Page:Allan Octavian Hume, C.B.; Father of the Indian National Congress.djvu/173

 widen their sympathies and lovingly band themselves in united action with all those fellow-labourers whose real aim, like their own, is the purification of mankind, would in twenty years raise the whole tone of national thought — but who, working on, each in his sectarian groove, not only without aiding, not only without sympathy for, but too often in positive hostility towards those whom they should hail as comrades and brothers, live and die leaving scarcely a foot-print on the soul-sands of the age.

Who can reckon the incalculable loss that the country sustains by this persistent antagonism of forces, which com- bined, would transform the nation in a single generation ? Let us, who labour on a humbler plane, beware how we allow ourselves to drift into analogous dissociation, and pinning our faiths on no one particular reform, no one special panacea, even if we have not ourselves the oppor- tunity of working in all directions, at least aid, sympathize, and co-operate with all who, in any form and in any direction, labour in singleness of heart for the common weal.

The time has not yet come when any of us, few as we are, can rightly take up a single branch of one of many questions and devote to that our entire thoughts and time, careless of all else. Your pet subjects are but side branches of the great question of elevating the status of our women, and cannot, it seems to me, be dissociated, theoretically or practically, from that. The majority of the opposition with which your proposals have been met in certain Native tircles has had its origin in the conviction that our women nd girls are not yet sufficiently educated to enable any great change in the social customs which regulate their lives to be safely made, at present.

To me personally, the promotion of female education (using the word in its broadest sense) as necessarily antece- dent to the thorough eradication of the grievous evils you so forcibly depict, appears a more important and imme- diately pressing question than those selected by you.

I cannot plead guilty to being a benevolent let-alonist.