A.O Hume was one of the founders of today's INC. He was one of the Britishmen who founded the party along with a few of his own countrymen and other Indians.
This is an extract I am taking from wikipedia :
On the 1st of March 1883 he wrote a letter to the graduates of the University of Calcutta(then under British India):
"If only fifty men, good and true, can be found to join as founders, the thing can be established and the further development will be comparatively easy. ...And if even the leaders of thought are all either such poor creatures, or so selfishly wedded to personal concerns that they dare not strike a blow for their country's sake, then justly and rightly are they kept down and trampled on, for they deserve nothing better. Every nation secures precisely as good a Government as it merits. If you the picked men, the most highly educated of the nation, cannot, scorning personal ease and selfish objects, make a resolute struggle to secure greater freedom for yourselves and your country, a more impartial administration, a larger share in the management of your own affairs, then we, your friends, are wrong and our adversaries right, then are Lord Ripon's noble aspirations for your good fruitless and visionary, then, at present at any rate all hopes of progress are at an end and India truly neither desires nor deserves any better Government than she enjoys. Only, if this -be so, let us hear no more factious, peevish complaints that you are kept in leading strings and treated like children, for you will have proved yourself such. Men know how to act. Let there be no more complaining of Englishmen being preferred to you in all important offices, for if you lack that public spirit, that highest form of altruistic devotion that leads men to subordinate private ease to the public weal - that patriotism that has made Englishmen what they are - then rightly are these preferred to you, rightly and inevitably have they become your rulers. And rulers and task-masters they must continue, let the yoke gall your shoulders never so sorely, until you realise and stand prepared to act upon the eternal truth that self-sacrifice and unselfishness are the only unfailing guides to freedom and happiness."
Hume had made this statement understanding full well the potential that existed in the Indian people and also understanding the greatness of their civilization. He being a true liberal and having indulged in the Sciences and having a fondness for it could not stomach what had become of the Indian people. He knew full well that the best way to colonize a people is make them feel civilizationally subservient and the British regime had largely acomplished this task through their able point man in India at that time Thomas Babington Macaulay.He was the person who introduced the English educational system in India..
Allan Octavian Hume along with Dadabhai Naoroji, Dinshaw Wacha, Womesh Chandra Bonnerjee, Surendranath Banerjee, Monomohun Ghose, Mahadev Govind Ranade[7] and William Wedderburn founded the INC in 1884 with the initial objective to find greater representation for educated Indians in the British India colonial government.
I would like to reproduce a famous poem of his which captures the feelings of the time. Each line is beautiful and indicates what he observed at the time in India. Quoting from wikipedia:
Old Man's Hope is a poem by Allan Octavian Hume, the founder of the Indian National Congress, in which he sought to channel the zeitgeist of unrest prevalent in India in the 1880s towards a self-rule movement.
The text of the poem is as follows-
Sons of Ind, why sit ye idle,
Wait ye for some Deva's aid?
Buckle to, be up and doing!
Nations by themselves are made!
Yours the land, lives, all, at stake, tho'
Not by you the cards are played;
Are ye dumb? Speak up and claim them!
By themselves are nations made!
What avail your wealth, your learning,
Empty titles, sordid trade?
True self-rule were worth them all!
Nations by themselves are made!
Whispered murmurs darkly creeping,
Hidden worms beneath the glade,
Not by such shall wrong be righted!
Nations by themselves are made!
Are ye Serfs or are ye Freemen,
Ye that grovel in the shade?
In your own hands rest the issues!
By themselves are nations made!
Sons of Ind, be up and doing,
Let your course by none be stayed;
Lo! the Dawn is in the East;
By themselves are nations made!
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