Allan Octavian Hume

It was very rarely, if ever, that a country's leading political organi zation and the main instrument of its freedom, was the handiwork of a foreigner. It was the singular privilege and supreme triumph of a retired British member of the Indian Civil Service to have brought the Indian National Congress into being at one end to organize the scattered elements of public life and focus them into an institution for political articulation, and at the other, to enable the British Govern ment to be in touch with popular feeling and profit by the increasing association of the peoples' repre sentatives with the management of affairs. Allan Octavian Hume was the man. As subsequent events indubitably established, he sowed fhe seeds of a larger growth and passed into history as one of Britain's noblest sons and India's greatest benefactors.

The purpose of this memoir is to bring into fresh remembrance the life and works of a man who came to initiate movements of great potentiality for the good of his followmen, who combined in himself the large-hearted love of freedom justice and equality and hated oppression and wrongdoing.