The Immediate Need
the well-known historical maxim, that revolutions do not occur when people are at the lowest depth of misery, but only when they are looking up and recovering hope. He then goes on as follows;—
"But if India does begin to breathe as a single national whole—and our own rule is perhaps doing more than ever was done by former governments to make this possible—then no such explosion of despair, even if there was cause for it, would be needed. For in that case the feeling would gain ground in the native army, and on the native army ultimately we depend. We could subdue the mutiny of 1857, formidable as it was, because it was spread through only a part of the army, because the people did not actively sympathise with it, and because it was possible to find native Indian races who would fight on our side. But the moment a mutiny is but threatened which shall be no mere mutiny, but the expression of a universal feeling of nationality, at that moment all hope is at an end, as all desire ought to be at an end, of preserving
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