Madhusudan_Das

152 Madhusudan Das:
of these two classes. The country cannot prosper unless
agriculture and industries simultaneously develop. Agriculture
provides raw materials for use in the industries. Students of social
science should realise this interdependence of industry and
agriculture. This is integral eduction. Europe is trying for this
kind of education. This kind of eduction will eliminate the
difference between intellectual and manual workers". 14
Madhusudan had delivered an address on February 17. 1924 in
the Bihar Young Mens' Institute Hall, Patna, on Dignity of Labour, in
course of which he said:
Volcanic eruptions bring up to the surface the things hidden in
the bowels of the earth. Social upheavals force on our attention
the feelings of a population. The recent non-cooperation
movement was a social upheaval. I do not wish to look at the
political aspect or significance of the movement. It first appealed
and appealed forcibly to the student community. Boys who spent
their infancy and a part of their boyhood in remote villages, left
their village life, changed their dress, their habits of daily life
and pursued with vigour and ardour the study of a foreign
language with a view to secure some high official position or to
take to one of the learned professions-these boys and young
men left their school and college and took to plying the charkha.
Did these young men believe that the earnings of plying charkha
would gratify the ambition with which they took to English
education ? Did they expect that the charkha would gratify their
pecuniary appetite ?
A short time after, they returned to their places in schools
and colleges. These facts have a lesson for us if we do not shut
our eyes. They prove the existence of a keen desire for manual
occupation. The head is stocked with knowledge, the hand is
starved. The famished hand took to this occupation just as a
starving man would eat any food without pauing to enquire
whether it was healthy or not.
Proceeding further he said:
Let us see how this social upheaval affected the masses. The
poor peasant who does not get two proper meals a day paid his
mite for getting swaraj. What does swaraj mean to him ? It means
to him the dawn of an era when he would live more comfortably,