QUOTE : Oh, would that<br />I had died the way the Sikh did! I can not go forward. I shall<br />not submit to being made to see more clearly than I do. Yet, if<br />I turn back I am self-confessed coward! Furthermore, how can I<br />turn back! How shall I reach India, alone, alive? As a corpse I<br />should no longer interest myself. And if I should succeed in<br />reaching India, I should despise myself, because you and Jimgrim<br />treated me as fellow man and yet I failed you. On the other hand,<br />if I go forward they will teach me the reality of things, of which<br />already I know much too much! It has been bad enough as failed<br />B.A. to stick my tongue into my cheek and flatter blind men--<br />pompous Englishmen and supine Indians--for a living. I have had<br />to eat dust from the wheels of what the politicians think is<br />progress; and I have had to be polite when I was patronized by<br />men whom I should pity if I had the heart to do it! And I could<br />endure it, Rammy sahib, because I only knew more than was good<br />for me and not all of it by any means! I do not wish to know more.<br />If I saw more clearly I should have to join the revolutionaries--<br />who are worse than those they revolute against! It is already<br />bad enough to have to toady to the snobs on top. To have to agree<br />with the snobs underneath, who seek to level all men to a common<br />meanness since they can not admire any sort of superiority--that<br />would be living death! I would rather pretend to admire the<br />Englishman whose snobbery exasperates me, than repeat the lies<br />of Indians whose only object is to do dishonestly and badly but<br />much more cleverly what the English do honestly and with all the<br />stupidity of which they are capable!