Indian Home Rules Gandhiji

Author(s): Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Gandhiji
Publisher: Yann Forget

Page 72

II.
Testimonies by eminent men
The following extracts from Mr Alfred Webb's valuable collection, if the testimony given therein be true, show that the ancient Indian civilisation has little to learn from the modern:
Victor Cousin (1792-1867)
Founder of systematic eclecticism in philosophy
"On the other hand, when we read with attention the poetical and philosophical movements of the East, above all, those of India, which are beginning to spread in Europe, we discover there so many truths, and truths so profound, and which make such a contrast with the meanness of the results at which the European genius has sometimes stopped, that we are constrained to bend the knee before that of the East, and to see in this cradle of the human race the native land of the highest philosophy."
J. Seymour Keay, MP
Banker in India and India agent (writing in 1883)
"It cannot be too well understood that our position in India has never been in any degree that of civilians bringing civilisation to savage races. When we landed in India we found there a hoary civilisation, which during the progress of thousands of years had fitted itself into the character and adjusted itself to the wants of highly intellectual races. The civilisation was not perfunctory, but universal and all-pervading furnishing the country not only with political systems, but with social and domestic institutions of the most ramified description. The beneficent nature of these institutions as a whole may be judged of from their effects on the character of he Hindu race. Perhaps there are no other people in the world who show so much in their characters the advantageous effects of their own civilisation. They are shrewd in business, acute in reasoning, thrifty, religious, sober, charitable, obedient to parents, referential to old age, amiable, lawabiding, compassionate towards the helpless, and patient under suffering."
72