In reply, you might well ask, why then is India loyal? Why do the people put up with all this? Why don't they rebel? Because they have been emasculated, and emasculated so completely, that they are absolutely helpless against your organized brigandage. They are weak, ignorant and incompetent. Sixty-four years ago they were not so helpless. But now they are completely demoralized and penniless. Your system has ground them into dust. They cannot even protect themselves from wild beasts. You have completely disarmed them. No Indian can possess a firearm except under a license from your magistrates, which is only rarely granted. You have completely hypnotized them by your professions of disinterested liberalism and altruism. The truth has, after all, dawned on them that you are the worst harpies they ever have had and if they could they would overthrow you without a scruple. You know that you are safe in their helplessness. When the war came they deluded themselves with the hope that in your hour of need you might accord them a better treatment, but by this time they have found their mistake and have concluded that, just as a lion may die of sheer exhaustion when attacked by an enemy rather than willingly loosen his grip on his prey so long as there is breath in his body, so a nation holding another in subjection might endanger her own existence without loosening her grip on her victim. When the war broke out in August, 1914, I, with other Indian publicists, thought that however badly you had treated us in the past we had nothing to gain by German victory and the best thing, under the circumstances, was for us to stand by you and establish our claim to better treatment. The Princes and people of India therefore stood by you. You and your colleagues have been singing their praises and extolling their loyalty, but nothing has been done so far to give them even the elementary political rights of a free people. Verily, we have had a deluge of fine words but not an iota of deeds. On the other hand, you have imposed fresh burdens on us. While doing an "act of justice" about the cotton duties you have committed a wrong which wipes away the little good that might otherwise have been expected to accrue therefrom. Your courts and officers in India have taken away what little freedom the people enjoyed before. In cases of alleged sedition the sentences inflicted have been quite on a par with the doings of the Romanoffs in Russia. This time even women have felt your steel.