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The Jaina Philosophy
work on India in toadying to the English officers and their conduct.
Ladies and gentlemen, you have heard all your lives from your missionaries who claim to be the messengers of God how ugly, wretched, immoral, and vile the heathens of India are; you have heard it over and over till it has become the national idea of your people. Your children are taught these ideas as they take in the mother's milk; but did you ever hear from these missionaries - the messengers of love to all mankind, of the tyrannies that are perpetrated over the Hindus in India; did they ever tell you that in India the English government have abolished duties on fine dry goods from Liverpool and Manchester for the purpose of finding a good market in India and have levied a 200 per cent, tax on the manufacture of salt in India to maintain a costly government. Did they ever tell you about all such things?
If they have not, whose messengers would you call these people who always side with tyranny, who throw their cloak of hypocritical religion over murderers and all sorts of criminals who happen to belong to their religion or to their country? You may think these men to be messengers of God; they may cheat with their smooth-tongued words the men and Women of America into subscribing largely to mission funds and thus bribe their passage to heaven. But India knows them.
The many learned missionary gentlemen who have written or who have exhausted their oratorical powers in denouncing India can only prove their claim to be an authority when they show their knowledge of the Hindu religion, and this can only be proven by their knowledge of Sanskrit. No man can know a bit of Hindu religion until he knows perfectly the Sanskrit language. When they can converse with me in this language, I shall consider their words worthy of consideration and not before. And if they cannot do this I would ask - what have they been doing so many years in India.
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