Bande Mataram

India Renascent

The patriot who passes judgment on a great movement in an era of change and turmoil, should be very confident that he has something worth saying before he ventures to speak; but if he can really put some new aspect on a momentous question or emphasize any side of it that has not been clearly understood, it [is] his bounden duty however obscure he may be to ventilate [it.]

The commonplace that India is in transition has of late been strongly impressed on us by certain English empiricists; they have devoted whole articles and pamphlets to marshal proofs and enumerate instances in support of this proposition

It is time that an Indian who has devoted his best thoughts and aspirations to the service of his country, should have in his turn a patient hearing

India is indeed a snake who has rejected her outworn winter weeds

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New Lamps for Old with India and the British Parliament - Notes

The nine articles comprising New Lamps for Old were published in the Indu Prakash of Bombay from 7 August 1893 to 6 March 1894. A preliminary article, "India and the British Parliament", was published in the same newspaper on 26 June 1893.

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India and the British Parliament

26-June-1893

A great critic has pronounced that the aim of all truly helpful criticism is to see the object as it really is. The Press is the sole contemporary critic of politics, and according as its judgments are sound or unsound, the people whose political ideas it forms, will be likely to prosper or fail. It is therefore somewhat unfortunate that the tendency of journalists should be to see the object not as it really is, but as they would like it to be. In a country like England this may not greatly matter; but in India, whose destinies are in the balance, and at a time when a straw might turn the scale, it is of the gravest importance that no delusion, however specious or agreeable, should be allowed to exist. Yet in the face of this necessity, the Indian Press seems eager to accept even the flimsiest excuse for deluding itself.

If we want a striking example of this, we need only turn to the recent vote in the House of Commons on the subject of simultaneous examinations for the Civil Service of India. On this occasion a chorus of jubilant paeans arose from the Press, resembling nothing so much as the joyful chorus of ducks when the monsoon arrives. Had then some political monsoon arrived raining down justice and happiness on this parched and perishing country? What was the fountain-head from which this torrent of dithyrambs derived its being? Was it a solemn and deliberate pronouncement by the assembled representatives of the English nation that the time was now come to do justice to India? Was it a resolution gravely arrived at in a full House, that the cruel burden of taxation which has exhausted our strength, must be alleviated without delay? Or was it a responsible pledge by a person in authority that the high-sounding promises of '58 should at last become something more than a beautiful chimera? No, it was simply a chance vote snatched by a dexterous minority from a meagre and listless House. As a fine tactical success it reflects

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every credit on the acuteness and savoir faire of our friends in Parliament, but no more expresses the real feeling of the English people than a decree of the Chinese Emperor would express it.

The vote was by no means a mandate of the British Parliament, as some have sonorously phrased it; it was merely a pious opinion. It will have to meet not only the bitter antagonism of the Indian Government, but the opposition, open or veiled, of a vast majority in the Commons. How then can it possibly be enforced? Can our handful of philo-Indian members help to eject a Government that will not ratify its empty triumph? It would be too absurd even to dream of such a thing: and even if any of them were so impossibly rash, their constituencies would quickly teach them that they were sent to Parliament to support Mr. Gladstone and not to do justice to India. The vote is nothing but a tactical advantage; and yet on this flimsy basis we have chosen to erect the most imposing castles in the air. Yet if this were an isolated instance of blindness, it might be allowed to pass without comment; but it is only one more example of a grave illusion that possesses the Indian mind. We constantly find it asserted that the English are a just people and only require our case to be clearly stated in order to redress our grievances. It is more than time that some voice should be raised—even though it may be the voice of one crying in the wilderness—to tell the Press and the public that this is a grave and injurious delusion, which must be expunged from our minds if we would see things as they really are.

The English are not, as they are fond of representing themselves, a people panting to do justice to all whom they have to govern. They are not an incarnation of justice, neither are they an embodiment of morality; but of all nations they are the most sentimental: hence it is that they like to think themselves, and to be thought by others, a just people and a moral people. It is true that in the dull comedy which we call English politics, Truth and Justice—written in large letters—cover the whole of the poster, but in the actual enactment of the play these characters have very little indeed to do. It was certainly not by appealing to the English sense of justice that the Irish people have come

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within reach of obtaining some measure of redress for their grievances. Mr. Parnell was enabled to force Mr. Gladstone's hand solely because he had built up a strong party with a purely Irish policy: but we unfortunately have neither a Parnell nor a party with a purely Indian policy. We have Mr. Naoroji and Sir W. Wedderburn, both staunch friends of India; we have Mr. Swift McNeill, true son of a high souled and chivalrous race; we have Mr. Mclaren, Mr. Paul and many others pledged to champion the Congress movement: but well nigh all these are Liberal members who must give their support to Mr. Gladstone, whether he is inclined to do justice to India or no. It is evident that if we wish to obtain any real justice from the British Parliament we must secure the pledges not of individual Liberals but of the responsible heads of the party, and that is just what we are least likely to obtain. For we must remember that within the last 20 years the immense personal influence of Mr. Gladstone has been leavening and indeed remoulding English political life; and the tendency of that influence has been to convert politics into a huge market where statesmen chaffer for votes. In this political bazaar we have no current coin to buy justice from the great salesman, and if he is inclined to give the commodity gratis, he will jeopardise many of the voters he has already in his hand. What lever have we then by which we can alter the entire fuse of English opinion on Indian matters? It is clear that we have none.

Moreover the lessons of experience do not differ from the lessons of common sense. After years of constant effort and agitation a bill was brought forward in Parliament professing to remodel the Legislative Councils. This bill was nothing short of an insult to the people of India. We had asked for wheaten bread, and we got in its place a loaf made of plaster-of-Paris and when Mr. Schwann proposed that the genuine article should be supplied, Mr. Gladstone assured him on his honour as a politician that the Executive authority would do its best to make plaster-of-Paris taste exactly like wheat. With this assurance Mr. Schwann and the Indian people were quite satisfied. Happy Indian people! And yet now that the loaf has actually reached their hands, they seem a little inclined to quarrel with the gift: they have even

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complained that the proportion of plaster in its composition is extravagantly large. Nevertheless we still go on appealing to the English sense of justice.

The simple truth of the matter is that we shall not get from the British Parliament anything better than nominal redress, or at the most a petty and tinkering legislation. This is no doubt a very disagreeable truth to the sanguine among us who believe that India can be renovated in a day, but we shall gain nothing by shutting our eyes to it. Rather we shall lose: for the more we linger in the wrong path, the further we shall wander from our real and legitimate goal. If we are indeed to renovate our country, we must no longer hold out supplicating hands to the English Parliament, like an infant crying to its nurse for a toy, but must recognise the hard truth that every nation must beat out its own path to salvation with pain and difficulty, and not rely on the tutelage of another. It is not within the scope of the present article to point out how this may be done. But until we recognise these simple truths, half of our efforts will fail—as they are now failing—through misdirection and want of real insight.

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New Lamps for Old - I

07-August-1893

If the blind lead the blind, shall they not both fall into a ditch? So or nearly so runs an apophthegm of the Galilean prophet, whose name has run over the four quarters of the globe. Of all those pithy comments on human life, which more than anything else made his teaching effective, this is perhaps the one which goes home deepest and admits of the most frequent use. But very few Indians will be found to admit—certainly I myself two years ago would not have admitted,—that it can truthfully be applied to the National Congress. Yet that it can be so applied,—nay, that no judicious mind can honestly pronounce any other verdict on its action,—is the first thing I must prove, if these articles are to have any raison d'être. I am quite aware that in doing this my motive and my prudence may be called into question. I am not ignorant that I am about to censure a body which to many of my countrymen seems the mightiest outcome of our new national life; to some a precious urn in which are guarded our brightest and noblest hopes; to others a guiding star which shall lead us through the encircling gloom to a far distant paradise: and if I were not fully confident that this fixed idea of ours is a snare and a delusion, likely to have the most pernicious effects, I should simply have suppressed my own doubts and remained silent. As it is, I am fully confident, and even hope to bring over one or two of my countrymen to my own way of thinking, or, if that be not possible, at any rate to induce them to think a little more deeply than they have done.

I know also that I shall stir the bile of those good people who are so enamoured of the British Constitution that they cannot like anyone who is not a partisan. "What!" they will say "you pretend to be a patriot yourself, and you set yourself with a light heart to attack a body of patriots, which has no reason at all for existing except patriotism,—nay, which is the efflorescence,

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the crown, the summit and coping-stone of patriotism? How wickedly inconsistent all this is! If you are really a friend to New India, why do you go about to break up our splendid unanimity? The Congress has not yet existed for two lustres; and in that brief space of time has achieved miracles. And even if it has faults, as every institution, however excellent it may be, must have its faults, have you any plausible reason for telling our weakness in the streets of Gath, and so taking our enemies into the secret?" Now, if I were a strong and self-reliant man, I should of course go in the way I had chosen without paying much attention to these murmurers, but being, as I am, exceedingly nervous and afraid of offending anyone, I wish to stand well, even with those who admire the British Constitution. I shall therefore find it necessary to explain at some length the attitude which I should like all thinking men to adopt towards the Congress.

And first, let me say that I am not much moved by one argument which may possibly be urged against me. The Congress, it will be said, has achieved miracles, and in common gratitude we ought not to expose it to any sort of harsh or malevolent criticism. Let us grant for the moment that the Congress has achieved miracles for us. Certainly, if it has done that, we ought to hold it for ever in our grateful memory; but if our gratitude goes beyond this, it at once incurs the charge of fatuity. This is the difference between a man and an institution; a great man who has done great things for his country, demands from us our reverence, and however he may fall short in his after-life, a great and high-hearted nation—and no nation was ever justly called great that was not high-hearted—will not lay rude hands on him to dethrone him from his place in their hearts. But an institution is a very different thing, it was made for the use and not at all for the worship of man, and it can only lay claim to respect so long as its beneficent action remains not a memory of the past, but a thing of the present. We cannot afford to raise any institution to the rank of a fetish. To do so would be simply to become the slaves of our own machinery. However I will at once admit that if an institution has really done miracles for us,—and miracles which are not mere conjuring tricks, but of a

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deep and solemn import to the nation,—and if it is still doing and likely yet to do miracles for us, then without doubt it may lay claim to a certain immunity from criticism. But I am not disposed to admit that all this is true of the Congress.

It is within the recollection of most of us to how giddy an eminence this body was raised, on how prodigious a wave of enthusiasm, against how immense a weight of resisting winds. So sudden was it all that it must have been difficult, I may almost say impossible, even for a strong man to keep his head and not follow with the shouting crowd. How shall we find words vivid enough to describe the fervour of those morning hopes, the April splendour of that wonderful enthusiasm? The Congress was to us all that is to man most dear, most high and most sacred; a well of living water in deserts more than Saharan, a proud banner in the battle of Liberty, and a holy temple of concord where the races met and mingled. It was certainly the nucleus or thrice-distilled essence of the novel modes of thought among us; and if we took it for more than it really was,—if we took it for our pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night; if we worshipped it as the morning-star of our liberty; if we thought of old myths, of the trumpets that shook down Jericho or the brazen serpent that healed the plague, and nourished fond and secret hopes that the Congress would prove all this and more than this;—surely our infatuation is to be passed by gently as inevitable in that environment rather than censured as unnatural or presuming.

If then anyone tells me that the Congress was itself a miracle, if in nothing else, at any rate in the enthusiasm of which it was the centre, I do not know that I shall take the trouble to disagree with him; but if he goes on and tells me that the Congress has achieved miracles, I shall certainly take leave to deny the truth of his statement. It appears to me that the most signal successes of this body were not miracles at all, but simply the natural outcome of its constitution and policy. I suppose that in the sphere of active politics its greatest success is to be found in the enlargement of the Legislative Councils. Well, that was perhaps a miracle in its way. In England a very common trick is to put one ring under a hat and produce in another part of the room

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what appears to be the same ring and is really one exactly like it—except perhaps for the superscription. Just such a miracle is this which the Congress has so triumphantly achieved. Another conjuring trick, and perhaps a cleverer one, was the snatch vote about Simultaneous Examinations, which owed its success to the sentimentalism of a few members of Parliament, the self-seeking of others and the carelessness of the rest. But these, however much we may praise them for cleverness, are, as I hope to show later on, of no really deep and solemn import to the nation, but simply conjuring tricks and nothing more. Over the rest of our political action the only epitaph we can write is "Failure." Even in the first flush of enthusiasm the more deep-thinking among us were perhaps a little troubled by certain small things about the Congress, which did not seem altogether right. The barefaced hypocrisy of our enthusiasm for the Queen-Empress,—an old lady so called by way of courtesy, but about whom few Indians can really know or care anything—could serve no purpose but to expose us to the derision of our ill-wishers. There was too a little too much talk about the blessings of British rule, and the inscrutable Providence which has laid us in the maternal, or more properly the step-maternal bosom of just and benevolent England. Yet more appalling was the general timidity of the Congress, its glossing over of hard names, its disinclination to tell the direct truth, its fear of too deeply displeasing our masters. But in our then state of mind we were disposed to pass over all this as amiable weaknesses which would wear off with time. Two still grosser errors were pardoned as natural and almost inadvertent mistakes. It was true that we went out of our way to flatter Mr. Gladstone, a statesman who is not only quite unprincipled and in no way to be relied upon, but whose intervention in an Indian debate has always been of the worst omen to our cause. But then, we argued, people who had not been to England, could not be expected to discern the character of this astute and plausible man. We did more than flatter Mr. Gladstone; we actually condescended to flatter "General" Booth, a vulgar imposter, a convicted charlatan, who has enriched himself by trading on the sentimental emotions of the English middle-class. But here

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too, we thought, the Congress has perhaps made the common mistake of confounding wealth with merit, and has really taken the "General" for quite a respectable person. In the first flush of enthusiasm, I say, such excuses and such toleration were possible and even natural, but in the moment of disillusionment it will not do for us to flatter ourselves in this way any longer. Those amiable weaknesses we were then disposed to pass over very lightly have not at all worn off with time, but have rather grown into an ingrained habit; and the tendency to grosser errors has grown not only into a habit, but into a policy. In its broader aspects the failure of the Congress is still clearer. The walls of the Anglo-Indian Jericho stand yet without a breach, and the dark spectre of Penury draws her robe over the land in greater volume and with an ampler sweep.

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New Lamps for Old - II

21-August-1893

But after all my present business is not with negative criticism. I want rather to ascertain what the Congress has really done, and whether it is so much as to condemn all patriots to an Eleusinian silence about its faults. My own genuine opinion was expressed, perhaps with too much exuberance of diction,—but then the ghost of ancient enthusiasm was nudging my elbow—when I described the Congress as a well of living water, a standard in the battle, and a holy temple of concord. It is a well of living water in the sense that we drink from it assurance of a living political energy in the country, and without that assurance perhaps the most advanced among us might not have been so advanced: for it is only one or two strong and individual minds, who can flourish without a sympathetic environment. I am therefore justified in describing the Congress as a well of living water; but I have also described it as the standard under which we have fought; and by that I mean a living emblem of our cause the tired and war-worn soldier in the mellay can look up to and draw from time to time fresh funds of hope and vigour. Such, and such only, is the purpose of a banner. One does not like to say that what must surely be apparent even to a rude intelligence, has been beyond the reach of intellects trained at our Universities and in the liberal professions. Yet it is a fact that we have entirely ignored what a casual inspection ought at once to have told us, that the Congress is altogether too unwieldy a body for any sort of executive work, and must solely be regarded as a convenient alembic, in which the formulae of our aspirations may be refined into clear and accurate expression. Not content with using a banner as a banner, we have actually caught up the staff of it with a view to breaking our enemy's heads. So blind a misuse must take away at least a third part of its virtue from the Congress, and if we are at all to recover the loss, we must recognize the

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limits of its utility as well as emend the device upon it.

