VI .PREFACE.

* make themselves one with the religion and the people/
" When," says Confucius, " the prince loves what the
people love and hates what the people hate, then is he
what is called the father of the people." These ideals are
absolutely unattainable by Englishmen in India. However
conscientious a Civil Servant or a Governor may be, his
heart is far away in England, and he counts the days till
he returns. He is, at best, the conscientious bailiff of an.
absentee landlord ; a person profoundly ignorant of the
nature of the soil that he attempts to cultivate.

It is not out of hatred for England that India
demands her freedom, it is partly for England's sake. The
ownership of India is a, chain about England's neck,—a
weight not less hurtful, because scarcely felt as such. "When
we learn to sing that Britons never will be masters we
shall make an end of slavery, " are true words spoken by a
well-known English writer. ISTo nation can serve faithfully
two ideals without hypocrisy. In Italy, in Japan, in
Persia, in Turkey, England's sympathies have been or still
are, with the great idealistic movements ; only in Egypt
and India, where these movements clash with her material
interests, her attitude is different! The exercise of despotic
power in India provides for England a large and powerful
reactionary element in her own governance. Those who on
the plea of necessity resort in India to punish men without
trial, or the suppression of free speech, will be ready on
the same plea to fall back upon the same resources in the
government of Ireland or the suppression of the iinemploy-
ed, or of women, in England. England may lose something*
of her own liberties, through the denial of liberty to others..
Harmful, too, to England is that change that comes over
nearly all Englishmen (of course, with noble exceptions),,
in the course of weeks or months after they set foot in