Education -- India; India -- Politics and government -- 1857-1919; India -- Social conditions
The retirement of Lord Morley has been announced just as these last
pages are going to press. The announcement has been received with
genuine and widespread regret at home, where criticism of certain
details and aspects of his administration has never detracted from a
genuine recognition of the lofty sense of duty and broad and courageous
statesmanship which he has displayed throughout a very critical period
in the history of our Indian Empire. It will assuredly be received with
the same feeling in India by all those who have at heart the destinies
of the British _Raj_ and the interests of the countless peoples
committed to our charge. Lord Morley's tenure of office will remain for
all times memorable in Anglo-Indian annals. He has set for the Indian
ship of State a new course upon which she will be kept with increasing
confidence in the future if we keep steadily before us the wise words
which, with his own singular felicity of speech, he addressed two years
ago to the Indian Civil Service:--"We have a clouded moment before us
now. We shall get through it--but only with self-command and without any
quackery or cant, whether it be the quackery of blind violence disguised
as love of order, or the cant of unsound and misapplied sentiment,
divorced from knowledge and untouched by any cool consideration of
facts."
NOTES
NOTE 1.
THE NATIVE PRESS.
Not a single Indian member of the Imperial Council made any serious
attempt to controvert the following description given by Sir Herbert
Risley of the demoralization of the native Press when he introduced the
new Press Bill on February 4, 1910:--We see the most influential and
widely-read portion of the Indian Press incessantly occupied in
rendering the Government by law established odious in the sight of the
Indian people. The Government is foreign, and therefore selfish and
tyrannical. It drains the country of its wealth; it has impoverished the
people, and brought about famine on a scale and with a frequency unknown
before; its public works, roads, railways, and canals have generated
malaria; it has introduced plague, by poisoning wells, in order to
reduce the population that has to be held in subjection it has deprived
the Indian peasant of his land; the Indian artisan of his industry, and
the Indian merchant of his trade; it has destroyed religion by its
godless system of education; it seeks to destroy caste by polluting
maliciously and of set purpose, the salt and sugar that men eat and the
cloth that they wear; it allows Indians to be ill-treated in British
Colonies; it levies heavy taxes and spends them on the army; it pays
high salaries to Englishmen, and employs Indians only in the worst paid
posts--in short, it has enslaved a whole people, who are now struggling
to be free.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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