The Congress has been, then, a well of living water and a standard in the battle of liberty; but besides these it has been something which is very much better than either of them, good as they too undoubtedly are; it has been to our divergent races and creeds a temple, or perhaps I should be more correct in saying a school of concord. In other words the necessities of the political movement initiated by the Congress have brought into one place and for a common purpose all sorts and conditions of men, and so by smoothing away the harsher discrepancies between them has created a certain modicum of sympathy between classes that were more or less at variance. Here, and not in its political action, must we look for any direct and really important achievement; and even here the actual advance has as a rule been absurdly exaggerated. Popular orators like Mr. Pherozshah Mehta, who carry the methods of the bar into politics, are very fond of telling people that the Congress has habituated us to act together. Well, that is not quite correct: there is not the slightest evidence to show that we have at all learned to act together; the one lesson we have learned is to talk together, and that is a rather different thing. Here then we have in my opinion the sum of all these capacities, in which the Congress has to any appreciable extent promoted the really high and intimate interests of the country. Can it then be said that in these lines the Congress has had such entirely beneficial effects as to put the gag on all harsher criticism? I do not think that it can be properly so said. I admit that the Congress has promoted a certain modicum of concord among us; but I am not prepared to admit that on this line of action its outcome has been at all complete and satisfying. Not only has the concord it tends to create been very partial, but the sort of people who have been included in its beneficent action, do not extend beyond certain fixed and narrow limits. The great mass of the people have not been appreciably touched by that healing principle, which to do the Congress justice has very widely permeated the middle class. All this would still leave us without sufficient grounds to censure the Congress at all severely, if only it were clear that its present line of action was

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tending to increase the force and scope of its beneficence: but in fact the very contrary appears. We need no soothsayer to augur that, unless its entire policy be remodelled, its power for good, even in the narrow circle of its present influence, will prove to have been already exploited. One sphere still remains to it; it is still our only grand assurance of a living political energy in the country: but even this well of living water must in the end be poisoned or dried up, if the inner political energy of which it is the outward assurance remains as poor and bounded as we now find it to be. If then it is true that the action of the Congress has only been of really high import on one or two lines, that even on those lines the actual result has been petty and imperfect, and that in all its other aspects we can pronounce no verdict on it but failure, then it is quite clear that we shall get no good by big talk about the splendid unanimity at the back of the Congress. A splendid unanimity in failure may be a very magnificent thing in its way, but in our present exigencies it is an unanimity really not worth having. But perhaps the Congress enthusiast will take refuge in stinging reproaches about my readiness to publish our weakness to the enemy. Well, even if he does I can assure him that however stinging his reproaches may be, I shall not feel at all stung by them. I leave that for those honest people who imagine that, when they have got the Civil Service and other lucrative posts for themselves, the Indian question will be satisfactorily settled. Our actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves, but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism. I really cannot see why we should rage so furiously against the Anglo-Indians and call them by all manner of opprobrious epithets. I grant that they are rude and arrogant, that they govern badly, that they are devoid of any great or generous emotion, that their conduct is that of a small coterie of masters surrounded by a nation of Helots. But to say all this is simply to say that they are very commonplace men put into a quite unique position. Certainly it would be very grand and noble, if they were to smother all thought of their own peculiar interests, and aim henceforth, not at their own promotion, not at their own enrichment, but at the

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sole good of the Indian people. But such conduct is what we have no right to expect save from men of the most exalted and chivalrous character; and the sort of people England sends out to us are not as a rule exalted and chivalrous, but are usually the very reverse of that. They are really very ordinary men,—and not only ordinary men, but ordinary Englishmen—types of the middle class or Philistines, in the graphic English phrase, with the narrow hearts and commercial habit of mind peculiar to that sort of people. It is something very like folly to quarrel with them for not transgressing the law of their own nature. If we were not so dazzled by the artificial glare of English prestige, we should at once acknowledge that these men are really not worth being angry with: and if it is idle to be angry with them, it is still more unprofitable to rate their opinion of us at more than a straw's value. Our appeal, the appeal of every high-souled and self-respecting nation, ought not to be to the opinion of the Anglo-Indians, no, nor yet to the British sense of justice, but to our own reviving sense of manhood, to our own sincere fellow-feeling—so far as it can be called sincere—with the silent and suffering people of India. I am sure that eventually the nobler part of us will prevail,—that when we no longer obey the dictates of a veiled self-interest, but return to the profession of a large and genuine patriotism, when we cease to hanker after the soiled crumbs which England may cast to us from her table, then it will be to that sense of manhood, to that sincere fellow-feeling that we shall finally and forcibly appeal. All this, it will be said, may be very true or very plausible, but it is after all made up of unsupported assertions. I quite admit that it is more or less so, nor did I at all intend that it should be otherwise; the proof and support of those assertions is a matter for patient development and wholly beside my present purpose. I have been thus elaborate with one sole end in view. I wish even the blindest enthusiast to recognise that I have not ventured to speak without carefully weighing those important considerations that might have induced me to remain silent. I trust that after this laboured preface even those most hostile to my views will not accuse me of having undertaken anything lightly or rashly. In my own opinion

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I should not have been to blame even if I had spoken without this painful hesitation. If the Congress cannot really face the light of a free and serious criticism, then the sooner it hides its face the better. For nine years it has been exempt from the ordeal; we have been content to worship it with that implicit trust which all religions demand, but which sooner or later leads them to disaster and defeat. Certainly we had this excuse that the stress of battle is not the time when a soldier can stop to criticize his weapon: he has simply to turn it to the best use of which it is capable. So long as India rang with turbulent voices of complaint and agitation, so long as the air was filled with the turmoil of an angry controversy between governors and governed, so long we could have little leisure or quiet thought and reflection. But now all is different; the necessity for conflict is no longer so urgent and has even given place to a noticeable languor and passivity, varied only by perfunctory public meetings. Now therefore, while the great agitation that once filled this vast peninsula with rumours of change, is content to occupy an obscure corner of English politics it will be well for all of us who are capable of reflection, to sit down for a moment and think. The hour seems to have come when the Congress must encounter that searching criticism which sooner or later arrives to all mortal things; and if it is so, to keep our eyes shut will be worse than idle. The only good we shall get by it is to point with a fresh example the aphorism with which I set out. "If the blind lead the blind, shall they not both fall into a ditch?"

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New Lamps for Old - III

28-August-1893

"Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting."

"The little that is done seems nothing when we look forward and see how much we have yet to do."

Thus far I have been making a circuit, in my disinclination to collide too abruptly with the prepossessions of my countrymen and now that I am compelled to handle my subject more intimately and with a firmer grasp, nothing but my deliberate conviction that it is quite imperative for someone to speak out, has at all persuaded me to continue. I have at the very outset to make distinct the grounds on which I charge the Congress with inadequacy. In the process I find myself bound to say many things that cannot fail to draw obloquy upon me: I shall be compelled to outrage many susceptibilities; compelled to advance many unacceptable ideas; compelled,—worst of all,—to stroke the wrong way many powerful persons, who are wont to be pampered with unstinted flattery and worship. But at all risks the thing must be done, and since it is on me that the choice has fallen, I can only proceed in the best fashion at my command and with what boldness I may. I say, of the Congress, then, this,—that its aims are mistaken, that the spirit in which it proceeds towards their accomplishment is not a spirit of sincerity and whole-heartedness, and that the methods it has chosen are not the right methods, and the leaders in whom it trusts, not the right sort of men to be leaders;—in brief, that we are at present the blind led, if not by the blind, at any rate by the one-eyed.

To begin with, I should a little while ago have had no hesitation in saying that the National Congress was not really national and had not in any way attempted to become national. But that was before I became a student of Mr. Pherozshah Mehta's

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speeches. Now to deal with this vexed subject, one must tread on very burning ground, and I shall make no apology for treading with great care and circumspection. The subject is wrapped in so thick a dust of controversy, and legal wits have been so busy drawing subtle distinctions about it, that a word which was once perfectly straightforward and simple, has become almost as difficult as the Law itself. It is therefore incumbent on me to explain what I wish to imply, when I say that the Congress is not really national. Now I do not at all mean to re-echo the Anglo-Indian catchword about the Hindus and Mahomedans. Like most catchwords it is without much force, and has been still farther stripped of meaning by the policy of the Congress. The Mahomedans have been as largely represented on that body as any reasonable community could desire, and their susceptibilities, far from being denied respect, have always been most assiduously soothed and flattered. It is entirely futile then to take up the Anglo-Indian refrain; but this at least I should have imagined, that in an era when democracy and similar big words slide so glibly from our tongues, a body like the Congress, which represents not the mass of the population, but a single and very limited class, could not honestly be called national. It is perfectly true that the House of Commons represents not the English nation, but simply the English aristocracy and middle class and yet is none the less national. But the House of Commons is a body legally constituted and empowered to speak and act for the nation, while the Congress is self-created: and it is not justifiable for a self-created body representing only a single and limited class to call itself national. It would be just as absurd if the Liberal party, because it allows within its limits all sorts and conditions of men, were to hold annual meetings and call itself the English National Congress. When therefore I said that the Congress was not really national, I simply meant that it did not represent the mass of the population.

But Mr. Pherozshah Mehta will have nothing to do with this sense of the word. In his very remarkable and instructive Presidential address at Calcutta, he argued that the Congress could justly arrogate this epithet without having any direct support

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from the proletariate; and he went on to explain his argument with the profound subtlety expected from an experienced advocate. "It is because the masses are still unable to articulate definite political demands that the functions and duty devolve upon their educated and enlightened compatriots to feel, to understand and to interpret their grievances and requirements, and to suggest and indicate how these can best be redressed and met." This formidable sentence is, by the way, typical of Mr. Mehta's style, and reveals the secret of his oratory, which like all great inventions is exceedingly simple: it is merely to say the same thing twice over in different words. But its more noteworthy feature is the idea implied that because the Congress professes to discharge this duty, it may justly call itself national. Nor is this all; Calcutta comes to the help of Bombay in the person of Mr. Manmohan Ghose, who repeats and elucidates Mr. Mehta's idea. The Congress, he says, asserting the rights of that body to speak for the masses, represents the thinking portion of the Indian people, whose duty it is to guide the ignorant, and this in his opinion sufficiently justifies the Congress in calling itself national. To differ from a successful barrister and citizen, a man held in high honour by every graduate in India, and above all a future member of the Viceroy's Council, would never have been a very easy task for a timid man like myself. But when he is reinforced by so respectable and weighty a citizen as Mr. Manmohan Ghose, I really cannot find the courage to persevere. I shall therefore amend the obnoxious phrase and declare that the National Congress may be as national as you please, but it is not a popular body and has not in any way attempted to become a popular body.

But at this point someone a little less learned than Mr. Pherozshah Mehta may interfere and ask how it can be true that the Congress is not a popular body. I can only point his attention to a previous statement of mine that the Congress represents not the mass of the population, but a single and limited class. No doubt the Congress tried very hard in the beginning to believe that it really represented the mass of the population, but if it has not already abandoned, it ought now at least to abandon the

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pretension as quite untenable. And indeed when Mr. Pherozshah Mehta and Mr. Manmohan Ghose have admitted this patent fact—not as delegates only, but as officials of the Congress—and have even gone so far as to explain the fact away, it is hardly requisite for me to combat the fallacy. But perhaps the enquirer not yet satisfied, may go on to ask what is that single and limited class which I imagine the Congress to represent. Here it may be of help to us to refer again to the speeches of the Congress leaders and more especially to the talented men from whom I have already quoted. In his able official address Mr. Manmohan Ghose asks himself this very question and answers that the Congress represents the thinking portion of the Indian people. "The delegates present here today" he goes on "are the chosen representatives of that section of the Indian people who have learnt to think, and whose number is daily increasing with marvellous rapidity." Perhaps Mr. Ghose is a little too facile in his use of the word "thinking". So much at the mercy of their instincts and prejudices are the generality of mankind, that we hazard a very high estimate when we call even one man out of ten thousand a thinking man. But evidently by the thinking portion Mr. Ghose would like to indicate the class to which he himself belongs; I mean those of us who have got some little idea of the machinery of English politics and are eager to import it into India along with cheap Liverpool cloths, shoddy Brummagem wares, and other useful and necessary things which have killed the fine and genuine textures. If this is a true interpretation he is perfectly correct in what he says. For it is really from this class that the Congress movement draws its origin, its support and its most enthusiastic votaries. And if I were asked to describe their class by a single name, I should not hesitate to call it our new middle class. For here too English goods have driven out native goods: our society has lost its old landmarks and is being demarcated on the English model. But of all the brand new articles we have imported, inconceivably the most important is that large class of people—journalists, barristers, doctors, officials, graduates and traders—who have grown up and are increasing with prurient rapidity under the aegis of the British rule: and

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this class I call the middle class: for, when we are so proud of our imported English goods, it would be absurd, when we want labels for them, not to import their English names as well. Besides this name which I have chosen is really a more accurate description than phrases like "thinking men" or "the educated class" which are merely expressions of our own boundless vanity and self-conceit. However largely we may choose to indulge in vague rhetoric about the all-pervading influence of the Congress, no one can honestly doubt that here is the constituency from which it is really empowered. There is indeed a small contingent of aristocrats and a smaller contingent of the more well-to-do ryots: but these are only two flying-wheels in the great middle-class machine. The fetish-worshipper may declare as loudly as he pleases, that it represents all sorts and conditions of people, just as the Anglo-Indians used to insist that it represented no one but the Bengali Babu. Facts have been too strong for the Anglo-Indian and they will be too strong in the end for the fetish-worshipper. Partisans on either side can in no way alter the clear and immutable truth—these words were put on paper long before the recent disturbances in Bombay and certainly without any suspicion that the prophecy I then hazarded would be fortified by so apt and striking a comment. Facts are already beginning to speak in a very clear and unambiguous voice. How long will the Congress sit like careless Belshazzar, at the feast of mutual admiration? Already the decree has gone out against it; already even the eyes that are dim can discern,—for has it not been written in blood?—the first pregnant phrase of the handwriting upon the wall. "God has numbered the kingdom and finished it." Surely after so rough a lesson, we shall not wait to unseal our eyes and unstop our ears, until the unseen finger moves on and writes the second and sterner sentence. "Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting." Or must we sit idle with folded hands and only bestir ourselves when the short hour of grace is past and the kingdom given to another more worthy than we?

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New Lamps for Old - IV

18-September-1893

I repeat then with renewed confidence, but still with a strong desire to conciliate Mr. Pherozshah Mehta, that the Congress fails, because it has never been, and has made no honest endeavour to be, a popular body empowered by the fiat of the Indian people in its entirety. But for all that I have not managed to bring my view into coincidence with Mr. Mehta's. It is true he is not invincibly reluctant to concede the limits, which hedge in the Congress action and restrict its output of energy; but he is quite averse to the dictum that by not transgressing the middle-class pale the Congress has condemned itself, as a saving power, to insignificance and ultimate sterility. The bounded scope of its potency and the subdued tone which it affects, are, he opines, precisely what our actual emergencies of the moment imperatively demand; wider activity and a more intense emphasis would be in his view highly unadvisable and even injurious and besides it does not at all signify whether we are fortified by popular sympathy or are not; for is not Mr. Pherozshah Mehta there with all the enlightenment of India at his back to plead temperately—temperately, mind you; we are nothing if not temperate—for just and remedial legislation on behalf of a patient and suffering people? In plain words a line of argument is adopted amounting to this:—"The Congress movement is nothing if not a grand suit-at-law, best described as the case of India vs. Anglo-India, in which the ultimate tribunal is the British sense of justice, and Pherozshah Mehta, Mr. Umesh Chandra Bonnerji and the other eminent leaders of the bar are counsel for the complainant. Well then when so many experienced advocates have bound themselves to find pleas for him, would it not be highly rash and inopportune for the client to insist on conducting his own complaint?" Now it is abundantly clear that, judged as it stands, this line of argument, though adroit beyond cavil and instinct

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with legal ingenuity, will nevertheless not answer. I am not going to deny that Mr. Pherozshah Mehta and the enlightenment of India, such as it is, are pleading, undoubtedly with temperance and perhaps with sincerity, for something or other, which for want of a more exact description, we may call remedial legislation. But so far there has been nothing at all to prevent me from denying that the analogy of the law-court holds; this sort of vicarious effort may be highly advantageous in judicial matters, but it is not, I would submit, at all adequate to express the reviving energies of a great people. The argument, I say, is not complete in itself, or to use a vernacular phrase, it will not walk; it badly wants a crutch to lean upon. Mr. Mehta is clever enough to see that and his legal acumen has taken him exactly to the very store where or not at all he must discover an efficient crutch. So he goes straight to history, correctly surmising that the experience of European races is all that we, a people new to modern problems, can find to warn or counsel us, and he tells us that this sort of vicarious effort has invariably been the original step towards progress: or, to put it in his own rhetorical way, "History teaches us that such has been the law of widening progress in all ages and all countries, notably in England itself." Here then is the argument complete, crutch and all; and so adroit is it that in Congress propaganda it has become a phrase of common parlance, and is now in fact the stereotyped line of defence. Certainly, if he is accurate in his historical data, Mr. Mehta has amply proved his case; but in spite of all his adroitness, I suspect that his trend towards double-shotted phrases has led him into a serious difficulty. "In all ages and all countries" is a very big expression, and Mr. Mehta will be exceedingly lucky if it will stand a close scrutiny. But Mr. Manmohan Ghose at least is a sober speaker; and if we have deserted his smooth but perhaps rather tedious manner for a more brilliant style of oratory, now at any rate, when the specious orator fails us, we may well return to the rational disputant. But we shall be agreeably disappointed to find that this vivid statement about the teaching of History is Mr. Ghose's own legitimate offspring and not the coinage of Mr. Mehta's heated fancy: indeed, the latter has done nothing but

