मेरा आजीवन कारावास / माझी जन्मठेप (स्वातंत्र्यवीर सावरकर - काले पानी का ऐतिहासिक संस्मरण)

dashing my head against a stone-wall, that was not the wall that would break, but that my head would break. I could have told him that day as follows : "Mr. Barrie, my head had received many bruises by my dashing it continuously against your prison-walls. No doubt about it. But behold! The wall of your prison has now been cracked and will soon crumble down. And I am here alive with all the bruises I have received in the fight.' I spent the whole night in thinking over the news, and made up my mind as to where I would oppose the Government in that move, and where I would support it heartily from the standpoint of India's interest in that affair. I at once realised that the stand I was going to take would cost me at the start in popularity with my own people. But I must be prepared for this opposition if I was to serve them well. Had I not passed through a similar experience of adverse criticism when I first launched the Shuddhi movement in the Andamans? I was in favour of prison-colony I was, from the start, against breaking up the prison-colony in the Andamans. What I had insisted upon breaking was the administration of it by harsh, hard-hearted, reactionary, and unsympathetic prison-regulations, so harmful to the prisoners coming under its jurisdiction. The colony and the settlement should have been continued on the lines of Canada and Australia, where England had sent its prisoners who made those colonies into thriving dominions. The worst felons were deported from England to Canada. And the fierce qualities of the criminals sent to Canada proved useful in conquering that land for cultivation and development from the aborigines of that country and the wild animals that had infested it. These fierce qualities tamed by proper discipline and control have many times helped the convict settlers to turn the land by proper cultivation into a dominion smiling with plenty and power, peace and progress. The colonial policy ought to aim at making the prisoners useful and honest citizens and not to kill their spirit or destroy their usefulness. The policy should not be that of revenge but improvement all round. In Canada, partly in America, and to a larger extent in Africa the convicts sent from England were kept free, though under severe discipline, and their enterprise and daring were utilised to good purpose. They colonised and brought under cultivation the wild and barren places of those continents. The human material that was running to waste in the old country grew in these new countries to hundred times its strength, and the growing population had turned these dominions into independent nations. England's man-power and its power as an empire grew with their growth and expansion. I felt from the point of view of India as a nation that the Andamans, instead of being abandoned, should be developed through its prisoners along similar lines. It was not the policy of our agitation to denude and destroy the Andamans. It was, we felt, to lose all the labour and money that had been spent on that soil for so many years in the past. It should be developed along national lines. For prisoners deported to the Andamans on a long or a life-sentence were bound to rot for fourteen years in the jails