Education -- India; India -- Politics and government -- 1857-1919; India -- Social conditions
the soberest and most abstemious populations known to any
part of the world?
If we have really self-government within the Empire, if
we have the rights of freedom of the Empire as Australia
has, as Canada has, as England has to-day, if we, 300 millions
of people, have that freedom of the Empire, the Empire
would cease to be British. It would be the Indian Empire,
and the alliance between England and India would be absolutely
an unequal alliance. That would be, if we had really
self-government within the Empire, exactly the relation as
co-partners in a co-British or anti-British Empire of the
future; and if the day comes when England will be reduced
to the alternative of having us as an absolutely independent
people or a co-partner with her in the Empire, she would
prefer to have us, like the Japanese, as an ally and no longer
a co-partner, because we are bound to be the predominant
partner in this Imperial firm. Therefore no sane Englishman,
politician or publicist can ever contemplate seriously the
possibility of a self-governing India, like the self-governing
colonies, forming a vital and organic part of the British
Empire. Therefore it is that Lord Morley says that so
long as India remains under the control of Great Britain
the government of India must continue to be a personal
and absolute one. Therefore it seems to me that this ideal,
the practically attainable ideal of self-government within the
Empire, when we analyse it with care, when we study it in
the light of common human psychology, when we study
it in the light of our past experience of the racial characteristics
of the British people, when we study it in the light of past
British history in India and other parts of the world, when
we study and analyse this ideal of self-government within
the Empire, we find it is a far more impracticable thing to
attain than even our ideal _Swaraj_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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