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convey it bodily into his own address. "History teaches us" says Mr. Ghose "that in all ages and all countries it is the thinking classes who have led the unthinking, and in the present state of our society we are bound not only to think for ourselves, but also to think for those who are still too ignorant to exercise that important function." When we find the intellectual princes of the nation light-heartedly propagating such gross inaccuracies, we are really tempted to inquire if high education is after all of any use. History teaches us! Why, these gentlemen can never have studied any history at all except that of England. Would they be ignorant otherwise that mainly to that country, if not to that country alone, their statement applies, but that about most ages and most countries it is hopelessly inaccurate? Absurd as the statement is, its career has been neither limited nor obscure. Shot in the first instance from Mr. Ghose's regulation smooth-bore, it then served as a bullet in Mr. Pherozshah's patent new double-barrelled rifle, and has ultimately turned out the stock ammunition of the Congress against that particular line upon which I have initially ventured. Here then the argument has culminated in a most important issue; for supposing this line of defence to be adequate, the gravest indictment I have to urge against the Congress goes at once to the ground. It will therefore be advisable to scrutinize Mr. Ghose's light-hearted statement; and if the policy he advocates is actually stamped with the genuine consensus of all peoples in all ages, then we shall very readily admit that there is no reason why the masses should not be left in their political apathy. But if it is quite otherwise and we cannot discover more than one precedent of importance, then Mr. Ghose and the Congress chairmen will not make us dance to their music, charm they never so wisely, and we shall be slow to admit even the one precedent we have got without a very narrow scrutiny. If then we are bent upon adopting England as our exemplar, we shall certainly imitate the progress of the glacier rather than the progress of the torrent. From Runnymede to the Hull riots is a far cry; yet these seven centuries have done less to change partially the political and social exterior of England, than five short years to change entirely the political and

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social exterior of her immediate neighbour. But if Mr. Ghose's dogmatic utterance is true of England, I imagine it does not apply with equal force to other climes and other eras. For example, is it at all true of France? Rather we know that the first step of that fortunate country towards progress was not through any decent and orderly expansion, but through a purification by blood and fire. It was not a convocation of respectable citizens, but the vast and ignorant proletariate, that emerged from a prolonged and almost coeval apathy and blotted out in five terrible years the accumulated oppression of thirteen centuries. And if the example of France is not sufficient to deprive Mr. Ghose's statement of force, let us divert our eyes to Ireland, where the ancient and world-wide quarrel between Celt and Teuton is still pending. Is it at all true that the initiators of Irish resistance to England were a body of successful lawyers, remarkable only for a power of shallow rhetoric, and deputed by the sort of men that are turned out at Trinity College, Dublin? At any rate that is not what History tells us. We do not read that the Irish leaders annually assembled to declaim glib orations, eulogistic of British rule and timidly suggestive of certain flaws in its unparalleled excellence, nor did they suggest as a panacea for Irish miseries, that they should be given more posts and an ampler career in the British service. I rather fancy Turlough O'Neill and his compeers were a different sort of men from that. But then it is hardly fair perhaps to cite as an example a disreputable people never prolific of graduates and hence incapable of properly appreciating the extraordinary blessings which British rule gives out so liberally wherever it goes. Certainly men who preferred action to long speeches and appealed, by the only method available in that strenuous epoch, not to the British sense of justice but to their own sense of manhood, are not at all the sort of people we have either the will or the power to imitate. Well then let us return to our own orderly and eloquent era. But here too, just as the main strength of that ancient strenuous protest resided in the Irish populace led by the princes of their class, so the principal force of the modern subtler protest resides in the Irish peasantry led by the recognized chiefs of an united people. I might go on and

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cull instances from Italy and America but to elaborate the matter further would be to insult the understanding of my readers. It will be sufficient to remind them that the two grand instances of ancient history point to an exactly similar conclusion. In Athens and in Rome the first political quarrel is a distinct issue between the man of the people and a limited, perhaps an alien, aristocracy. The force behind Cleisthenes and the constituency that empowered Tiberius Gracchus were not a narrow middle class, but the people with its ancient wrongs and centuries of patient endurance.

If then, as we are compelled to infer, Mr. Mehta's statement is entirely inaccurate of remoter ages and in modern times accurate of one country alone, we shall conclude that whatever other proof he may find for his lame argument, that crutch at least is too large and must go to the ground. But Mr. Mehta, too acute and experienced a pleader to be disheartened by any initial failure, will no doubt pick up his crutch again and whittle it down to the appropriate size. It may be quite correct, he will perhaps tell me, that his statement applies with appreciable force to England and to England alone but when all is said, it does not eventually matter. In allowing that his statement does generally apply to England, I have admitted everything he seriously wants me to admit, for England is after all that country which has best prospered in its aspirations after progress, and must therefore be the grand political exemplar of every nation animated by a like spirit, and it must be peculiarly and beyond dispute such for India in her present critical stage of renascence. I am quite aware that in the eyes of that growing community which Mr. Ghose is pleased to call the thinking class, these plausible assertions are only the elementary axioms of political science. But however confidently such statements are put before me, I am not at all sure that they are entirely correct. I have not quite made up my mind that England is indeed that country which has best prospered in its aspirations after progress and I am as yet unconvinced that it will eventually turn out at all a desirable exemplar for every nation aspiring to progress, or even for its peculiar pupil, renascent India. I shall therefore feel more disposed to probe

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the matter to the bottom than to acknowledge a very disputable thesis as in any way self-evident. To this end it is requisite closely to inquire what has actually been the main outcome of English political effort, and whether it is of a nature to justify any implicit reliance on English methods or exact imitation of English models.

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New Lamps for Old - V

30-October-1893

We have then to appreciate the actual conditions of English progress, in their sound no less than their unsound aspects: and it will be to our convenience to have ready some rough formulae by which we may handle the subject in an intelligible way. To this problem Mr. Surendranath Banerji, a man who with all his striking merits, has never evinced any power of calm and serious thought, proffers a very grandiloquent and heart-stirring solution. "We rely" he has said "on the liberty-loving instincts of the greatest representative assembly in the world, the palladium of English Liberty, the sanctuary of the free and brave, the British House of Commons" and at this inspiriting discharge of oratory there was, we are told, nor do we wonder at it—a responding volley of loud and protracted applause. Now when Mr. Banerji chooses to lash himself into an oratorical frenzy and stir us with his sounding rhetoric, it is really impracticable for anything human to stand up and oppose him: and though I may hereafter tone down his oriental colouring to something nearer the hue of truth, yet it does not at present serve my purpose to take up arms against a sea of eloquence. I would rather admit at once the grain of sound fact at the core of all this than strip off the costly integuments with which Mr. Banerji's elaborate Fancy chooses to invest it. But when Mr. Banerji's words no longer reverberate in your ears, you may have leisure to listen to a quieter, more serious voice, now unhappily hushed in the grave,—the voice of Matthew Arnold, himself an Englishman and genuine lover of his country, but for all that a man who thought deeply and spoke sanely. And where according to this sane and powerful intellect shall we come across the really noteworthy outcome of English effort? We shall best see it, he tells us, not in any palladium or sanctuary, not in the greatest representative assembly in the world, but in an aristocracy materialized, a

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middle class vulgarised and a lower class brutalized: and no clear-sighted student of England will be insensible to the just felicity with which he has hit off the social tendencies prevailing in that country. Here then we have ready rough formulae by which we may, at the lowest, baldly outline the duplicate aspect of modern England: for now that we have admitted Mr. Banerji's phrase as symbolic of the healthy outcome creditable to English effort, we can hardly be shy of admitting Matthew Arnold's phrase as symbolic of the morbid outcome discreditable to it. But it is still open to us to evince a reasonable doubt whether there is any way of reconciling two items so mutually destructive: for it does seem paradoxical to rate the produces of institutions so highly lauded and so universally copied at a low grade in the social ladder. But this apparent paradox may easily be a vital truth; and in establishing that, as I hope to establish it, I shall have incidentally to moot another and wider theorem. I would urge that our entire political philosophy is rooted in shallow earth, so much so indeed that without repudiation or radical change we cannot arrive at an attitude of mind healthily conducive to just and clear thinking. I am conscious that the argument has hitherto been rather intangible and moved too largely among wide abstract principles. Such a method is by its nature less keenly attractive to the general readers than a close and lively handling of current politics, but it is required for an adequate development of my case, and I must entreat indulgence a step or two further, before I lay any grasp on the hard concrete details of our actual political effort.

Now the high value at which Mr. Mehta appraises history as our sole available record of human experience in the mass will clearly be endorsed by every thoughtful and judicious mind. But to sustain it at that high level of utility, we must not indulge in hasty deductions based on a very partial scrutiny, but must group correctly and digest in a candid spirit such data as we can bring within our compass. If we observe this precept, we shall not easily coincide with his opinion that European progress has been of a single texture. We shall rather be convinced that there run through it two principles of motion distinct in nature and

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adverse in event, the trend of whose divergence may be roundly expressed as advance in one direction through political methods and in another direction through social methods. But as the use of these time-worn epithets might well promote misconception and drag us into side-issues, I will attempt a more delicate handling and solicit that close attention without which so remote and elusive a subject cannot come home to the mind with proper force and clearness.

In bringing abstractions home to the human intelligence, it is perhaps best to dispel by means of near and concrete specimens that sense of remoteness which we shrink from in what is at all intangible. Hence I shall attempt to differentiate by living instances the two principles which I suggest as the main motors of progress. The broad cast of national thought in England prevalent from very early times, may not inappropriately stand for the sort of progress that runs after a political prize. The striking fact of English history—the fact that dwarfs all others—is, without doubt, the regular development from certain primordial seeds and the continuous branching out, foliation and efflorescence of the institution which Mr. Banerji has justly termed the greatest representative assembly in the world. This is highly typical of the English school of thought and the exaggerated emphasis it lays on the mould and working of institutions. However supreme in the domain of practical life, however gifted with commercial vigour and expansive energy, the English mind with its short range of vision, its too little of delicacy and exactness, its inability to go beyond what it actually sees, is wholly unfit for any nice appraisal of cause and effect. It is without vision, logic, the spirit of curiosity, and hence it has not any habit of entertaining clear and high ideals, any audacity of experiment, any power of finding just methods nicely adopted to produce the exact effect intended:—it is without speculative temerity and the scientific spirit, and hence it cannot project great political theories nor argue justly from effect to cause. All these incapacities have forced the English mind into a certain mould of thought and expression. Limited to the visible and material, they have put their whole force into mechanical invention; void of curiosity,

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they have hazarded just so much experiment and no more, as was necessary to suit existing institutions to their immediate wants; inexact, they have never cared in these alterations to get at more than an approximation to the exact effect intended; illogical and without subtlety, they have trusted implicitly to the political machines, for whose invention they have a peculiar genius, and never cared to utilize mightier forces and a subtler method. Nor is this all: in their defect of speculative imagination, they are unable to get beyond what they themselves have experienced, what they themselves have effected. Hence, being unscientific and apt to impute every power to machinery, they compare certain sets of machines, and postulating certain effects from them, argue that as this of their own invention has been attended by results of the highest value, it is therefore of an unique excellence and conserves in any and every climate its efficiency and durability. And they do not simply flaunt this opinion in the face of reason, but, by their stupendous material success and vast expansion, they have managed to convince a world apt to be impressed by externals, that it is correct, and even obviously correct. Yet it is quite clear that this opinion, carefully analysed, reduces itself to a logical absurdity. By its rigid emphasizing of a single element it slurs over others of equal or superior importance: it takes no account of a high or low quality in the raw material, of variant circumstances, of incompatibilities arising from national temperament, and other forces which no philosophical observer will omit from his calculations. In fact it reduces itself to the statement, that, given good machinery, then no matter what quality of material is passed through it, the eventual fabric will be infallibly of the most superior sort. If the Indian intellect had been nourished on any but English food, I should be content with stating the idea in this its simplest form, and spare myself a laborious exegesis; but I do not forget that I am addressing minds formed by purely English influences and therefore capable of admitting the rooted English prejudice that what is logically absurd, may be practically true. At present however I will simply state the motive principle of progress exemplified by England as a careful requisition and

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high appraisal of sound machinery in preference to a scientific social development.

But if we carry our glance across the English Channel, we shall witness a very different and more animating spectacle. Gifted with a lighter, subtler and clearer mind than their insular neighbours, the French people have moved irresistibly towards a social and not a political development. It is true that French orators and statesmen, incapacitated by their national character from originating fit political ideals, have adopted a set of institutions curiously blended from English and American manufactures; but the best blood, the highest thought, the real grandeur of the nation does not reside in the Senate or in the Chamber of Deputies; it resides in the artistic and municipal forces of Parisian life, in the firm settled executive, in the great vehement heart of the French populace—and that has ever beaten most highly in unison with the grand ideas of Equality and Fraternity, since they were first enounced on the banner of the great and terrible Republic. Hence though by the indiscreet choice of a machine, they have been compelled to copy the working of English machinery and concede an undue importance to politics, yet the ideals which have genuinely influenced the spirit which has most deeply permeated their national life are widely different from that alien spirit, from those borrowed ideals. I have said that the French mind is clearer, subtler, lighter than the English. In that clarity they have discerned that without high qualities in the raw material excellence of machinery will not suffice to create a sound and durable national character,—that it may indeed develop a strong, energetic and capable temper, but that the fabric will not combine fineness with strength, will not resist permanently the wear and tear of time and the rending force of social problems:—through that subtlety they divined that not by the mechanic working of institutions, but by the delicate and almost unseen moulding of a fine, lucid and invigorating atmosphere, could a robust and highly-wrought social temper be developed:—and through that lightness they chose not the fierce, sharp air of English individualism, but the bright influence of art and letters, of happiness, a wide and liberal culture, and

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the firm consequent cohesion of their racial and social elements. To put all this briefly, the second school of thought I would indicate to my readers, is the preference of a fine development of social character and a wide diffusion of happiness to the mechanic development of a sound political machinery. Here then as indicated by these grand examples we have our two principal motors of progress; a careful requisition, for the sake of evolving an energetic national character and high level of capacity, of a sound political machinery; and the ardent, yet rational pursuit, for its own sake, of a sound and highly-wrought social temper.

