Sir Valentine Chirol

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But a good deal more than two thousand years have passed since they constituted themselves the only authorized intermediaries between mankind and the gods. In them became vested the monopoly of the ancient language in which all religious rites are performed, and with a monopoly of the knowledge of Sanskrit they retained a monopoly of learning long after Sanskrit itself had become a dead language. Like the priests who wielded a Latin pen in the Middle Ages in Europe, they sat as advisers and conscience-keepers in the councils of every Hindu ruler. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We are too deeply pledged now to the general principles upon which our educational policy in India is based for even its severest critics to contemplate the possibility of abandoning it. But for this very reason it is all the more important that we should realize the grave defects of the existing system, or, as some would say, want of system, in order that we may, so far as possible, repair or mitigate them. There can be no turning back, and salvation lies not in doing less for Indian education, but in doing more and in doing it better. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There can never be between Englishmen and Indians the same community of historical traditions, of racial affinity, of social institutions, of customs and beliefs that exists between people of our own stock throughout the British Empire. The absence of these sentimental bonds, which cannot be artificially forged, makes it impossible that we should ever concede to India the rights of self-government which we have willingly conceded to the great British communities of our own race. ”

“ To that end we must shrink from no sacrifices to improve our methods of education. The evils for which we have to find remedies have been of slow growth, and they can only be slowly cured. But they can be cured by patient and sustained effort, and by carrying courageously into practice the principle, which none of us will challenge in theory, that the formation of character on a sound moral basis, inseparable in India from a sound religious basis, is at least as important a part of the educational process as the development of the intellect. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is a strange anomaly that, at a time when we have no hesitation in introducing Indians into our Executive Councils, those who serve the King-Emperor in the Indian Army can only rise to quite subordinate rank. A good deal has no doubt been done to improve the quality of the native officer from the point of view of military education, but, under present conditions, the Indian Army does not offer a career that can attract Indians of good position, though it is just among the landed aristocracy and gentry of India that military traditions are combined with the strongest traditions of loyalty. ”

“ If we are to save and to foster the better elements, we must stamp out the worse. Do not let us be frightened by mere words. To talk, as some do, of the Indian Press being "gagged" by the new Press Act is absurd. It is as free to-day as it has always been to criticize Government as fully and fearlessly, and, one may add, often as unjustly, as party newspapers in this country are wont to criticize the Government of the day. It is no longer free to preach revolution and murder with the cynical audacity shown in some of the quotations I have given various Nationalist organs. ”

“ In Western countries the education given in our schools, from the Board school to the University, is always more or less on the same plane as that of the class from which the boys who attend them are drawn. It is merely the continuation and the complement of the education our children receive in their own homes from the moment of their birth, and it moves on the same lines as the world in which they live and move and have their being. In India, with rare exceptions, it is not so, but exactly the reverse. ”

“ Can we expect that the youth of India will grow up to be law-abiding citizens if we deprive them of what their parents hold to be "the keystone to the formation of character"? Can we close our eyes to what so many responsible Indians regard as one of the chief causes of the demoralization which has crept into our schools and colleges? The State can, doubtless, exact in many ways more loyal co-operation from Indian teachers in safeguarding their pupils from the virus of disaffection. ”

“ The ancient Hindu theory of government is fully disclosed in the Mahabharata, the most majestic work ever produced by the human intellect, a work, too, which is to-day as popular with Indians as when 40 centuries ago it was chanted to instruct the youth and beguile the tedium of the princes of Hastinapura. Unlike all systems of government known to the West, the Hindu system contains no popular element whatever. ”

“ Every day the Press proclaims, openly or by suggestion or allusion, that the only cure for the ills of India is independence from foreign rule, independence to be won by heroic deeds, self-sacrifice, martyrdom on the part of the young, in any case by some form of violence. Hindu mythology, ancient and modern history, and more especially the European literature of revolution, are ransacked to furnish examples that justify revolt and proclaim its inevitable success. ”

