Unit 6: Selection Vocabulary 1

There was a moment when it seemed that everyone would rush at the food and we’d have to be barbaric and eat with our hands, fighting over the feast laid out on the lovely tables.

Our host did nothing, and said nothing. No one was sure what to do. Insurrection brooded in the winds.

Then your situation would be polarized. It would be you and them.

My wife and I filed out with the others, towards the gardens, in the sumptuous grounds of that magnificent estate.

The Empress returned her a message of sympathy and help, and to the women of England the Queen said, “We desire it to be generally known that we sympathize with every effort made to relieve the suffering of the state of women in India”; and when Lord Dufferin went out as Governor-General, she commissioned Lady Dufferin to establish a permanent fund for providing qualified women doctors for work in India.

Her Majesty continued to take the greatest interest in this work, and was in constant communication with the Viceroy’s wife regarding its further organization and extension, up to the time of her death.

This was done in her stead by the Prince of Wales in 1875–6, and it was while he was making the tour that Lord Beaconsfield introduced the Royal Titles Bill into Parliament, conferring upon the Queen the title of Empress of India, a distinction regarded by John Bull as superfluous to a Crown the most distinguished in the world...

...but Her Majesty personally desired it, not, as gossip affirmed, because of the advent at Court of her second son’s Imperial bride, but as a means of binding her Indian subjects to her in a closer manner.

When the Indian delegates to the Exhibition first saw their Empress, a homely-looking lady in a black silk gown, they expressed disappointment, having expected to see her decked out in the pomp and circumstance of a mighty potentate.

A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.

Freedom and power bring responsibility. The responsibility rests upon this Assembly, a sovereign body representing the sovereign people of India.

That future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving so that we may fulfil the pledges we have so often taken and the one we shall take today.

The service of India means the service of the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity.

And to India, our much-loved motherland, the ancient, the eternal and the ever-new, we pay our reverent homage and we bind ourselves afresh to her service.