It may be worth while here to develop a point I have broadly suggested, that with these distinct lines of feeling accord distinct types of racial character. The social ideal is naturally limited to peoples distinguished by a rare social gift and an unbounded receptivity for novel ideas along with a large amount of practical capacity. The ancient Athenian, pre-eminent for lightness of temper and lucidity of thought, was content with the simplest and most nakedly logical machinery, and principally sought to base political life on equality, a wide diffusion of culture, and a large and just social principle. Moreover, as the subtlest and hence the most efficient way of conserving the high calibre of his national character, he chose the infusion of light, gaiety and happiness into the common life of the people. Clear in thought and felicitous in action, he pursued an ideal strictly consonant with his natural temper and rigidly exclusive of the anomalous: and so highly did he attain, that the quick, shifting, eager Athenian life, with its movement and colour, its happy buoyancy, its rapid genius, or, as the Attic poet beautifully phrases it, walking delicately through a fine and lucid air, has become the admiration and envy of posterior ages. The modern Frenchman closely allied by his clear habit of mind to the old Athenian, himself lucid in thought, light in temper and not without a supreme felicity of method in practical things, evinces much the same sentiments, pursues much the same ideals. He too has a happily-adjusted executive machinery, elaborated indeed to fit the needs of a modern community, but pervaded by a thoroughly clear and logical spirit. He also has a passionate craving for equality

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and a large and just social principle, and prefers to conserve the high calibre of his national character by the infusion of light, gaiety and happiness into the common life of the people. And he too has so far compassed his ideal that a consensus of competent observers have pronounced France certainly the happiest, and, taken in the mass, the most civilized of modern countries. But to the Englishman or American, intellect, lucidity, happiness are not of primary importance: they strike him in the light of luxuries rather than necessities. It is the useful citizen, the adroit man of business, the laborious worker, whom he commends with the warmest emphasis and copies with the most respectful emulation. Such a cast of mind being entirely incompatible with social success, he directs his whole active powers into the grosser sphere of commerce and politics, where practical energy, unpurified by thought, may struggle forward to some vulgar and limited goal. To put it in a concrete form Paris may be said to revolve around the Theatre, the Municipal Council and the French Academy, London looks rather to the House of Commons and New York to the Stock Exchange. I trust that I have now clearly elucidated the exact and intimate nature of those two distinct principles on which progress may be said to move. It now remains to gauge the practical effect of either policy as history indicates them to us. We in India, or at any rate those races among us which are in the van of every forward movement, are far more nearly allied to the French and Athenian than to the Anglo-Saxon, but owing to the accident of British domination, our intellects have been carefully nurtured on a purely English diet. Hence we do not care to purchase an outfit of political ideas properly adjusted to our natural temper and urgent requirements, but must eke out our scanty wardrobe with the cast-off rags and threadbare leavings of our English Masters and this incongruous apparel we display with a pompous self-approval which no unfriendly murmurs, no unkind allusions are allowed to trouble. Absurd as all this is, its visible outcome is clearly a grave misfortune. Prompted by our English instruction we have deputed to a mere machine so arduous a business as the remoulding of our entire destinies,

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needing as it does patient and delicate manual adjustment and a constant supervising vigilance—and this to a machine not efficient and carefully pieced together but clumsy and made on a rude and cheap model. So long as this temper prevails, we shall never realise how utterly it is beyond the power of even an excellent machine to renovate an effete and impoverished national character and how palpably requisite to commence from within and not depend on any exterior agency. Such a retrospect as I propose will therefore be of peculiar value, if it at all induces us to acknowledge that it is a vital error, simply because we have invented a clumsy machine, to rest on our oars and imagine that expenditure of energy in other directions is at present superfluous.

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New Lamps for Old - VI

13-November-1893

That this intimate organic treatment of which I speak is really indispensable, will be clearly established by the annals of ancient Rome. The Romans were a nation quite unique in the composition and general style of their character; along with a predilection for practical energy, a purely material habit of mind, and an indifference to orderly and logical methods which suggest a strong affinity to the Anglo-Saxon temperament, they possessed a robust and clear perception, and a strong practical contempt for methods pronounced by hard experience to be ineffectual, which are entirely un-English and allied rather to the clarity and impatience of the Gaul. Moreover their whole character was moulded in a grand style, such as has not been witnessed by any prior or succeeding age—so much so that the striking description by which the Greek ambassador expressed the temper of the Roman Senate, might with equal justice be transferred to the entire people. They were a nation of Kings: that is to say, they possessed the gift of handling the high things of life in a grand and imposing style, and with a success, an astonishing sureness of touch, only possible to a natural tact in government and a just, I may say a royal instinct for affairs. Yet this grand, imperial nation, even while it was most felicitous abroad in the manner and spirit in which it dealt with foreign peoples, was at home convulsed to a surprising extent by the worst forms of internal disorder:—and all for the want of that clear, sane ideal which has so highly promoted the domestic happiness of France and Athens. At first, indeed, the Romans inexpert in political methods, were inclined to repose an implicit trust in machinery, just as the English have been inclined from the primary stages of their development, and just as we are led to do by the contagious influence of the Anglomaniac disease. They hoped by the sole and mechanic action of certain highly lauded

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institutions to remove the disorders with which the Roman body politic was ailing. And though at Rome no less than among ourselves, the social condition of the poor filled up the reform posters and a consequent amelioration was loudly trumpeted by the popular leaders, yet the genuine force of the movement was disposed, as is the genuine force of the present Congress movement, to the minimising of purely political inequality. But when the coveted institutions were in full swing, a sense gradually dawned on the people that the middle class had the sole enjoyment of any profit accruing from the change, as indeed it is always to the middle class alone that any profit accrues from the elimination of merely political inequality; but the great Roman populace untouched by the change for which they had sacrificed their ease and expended their best and highest energies, felt themselves pushed from misery to misery and broke out again in a wild storm of rebellion. But to maintain a stark persistence in unreason, to repose an unmoved confidence in the bounded potency of a mechanic formula, proved ineffectual by the cogent logic of hard experience, they had no thought, or if they had the thought, they being a genuinely practical race, and not like the English, straining after practicality, had not the disposition. Hence that mighty struggle was fought out with perplexed watchwords, amid wild alarms and rumours of battle and in a confused medley of blood, terror and unspeakable desolation. In that horror of great darkness, the Roman world crashed on from ruin to ruin, until the strong hand of Caesar stayed its descent to poise it on the stable foundation of a sane and vigilant policy rigorously enforced by the fixed will of a single despotic ruler. But the grand secret of his success and the success of those puissant autocrats who inherited his genius and his ideals, was the clear perception attained to by them that only by social equality and the healing action of a firm despotism, could the disorders of Rome be permanently eradicated. Maligned as they have been by those who suffered from their astuteness and calm strength of will, the final verdict of posterity will laud in them that terrible intensity of purpose and even that iron indifference to personal suffering, which they evinced in forcing the Caesarian policy to

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its bitter but salutary end. The main lesson for us however is the pregnant conclusion that the Romans, to whom we cannot deny the supreme rank in the sphere of practical success, by attempting a cure through external and mechanic appliances entailed on themselves untold misery, untold disorder, and only by a thorough organic treatment restored the sanity, peace, settled government and calm felicity of an entire world.

But perhaps Mr. Mehta will tell me "What have we to do with the ancient Romans, we who have an entirely modern environment and suffer from disorders peculiar to ourselves?" Well, the connection is not perhaps so remote as Mr. Mehta imagines: I will not however press that point, but rather appeal to the instance of two great European nations, who also have an entirely modern environment and suffer or have suffered from very similar maladies—and so end my long excursion into the domain of abstract ideas.

As the living instances most nearly suggesting the diversity of impulse and method, which is my present subject, I have had occasion to draw a comparison between these two peoples, whom, by a singular caprice of antithesis, chance has put into close physical proximity, but nature has sundered as far as the poles in genius, temper and ideals. Whatever healthy and conservative effects accrue from the close pursuit of either principle, whatever morbid and deleterious effects accrue from the close pursuit of either principle, will be seen operating to the best advantage in the social and political organism of these two nations. The healthy effects of the one impulse we shall find among those striking English qualities which at once catch the eye, insatiable enterprise, an energetic and pushing spirit, a vigorous tendency towards expansion, a high capacity for political administration, and an orderly process of government; the morbid effects are social degradation and an entire absence of the cohesive principle. The better qualities have no doubt grown by breathing the atmosphere of individualism and been trained up by the habit of working under settled and roughly convenient forms; but after all is said, the original high qualities of the raw material enter very largely into the credit side of

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the account. Even were it not so, we are not likely, tutored by English instruction, to undervalue or to slur over the successful and imposing aspect of English attainment. Hence it will be more profitable for us, always keeping the bright side in view, to concentrate our attention on the unsounder aspects which we do not care to learn, or if we have learned, are in the habit of carefully forgetting. We may perhaps realize the nature of that unsounder aspect, if we amplify Matthew Arnold's phrase:—an aristocracy no longer possessed of the imposing nobility of mind, the proud sense of honour, the striking pre-eminence of faculty, which are the saving graces—nay, which are the very life-breath of an aristocracy; debased moreover by the pursuit, through concession to all that is gross and ignoble in the English mind, of gross and ignoble ends:—a middle class inaccessible to the influence of high and refining ideas, and prone to rate everything even in the noblest departments of life, at a commercial valuation:—and a lower class equally without any germ of high ideas, nay, without any ideas high or low; degraded in their worst failure to the crudest forms of vice, pauperism and crime, and in their highest attainment restricted to a life of unintelligent work relieved by brutalising pleasures. And indeed the most alarming symptoms are here; for it may be said of the aristocracy that the workings of the Time-Spirit have made a genuine aristocracy obsolete and impracticable, and of the middle class, that, however successful and confident, it is in fact doomed; its empire is passing away from it: but with the whole trend of humanity shaping towards democracy and socialism, on the calibre and civilisation of the lower class depends the future of the entire race. And we have seen what sort of lower class England, with all her splendid success, has been able to evolve—in calibre debased, in civilisation nil. And after seeing what England has produced by her empiricism, her culture of a raw energy, her exaltation of a political method not founded on reason, we must see what France has produced by her steady, logical pursuit of a fine social ideal: it is the Paris ouvrier with his firmness of grasp on affairs, his sanity, his height of mind, his clear, direct ways of life and thought,—it is the French peasant

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with his ready tact, his power of quiet and sensible conversation, located in an enjoyable corner of life, small it may be, but with plenty of room for wholesome work and plenty of room for refreshing gaiety. There we have the strong side of France, a lucid social atmosphere, a firm executive rationally directed to insure a clearly conceived purpose, a high level of character and refinement pervading all classes and a scheme of society bestowing a fair chance of happiness on the low as well as the high. But if France is strong in the sphere of England's weakness, she is no less weak in the sphere of England's strength. Along with and militating against her social happiness, we have to reckon constant political disorder and instability, an alarming defect of expansive vigour, and entire failure in the handling of general politics. France, unable to conceive and work out a proper political machinery, has been reduced to copy with slight variations the English model and import a set of machinery well suited to the old English temper, but now unsuited even to the English and still more to the vehement French character. Passionate, sensitive, loquacious, fond of dispute and apt to be blown away by gusts of feeling, the Gaul is wholly unfit for that heavy decorum, that orderly process of debate, that power of combining anomalies, which still exist to a great extent in England, but which even there must eventually grow impossible. Hence the vehement French nation after a brief experience of each alien manufacture has grown intensely impatient and shipped it back without superfluous ceremony to its original home. Here is the latent root of that disheartening failure which has attended France in all her brief and feverish attempts to discover a stable basis of political advance,—of that intense consequent disgust, that scornful aversion to politics which has led thinking France to rate it as an indecent harlequin-show in which no serious man will care to meddle. But if this were all, a superficial observer might balance a defect and merit on one side by an answering merit and defect on the other, and conclude that the account was clear; but social status is not the only department of success in which England compares unfavourably with France. There is her fatal incoherency, her want of political cohesion, her want of

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social cohesion. A Breton, a Basque, a Provençal, though no less alien in blood to the mass of the French people than the Irish, the Welsh, the Scotch to the mass of the English people, would repel with alarm and abhorrence the mere thought of impairing the fine solidarity, the homogeneity of sentiment, which the possession of an agreeable social life has developed in France. And we cannot sufficiently admire the supreme virtue of that fine social development and large diffusion of general happiness, which has conserved for France in the midst of fearful political calamities her splendid cohesiveness as a nation and as a community. In England on the other hand we see the sorry spectacle of a great empire lying at the mercy of disintegrating influences, because the component races have neither been properly merged in the whole nor persuaded by the offer of a high level of happiness to value the benefits of solidarity. And if France by her injudicious choice of mechanism, her political incapacity, her refusal to put her best blood into politics, has involved herself in fearful political calamities, no less has England by her exclusive pursuit of machinery, her social incompetence, her prejudice against a rational equality, her excessive individualism, entered on an era of fearful social calamities. It is a suggestive fact that the alienation of sympathy, the strong antipathetic feelings of Labour towards Capital, are nowhere so marked, the quarrel between them is nowhere so violent, sustained and ferocious as in the two countries which are proudest of their institutions and have most systematically neglected their social development—England and America. It is not therefore unreasonable to conclude—and had I space and leisure, I should be tempted to show that every circumstance tends to fortify the conclusion and convert it into a certainty—that this social neglect is the prime cause of the fearful array of social calamities, whose first impact has already burst on those proud and successful countries. But enough has been said, and to discuss the matter exhaustively would unduly defer the point of more direct importance for ourselves;—I mean the ominous connection which these truths have with the actual conditions of politics and society in India.

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New Lamps for Old - VII

04-December-1893

I am not ignorant that to practical men all I have written will prove beyond measure unpalatable. Strongly inimical as they are to thought in politics, they will detect in it an offensive redolence of dilettantism, perhaps scout it as a foolish waste of power, or if a good thing at all a good thing for a treatise on general politics, a good thing out of place. To what end these remote instances, what pertinence in these political metaphysics? I venture however to suggest that it is just this gleaning from general politics, this survey and digestion of human experience in the mass that we at the present moment most imperatively want. No one will deny,—no one at least in that considerable class to whose address my present remarks are directed,—that for us, and even for those of us who have a strong affection for oriental things and believe that there is in them a great deal that is beautiful, a great deal that is serviceable, a great deal that is worth keeping, the most important objective is and must inevitably be the admission into India of Occidental ideas, methods and culture: even if we are ambitious to conserve what is sound and beneficial in our indigenous civilization, we can only do so by assisting very largely the influx of Occidentalism. But at the same time we have a perfect right to insist, and every sagacious man will take pains to insist, that the process of introduction shall not be as hitherto rash and ignorant, that it shall be judicious, discriminating. We are to have what the West can give us, because what the West can give us is just the thing and the only thing that will rescue us from our present appalling condition of intellectual and moral decay, but we are not to take it haphazard and in a lump; rather we shall find it expedient to select the very best that is thought and known in Europe, and to import even that with the changes and reservations which our diverse conditions may be found to dictate. Otherwise instead

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of a simply ameliorating influence, we shall have chaos annexed to chaos, the vices and calamities of the West superimposed on the vices and calamities of the East.

No one has such advantages, no one is so powerful to discourage, minimise and even to prevent the intrusion of what is mischievous, to encourage, promote and even to ensure the admission of what is salutary, than an educated and vigorous national assembly standing for the best thought and the best energy in the country, and standing for it not in a formal parliamentary way, but by the spontaneous impulse and election of the people. Patrons of the Congress are never tired of giving us to understand that their much lauded idol does stand for all that is best in the country and that it stands for them precisely in the way I have described. If that is so, it is not a little remarkable that far from regulating judiciously the importation of Occidental wares we have actually been at pains to import an inferior in preference to a superior quality, and in a condition not the most apt but the most inapt for consumption in India. Yet that this has been so far the net result of our political commerce with the West, will be very apparent to anyone who chooses to think. National character being like human nature, maimed and imperfect, it was not surprising, not unnatural that a nation should commit one or other of various errors. We need not marvel if England, overconfident in her material success and the practical value of her institutions has concerned herself too little with social development and set small store by the discreet management of her masses: nor must we hold French judgment cheap because in the pursuit of social felicity and the pride of her magnificent cohesion France has failed in her choice of apparatus and courted political insecurity and disaster. But there are limits even to human fallibility and to combine two errors so distinct would be, one imagines, a miracle of incompetence. Facts however are always giving the lie to our imaginations; and it is a fact that we by a combination of errors so eccentric as almost to savour of felicity, are achieving this prodigious tour de force. Servile in imitation with a peculiar Indian servility we have swallowed down in a lump our English diet and especially

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that singular paradox about the unique value of machinery: but we have not the stuff in us to originate a really effective instrument for ourselves. Hence the Congress, a very reputable body, I hasten to admit, teeming with grave citizens and really quite flush of lawyers, but for all that meagre in the scope of its utility and wholly unequal to the functions it ought to exercise. There we have laid the foundations, as the French laid the foundations, of political incompetence, political failure; and of a more fatal incompetence, a more disastrous failure, because the French have at least originality, thought, resourcefulness, while we are vainglorious, shallow, mentally impotent: and as if this error were not enough for us, we have permitted ourselves to lose all sense of proportion, and to evolve an inordinate self-content, an exaggerated idea of our culture, our capacity, our importance. Hence we choose to rate our own political increase higher than social perfection or the advancement, intellectual and economical, of that vast unhappy proletariate about which everybody talks and nobody cares. We blandly assent when Mr. Pherozshah in the generous heat of his temperate and carefully restricted patriotism, assures us after his genial manner that the awakening of the masses from their ignorance and misery is entirely unimportant and any expenditure of energy in that direction entirely premature. There we have laid the foundation, as England laid the foundation, of social collapse, of social calamities. We have sown the wind and we must not complain if we reap the whirlwind. Under such circumstances it cannot be superfluous or a waste of power to review in the light of the critical reason that part of human experience most nearly connected by its nature with our own immediate difficulties. It is rather our main business and the best occupation not of dilettantes but of minds gifted with insight, seriousness, original power. So much indeed is it our main business that according as it is executed or neglected, we must pronounce a verdict of adequacy or inadequacy on our recent political thought: and we have seen that it is hopelessly inadequate, that all our efforts repose on a body organically infirm to the verge of impotence and are in their scheme as in their practice selfishly frigid to

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social development and the awakening of the masses.

