98 INDIA STRUGGLES FOR FREEDOM

and went on to add that there was not a single man amongst his
hearers who would not admit that it \\as for IT is ^ood. Unfortu-
nately, gentlemen, Providence is only too often appealed to
. . . . Although there is not a man amongst us who is
not sincerely loyal to the British Government, yet claiming
the undoubted right of British subjects to criticise the acts of
the Government, may we not respectfully ask our rulers—and in this
connection I make no distinction between the different English
political parties—may we not ask whether we are to believe that the
policy which many years ago killed our indigenous industries, which
even only the other day and under a liberal administration unblush-
ingly imposed excise duties on our cotton manufactures, which
steadily drains our national resources to the extent of something like
20 million sterling per annum, and which by imposing heavy burdens
on an agricultural population increases the frequency and intensity of
OUP famines to an extent unknown in former times—are we to believe
that the various administrative acts which have led to these results
were directly inspired by the beneficent Providence ? " 7

Romesh Chunder Dutt, historian, administrator, Congress Presi-
dent, who held to the end of his days a sturdy belief in British justice
and a hope that " Englishmen will see it fit and desirable to allow to
the people of India some voice and some power, duly guarded, in
improving their circumstances in life ", could not help stating empha-
tically that "India's economic history proves the truth of J. S. Mill's
dictum: ' The government of a people by itself has a meaning and a
reality, but such a thing as government of one people by another does
not and cannot exist. One people may keep another for its own use,
a place to make money in, a human cattle farm for the profits of its
own inhabitants'". He once made a sober catalogue of the more
spectacular Indian calamities over a sixty-year stretch and mildly
jSuggested the remedy of political reform : " The year of the acces-
;sion of the Queen (1837) was marked by a severe famine which deso-
?lated Northern India, and counted its victims by the million. The
,'year of the.Indian Mutiny (1857) was the commencement of the next
'twenty years marked by three great famines—the famines of the
North-West, of Orissa and of Behar. The year in which the Queen
: assumed the title of Empress of India (1877) was the year of a more
.terrible famine in Madras, which swept away five millions of the
people of Southern India. And the year of the Queen's Diamond
Jubilee (1897) has, unfortunately, been marked in India by another
Widespread famine which embraces the greater part of India

Congress Presidential Addresses, 1885-1916" (Natesan, Madras, 1918), fassin.