I turn your gift
into service to the Motherland; I consecrate my life anew to her in
worship by action. All that I have and am, I lay on the Altar of the
Mother, and together we shall cry, more by service than by words: VANDE
MATARAM.
There is, perhaps, one value in your election of me in this crisis of
India's destiny, seeing that I have not the privilege to be Indian-born,
but come from that little island in the northern seas which has been, in
the West, the builder-up of free institutions. The Aryan emigrants, who
spread over the lands of Europe, carried with them the seeds of liberty
sown in their blood in their Asian cradle-land. Western historians trace
the self-rule of the Saxon villages to their earlier prototypes in the
East, and see the growth of English liberty as up-springing from the
Aryan root of the free and self-contained village communities.
Its growth was crippled by Norman feudalism there, as its
millennia-nourished security here was smothered by the East India
Company. But in England it burst its shackles and nurtured a
liberty-loving people and a free Commons' House.
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