The Immediate Need
England and at the hands of the English people. But now, at last, experience itself has taught me that this way of thinking suffers from one fatal defect. There is no inner strength in it, no inner resource, by appeal to which India may be brought out of the vicious circle that Seeley so terribly depicts. Desperate diseases demand desperate remedies, not poultices and bandaging. Even if the dependence on England became more and more attenuated as year after year went slowly by, even if the reforms gave certain privileges which had not been given before, these things would be a gift, a boon, an act of patronising condescension, and thus a weakness, not a strength; all the while the spirit of dependence would remain. And, if Seeley’s diagnosis of the malady which afflicted India was true, then we had no time to wait. For while doles of Home Rule were being niggardly meted out with the one hand, independence itself was being undermined, and the fatal habit of looking to England, in a defenceless sort of way, was