Here then we have got a little nearer to just and adequate comprehension. At any rate I hope to have enforced on my readers the precise and intrinsic meaning of that count in my indictment which censures the Congress as a body not popular and not honestly desirous of a popular character—in fact as a middle-class organ selfish and disingenuous in its public action and hollow in its professions of a large and disinterested patriotism. I hope to have convinced them that this is a solid charge and a charge entirely damaging to their character for wisdom and public spirit. Above all I hope to have persuaded Mr. Pherozshah Mehta, or at least the eidolon of that great man, the shadow of him which walks through these pages, that our national effort must contract a social and popular tendency before it can hope to be great or fruitful. But then Mr. Pherozshah is a lawyer: he has, enormously developed in him, that forensic instinct which prompts men to fight out a cause which they know to be unsound, to fight it out to the last gasp, not because it is just or noble but because it is theirs; and in the spirit of that forensic tradition he may conceivably undertake to answer me somewhat as follows. "Material success and a great representative assembly are boons of so immense a magnitude, so stupendous an importance that even if we purchase them at the cost of a more acute disintegration, a more appalling social decadence, the rate will not be any too exorbitant. Let us exactly imitate English success by an exact imitation of English models and then there will be plenty of time to deal with these questions which you invest with fictitious importance." Monstrous as the theorem is, profound as is the mental darkness which pervades it, it summarises not unfairly the defence put forward by the promoters and well-wishers of the Congress.

On us as the self-elected envoys of a new evangel there rests a heavy responsibility, assumed by our own will, but which once assumed we can no longer repudiate or discard; a responsibility which promises us immortal credit, if performed with sincerity and wisdom, but saddled with ignominy to ourselves and disaster to our country, if we discharge it in another spirit and

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another manner. To meet that responsibility we have no height, no sincerity of character, no depth of emotion, no charity, no seriousness of intellect. Yet it is only a sentimentalist, we are told, who will bid us raise, purify and transform ourselves so that we may be in some measure worthy of the high and solemn duties we have bound ourselves to perform! The proletariate among us is sunk in ignorance and overwhelmed with distress. But with that distressed and ignorant proletariate,—now that the middle class is proved deficient in sincerity, power and judgment,—with that proletariate resides, whether we like it or not, our sole assurance of hope, our sole chance in the future. Yet he is set down as a vain theorist and a dreamy trifler who would raise it from its ignorance and distress. The one thing needful we are to suppose, the one thing worthy of a great and statesmanlike soul is to enlarge the Legislative Councils, until they are big enough to hold Mr. Pherozshah M. Mehta, and other geniuses of an immoderate bulk. To play with baubles is our ambition, not to deal with grave questions in a spirit of serious energy. But while we are playing with baubles, with our Legislative Councils, our Simultaneous Examinations, our ingenious schemes for separating the judicial from the executive functions,—while we, I say, are finessing about trifles, the waters of the great deep are being stirred and that surging chaos of the primitive man over which our civilized societies are superimposed on a thin crust of convention, is being strangely and ominously agitated. Already a red danger-signal has shot up from Prabhas-Patan, and sped across the country, speaking with a rude eloquence of strange things beneath the fair surface of our renascent, enlightened India: yet no sooner was the signal seen than it was forgotten. Perhaps the religious complexion of these occurrences has lulled our fears; but when turbulence has once become habitual in a people, it is only folly that will reckon on its preserving the original complexion. A few more taxes, a few more rash interferences of Government, a few more stages of starvation, and the turbulence that is now religious will become social. I am speaking to that class which Mr. Manmohan Ghose has called the thinking portion of the Indian community: well,

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let these thinking gentlemen carry their thoughtful intellects a hundred years back. Let them recollect what causes led from the religious madness of St. Bartholomew to the social madness of the Reign of Terror. Let them enumerate if their memory serves them, the salient features and symptoms which the wise man detected many years before the event to be the sure precursors of some terrible catastrophe; and let them discover, if they can, any of those symptoms which is absent from the phenomena of our disease. With us it rests—if indeed it is not too late—with our sincerity, our foresight, our promptness of thought and action, that the hideous parallel shall not be followed up by a sequel as awful, as bloody and more purely disastrous. Theorist, and trifler though I may be called, I again assert as our first and holiest duty, the elevation and enlightenment of the proletariate: I again call on those nobler spirits among us who are working erroneously, it may be, but with incipient or growing sincerity and nobleness of mind, to divert their strenuous effort from the promotion of narrow class-interests, from silly squabbles about offices and salaried positions, from a philanthropy laudable in itself and worthy of rational pursuit, but meagre in the range of its benevolence and ineffectual towards promoting the nearest interests of the nation, into that vaster channel through which alone the healing waters may be conducted to the lips of their ailing and tortured country.

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New Lamps for Old - VIII

05-February-1894

Poverty of organic conception and unintelligence of the deeper facts of our environment are the inherent vices I have hitherto imputed to the Congress and the burgess-body of which it is the political nucleus. But I have not done enough when I have done that. Perversion or error in the philosophy of our aim does indeed point to a serious defect of the political reason, but it is not incompatible with a nearer apprehension and happier management of surface facts; and if we had been so far apprehensive and dexterous, that would have been an output of native directness and force on which we might reasonably felicitate ourselves. For directness and force are an inalienable ancestral inheritance handed down by vigorous forefathers, and where they are, the political reason which comes of liberal culture and ancient experience, may be waited for with a certain patient hopefulness. But it is to be feared that our performance up to date does not give room for so comforting an assurance. Is it not rather the fact that our whole range of thought and action has been pervaded by a stamp of unreality and helplessness, a straining after achievement for which we have not the proper stamina and an entire misconception of facts as well as of natural laws? To be convinced of this we have only to interrogate recent events, not confiding in their outward face as the shallow and self-contented do, but getting to the heart of them, making sure of their hidden secret, their deeper reality. Indeed it will not hurt any of us to put out of sight for a moment those vain and fantastic chimeras about Simon de Montfort and the gradual evolution of an Indian Parliament, with which certain politicians are fond of amusing us, and look things straight in the face. We must resolutely hold fast to the primary fact that right and effective action can only ensue upon a right understanding of ourselves in relation to our environment. For by reflection or instinct to

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get a clear insight into our position and by dexterity to make the most of it, that is the whole secret of politics, and that is just what we have failed to do. Let us see whether we cannot get some adequate sense of what our position really is: after that we shall be more in the way to hit closely the exact point at which we have failed.

Whatever theatrical attitude it may suit our vanity to adopt, we are not, as we pretend to be, the embodiment of the country's power, intelligence and worth: neither are we disinterested patriots striving in all purity and unselfishness towards an issue irreproachable before God. These are absurd pretensions which only detract from the moral height of our nature and can serve no great or serious end. We may gain a poor and evanescent advantage by this sort of hypocrisy, but we lose in candour and clearness of intellect, we lose in sincerity which is another name for strength. If we would only indulge less our bias towards moral ostentation and care more to train ourselves in a healthy robustness and simple candour, it would really advantage us not only in character, but in power; and it would have this good effect, that we should no longer throw dust into our own eyes; we should be better fitted to see ourselves as a critic of human society would see us, better able to get that clear insight into our own position, which is one condition of genuine success. No, we are not and cannot be a body of disinterested patriots. Life being, as science tells us, an affirmation of one's self, any aggregate mass of humanity must inevitably strive to emerge and affirm its own essence, must by the law of its own nature aspire towards life, aspire towards expansion, aspire towards the perfecting of its potential strength in the free air of political recognition and the full light of political predominance. That is just what has been happening in India. In us the Indian burgess or middle-class emerges from obscurity, perhaps from nothingness, and strives between a strong and unfeeling bureaucracy and an inert and imbecile proletariate to possess itself of rank, consideration and power. Against that striving it is futile to protest; one might as well quarrel with the law of gravitation; but though our striving must be inherently selfish, we can at least make some small effort to

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keep it as little selfish as possible, to make it, as far as may be, run in harness with the grand central interests of the nation at large. So much at least those of us who have a broad human affection for our country as distinct from ourselves, have a right to expect.

Thus emergent, thus ambitious, it was our business by whatever circumstances we were environed, to seize hold of those circumstances and make ourselves masters of them. The initial difficulties were great. A young and just emergent body without experience of government, without experience even of resistance to government, consequently without inherited tact, needs a teacher or a Messiah to initiate it in the art of politics. In England the burgess was taught almost insensibly by the nobility; in France he found a Messiah in the great Napoleon. We had no Napoleon, but we had a nobility. Europeans, when the spirit moves them to brag of their superiority over us Asiatics, are in the habit of saying that the West is progressive, the East stationary. That is a little too comprehensive. England and France are no doubt eminently progressive, but there are other countries of Europe which have not been equally forward. America is a democratic country which has not progressed: Russia is a despotic country which has not progressed: in Italy, Spain, Germany even progress has been factitious and slow. Nevertheless, though the vulgar wording of the boast may be loose and careless, yet it does express a very real superiority. The nations of the West are not all progressive, true; but they are all in that state which is the first condition of progress, a state, I mean, of fluidity, but of fluidity within limits, fluidity on a stable and normal basis. If no spirit of thought or emotion moves on the face of the waters, they become as foul and stagnant as in the most conservative parts of Asia, but a very slight wind will set them flowing. In most Asiatic countries,—I do not speak of India—one might almost imagine a hurricane blowing without any perceptible effect. Accordingly in Europe the transition of power from the noble to the burgess has been natural and inevitable. In India, just as naturally and inevitably, the administration remained with the noble. The old Hindu mechanism of society and government certainly did prescribe limits, certainly

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had a basis that was stable and normal; but it was too rigid, too stationary: it bound down the burgess and held him in his place by an iron weight of custom and religious ordinance. The regime that overthrew and succeeded it, the Mussulman regime, was mediaeval in character, fluid certainly, indeed in a perpetual state of flux, but never able to shake off the curse of instability, never in a position to prescribe limits, never stable, never normal. In such a society the qualities which make for survival, are valour, dexterity, initiative, swiftness, a robust immorality, qualities native to an aristocracy and to nations moulded by an aristocracy, native also to certain races, but even in those nations, even in those races, alien to the ordinary spirit of the burgess. His ponderous movements, his fumbling, his cold timidity, his decent scrupulousness have been fatal to his pretensions, at times inimical to his existence. Accordingly in India he has been submerged, scarcely existent. Great affairs and the high qualities they nourish have rested in the hand of the noble. We had then our nobility, our class trained and experienced in government and affairs: but to them unhappily we could not possibly look for guidance or even for co-operation. At the period of our emergence they were lethargic, effete, moribund, partially sunk in themselves; and even if any of the old energy had survived their fall, the world in which they moved was too new and strange, the transition to it had been too sudden and confounding to admit of their assimilating themselves so as to move with ease and success under novel conditions. The old nobility was quite as helpless from decay and dotage, as we from youthful inexperience. It was foreign energy that had pushed aside the old outworn machinery, it was an alien government that had by policy and self-will hurried us into a new and quite unfamiliar world. Would that government, politic and self-willed as it was, help us to an activity that might, nay, that must turn eventually to their personal detriment? Certainly they had the power but quite as certainly they had not the will. No doubt Anglo-Indians have very little right to speak of us as bitterly as they are in the habit of doing. By setting themselves to compel our social elements into a state of fluidity, and for that purpose

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not only putting in motion organic forces but bringing direct pressure to bear, by strictly enforcing system and order so as to lay down fixed limits and a normal basis, within which the fluid elements might settle into new forms, they in fact made themselves responsible for us and lost the right to blame anyone but themselves for what might ensue. They are in the unlucky position of responsibility for a state of things which they abhor and certainly had no intention of bringing about. The force which they had in mind to construct was a body of grave, loyal and conservative citizens, educated but without ideas, a body created by and having a stake in the present order, and therefore attached to its continuance, a power in the land certainly, but a power for order, for permanence, not a power for disturbance and unrest. In such an enterprise they were bound to fail and they failed egregiously. Sir Edwin Arnold when he found out that it was a grievous mistake to occidentalize us, forgot, no doubt, for the moment his role as the preacher and poetaster of self-abnegation, and spoke as an ordinary mundane being, the prophet of a worldly and selfish class: but if we accept his words in that sense, there can be no doubt that he was perfectly right. Anglo-Indians had never seriously brought themselves to believe that we are in blood and disposition a genuine Aryan community. They chose to regard our history as a jungle of meaningless facts, and could not understand that we were not malleable dead matter, but men with Occidental impulses in our blood, not virgin material to be wrought into any shape they preferred, but animate beings with a principle of life in us and certain, if subjected to the same causes, placed in the same light and air as European communities, to exhibit effects precisely similar and shape ourselves rather than be shaped. They proposed to construct a tank for their own service and comfort; they did not know that they were breaking up the fountains of the great deep. There, stated shortly, is the whole sense of their policy and conduct. The habit, set in vogue by rhetoricians of Macaulay's type, of making large professions of benevolence invested with an air of high grandiosity, has become so much a second nature with them, that I will not ask if they are sincere

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when they make them: but it is a rhetorical habit and nothing more. We who are not interested in keeping up the fiction, may just as well pierce through it to the fact. If they had seen things as they really are, they would have been wisely inactive: but they wanted a submissive and attached population, and they thought they had hit on the best way of getting what they wanted. In this confidence, if there was a great deal of delusion, there was also something of truth. But we must not be surprised or indignant if the Anglo-Indians, when they saw their confidence so rudely dashed and themselves confronted, not with submission and attachment but with a body eager, pushing, recriminative, pushing for recognition, pushing for power, covetous above all of that authority which they had come to regard as their private and peculiar possession,—there is no cause for surprise or resentment, if they cared little for the grain of success in their bushelful of failure, and regarded us with those feelings of alarm, distrust and hatred which Frankenstein experienced when having hoped to make a man, he saw a monster. Their conduct was too natural to be censured. I do not say that magnanimity would not have been better, more dignified, more politic. But who expects magnanimity from bureaucracy? The old nobility then were almost extinct and had moreover no power to help us: the bureaucracy had not the will. Yet it was from their ranks that the Messiah came.

