भारतीय इतिहास के ६ स्वर्णिम पृष्ठ (वीर सावरकर - विदेशी आक्रान्ताओं पर विजय गाथा)

Captain—now Major Murray is superintending the jail affairs. As long as he is here, you may rest assured that nothing that evinces a personal rancour will be done or said; no underhand pinpricks, beyond what the regulations require. Every letter and every book you send will be duly delivered. As far as our daily life is concerned, well, it is going on in the same even way as it did last year. In a prison what happens on the first day happens always-if nothing worse happens. In fact, it seems to be the essence of prison discipline to avoid all novelty, all change. Like specimen and curios in a museum—here we are each exactly in the same place and same position, bottled and labelled with the same numbers with more or less dust about us; and the guide book that I wrote to you in my last year’s letter may serve the purpose of description as long as 1 am here. We get up early—work hard, eat punctually—at the same time, at the same place and the same amount and kind of food prepared with same match-less prison-skill and medical care. I read much in the time that can be spared from work and sometimes in the evening attack many flowers-now remembered only in names-and flower-like themes with blank verse and then sleep. Here one thing must be said. Although it is true that prisoners are not free to do or say what they will, yet to the credit of the jail authorties, it must be admitted that everyone is absolutely free to dream what he likes. And I assure you I take the fullest advantage of this concession. Almost every night, I tell you, I break jail and out by dale and down and by tower and town, go on romping till I find some one of you—some one who somewhere had been held close to my bosom! Every night I do it but my beneficient jailors take no notice of it. You have only to wake in the jail, that is all they say. I hope just at the end of the war, you send a public petition for the release of us. The thing is this. Not only in India but even in any free and self- governing country, the Government cannot release political prisoners unless the Government are backed up and supported by the wish of the people to that effect. An exercise of the right of amnesty cannot be made by the king or the president unless the people are willing to have the prisoners back. If Indians are willing and petitions to that effect go at the end of the war, we may be released and if Indians are not willing to have us back, neither the Government can release us nor it is worthwhile to have that release. Port Blair is willing to have me, and I am here. I have no wish to thrust myself on any people unwilling to have me back. At any rate you may ask for our being sent out of this jail just as all other prisoners—even those who had