Page:Allan Octavian Hume, C.B.; Father of the Indian National Congress.djvu/99

 by such leaders as Edmund Burke, Lord Macaulay, and John Bright : the policy embodied in the wise Statute of 1833, and the noble Proclamation of Queen Victoria in 1858.

It will be remembered that in 1885, the first year of the Congress, Mr. Hume paid a visit to this country, and in consultation with Parliamentary friends, sketched out a plan of campaign for the propaganda in England. We have now to see what action was taken in this direction. At first he cherished the hope that some concessions might, by the force of persuasion, be obtained in India from the Viceroy in Council, but when year after year passed away without any response to the Congress prayer, he became convinced that no reform of any value could be expected from the official hierarchy at Simla, and that it was from England that the impulse must come, if any satisfaction was to be obtained for Indian aspirations. Accordingly in a letter, dated 10th February 1889 from Calcutta, he pressed upon Congress workers the vital need for the British propaganda on an adequate scale. He pointed out that in India the work of the Congress in consolidating public opinion had been in great measure accomplished, and that, broadly speaking, all Indian progressives were agreed as to the proper remedies for Indian grievances and disabilities, but "our European officials — who are here all-powerful — in consequence of service traditions and bureaucratic bias, as a body deny utterly the justice of our contentions, and are not to be convinced by anything that we can ever possibly say. We impute no blame to them for this — it is only natural — for the tendency of all the reforms we advocate is to curtail the virtually autocratic powers now exercised by these officials, and unless they were more than human they must necessarily be antagonistic to our programme. Giving all due credit to our European officials, and