Page:Allan Octavian Hume, C.B.; Father of the Indian National Congress.djvu/100

 acknowledging their many merits, nothing nevertheless is more certain than that, so long as we confine our reclamations to their ears, we shall never secure those important reforms that we all know to have now become essential, not only to our own welfare but to the auspicious continuance of British rule in India. . . . Our only hope lies in awakening the British public to a sense of the wrongs of our people — to a consciousness of the unwisdom and injustice of the present administration. The least that we could do would be to provide ample funds — for sending and keeping constantly in England deputations of our ablest speakers to plead their country's cause — to enable our British Committee to keep up an unbroken series of public meetings, whereat the true state of affairs in India might be expounded — to flood Great Britain with pamphlets, leaflets, newspapers, and magazine articles — in a word to carry on an agitation there, on the lines and scale of that in virtue of which the Anti-Corn-Law League triumphed." Would that India had followed this wise leadership ! A frontal attack on bureaucratic power, firmly entrenched at Simla — with all the armoury of repression at its command — was hopeless. But success was within reach, by means of a flanking movement, that is, by an appeal to the British elector ; for the elector's vote gives office to the Prime Minister, and the Prime Minister nominates the Secretary of State, to whom the Viceroy in Council, with all the official hosts, is subordinate. Unfortunately the party of progress in India have never properly realized the practical advantage of this method, and in succeeding years have brought upon themselves endless woes by futile resistance in India to irresistible force, while neglecting to conduct effectively in England the operations which, with a moderate expenditure of labour and of money, would have secured to them a painless victory.