Page:Allan Octavian Hume, C.B.; Father of the Indian National Congress.djvu/118

Hume exhorted his hearers to be courageous and steady fast : " Let nothing discourage you/' he said, '^ hold fas to that conviction which all the best and wisest share that right must, and ever does triumph in the end, an( that nations have only to deserve, to secure all that thej aspire to. Checks to progress may come — alas, I feai must come — as I have warned you, and many years ma] pass during which apparently you gain no single inch- nay, it may be, even lose ground ; but throughout it all work on dauntlessly, preparing for the good time as- suredly coming — work on ceaselessly, and India shall one day reap a glorious harvest of your labours. Let nothing — no temporary checks, no temporary losses — dishearten you. The spirit of the age is behind you, and win you must before the end comes. . . . No matter how impossible immediate progress may, owing to the tyranny of circumstances, appear, you are bound as true men to hammer on — hammer, hammer, hammer — never relaxing your efforts, and so gradually acquiring that habit of unwavering persistence that as a nation you so sadly lack. You can work at high pressure for a week, but to run at low pressure, uniformly and unwearyingly for a year, is beyond most of you ; and yet this power of sustained continuous exertion is the very first requisite for political success, and if these anticipated checks only teach you this, they will prove not misfortunes but blessings in disguise." If unhappily a great European war broke out, and England was involved, he adjured them to give united and ungrudging support to the British people, who with all their defects were ^^ a noble nation, that has ever sounded the advance to all the listening peoples of the world along the paths of freedom — the nation to which you owe most of what you now most highly prize " : they should ^' rally as one man to the side of those little isles which have been justly