Page:Allan Octavian Hume, C.B.; Father of the Indian National Congress.djvu/169

 achieved, it can only be by linking together all those who love the light and would fain push the darkness farther back, in a common effort against a common evil.

Doubtless, division of labour is the seed of Progress, and throughout the universe specialization goes hand in hand with development. We may expect different minds to devote themselves more especially to different sections of the work, but they must be taken up as integral parts of the whole, subordinate portions of the common enterprise in which all are interested.

As it is, in consequence of the all-pervading spirit of division of labour, the minds of our reformers are, as a rule, too exclusively turned to individual abuses and too little in sympathy with the aspirations of fellow-workers struggling against other forms of wrong ; and our first aim should be to infuse a spirit of catholicity into the entire body of those willing to labour, in any direction, for the common weal.

It is essential, I think, that we should all try to realize that closely interwoven in humanity as are the physical, intellectual and psychical factors, progress in any direction, to be real or permanent, postulates a corresponding progress in other directions — that though we may and must most specially devote our energies to overcoming the particular adversary that circumstances have most immediately opposed to us, we each form but one unit in a force contending against a common foe, whose defeat will depend as much on the success of each of our fellow-soldiers as on our own. In the hour of battle it signifies nothing whether a man is in the light or grenadier company, the whole regiment must advance — the individual can do little ; it matters not whether one is in the cavalry, artillery, infantry, pioneers or what not, the success of each is the success of all, the defeat of any an additional obstacle to the triumph of the rest.

At present the greatest impediment to all progress here appears to me to consist in a general failure to realize the essential unity of the cause of reform. You find earnest