Page:The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 1.djvu/223

 towards the Brittish Government,in the most absolute sense that I can use, and you understand the words. Moral truthfulness is as marked a characteristic of the Settia (upper) class of Bombay as of the Teutonic race itself. The people of India, in short, are in no intrinsic sense our inferiors, while in things measured by some of the false standards—false to our-selves—we pretend to believe in, they are our superiors.

Sri C. Trevelyan remarks that:


 * They have very considerable administrative qualities, great patience, industry, and great acuteness and intelligence.

Of the family relations, thus speaks Sir W. W. Hunter:


 * There is simply no comparison between Englishmen and Hindus with respect to the place occupied by family interests and family affections in their minds. The love of parents for children and of children for parents has scarcely any counterpart in England. Parental and filial affection occupies among our Eastern fellow-citizens the place which is taken in this country by the passion between the sexes

And Mr. Pincott thinks that:


 * In all social matters the English are far more fitted to sit at the feet of Hindus and learn as disciples than to attempt to become masters.

Says M. Louis Jacolliot:


 * Soil of ancient India, cradle of humanity, hail! Hail, venerable and efficient nurse, whom centuries of brutal invasions have not yet buried under the dust of oblivion. Hail, fatherland of faith, of love, of poetry, and of science! May we hail a revival of thy past in our Western future!

Says Victor Hugo:


 * These nations have made Europe, France and Germany. Germany is for the Occident that which India is for the Orient.

Add to this the facts that India has produced a Buddha, whose life some consider the best and the holiest lived by a mortal, and some to be second only to that lived by Jesus; that India has produced an Akbar, whose policy the British Government have followed with but few modifications; that India lost, only a few years ago, a Parsee Baronet who astonished not India only, but England also, by his munificent charities; that India has produced Christodas Paul, a journalist, whom Lord Elgin, the present Viceroy, compared with the best European journalists; that India has produced Justices Mahomed and Muthukrishna Aiyer, both Judges of High Courts in India, whose judgments have been pronounced