“ Can any Englishman, however fervent his faith in liberty, regret that some at least of these papers have now disappeared either as the result of prosecutions under the Indian Criminal Code or from the operation of the new Press Law? The mischief they have done still lives and will not be easily eradicated. It is the fashion in certain quarters to reply:—"But look at the Anglo-Indian newspapers, at the aggressive and contemptuous tone they assume towards the natives of India, at the encouragement they constantly give to racial hatred." ”

“ For there is no more striking contrast to the liberal and democratic professions of a body which claims, as does the Indian National Congress, to represent an enlightened, progressive, and national Hinduism than the fact that in the course of its 25 years' existence it has scarcely done anything to give practical effect to its theoretical repudiation of a social system that condemns some 50 millions out of the 300 millions of the Hindu population of India to a life of unspeakable degradation. ”

“ And therefore no compromise is possible under such conditions between self-government in India and the overlordship of England. If self-government is conceded to us, what would be England's position not only in India, but in the British Empire itself? Self-government means the right of self-taxation; it means the right of financial control; it means the right of the people to impose protective and prohibitive tariffs on foreign imports. The moment we have the right of self-taxation, what shall we do? We shall not try to be engaged in this uphill work of industrial boycott. ”

“ I can imagine no more wicked desecration than that the sacrilegious hand of the Anarchist should be laid upon the Indian song of songs, and that a masterpiece of transcendental philosophy and religious ecstasy should be perverted to the base uses of preaching political murder. ”

“ The blind hatred of everything English with which the younger generation is so largely saturated can only, in most cases, be the result of the teachings that have impressed upon them the existence of a fundamental antagonism between Hindu ideals and ours. Like the wretched Kanhere at Nasik, they would have to admit that they never suffered injustice themselves nor knew of any one who had. A great many have never come into contact with a single Englishman, and their ignorance even of the system of government under which they live is profound. ”

“ The Japanese war, in which Russia lost battles not only by land, but also at sea, was even a more significant and striking warning that the era of facile victories in Asia had ended; since never before in all history had an Asiatic navy won a great sea-fight against European fleets. That the unquiet spirit, which from these general causes has been spreading over the Eastern Continent, should be particularly manifest in countries under European Governments is not unnatural; it inevitably roused the latent dislike of foreign rule, with which a whole people is never entirely content. ”

“ It is the breath of the West that has stirred the spiritual and intellectual activity of which Hindu revivalism and political disaffection, glorified under the name of Nationalism, are unfortunately the most prominent and the most recent but not the only outcome. Another and much healthier outcome is the sense of social duty and social service which has grown up amongst many educated Indians of all races and creeds, and amongst none more markedly than amongst the Hindus. Traditions of mutual helpfulness are indeed deep-rooted in India as in all Oriental communities. ”

“ According to the Rajah of Dewas, one of the most enlightened of the younger Hindu chiefs, "it is a well known fact that the endeavours of the seditious party are directed not only against the Paramount Power, but against all constituted forms of government in India, through an absolutely misunderstood sense of 'patriotism,' and through an attachment to the popular idea of 'government by the people,' when every level-headed Indian must admit that India generally has not in any way shown its fitness for a popular government." ”

“ One of the dangers we have to guard against is that, because the Western-educated Indian is to the stay-at-home Englishman, and even to the Englishman whose superficial knowledge of India is confined to brief visits to the chief cities of India, the most, and indeed the only, articulate Indian, we should regard him as the only or the most authoritative mouthpiece of the needs and wishes of other classes or of the great mass of his fellow-countrymen with whom he is often in many ways in less close touch than the Englishman who lives in their midst. ”

“ Thus it is amongst high-caste Hindus that for the last three-quarters of a century English education has chiefly spread, and, indeed, been most eagerly welcomed; it is amongst them that British administration has recruited the great majority of its native servants in every branch of the public service; it is amongst them also that are chiefly recruited the liberal professions, the Press, the schoolmasters—in fact all those agencies through which public opinion and the mind of the rising generation are most easily moulded and directed. ”