Page:Allan Octavian Hume, C.B.; Father of the Indian National Congress.djvu/171

 evil engendered by poverty, hunger, and natural envy of those more fortunate, and that the hope of attaining to the exercise of political functions is often one of the strongest incitements to a higher morality — that the extinction of a few evil customs will avail little without a thorough recast of the social framework, a thing only possible as the result of a general advance along all the other lines, physical, intel- lectual, psychical and political — and that lastly, nations in the long run always get precisely as good a Government as they deserve, and that no nominal political enfranchisement will in practice prove more than a change of evils unless such an advance has simultaneously or antecedently been made along all these other lines as shall render the country qualified to assimilate its improved political status.

Now, whether rightly or wrongly, it seems to me that a sporadic crusade such as the one you have now undertaken — not to capture the Holy Land, but merely to destroy one little stronghold of the infidels therein — is an utter waste of power, in so much that even if crowned with momentary success, it could have no permanent result while the hills that command it and its water-supply are still in the hands of the enemy. It would be like our capture of the Redan before the Mamelon was in our allies' hands.

And I think further that such isolated crusades have a distinct tendency to intensify that sectarianism in Reform which, as I have already said, seems to me the chief obstacle to progress. And when you threaten, as you often do, to abandon all other work and devote for the rest of your life your great abilities and energies, your fearless honesty and fiery enthusiasm, to these two comparatively minor matters, you seem to me, I confess, like a man who should concentrate all his attention and efforts upon a single plank in the bottom of his ship, leaving all the rest to wind and wave, to rock and rot, as Chance may will it.

No doubt specialization goes hand in hand with develop- ment ; but national reform here is still in the amoebic stage, and no such specialization as this would imply is as yet practicable. We all remember the statesman who was said