ress when he introduced the
new Press Bill on February 4, 1910:--We see the most influential and
widely-read portion of the Indian Press incessantly occupied in
rendering the Government by law established odious in the sight of the
Indian people. The Government is foreign, and therefore selfish and
tyrannical. It drains the country of its wealth; it has impoverished the
people, and brought about famine on a scale and with a frequency unknown
before; its public works, roads, railways, and canals have generated
malaria; it has introduced plague, by poisoning wells, in order to
reduce the population that has to be held in subjection it has deprived
the Indian peasant of his land; the Indian artisan of his industry, and
the Indian merchant of his trade; it has destroyed religion by its
godless system of education; it seeks to destroy caste by polluting
maliciously and of set purpose, the salt and sugar that men eat and the
cloth that they wear; it allows Indians to be ill-treated in British
Colonies; it levies heavy taxes and spends them on the army; it pays
high salaries to Englishmen, and employs Indians only in the worst paid
posts--in short, it has enslaved a whole people, who are now struggling
to be free.

My enumeration may not be exhaustive but these are some of the
statements that are now being implanted as axioms in the minds of rising
generation of educated youths, the source from which we recruit the
great body of civil officials who administer India. If nothing more were
said, if the Press were content to--

"let the lie Have time on its own wings to fly" things would be bad
enough. But very much more is said. Every day the Press proclaims,
openly or by suggestion or allusion, that the only cure for the ills of
India is independence from foreign rule, independence to be won by
heroic deeds, self-sacrifice, martyrdom on the part of the young, in any
case by some form of violence. Hindu mythology, ancient and modern
history, and more especially the European literature of revolution, are
ransacked to furnish examples that justify revolt and proclaim its
inevitable success. The methods of guerilla warfare as practised in
Circassia, Spain, and South Africa; Mazzini's gospel of political
assassination; Kossuth's most violent doctrines; the doings of Russian
Nihilists; the murder of the Marquis Ito; the dialogue between Arjuna
and Krishna in the "Gita," a book that is to Hindus what the "Imitation
of Christ" is to e