The Immediate Need
sentence, which has been one of the most often quoted from his book:—
“To withdraw,” he says, “the British Government from a country like India, which is dependent on it, and which we have made incapable of depending on anything else, would be the most inexcusable of all conceivable crimes, and might possibly cause the most stupendous of all conceivable calamities.”
This sentence, which I have italicised, can only have one meaning. It implies that India has no way out of her difficulties. The historian can look forward to no period when India will be able to depend upon herself alone for protection. The rule of the British in India is regarded as parallel to that of the Romans in Britain in ancient times. When the Romans left the shores of Britain, the wretched inhabitants, we are told, gazed longingly after them as the Roman ships departed, being themselves too weakened by foreign
government to have any powers of self-defence left. Even so, Sir John Seeley
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