favour of the protection of minorities. ”

“ There is no healthy play of public opinion. The classes whose confidence in the British Raj is still unshaken are practically unrepresented in the Press, which is mostly in the hands of the intellectuals, of whom the majority are drifting into increasing estrangement, while the minority are generally too timid to try to stem the flowing tide. Nor, if the "moderates" in Bengal were overawed by the violence of the new creed, can the whole blame be laid upon their shoulders when one remembers how little was being done by Government, and how ineffective that little was to check this incendiarism. ”

“ Then, whether it be their train or not, there is a din of yelling voices, a frenzied rush up and down the platform, and, even before those who want to get out have had time to alight, a headlong scramble for places—as often as not in the wrong carriages and always apparently in those that are already crammed full, as the Indian is essentially gregarious—and out again with fearful shouts and shrill cries if a bundle has gone astray, or an agitated mother has mislaid her child, or a traveller discovers at the last moment that it is not after all the train he wants. ”

“ Are we not at least entitled to claim that the Indian tax-payer's money should not be spent merely on the maintenance of British garrisons that are here to-day and gone to-morrow, and of an Indian army that is so constituted as to lack all the essentials of a national army, but should go to the building up of an army really worthy to take its place on equal terms when India attains to self-government with the other armies of a commonwealth of free nations? ”

“ High over all classes is the King. He is the living symbol of strength and power. He is "the tiger among men," the "bull of the Bharata race," and his form and features bear the visible impress of the Most High. The whole arduous business of government rests on his shoulders. He cannot appeal to his subjects to help him in carrying out good administration nor can he leave his duties to others. ”

“ If India had displayed in the best sense of the word an Imperial spirit and made sacrifices that entitled her to be treated as a partner in, rather than a mere dependency of, the British Empire, was she still to be denied a large instalment at least of the political liberties which had been long ago conferred on the self-governing Dominions? Were her people to be refused in the self-governing Dominions themselves the equality of treatment which her representatives were allowed to enjoy in the council-chamber of the Empire? ”

“ Arabindo Ghose scarcely disguised its hostility to British rule itself and to all that British ascendancy stands for. Hinduism for the Hindus, or, as they preferred to put it, "Arya for the Aryans," was the war-cry of zealots, half fanatics, half patriots, whose mysticism found in the sacred story of the Bhagvat Gita not only the charter of Indian independence but the sanctification of the most violent means for the overthrow of an alien rule. ”

“ The essence is in all cases the maintenance of their administrative autonomy under their own dynastic rulers whose hereditary rights and privileges are permanently guaranteed to them, subject to their loyalty to the British Crown and to reasonably good government. The Princes and Chiefs who rule over them—some well, a few rather badly, most of them perhaps indifferently; some Hindus, some Mahomedans; some still very conservative and almost mediaeval, some on genuinely progressive lines; some with a mere veneer of European modernity—are all equally jealous of their rights and their dignity. ”

“ The loss of contact between the Government of India and Anglo-Indian administrators has been as painfully felt as the frigid tone of many official utterances in Parliament, which have seemed inspired by a desire more often to avoid party embarrassments at Westminster than to protect public servants, who have no means of defending themselves, against even the grossest forms of misrepresentation and calumny, leading straight to the revolver and the bomb of the political assassin. ”

“ In estimating the politically-minded portion of the people of India we should not go either to census reports on the one hand, or to political literature on the other. It is one of the most difficult portions of our task to see them in their right relation to the rest of the country. Our obligations to them are plain, for they are intellectually our children. They have imbibed ideas which we ourselves have set before them, and we ought to reckon it to their credit. The present intellectual and moral stir in India is no reproach but rather a tribute to our work. ”

“ We must continue to govern India as the greatest of the dependencies of the British Crown, but we must do our utmost to satisfy Indians of all classes and castes and beliefs that we govern them as none of their race could govern them, with an equal and absolutely impartial regard for all law-abiding communities, with an intelligent appreciation of their peculiar interests, and with genuine consideration for all their ideas, so long as those ideas are compatible with the maintenance and security of British rule. ”

“ Here one sees India as it was before the Mahomedan invasions, in the days of the last of the great Indian rulers who succeeded for a time in bending the whole of Northern India to his will. As always in India, behind whatever form of temporal power might for the moment appear to be paramount, religion and the social order which it consecrates represented the real paramount power that alone endures. In this extraordinary festival which marked the close of Harsha's reign the picture left to us is singularly complete. ”

“ The ruler is a public servant of the collective nation, and that is all. To introduce this notion among a people whose idea of government has run for thousands of years on the lines of absolute monarchy and hereditary if not divine right is nothing short of revolutionary. All idea of the sacredness of authority is at once gone. The Government is a thing to be dictated to by the people, to be threatened and bullied and even exterminated if it does not comply with the nation's wishes. ”

“ Let your law-courts with their cumbersome and ruinous procedure disappear, and India will set up her old Panchayats, in which justice will be dispensed in accordance with her own conscience. For your schools and colleges, upon which lakhs of rupees have been wasted in bricks and mortar for the erection of ponderous buildings that weigh as heavily upon our boys as the educational processes by which you reduce their souls to slavery, we will give them simpler structures, open to God's air and light, and the learning of our forefathers that will make them free men once more. ”