Besant, Annie Wood: Wake up, India: a plea for social reform (Adyar, India , Krotona [i.e. Los Angeles], 1913)

were all removed these crimes would find their
end.

Let us then try, with regard to students in England,
to make for them there more home-like surroundings
than they have. Do not send them too young; do
not send school-boys. They become denationalised.
Mark India—India's hall-mark—on them before you
send them abroad, and then they will come back
enriched from the West and not impoverished as too
often they do to-day. Then make in that western
land such homes for them as we have made; follow
out the plan we are following there, of getting well-
to-do English people to invite these boys to their
houses, to ask them down from Saturday to Monday,
to treat them as friends, and give them the best
that England has to give. For if these boys are
thrown out, as they are, amongst fifth-rate and sixth-
rate people in miserable lodgings, among vulgar and
ill-educated folk, how can you expect them to come
back polished gentlemen ? They sometimes pick up
the manners of the stable in England, and then come
back and show them off here to their disgusted
elders. That is not their fault. It is the fault of
those elders who have cast out these young ones into
a foreign land, careless of what happened to them
there. Before you send young men over there ex-
plain to them the difference between the essential
and the unessential in their religion. Explain to
them, for instance, that if they go abroad they must