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New Lamps for Old - IX

06-March-1894

The Civilian Order, which accounts itself, and no doubt justly, the informing spirit of Anglo-India, is credited in this country with quite an extraordinary degree of ability and merit, so much so that many believe it to have come down to us direct from heaven. And it is perhaps on this basis that in their dealings with Indians,—whom being moulded of a clay entirely terrestrial, one naturally supposes to be an inferior order of creatures,—they permit themselves a very liberal tinge of presumption and arrogance. Without disputing their celestial origin, one may perhaps be suffered to hint that eyes unaffected by the Indian sun, will be hard put to it to discover the pervading soul of magnificence and princeliness in the moral and intellectual style of these demigods. The fact is indeed all the other way. The general run of the Service suffers by being recruited through the medium of Competitive Examination: its tone is a little vulgar, its character a little raw, its achievement a little second-rate. Harsh critics have indeed said more than this; nay, has not one of themselves, has not Mr. Rudyard Kipling, a blameless Anglo-Indian, spoken, and spoken with distressing emphasis to the same effect? They have said that it moves in an atmosphere of unspeakable boorishness and mediocrity. That is certainly strong language and I would not for a moment be thought to endorse it; but there is, as I say, just a small sediment of truth at the bottom which may tend to excuse, if not to justify, this harsh and unfriendly criticism. And when one knows the stuff of which the Service is made, one ceases to wonder at it. A shallow schoolboy stepping from a cramming establishment to the command of high and difficult affairs, can hardly be expected to give us anything magnificent or princely. Still less can it be expected when the sons of small tradesmen are suddenly promoted from the counter to govern great provinces. Not that I have any fastidious prejudice against

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small tradesmen. I simply mean that the best education men of that class can get in England, does not adequately qualify a raw youth to rule over millions of his fellow-beings. Bad in training, void of culture, in instruction poor, it is in plain truth a sort of education that leaves him with all his original imperfections on his head, unmannerly, uncultivated, unintelligent. But in the Civil Service, with all its vices and shortcomings, one does find, as perhaps one does not find elsewhere, rare and exalted souls detached from the failings of their order, who exhibit the qualities of the race in a very striking way; not geniuses certainly, but swift and robust personalities, rhetorically powerful, direct, forcible, endowed to a surprising extent with the energy and self-confidence which are the heirlooms of their nation; men in short who give us England—and by England I mean the whole Anglo-Celtic race—on her really high and admirable side. Many of these are Irish or Caledonian; others are English gentlemen of good blood and position, trained at the great public schools, who still preserve that fine flavour of character, scholarship and power, which was once a common possession in England, but threatens under the present dispensation to become sparse or extinct. Others again are veterans of the old Anglo-Indian school, moulded in the larger traditions and sounder discipline of a strong and successful art who still keep some vestiges of the grand old Company days, still have something of a great and noble spirit, something of an adequate sense how high are the affairs they have to deal with and how serious the position they are privileged to hold. It was one of these, one endowed with all their good gifts, it was Mr. Allan Hume, a man acute and vigorous, happy in action and in speech persuasive, an ideal leader, who prompted, it may be by his own humane and lofty feelings, it may be by a more earthly desire of present and historic fame, took us by the hand and guided us with astonishing skill on our arduous venture towards pre-eminence and power. Mr. Hume, I have said, had all the qualities that go to make a fine leader in action. If only he had added to these the crowning gifts, reflectiveness, ideas, a comprehensive largeness of vision! Governing force, that splendid distinction inherited by England from her old Norman

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barons, governing force and the noble gifts that go along with it, are great things in their way, but they are not the whole of politics. Ideas, reflection, the political reason count for quite as much, are quite as essential. But on these, though individual Englishmen, men like Bolingbroke, Arnold, Burke, have had them pre-eminently, the race has always kept a very inadequate hold: and Mr. Hume is distinguished from his countrymen, not by the description of his merits, but by their degree. His original conception, I cannot help thinking, was narrow and impolitic.

He must have known, none better, what immense calamities may often be ripening under a petty and serene outside. He must have been aware, none better, when the fierce pain of hunger and oppression cuts to the bone what awful elemental passions may start to life in the mildest, the most docile proletariates. Yet he chose practically to ignore his knowledge; he conceived it as his business to remove a merely political inequality, and strove to uplift the burgess into a merely isolated predominance. That the burgess should strive towards predominance, nay, that for a brief while he should have it, is only just, only natural: the mischief of it was that in Mr. Hume's formation the proletariate remained for any practical purpose a piece off the board. Yet the proletariate is, as I have striven to show, the real key of the situation. Torpid he is and immobile; he is nothing of an actual force, but he is a very great potential force, and whoever succeeds in understanding and eliciting his strength, becomes by the very fact master of the future. Our situation is indeed complex and difficult beyond any that has ever been imagined by the human intellect; but if there is one thing clear in it, it is that the right and fruitful policy for the burgess, the only policy that has any chance of eventual success, is to base his cause upon an adroit management of the proletariate. He must awaken and organize the entire power of the country and thus multiply infinitely his volume and significance, the better to attain a supremacy as much social as political. Thus and thus only will he attain to his legitimate station, not an egoist class living for itself and in itself, but the crown of the nation and its head.

But Mr. Hume saw things in a different light, and let me

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confess out of hand, that once he had got a clear conception of his business, he proceeded in it with astonishing rapidity, sureness and tact. The clear-cut ease and strong simplicity of his movements were almost Roman; no crude tentatives, no infelicitous bungling, but always a happy trick of hitting the right nail on the head and that at the first blow. Roman too was his principle of advancing to a great object by solid and consecutive gradations. To begin by accustoming the burgess as well as his adversaries to his own corporate reality, to proceed by a definitive statement of his case to the Vice-regal Government, and for a final throw to make a vehement and powerful appeal to the English Parliament, an appeal that should be financed by the entire resources of middle-class India and carried through its stages with an iron heart and an obdurate resolution, expending moreover infinite energy,—so and so only could the dubious road Mr. Hume was treading, lead to anything but bathos and anticlimax. Nothing could be happier than the way in which the initial steps were made out. To be particularly obstreperous about his merits and his wrongs is certainly the likeliest way for a man to get a solid idea of his own importance and make an unpleasant impression on his ill-wishers. And for that purpose, for a blowing of trumpets in concert, for a self-assertion persistent, bold and clamorous, the Congress, however incapable in other directions may be pronounced perfectly competent; nay, it was the ideal thing. The second step was more difficult. He had to frame somehow a wording of our case at once bold and cautious, so as to hit Anglo-India in its weak place, yet properly sauced so as not to offend the palate, grown fastidious and epicurean, of the British House of Commons. Delicate as was the task he managed it with indubitable adroitness and a certain success. We may perhaps get at the inner sense of what happened, if we imagine Mr. Hume giving this sort of ultimatum to the Government. "The Indian burgess for whose education you have provided but whose patrimony you sequestrated and are woefully mismanaging, having now come to years of discretion, demands an account of your stewardship and the future management of his own estate. To compromise, if you

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are so good as to meet us half-way, we are not unready, but on any other hypothesis our appeal lies at once to the tribunal of the British Parliament. You will observe our process is perfectly constitutional." The sting of the scorpion lay as usual in its tail. Mr. Hume knew well the magic power of that word over Englishmen. With a German garrison it would have been naught; they would quickly have silenced with bayonets and prohibitive decrees any insolence of that sort. With French republicans it would have been naught; they would either have powerfully put it aside or frankly acceded to it. But the English are a nation of political jurists, and any claim franked by the epithet "constitutional" they are bound by the very law of their being to respect or at any rate appear to respect. The common run of Anglo-Indians, blinded as selfishness always does blind people, might in their tremulous rage and panic vomit charges of sedition and shout for open war; but a Government of political jurists pledged to an occidentalizing policy could not do so without making nonsense of its past. Moreover a Government vice-regal in constitution cannot easily forget that it may have to run the gauntlet of adverse comment from authorities at home. But if they could not put us down with the strong hand or meet our delegates with a non possumus, they were not therefore going to concede to us any solid fraction of our demands. It is the ineradicable vice of the English nature that it can never be clear or direct. It recoils from simplicity as from a snake. It must shuffle, it must turn in on itself, it must preserve cherished fictions intact. And supposing unpleasant results to be threatened, it escapes from them through a labyrinth of unworthy and transparent subterfuges. Our rulers are unfortunately average Englishmen, Englishmen, that is to say, who are not in the habit of rising superior to themselves; and if they were uncandid, if they were tortuously hostile we may be indignant, but we cannot be surprised. Mr. Hume at any rate saw quite clearly that nothing was to be expected, perhaps he had never seriously expected anything, from that quarter. He had already instituted with really admirable promptitude, the primary stages of his appeal to the British Parliament.

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At the Turn of the Century

The last century of the second millennium after Christ has begun; of the twenty centuries it seems the most full of incalculable possibilities & to open the widest door on destiny. The mind of humanity feels it is conscious of a voice of a distant advancing Ocean and a sound as of the wings of a mighty archangel flying towards the world, but whether to empty the vials of the wrath of God or to declare a new gospel of peace upon earth and goodwill unto men, is as yet dark to our understanding.

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Old Moore for 1901

Opening months of year—political trouble & agitation for France

Feb. & March—Eastern question to be revived, Indian affairs cause anxiety

May—Recrudescence of troubles in Ireland

June—Anarchism rampant & Spanish King in danger from insidious foes

July—Numerous & startling catastrophes, Widespread disaster in the East

Autumn—Plague & Famine in India, Holland assumes diplomatic & dangerous attitude, Under ill advice its rulers may suffer reverse

November—Revival of sedition & turbulence in India & Egypt

December—insurrections, revolts & seditions the order of the day

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The Congress Movement

With the opening of the twentieth century there is visible in India—visible at least to a trained political observer who is accustomed to divine the flux & change of inner forces from the slight signs that are the first faintly heard footsteps of the future & does not limit himself to the imposing & external features which are often merely the landmarks of the past—a remarkable & most vital change in the feeling and thought habit of our nation or at least of those classes in it whose thought & action most tells on the future. The life-stream of our national existence is taking a massive swerve towards a far other ocean than the direction of its flow hitherto had ever presaged. If I say that the Congress movement has spent itself, I shall be reminded of the Ahmedabad Congress, the success of the Industrial Exhibition and the newborn enthusiasm of Gujarat. Are these, it may be said, symptoms of decline & weakness? The declining forces of a bygone impetus touching a field which it had not yet affected, assume thereby some resemblance to their first youthful vigour but must not on that account be mistaken for the great working vitality of youth & manhood. The political activity of the nation gathering itself into the form of the Congress rose for some time with noise and a triumphant surging impetus until like a wave as it culminates breaking upon rocks, it dashed itself against the hard facts of human nature & the elementary conditions of successful political action which the Congress leaders had never grasped or had chosen to ignore; there it stopped and now there is throughout the country the languor, the weakness, the tendency to break up & discohere of the retiring wave. But behind & under cover of this failure & falling back there has been slowly & silently gathering another & vaster wave the first

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voices of which are now being heard, the crests of whose foam are just mounting here & there into view. Soon it will push aside or assimilate its broken forerunner, occupy the sea and ride on surging and shouting to its predestined failure or triumph. By the succession of such waves shall our national life move forward to its great & inevitable goal.

For us of the new age, who are to mount on the rising slope of the wave even if we do not live to ride on its crest, the first necessity is to understand the career of our predecessor, the principle of its life and the source of its weakness. I have said that the Congress movement broke itself on the hard facts of human nature [incomplete]

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Fragment for a Pamphlet

Having in an organisation of this kind a ready and efficient instrument of work, it remains to consider on what lines the energy of the nation may best expend itself. Strength and unity are our objective; ceaseless and self-reliant labour is our motive power; education, organisation and self-help are our road. It is moreover a triple strength we shall have to seek, strength mental, strength material and strength moral. Now it is not the object of this pamphlet to lay down rigidly or in detail the lines on which our movement ought to proceed; that is a question beyond the scope of any single intellect; it is for the united thought of the nation to decide. But the main principles and divergent branches which national energy is bound to take if it would do its work thoroughly may well be very briefly specified. To improve the mental force of the race will be our first object; and for this we need that we ourselves should think, more deeply, as well as that we should [incomplete]

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Unity: An Open Letter

An Open Letter to those who despair of their Country

To the sons of our mother Bharat who disclaim their sonhood, to the children of languor and selfishness, to the wooers of safety & ease, to the fathers of despair and death—greeting.

To those who impugning the holiness of their Mother refuse to lift her out of danger lest they defile their own spotless hands, to those who call on her to purify herself before they will save her from the imminent & already descending sword of Death,—greeting.

Lastly to those who love & perhaps have striven for her but having now grown themselves faint and hopeless bid others to despair and cease,—to them also greeting.

Brothers,—for whether unwise friends or selfish enemies of my Mother, you are still her children,—there is a common voice among you spreading dismay and weakness in the hearts of the people; for you say to each other and to all who would speak to you of their country, "Let us leave these things and look to our daily bread; this nation must perish but let us at least and our children try to live while live we can. We are fallen and depraved and our sins grow upon us day by day; we suffer & are oppressed and oppression increases with every setting of the sun; we are weak and languid and our weakness grows weaker and our languor more languid every time the sun rises in the east. We are sick and broken; we are idle and cowardly; we perish every year from famine and plague; disease decimates us, with every decade poverty annihilates family after family; where there

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were a hundred in one house, there are now ten; where there was once a flourishing village, the leopard and the jackal will soon inhabit. God is adverse to us and ourselves our worst enemies; we are decaying from within and smitten from without. The sword has been taken out of our hands and the bread is being taken out of our mouths. Worst of all we are disunited beyond hope of union and without union we must ere long perish. It may be five decades or it may be ten, but very soon this great and ancient nation will have perished from the face of the earth and the negro or the Malay will inherit the homes of our fathers & till the fields to glut the pockets & serve the pleasure of the Englishman or the Russian. Meanwhile it is well that the Congress should meet once a year & deceive the country with an appearance of life; that there should be posts for the children of the soil with enough salary to keep a few from starving, that a soulless education should suck the vigour & sweetness out of body & heart & brain of our children while flattering them with the vain lie that they are educated & enlightened; for so shall the nation die peacefully of a sort of euthanasia lapped in lies & comforted with delusions and not violently & in a whirlwind of horror and a great darkness of fear & suffering."

With such Siren song do you slay the hearts of those who have still force and courage to strive against Fate and would rescue our Mother out of the hands of destruction. Yet I would willingly believe that matricides though you are, it is in ignorance. Come therefore, let us reason calmly together.

Is it indeed [incomplete]

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The Proposed Reconstruction of Bengal

Partition or Annihilation?

In the excitement & clamour that has followed the revolutionary proposal of Lord Curzon's Government to break Bengal into pieces, there is some danger of the new question being treated only in its superficial aspects and the grave & startling national peril for which it is the preparation being either entirely missed or put out of sight. On a perusal of the telegrams which pour in from Eastern Bengal one is struck with the fact that they mainly deal with certain obvious & present results of the measure, not one of which is really vital. The contention repeatedly harped on that Assam is entirely different to us in race, language, manners etc. is in the first place not altogether true, and even if true, is very bad political strategy. In these days when the whole tendency of a reactionary Government is to emphasize old points of division & create new ones, it should plainly be the policy of the national movement to ignore points of division and to emphasize old and create new points of contact and union. The Assamese possess the same racial substratum as ourselves though the higher strata may be less profoundly Aryanised and their language is a branch of Bengali which but for an artificial diversion would have merged into the main stream of Bengali speech. Why then should we affront our brothers in Assam and play the game of our opponents by declaring them outcast from our sympathies? The loss by Eastern Bengal of a seat on the Legislative Council is again the loss of a delusion and does not really concern its true national welfare. Even separation from the Calcutta High Court if it should come about, means very little now that the

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High Court has definitely ceased to protect the liberties of the people and become an informal department of the Government. The dislocation of trade caused by its diversion from Calcutta to Chittagong might be a calamity of the first magnitude to Calcutta but its evil effects on Eastern Bengal would, the enemy might well argue, be of a very temporary character. The transfer of advanced provinces to a backward Government is, no doubt, in itself a vital objection to the measure but can be at once met by elevating the new province to the dignity of a Lieutenant-Governorship with a Legislative Council and a Chief Court. Indeed by this very simple though costly contrivance the Government can meet every practical objection of a political nature that has been urged against their proposal. There are signs which seem to indicate that this is the expedient to which Government will eventually resort and under the cover of it affect an even more extended amputation than it was at first convenient to announce; for Rajshahi as well as Faridpur & Backergunge,, are it appears also to be cut away from us. There would remain the violation of Bengali sentiment and the social disturbance and mortal inconvenience to innumerable individuals which must inevitably accompany such a disruption of old ties & interests and severance from the grand centre of Bengali life. But our sentiments the Government can very well afford to ignore and the disturbance and inconvenience they may politely regret as deplorable incidents indeed but after all minor & temporary compared with the great and permanent administrative necessities to be satisfied. Will then the people of Eastern Bengal finally, seeing the Government determined, pocket the bribe of a separate Lieutenant-Governorship, a Legislative Council and High Court and accept this violent revolution in our national life? Or will Western Bengal submit to lose Eastern Bengal on such terms? If not, then to nerve them for the struggle their refusal will involve they must rely on something deeper than sentiment, something more potent than social & personal interests, they must have the clear & indelible consciousness of the truth that this measure is no mere administrative proposal but a blow straight at the heart of the nation. The failure to

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voice clearly this, the true & vital side of the question can arise only from want of moral courage or from that fatal inability to pass beyond superficialities & details & understand in their fullness deep truths & grand issues in politics, which has made our political life for the last fifty years so miserably barren and ineffective. That it springs largely if not altogether from the latter is evidenced by the amazing apathy which allows Western Bengal to sit with folded hands and allow Eastern Bengal to struggle alone and unaided. Eastern Bengal is menaced with absorption into a backward province and therefore struggles; Western Bengal is menaced with no such calamity and can therefore sit lolling on its pillows, hookah-pipe in hand, waiting to see what happens; this apparently is how the question is envisaged by a race which considers itself the most intelligent and quick witted in the world. That it is something far other than this, that the danger involved is far more urgent and appalling, is what I shall try to point out in this article.

