Page:Young India.pdf/168

136 proof of its having been started before time and on wrong foundations.

Had not Mr. Hume said that “ whether in the individual or the nation, all vital progress must spring from within,” and that it was “ to her own sons that the country must look for the initiative?” Did not Mr. Hume say in his manifesto of 1883 that “ in vain may aliens like myself love India. . . in vain may they struggle and sacrifice. . . they may assist with advice and suggestion, but they lack the essential of nationality, and the real work must ever be done by the people of the country themselves?”

These may be only truisms, but they are fundamental and any political effort made in defiance of them must be futile and impotent. The Indian leaders of the Congress have never fully realised the absolute truth of these principles and the result is the comparatively poor record of the Congress. In his original manifesto issued in 1883, Mr. Hume wanted fifty Indians “ with sufficient power of selfsacrifice, sufficient love for and pride in their country, sufficient genuine and unselfish heartfelt patriotism to take the initiative and if needs be to devote the rest of their lives to the cause.”

Of course there were many times fifty men of that kind in the country, even then, who were devoting their lives to the service of their country, but not in the political line. It took the Congress and the country, by working on Congress lines, more than twenty years to produce fifty, many times fifty, such men to devote their lives to the political cause.