ABSTRACT
The following is the substance of the message given by Rabindranath Tagore at the Yearly Meeting, in the Friends’ House, London, on M ay 24, 1930:—
“ India is being ruled by a complicated machine. The mechanics who drive it have a long training in power, but no tradition of human sympathy, which is superfluous in a workshop. They are incapable of understanding the living India owing to the natural mentality of bureaucracy, which simplifies its task and manages an alien race from a distance through various switches and handles and wheels and hardly ever through human touch. It produces perfect results so long as the subject race meekly behaves like dead material yielding to the machinemade law and order, offering no resistance when exploited. The people morally responsible for this flawlessly standardized rule lives across a far-away sea, satisfied at the unmurmuring silence brooding over a vast country-at a peace which is uncreative like that of a barren waste-and clings to a com fortable faith in the man on the spot and to the proud privilege of a first-class power in the West.
