words with which to thank you, no eloquence with which to repay my debt.
My deeds must speak for me, for words are too poor. 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. Here, it similarly
bourgeoned out into the Congress activities, and more recently into
those of the Muslim League, now together blossoming into Home Rule for
India. The England of Milton, Cromwell, Sydney, Burke, Paine, Shelley,
Wilberforce, Gladstone; the England that sheltered Mazzini, Kossuth,
Kropotkin, Stepniak, and that welcomed Garibaldi; the England that is
the enemy of tyranny, the foe of autocracy, the lover of freedom, that
is the England I would fain here represent to you to-day. To-day, when
India stands erect, no suppliant people, but a Nation, self-conscious,
self-respecting, determined to be free; when she stretches out her hand