Unfortunately, to do this is impossible without treading on Lord Curzon's corns and indeed on the tenderest of all the crop. We have recently been permitted to know that our great Viceroy particularly objects to the imputation of motives to his Government—and not unnaturally; for Lord Curzon is a vain man loving praise & sensitive to dislike & censure; more than that, he is a statesman of unusual genius who is following a subtle and daring policy on which immense issues hang and it is naturally disturbing him to find that there are wits in India as subtle as his own which can perceive something at least of the goal at which he is aiming. But in this particular instance he has only himself & Mr. Risley to thank, if his motives have been discovered—or let us say, misinterpreted. The extraordinary farrago of discursive ineptitudes which has been put forward [incomplete]

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On the Bengali and the Mahratta

The relation of the Bengalis to other races of India

Bengali & Mahratta

creation & concentration
traditions. weight of
intellectual basis. Rajput. Islam. Bihar.
resulting unerringness of tendency as illustrated by vernacular literature, preparatory light for religious & social reconstruction. tendency towards science & industry—failure in education & physical training.

In England or India?

Necessity of provincial before national development

Literary reconstruction. Academy, its duties.

Religious reconstruction

Social reconstruction

Educational reconstruction

Science & Industry

Political Reconstruction—the masses

Elements in Bengal, Prince, pleader & peasant

Possible expansion of Bengal

In England or India?

Prior necessity of Provincial Union... let the Bengalis & Mahrattas organize themselves & spread their influence over the rest of India.

the genius of the Bengalis is at present original, creative, moving towards development & acquisition, the genius of the Mahrattas critical, conservative, standing in the concentration of what it has already developed & acquired.

Mahratta activity has been the most brilliant passage in our

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history since the fall of Prithvi Raj & we may well look back to it with pride & admiration but it is to be feared that it did not proceed upon a sufficiently intellectual basis. Had the movement of thought & intelligence expressed in the writings of Ramdas, Tukaram, Moropunt been allowed first to fulfil itself & the Mahratta development refrained from transferring itself too hastily into the sphere of political action, the result might have been more sure, more lasting.

The Bengali is not weighted in the race by traditions inconsistent with present necessities.

That we should all act together, is a fine thing, but the question still remains what will that action come to? When all the limbs are themselves too weak & incoherent to effect anything, it is cold comfort to be told that they are learning to cohere with one another. Let them cohere among themselves first.

In a struggle between a strong Govt & an organized nation, when that struggle is put to the arbitration of armed force, all the chances are with the Gavt, & in nine cases out of ten it is morally sure of victory, but where the struggle is decided by the clash of social & intellectual agencies & under conditions of law, the relations are exactly reversed, & indeed they are more than reversed.

The India of today may be presented under the image of the Greek biga [incomplete]

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Bhawani Mandir

OM Namas Chandikayai.

A temple is to be erected and consecrated to Bhawani, the mother, among the hills. To all the children of the mother, the call is sent forth to help in the sacred work.

WHO IS BHAWANI?

Who is Bhawani, the mother, and why should we erect a temple to Her?

BHAWANI IS THE INFINITE ENERGY.

In the unending revolutions of the world, as the wheel of the Eternal turns mightily in its courses, the Infinite Energy which streams forth from the Eternal and sets the wheel to work, looms up in the vision of man in various aspects and infinite forms. Each aspect creates and marks an age. Sometimes She is Love, sometimes She is Knowledge, sometimes She is Renunciation, sometimes She is Pity. This Infinite Energy is Bhawani. She also is Durga, She is Kali, She is Radha the Beloved, She is Lakshmi. She is our Mother and the Creatress of us all.

BHAWANI IS SHAKTI.

In the present age, the Mother is manifested as the mother of Strength. She is pure Shakti.

THE WHOLE WORLD IS GROWING FULL OF THE MOTHER AS SHAKTI.

Let us raise our eyes and cast them upon the world around us. Wherever we turn our gaze, huge masses of strength rise before

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our vision, tremendous, swift and inexorable forces, gigantic figures of energy, terrible sweeping columns of force. All is growing large and strong. The Shakti of war, the Shakti of wealth, the Shakti of Science are tenfold more mighty and colossal, a hundredfold more fierce, rapid and busy in their activity, a thousandfold more prolific in resources, weapons and instruments than ever before in recorded history. Everywhere the Mother is at work; from Her mighty and shaping hands enormous forms of Rakshasas, Asuras, Devas are leaping forth into the arena of the world. We have seen the slow but mighty rise of great empires in the West, we have seen the swift, irresistible and impetuous bounding into life of Japan. Some are Mleccha Shaktis clouded in their strength, black or blood-crimson with tamas or rajas, others are Arya Shaktis, bathed in a pure flame of renunciation and utter self-sacrifice: but all are the Mother in Her new phase, remoulding, creating. She is pouring Her spirit into the old; She is whirling into life the new.

WE IN INDIA FAIL IN ALL THINGS FOR WANT OF SHAKTI.

But in India the breath moves slowly, the afflatus is long in coming. India, the ancient mother, is indeed striving to be reborn, striving with agony and tears, but she strives in vain. What ails her, she, who is after all so vast and might be so strong? There is surely some enormous defect, something vital is wanting in us; nor is it difficult to lay our finger on the spot. We have all things else, but we are empty of strength, void of energy. We have abandoned Shakti and are therefore abandoned by Shakti. The Mother is not in our hearts, in our brains, in our arms.

The wish to be reborn we have in abundance, there is no deficiency there. How many attempts have been made, how many movements have been begun, in religion, in society, in politics! But the same fate has overtaken or is preparing to overtake them all. They flourish for a moment, then the impulse wanes, the fire dies out, and if they endure, it is only as empty shells, forms from which the Brahma has gone or in which it lies overpowered

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with tamas and inert. Our beginnings are mighty, but they have neither sequel nor fruit.

Now we are beginning in another direction; we have started a great industrial movement which is to enrich and regenerate an impoverished land. Untaught by experience, we do not perceive that this movement must go the way of all the others, unless we first seek the one essential thing, unless we acquire strength.

OUR KNOWLEDGE IS A DEAD THING FOR WANT OF SHAKTI.

Is it knowledge that is wanting? We Indians born and bred in a country where Jnana has been stored and accumulated since the race began, bear about in us the inherited gains of many thousands of years. Great giants of knowledge rise among us even today to add to the store. Our capacity has not shrunk, the edge of our intellect has not been dulled or blunted, its receptivity and flexibility are as varied as of old. But it is a dead knowledge, a burden under which we are bowed, a poison which is corroding us rather than as it should be a staff to support our feet, and a weapon in our hands; for this is the nature of all great things that when they are not used or are ill used, they turn upon the bearer and destroy him.

Our knowledge then, weighed down with a heavy load of tamas, lies under the curse of impotence and inertia. We choose to fancy indeed, now-a-days, that if we acquire Science, all will be well. Let us first ask ourselves what we have done with the knowledge we already possess, or what have those, who have already acquired Science, been able to do for India. Imitative and incapable of initiative, we have striven to copy the methods of England, and we had not the strength: we would now copy the methods of the Japanese, a still more energetic people; are we likely to succeed any better? The mighty force of knowledge which European Science bestows is a weapon for the hands of a giant, it is the mace of Bheemsen: what can a weakling do with it but crush himself in the attempt to wield it?

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OUR BHAKTI CANNOT LIVE AND WORK FOR WANT OF SHAKTI.

Is it love, enthusiasm, Bhakti that is wanting? These are ingrained in the Indian nature, but in the absence of Shakti we cannot concentrate, we cannot direct, we cannot even preserve it. Bhakti is the leaping flame, Shakti is the fuel. If the fuel is scanty how long can the fire endure?

When the strong nature, enlightened by knowledge, disciplined and given a giant's strength by Karma, lifts itself up in love and adoration to God, that is the Bhakti which endures and keeps the soul for ever united with the Divine. But the weak nature is too feeble to bear the impetus of so mighty a thing as perfect Bhakti; he is lifted up for a moment, then the flame soars up to Heaven, leaving him behind exhausted and even weaker than before. Every movement of any kind of which enthusiasm and adoration are the life, must fail and soon burn itself out so long as the human material from which it proceeds is frail and light in substance.

INDIA THEREFORE NEEDS SHAKTI ALONE.

The deeper we look, the more we shall be convinced that the one thing wanting, which we must strive to acquire before all others, is strength—strength physical, strength mental, strength moral, but above all strength spiritual which is the one inexhaustible and imperishable source of all the others. If we have strength, everything else will be added to us easily and naturally. In the absence of strength we are like men in a dream who have hands but cannot seize or strike, who have feet but cannot run.

INDIA, GROWN OLD AND DECREPIT IN WILL, HAS TO BE REBORN.

Whenever we strive to do anything, after the first rush of enthusiasm is spent, a paralysing helplessness seizes upon us. We often see in the cases of old men full of years and experience

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that the very excess of knowledge seems to have frozen their powers of action and their powers of will. When a great feeling or a great need overtakes them and it is necessary to carry out its promptings in action, they hesitate, ponder, discuss, make tentative efforts and abandon them or wait for the safest and easiest way to suggest itself, instead of taking the most direct; thus the time when it was possible and necessary to act passes away. Our race has grown just such an old man with stores of knowledge, with ability to feel and desire, but paralysed by simple sluggishness, senile timidity, senile feebleness. If India is to survive, she must be made young again. Rushing and billowing streams of energy must be poured into her; her soul must become, as it was in the old times, like the surges, vast, puissant, calm or turbulent at will, an ocean of action or of force.

INDIA CAN BE REBORN.

Many of us utterly overcome by tamas, the dark and heavy demon of inertia, are saying now-a-days that it is impossible; that India is decayed, bloodless and lifeless, too weak ever to recover; that our race is doomed to extinction. It is a foolish and idle saying. No man or nation need be weak unless he chooses, no man or nation need perish unless he deliberately chooses extinction.

WHAT IS A NATION? THE SHAKTI OF ITS MILLIONS.

For what is a nation? What is our mother-country? It is not a piece of earth, nor a figure of speech, nor a fiction of the mind. It is a mighty Shakti, composed of the Shaktis of all the millions of units that make up the nation, just as Bhawani Mahisha-Mardini sprang into being from the Shaktis of all the millions of gods assembled in one mass of force and welded into unity. The Shakti we call India, Bhawani Bharati, is the living unity of the Shaktis of three hundred millions of people; but she is inactive, imprisoned in the magic circle of tamas, the self-indulgent inertia and ignorance of her sons. To get rid of tamas we have but to wake the Brahma within.

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IT IS OUR OWN CHOICE WHETHER WE CREATE A NATION OR PERISH.

What is it that so many thousands of holy men, Sadhus and Sannyasis, have preached to us silently by their lives? What was the message that radiated from the personality of Bhagawan Ramkrishna Paramhansa? What was it that formed the kernel of the eloquence with which the lionlike heart of Vivekananda sought to shake the world? It is this that in every one of these three hundred millions of men from the Raja on his throne to the coolie at his labour, from the Brahmin absorbed in his sandhya to the Pariah walking shunned of men, GOD LIVETH. We are all gods and creators, because the energy of God is within us and all life is creation; not only the making of new forms is creation, but preservation is creation, destruction itself is creation. It rests with us what we shall create; for we are not, unless we choose, puppets dominated by Fate and Maya: we are facets and manifestations of Almighty Power.

INDIA MUST BE REBORN, BECAUSE HER REBIRTH IS DEMANDED BY THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD.

India cannot perish, our race cannot become extinct, because among all the divisions of mankind it is to India that is reserved the highest and the most splendid destiny, the most essential to the future of the human race. It is she who must send forth from herself the future religion of the entire world, the Eternal religion which is to harmonise all religion, science and philosophies and make mankind one soul. In the sphere of morality, likewise, it is her mission to purge barbarism (mlecchahood) out of humanity and to aryanise the world. In order to do this, she must first re-aryanise herself.

It was to initiate this great work, the greatest and most wonderful work ever given to a race, that Bhagawan Ramkrishna came and Vivekananda preached. If the work does not progress as it once promised to do, it is because we have once again allowed the terrible cloud of tamas to settle down on our souls

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—fear, doubt, hesitation, sluggishness. We have taken, some of us, the Bhakti which poured forth from the one and the Jnana given us by the other, but from the lack of Shakti, from the lack of Karma, we have not been able to make our Bhakti a living thing. May we yet remember that it was Kali, who is Bhawani mother of strength, whom Ramkrishna worshipped and with whom he became one.

But the destiny of India will not wait on the falterings and failings of individuals; the mother demands that men shall arise to institute her worship and make it universal.

TO GET STRENGTH WE MUST ADORE THE MOTHER OF STRENGTH.

Strength then and again strength and yet more strength is the need of our race. But if it is strength we desire, how shall we gain it if we do not adore the Mother of strength? She demands worship not for Her own sake, but in order that She may help us and give Herself to us. This is no fantastic idea, no superstition but the ordinary law of the universe. The gods cannot, if they would, give themselves unasked. Even the Eternal comes not unaware upon man. Every devotee knows by experience that we must turn to Him and desire and adore Him before the Divine Spirit pours in its ineffable beauty and ecstasy upon the soul. What is true of the Eternal, is true also of Her who goes forth from Him.

RELIGION THE TRUE PATH.

Those who, possessed with western ideas, look askance at any return to the old sources of energy may well consider a few fundamental facts.

THE EXAMPLE OF JAPAN.

I. There is no instance in history of a more marvellous and sudden up-surging of strength in a nation than modern Japan. All sorts of theories had been started to account for the uprising,

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but now intellectual Japanese are telling us what were the fountains of that mighty awakening, the sources of that inexhaustible strength. They were drawn from religion. It was the Vedantic teachings of Oyomei and the recovery of Shintoism with its worship of the national Shakti of Japan in the image and person of the Mikado that enabled the little island empire to wield the stupendous weapons of western knowledge and science as lightly and invincibly as Arjun wielded the Gandiv.

INDIA'S GREATER NEED OF SPIRITUAL REGENERATION.

II. India's need of drawing from the fountains of religion is far greater than was ever Japan's; for the Japanese had only to revitalise and perfect a strength that already existed. We have to create strength where it did not exist before; we have to change our natures, and become new men with new hearts, to be born again. There is no scientific process, no machinery for that. Strength can only be created by drawing it from the internal and inexhaustible reservoirs of the Spirit, from that Adya-Shakti of the Eternal which is the fountain of all new existence. To be born again means nothing but to revive the Brahma within us, and that is a spiritual process,—no effort of the body or the intellect can compass it.

RELIGION THE PATH NATURAL TO THE NATIONAL MIND.

III. All great awakenings in India, all her periods of mightiest and most varied vigour have drawn their vitality from the fountain-heads of some deep religious awakening. Wherever the religious awakening has been complete and grand, the national energy it has created has been gigantic and puissant; wherever the religious movement has been narrow or incomplete, the national movement has been broken, imperfect or temporary. The persistence of this phenomenon is proof that it is ingrained in the temperament of the race. If you try other and foreign methods,

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we shall either gain our end with tedious slowness, painfully and imperfectly, or we shall not attain it at all. Why abandon the plain way which God and the Mother have marked out for you to choose faint and devious paths of your own treading?

THE SPIRIT WITHIN IS THE TRUE SOURCE OF STRENGTH.

IV. The Brahma within, the one and indivisible ocean of spiritual force is that from which all life material and mental is drawn. This is beginning to be as much recognised by leading western thinkers as it was from the old days by the East. If it be so, then spiritual energy is the source of all other strength. There are the fathomless fountain-heads, the deep and inexhaustible sources. The shallow surface springs are easier to reach, but they soon run dry. Why not then go deep instead of scratching the surface? The result will repay the labour.

THREE THINGS NEEDFUL.

We need three things answering to three fundamental laws.

I. BHAKTI—THE TEMPLE OF THE MOTHER.

We cannot get strength unless we adore the Mother of strength.

We will therefore build a temple to the white Bhawani, the mother of strength, the Mother of India; and we will build it in a place far from the contamination of modern cities and as yet little trodden by man, in a high and pure air steeped in calm and energy. This temple will be the centre from which Her worship is to flow over the whole country; for there worshipped among the hills, She will pass like fire into the brains and hearts of Her worshippers. This also is what the Mother has commanded.

II. KARMA—A NEW ORDER OF BRAHMACHARINS.

Adoration will be dead and ineffective unless it is transmuted into Karma.

