The intemperance of our habits does not immediately show its effects
when we are in the vigour of our youth. But it gradually consumes that
vigour, and when the period of decline sets in then we have to settle
accounts and pay off our debts, which leads us to insolvency. In the
West you are still able to carry your head high, though your humanity is
suffering every moment from its dipsomania of organizing power. India
also in the heyday of her youth could carry in her vital organs the dead
weight of her social organizations stiffened to rigid perfection, but it
has been fatal to her, and has produced a gradual paralysis of her
living nature. And this is the reason why the educated community of
India has become insensible of her social needs. They are taking the
very immobility of our social structures as the sign of their
perfection,--and because the healthy feeling of pain is dead in the
limbs of our social organism they delude themselves into thinking that
it needs no ministration. Therefore they think that all their energies
need their only scope in the political field. It is like a man whose
legs have become shrivelled and useless, trying to delude himself that
these limbs have grown still because they have attained their ultimate
salvation, and all that is wrong about him is the shortness of his
sticks.
So much for the social and the political regeneration of India. Now we
come to her industries, and I am very often asked whether there is in
India any industrial regeneration since the advent of the British
Government. It must be remembered that at the beginning of the British
rule in India our industries were suppressed, and since then we have not
met with any real help or encouragement to enable us to make a stand
against the monster commercial organizations of the world. The nations
have decreed that we must remain purely an agricultural people, even
forgetting the use of arms for all time to come. Thus India is being
turned into so many predigested morsels of food ready to be swallowed at
any moment by any nation which has even the most rudimentary set of
teeth in its head.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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