Even my worst enemies have not been able to point out anything in my
life which would give any one even the shadow of a reason to say that,
in my private life, I have not been as good and honorable a person as
any British politician or diplomat or proconsul, is or has been or can
be. My record as a wage-earner is as clean and as honorable as that of
the best of Britishers engaged in governing India.
Mr. H. W. Nevinson, than whom a more truthful and honorable publicist is
not known in British life, has said in his work, "The New Spirit in
India," that once when he told a high Anglo-Indian official that I was a
good man held in great esteem by my countrymen, the latter remarked,
that because I had a high character in private life, I was the more
dangerous as an agitator.
I am reciting all this as evidence of my credentials to speak on
behalf of my countrymen. Just now I am a mere exile. For the present,
I cannot think of returning to India, unless in course of time I begin
to feel that by running the risk of being hanged or imprisoned, I
should be doing a greater service to my country, than by remaining
outside. I am now in the fifty-third year of my life, out of which
more than thirty-four were spent in the limelight of public gaze. I am a
man of family with children and grandchildren and have had my share,
however small, of the good things of the world. Political freedom for
India has been a passion to me ever since I was a boy. However hard the
life of an exile or a convict may be, I am prepared to risk everything
in the cause of my country.
In the language of that prince of political exiles, Joseph Mazzini, the
word "exile," is perhaps the most cursed in the dictionary of man. It
dries up the springs of affection; it deprives its victims of the sweet
babblings and lispings of his little ones with whom every man of age
loves to beguile the evening of his days; it closes the avenues of all
comfort that are associated with that sweet word home; it shuts the
doors of heaven and makes life a continued agony, hanging on the slender
thread of such pity and hospitality as one may receive from the generous
and kind-hearted foreigner.