1 Gentlemen reformers with an English Education— Lights of Aryavarta take our heartiest applause, For the spectacle you offer of an 'educated' nation Working out its freedom under 'educated' laws. 2 Laudable your sentiments, eloquent your diction, For your flowing periods, all our language racked is. May a brutal Briton ask:—'Wherefore then the friction 'Twixt the golden Principle and the grubby Practice.' 3 Gentlemen reformers, you have heard the story Weighed the woman's evidence—marked the man's reply. Here's a chance for honour, notoriety and glory! Graduates of culture will you let that chance go by? 4 [You can lecture government, draught a resolution— Sign a huge memorial—that Calcutta saw. Never such an opening for touching elocution— As the text of Rukhmibhaio, jailed by Hindu law] 5 What? No word of protest ? Not a sign of pity ? Not a hand to help the girl, but, in black and white Writes the leading oracle of the leading city:— 'We the Indian nation, we hold it served her right. 6 Wherefore, gracious government, let her do her sentence: Learn the majesty of Law, teach our erring wives— By a six months' sojourn in a common prison pent—hence She and they are cattle at our service all their lives.' 7 Gentlemen reformers, you can understand the loathing That would fill your bosoms did a mehter claim to share On the strength of velvet skull-cap and a suit of snowy [clothing Your name and rank and prospects and a seat beside your chair] 8 [Very hard it is to keep in bounds of decent moderation— And grief to smother epithets unseemly out of place When excellent reformers chose to call themselves a nation And clamour for equality beside the higher race. 9 It is then the brutal Briton feels an impulse, wild, unruly— That tingles in the toe nails of a non-official boot— Lumps in one mean heap of cruelty the graduate and cooly— And the old race-instinct answers to the clamour:—Hut you brute. 10 Which is barbarous and savage but the graduate of culture May console himself with thinking of the proverb wise and old 'Though you paint him as a peacock, still the vulture is a vulture'— And the dôm is still an outcast though you plate his back with gold.]
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