THE COLONY
21
Then he turned to describing the growth of government oppression.
He removed
his
spectacles, put aside his notes and raised his voice
again. It rang out to the edge of the field as he spoke of the insults
and humiliations that the colored people had suffered; he spoke of
the provocations in the North, telling in some detail of the false case
the government had built against one of its own underlings, and his
voice was full of indignation; he described the efficient working of
the censorship and warned against future provocations, and his voice
dropped and took on the well-practiced and sustained sinister tone,
the slow and crafty and evil intonation, sibilant and harsh, that
mimicked the oppressor's evil. The crowd responded as a body, ex–
pressing its anger, murmuring or crying out its protest. The little
girls who had sung the hymns now wailed in distress, and Satya paused
at appropriate moments to let them mingle their young voices with
the grief of their elders. The sun rose and the heat of the morning
increased. Satya sweated, and the crowd sweated with
him.
The
natives were now pulling on the sheets of bamboo that hung over the
grandstand.
"And what have they?" he cried out, his voice once more hard
and clear in its anger, "what have they in their own country?" He
wheeled sideways, and stood with
his
left shoulder and arm raised,
his right arm drawn back-the pose of a javelin thrower about to
let hurl at the crowd. "What of their boast that they have abolished
poverty and disease and unemployment? What of the promises they
hold out to us? I have thanked them for their good intentions-!
have expressed the people's gratitude to them. We say: No, thank
you! Far happier is our own wretched
pea~ant
with
his
acre of un–
productive ground and his blistered hands, with
his
broken back and
cut and bleeding feet-far happier is he, so long as he resists their
rule, than anyone of their own well-fed and athletic race who submits
to it! We say: No! Little do they realize that the crust of freedom
which we treasure with our sacred hunger is better and richer and
purer than the soft, white poisoned bread that they must eat. What
are their goods to us?-the corruption o£ riches, the greed that fastens
on the land, the lust and the luxury in which the few wallow and in
the envy of which the many are ground unto death. We know what
their goods are, and we are not lured by them. We say: No! We
say: your poverty persists in spite of all your efforts to abolish it, and
it always will persist. It persists in your movie houses, where, not the
bright screen, but the darkness of
th~
theatre truly mirrors the life
you lead.
It
persists ·in your levers and cranes, your contrivances and
