And lastly, what are our duties to our country? These are essentially to
win honour for it and also win for it security and peace. As regards
winning honour for our country, it is true that while India has offered
from the earliest times welcome and hospitality to all peoples and
nationalities her children have been subjected to intolerable
humiliations in other countries even under the flag of our king.
There can be no question of the fundamental duty of every Indian to
stand up and uphold the honour of his country and strove for the removal
of wrong.
The general task of redressing wrong is not a problem of India alone,
but one in which the righteous men are interested the world over. For
wrong cries for redress everywhere, in the clashings interests of the
rich and poor, between capital and labour, between those who hold the
power and those from whom it has been withheld,--in a word in the
struggle of the Disinherited.
When any man is rendered unable to uphold his manhood and self-respect
and woman are deprived of the chivalrous protection and consideration of
men and subjected to degradation, the general level of manhood or
womanhood in the world is lowered. It then becomes an outrage to
humanity and a challenge to all men to safeguard the sacredness of our
common human nature.
What is the machinery which sets a going a world movement for the
redress of wrong? For this I need not cite instances from the history of
other countries but take one which is known to you and in which the
living actors are still among us. In the midst of the degradation of his
countrymen in South Africa, there stood up a man himself nurtured in
luxury, to take up the burden of the disinherited. His wife too stood by
him, a lady of gentle birth. We all know who that man is--he is
Gandhi,--and what humiliations and suffering he went through. Do you
think he suffered in vain and that his voice remained unheard? It was
not so, for in the great vortex of passion for Justice, there were
caught others--men like Polak and Andrews. Are they your countrymen? Not
in the narrow sense of the word but truly in a larger sense, that these
who choose to bear and suffer belong to one clan the clan from which
Kshatriya Chivalry is recruited. The removal of suffering and of the
cause of suffering is the Dharma of the strong Kshatriya. The earth is
the wide and universal theatre of man's woeful pageant. The question is
who is to suffer more than his share. Is the burden to fall on the weak
or the strong? Is it to be under hopeless compulsion or of voluntary
acceptance?