The question immediately before India now is, which of two courses with regard to ourselves the new spirit as a whole will take. On the one hand, it may follow the line of most resistance. It may proclaim throughout the whole country: “It is useless to trouble about any reforms that these intruding foreigners will give us. Let them go on their way with their Advisory Councils, their Notables, their extended Legislative Councils, and other deceits. They have never paid the smallest attention to our real demands. In Mill’s words, they keep us as a warren or preserve for their own use, a place to make money in, a human farm to be worked for their own profit. It is for us to pursue our own course, disregarding their presence. Beyond paying their taxes, we need have little concern with them. If they imprison us, we will go to gaol silently; if they deport us without trial, we will endure without protest; if they execute us, we know that our souls will be at once re-incarnated to continue the struggle. But we will not notice their Government either by sharing in it or denouncing it. In religion, in education, in industries and common life, we will follow our own national lines just as though no foreigners were pretending to rule us. If enough of us combine, we shall embarrass their position; perhaps we shall make it untenable as well as ridiculous. But whether it is untenable or not, we do not greatly care, till a common Indian nationality has the strength to take freedom into its own hands.” That is the line of most resistance, always a tempting line to take, and many Indians are taking it now. The temptation must be almost irresistible in a vast population like India’s, where a handful of people from a distant country maintain a predominance unmitigated by social intercourse, marriage, or permanent residence. All the more because this predominance rests on so narrow a basis that for its own maintenance it is inclined to deter the subject race from all initiative, enterprise, or leadership, and so to reduce it to what Dadabhai Naoroji has described as “moral poverty.” Any movement to check this national deterioration must be welcomed on behalf of the Indian peoples, except by those who openly desire those races to remain as flocks of sheep, dependent on the good nature or interested bounty of their appointed shepherds. But that is not the ideal that the best of our statesmen in India have set before themselves, nor is it an ideal that can any longer be maintained. The new spirit has already overthrown it.[72]