There is no place for them in their motherland". Here, Dadabhai Naoroji, who was educated at a tertiary level at university in England, criticises the British schooling of the Indian people. This statement and its negative opinions is contradicted when it was said of British style schooling in India, "Missionaries" schools for Indian children were crucial in the spread of Western values and knowledge to many Indians". The bias of Dadabhai Naoroji against the European colonists would have had a great influence on his opinions of the actions of the British and in particular the government rulers. This would have made his writings, in this case "The Moral Impoverishment of India", extremely opinionated and subjective. The attitudes reflected in his memorandum are that of Indian nationalists who later developed the Indian National Congress in 1885. This group fought for Indians to gain political representation within the government and Dadabhai Naoroji was president of the congress when it first called for the independence of India. .
The famines that had been occurring throughout Indian under British rule would have had an impact on the way in which the nationalists viewed the colonists. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century there were eighteen separate famines across India, claiming an average of one life per two minutes. In particular, Dadabhai Maoroji's memorandum and the attitude he expresses in this writing would have been greatly influenced by the famines of 1878-79. It is noted that the devastation brought about by these famines was great. There were predictions of a good harvest, but it was destroyed by rats. These famines brought reality to the fact that over the last seven or eight years the population decreased by fifty per cent. The famines brought great tragedy to India and it was since British colonisation that the occurrences of famines increased dramatically.