Page:Allan Octavian Hume, C.B.; Father of the Indian National Congress.djvu/168

 moment to be, the most serious obstacle to real National progress.

I do not ignore the fact that in our practical work we may and often must, adopt the moral of the fagot fable and proceed to break the sticks one by one, but we must all, from the outset, realize the entire fagot and set before us as our ultimate aim and end, not the fracture of the one stick but the destruction of the entire bundle.

But to me it seems that you put forward these two unquestionably desirable reforms as if they were the most momentous questions of the day, and as if on them hinged the national regeneration, whereas they are mere fractional parts which can never be successfully manipulated by themselves, and which even if they could be so treated, would not, independently of progress in other directions, produce any very marked results upon the country as a whole.

The tendency of your Notes must be, I fear, to give all your readers a somewhat exaggerated and disproportioned idea of the importance of these matters, themselves only branches of the larger question of raising the status of our women generally, itself again only one of many essential factors in National progress.

Moreover, pressing these isolated points so strongly, as if they were obligatory and stood by themselves, and not as mere optional sections of a general enterprise, has certainly temporarily alienated some who would cordially have cooperated in many other sections. Now we cannot afford to alienate a single possible coadjutor, and it is only by starting on a platform co-extensive with the aspirations of the country that we can hope to secure the co-operation of even the majority of that powerful (though numerically small) body of earnest workers who have learnt to look in one direction or another, outside the sordid veil of "self" that still darkens the perceptions of their brethren.

The earnest and unselfish labourers for Progress in this country constitute but an infinitesimal fraction of the population, a fraction that becomes absolutely inappreciable if further subdivided. If, then, any real results are to be