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We will therefore have a math with a new Order of Karma-Yogins attached to the temple, men who have renounced all in order to work for the Mother. Some may, if they choose, be complete Sannyasins, most will be Brahmacharins who will return to the grihasthasram when their allotted work is finished; but all must accept renunciation.

WHY? FOR TWO REASONS:—

(1) Because it is only in proportion as we put from us the pre-occupation of bodily desires and interests, the sensual gratifications, lusts, longings, indolences of the material world, that we can return to the ocean of spiritual force within us.

(2) Because for the development of Shakti, entire concentration is necessary; the mind must be devoted entirely to its aim as a spear is hurled to its mark; if other cares and longings distract the mind, the spear will be carried out from its straight course and miss the target. We need a nucleus of men in whom the Shakti is developed to its uttermost extent, in whom it fills every corner of the personality and overflows to fertilise the earth. These, having the fire of Bhawani in their hearts and brains, will go forth and carry the flame to every nook and cranny of our land.

III. JNANA—THE GREAT MESSAGE.

Bhakti and Karma cannot be perfect and enduring unless they are based upon Jnana.

The Brahmacharins of the Order will therefore be taught to fill their souls with knowledge and base their work upon it as upon a rock. What shall be the basis of their knowledge? What but the great so-aham, the mighty formula of the Vedanta, the ancient gospel which has yet to reach the heart of the nation, the knowledge which when vivified by Karma and Bhakti delivers man out of all fear and all weakness.

स्वल्पमप्यस्य धर्मस्य त्रायते महतो भयात् ।

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THE MESSAGE OF THE MOTHER.

When, therefore, you ask who is Bhawani the mother, She herself answers you, "I am the Infinite Energy which streams forth from the Eternal in the world and Eternal in yourselves. I am the Mother of the Universe, the Mother of the Worlds, and for you who are children of the Sacred land, aryabhumi, made of her clay and reared by her sun and winds, I am Bhawani Bharati, Mother of India."

Then if you ask why we should erect a temple to Bhawani the mother, hear Her answer, "Because I have commanded it and because by making a centre for the future religion, you will be furthering the immediate will of the Eternal and storing up merit which will make you strong in this life and great in another. You will be helping to create a nation, to consolidate an age, to aryanise a world. And that nation is your own, that age is the age of yourselves and your children, that world is no fragment of land bounded by seas and hills, but the whole earth with her teeming millions."

Come then, hearken to the call of the Mother. She is already in our hearts waiting to manifest Herself, waiting to be worshipped,—inactive because the God in us is concealed by tamas, troubled by Her inactivity, sorrowful because Her children will not call on Her to help them. You who feel Her stirring within you, fling off the black veil of self, break down the imprisoning walls of indolence, help Her each as you feel impelled, with your bodies or with your intellect or with your speech or with your wealth or with your prayers and worship, each man according to his capacity. Draw not back, for against those who were called and heard Her not, She may well be wroth in the day of Her coming; but to those who help Her advent even a little, how radiant with beauty and kindness will be the face of their Mother!

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Bhawani Mandir: Appendix

The work and rules of the new Order of Sannyasis will be somewhat as follows

GENERAL RULES.

1) All who undertake the life of Brahmacharya for the Mother, will have to vow themselves to Her service for four years, after which they will be free to continue the work or return to family life.

2) All money received by them in the Mother's name will go to the Mother's Service. For themselves they will be allowed to receive shelter and their meals, when necessary, and nothing more.

3) Whatever they may earn for themselves, e.g. by the publication of books etc., they must give at least half of it to the service of the Mother.

4) They will observe entire obedience to the Head of the Order and his one or two assistants in all things connected with the work or with their religious life.

5) They will observe strictly the discipline and rules of achar and purity, bodily and mental, prescribed by the Heads of the Order.

6) They will be given periods for rest or for religious improvement during which they will stop at the math, but the greater part of the year they will spend in work outside. This rule will apply to all except the few necessary for the service of the Temple and those required for the central direction of the work.

7) There will be no gradations of rank among the workers and none must seek for distinction or mere personal fame, but practise strength and self-effacement.

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II. WORK FOR THE PEOPLE.

8) Their chief work will be that of mass instruction and help to the poor and ignorant.

9) This they will strive to effect in various ways—

1) Lectures and demonstrations suited to an uneducated intelligence.

2) Classes and nightly schools.

3) Religious teachings.

4) Nursing the sick.

5) Conducting works of charity.

6) Whatever other good work their hands may find to do and the Order approves.

III. WORKS FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS.

10) They will undertake, according as they may be directed, various works of public utility in the big towns and elsewhere connected especially with the education and religious life and instruction of the middle classes, as well as with other public needs.

IV. WORK WITH THE WEALTHY CLASSES.

11) They will approach the zamindars, landholders and rich men generally, and endeavour—

1) To promote sympathy between the zamindars and the peasants and heal all discords.

2) To create the link of a single and living religious spirit and a common passion for one great ideal between all classes.

3) To turn the minds of rich men to works of public beneficence and charity to those in their neighbourhood independent of the hope of reward and official distinction.

V. GENERAL WORK FOR THE COUNTRY.

12) As soon as funds permit, some will be sent to foreign

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countries to study lucrative arts and manufactures.

13) They will be as Sannyasis during their period of study, never losing hold of their habits of purity and self-abnegation.

14) On their return they will establish with the aid of the Order, factories and workshops, still living the life of Sannyasis and devoting all their profits to the sending of more and more such students to foreign countries.

15) Others will be sent to travel through various countries on foot, inspiring by their lives, behaviour and conversation, sympathy and love for the Indian people in the European nations and preparing the way for their acceptance of Aryan ideals.

After the erection and consecration of the Temple, the development of the work of the Order will be pushed on as rapidly as possible or as the support and sympathy of the public allows. With the blessing of the Mother this will not fail us.

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Ethics East and West

[..... if the] natural disparity which is so confidently asserted by Europeans and reasserted in echo by not a few Anglicised or revolted Hindus, be a truth and not a fiction of racial pride, the national movement in India becomes a blunder and a solecism. For this movement proceeds on two assertions which the European position directly traverses, the natural equality of the Asiatic to the European, which justifies us in aspiring to liberty and the control of our own destinies and the immense superiority of our own religion, ethics and social ideals to the Western. In traffic with the West we seek only to import the scientific knowledge, the mechanical apparatus of war and communication and the method of efficient organisation in Government which have made it so eminently formidable, but we wish to bar out, if may be, all that disease of the intellect & social constitution born of individualistic materialism which makes it so eminently miserable. If we are right, our spiritual and moral strength without which material greatness cannot endure lies in the use and development of our own religion and ideals. Otherwise, our whole aspiration is an unhealthy dream and there is no reason in Nature why we should not remain for ever the subjects and servants of European races with an occasional change of masters as our sole relief in the long monotony of servitude. It is therefore essential for us to know the truth. In the following pages I have sought to provide the materials for a correct judgment, aiming chiefly at a right presentation of the spirit and truth of our ancient philosophy, religion and ethics, which have hitherto been presented to the world by European expositors who show at every step their imperfect and often

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utterly erroneous understanding of what they pretend to explain. It is necessary to understand aright before we praise or condemn; and the ethical aspect of Hinduism is like everything Hindu so much a part and a thing of itself that it is only those of whose blood & bone it has become a part who can be trusted to put it before others from a right perspective and in the true proportions. Only then can the issue between the East and West be justly decided.

CHAPTER I: THE ETHICAL BASIS IN EUROPE

Morality is like all else in this world of perceptions, phenomenal in its nature; it is neither eternal nor unchanging, but depends on two things, that in which it lives & moves and the conditions that surround & work upon its receptacle. It is true that certain virtues, purity, humanity, truth, self-sacrifice are at present vaguely recognized as moral standards by all civilized peoples; but they were not recognized at all times & places in the past and there is no guarantee that they will be recognized at all times and places in the future. Moreover the definite meaning and extent of these names and the limits within which men are willing to honour them in practical life, varies immensely in different countries. The standard of morality is determined not by the profession of the community, but by the actual though unwritten code of actions which the community as a whole strives to practise and which, even if it does not succeed in attaining, it honestly approves & honours in those who do attain it. Indeed the extraordinary variations & flat contradiction of the ethical standard as determined by place and time, has become so much a commonplace that it is hardly worth while to dwell upon it. The no less extraordinary variations and flat contradictions of the ethical standard as practised in the same place and the same time, have not received so much attention, and yet they are of even greater psychological value.

Determined by time and place. All things move indeed in space and time and are to a certain extent conditioned by them;

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but they are not determined by these mental abstractions. The determining forces are always two, the adhara or receptacle or field and the conditions which act on the receptacle. The field of morality is triple, the individual, the collective mind of the community, race, nation or body of nations that profess it and the collective mind of all humanity, the latter attaining especial importance in these days when all parts of the world are in some sort of touch with each other. The conditions which act on it are the various physical and other influences which have acted or are now acting on the individual and collective mind and most of all its spiritual history.

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Resolution at a Swadeshi Meeting

24-September-1905

[The first resolution of the meeting, proposed by Nagar Seth Haribhakti, was: "Kaka Joshi started the Swadeshi movement, but due to several reasons it became lifeless. Now however it is more alive than ever as a result of the life-giving medicine the Bengali physicians have given it."]

The second resolution was proposed by Principal Aravind Ghose. It ran: "Kaka Joshi's efforts proved unsuccessful because the conditions were not favourable at that time. The present wave of support for the movement is very strong, and we should make comprehensive efforts to prevent the wave from receding. We must ensure that the movement is sustained." Such was the content of the second resolution put forward by Principal Ghose in his fluent English. The resolution was seconded by Seth Chimanlal Samal Becharwala in Gujarati, and by Rao Bahadur Sarangapani.

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A Sample-Room for Swadeshi Articles

Objects

1) I propose that a permanent sample-room should be maintained by the Baroda Industrial Association in its own offices, fulfilling the following purposes

(1) an ocular demonstration to the public and the merchants of the number and kind of goods they can have from their own country;

(2) a standing advertisement of Swadeshi articles procurable in the local market;

(3) a register of information available to all interested in the industrial development of the country.

Means of providing the Sample-room at a minimum expense

2) The sample-room should be begun on a modest scale and gradually enlarged in its scope. The Sub-Committee should see that no means of saving expense should be spared consistently with the usefulness of the institution.

3) The saving of expense may be effected in various ways.

In the first place the Committee should at first confine itself only to those articles which are in daily or common use and therefore essential to the needs or comfort of the general population.

4) Having fixed on the kind of articles to which it will limit itself, the Committee will first inquire what goods, e.g. clothes etc. can be had through the local merchants and obtain samples from them gratis. As the sample-room will be in its

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secondary character a free advertisement for the merchants, they will probably be glad enough to seize the opportunity.

5) Again the Committee should draw up a circular (typewritten) stating the objects of the sample-room, pointing out that it will be a free advertisement introducing all goods sent there to the local market, and inviting manufacturers to send samples. This announcement may also be made in the local papers as well as one or two widely circulated journals outside. The circular may, if necessary, be franked by responsible persons holding good positions in order to assure the manufacturers etc. of the bona-fides of the institution. If so assured, they will probably be quite willing to secure an advertisement by sending their samples gratis; for it must be remembered that the goods will be mostly of a common order and therefore cheap.

6) Still farther to lighten the burden, the Association may approach the authorities to make an exception as to Jakat in the case of articles sent for the sample-room and certified by responsible officers of the Association.

7) In the case of samples required which are not sent by the manufacturer on the general invitation, a special request may be made to him to afford this facility to the Association.

8) Only in case these methods fail, the Committee will be entitled in case of necessity to purchase samples. In this way the cost of providing the sample-room will be kept at a minimum.

9) It will be the business of the Information Committee to see that the sample-room is kept up to date.

10) Outside the limits laid down in Para 3, the Committee will gladly accept samples but will not buy them.

11) This rule however should not prevent the extension of the scope of the sample-room when funds & opportunity permit.

Establishment

12) The establishment of the sample-room should consist of at least one clerk and one servant.

N.B. The undersigned hopes after some time (if the scheme be adopted) to provide a clerk either gratis or for a minimum

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pay covering only his food and lodging, but until then or failing this, he is ready to pay at least Rs 12 monthly for the purpose.

13) The sample-room will remain constantly under the inspection of the General Secretaries and especially of the Secretary for the Information Committee.

Means for the Better Fulfilment of the First Object

14) For the better fulfilment of object (1) in Para 1, the samples should be carefully classified by the Committee and arranged on a clear system, labels & numbers with the descriptive name of the article, its ordinary price and place of production affixed.

(2) Any considerable changes in price may occasionally be entered, but the Committee will not hold itself responsible for accuracy in this respect.

Means for the ditto of the Second Object

15) For the better fulfilment of object (2) the following arrangement may be made

A small placard may be affixed to goods procurable [incomplete]

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On the Barisal Proclamation

07-November-1905

[.....] nettle firmly in the hope that prompt measures might crash if not root out the growing evil. With a Fraser and a Fuller holding the bureaucratic sceptre there could be little doubt which of the two alternatives would recommend itself to the authorities. Sir Andrew Fraser, hampered with the traditions of legality and bureaucratic formalism, has begun cautiously, thundering loudly but sparing the lightning flash. Mr. Fuller, violent, rude & truculent in character and accustomed to the autocracy of a non-regulated province, has rushed like a mad bull at the obnoxious object; his violence may or may not temporarily defeat itself by compelling the Government of India or the Secretary of State to intervene, but even should this happen it will make little difference. The policy of repression is a necessity to the Government and will only be foregone, if the national leaders on their side desist from the new Nationalism.

This being the situation, what must be the attitude of the nation in the face of this crisis in its destinies? The result of the first violent collision between the opposing armies of despotism and liberty, has not been encouraging to the lovers of freedom. No Bengali can read the account of the interview between Mr. Fuller and the Barisal leaders, without a blush of shame for himself and his nation. A headstrong and violent man, presuming insufferably on the high position to which an inscrutable Providence has suffered him to climb, summons the leaders of a spirited community, men of culture, worth and dignity, strong in the trust and support of the people, and after subjecting them to insults of an unprecedented grossness compels them at the point of the bludgeon to withdraw a public appeal which their position

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as leaders had made it their mere duty to publish and circulate. What ought these men to have done in reply? Surely they should have repelled the insults with a calm and simple dignity, or if that would not serve, with a self-assertion as haughty, if less violent than the self-assertion of the unmannerly official before them, and to the demand for the withdrawal of their appeal they should have returned a plain and quiet negative. And if as a result Mr. Fuller were immediately to send them to the prison, or the whipping post, or the gallows itself, what difference would that make to their duty as public men & national leaders? But the Barisal leaders instead submitted as meekly as rebuked & beaten schoolboys to a hectoring pedagogue cane in hand. The citizens of Rungpur showed at least a firmer spirit.

Nevertheless the Barisal leaders have strong excuses for their failure of nerve. Decades of selfish ease & comfort, of subservience to officialdom, of traditional meekness & docility have taken the strong fibre out of the middle-class Bengali and left him a mass of mere softness and pliability. Out of such material champions of liberty cannot be made in a single day, nor has the national movement as yet reached that stage of high pressure surcharged with electricity & fiery vitality when weaklings are turned into giants and the timid into martyrs & heroes. Confronted with the formidable & frowning aspect of Mr. Fuller, deafened with the thunders of this self-important Godling, cut off from the accustomed inspiration of cheering crowds, what wonder if the citizens of Barisal were browbeaten, [. . .] & cowed into submission.

Moreover, the Calcutta leaders are not without blame for their failure of courage. It should never have been left to an out of the way township like Barisal to issue the proclamations which have awaked the Fullerian thunders; that was the duty of the leaders of the nation in the metropolis. A small locality cannot be strong enough to fight the battles of the nation unaided, and if local leaders feel themselves in the critical moment, too weak & isolated to resist violent oppression, they are to be more pitied than blamed. We are suffering for our defective organisation. Had the Calcutta chiefs organized these local

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Committees throughout the land before the Partition became an accomplished fact, had Barisal felt that it had not only the enthusiasm but the organized strength of the nation behind it, the present situation would have soon been made impossible.

Enough of the past; let us turn to our duty in the future. The one thing that would be impossible and intolerable is any kind of submission to the Fullerian policy. Whatever form of public activity has been stopped by the threat of the Gurkha rifles, must be recontinued. If the Barisal proclamation has been withdrawn, it must be reissued and this time not by the Barisal leaders to their district but by the national leaders in Calcutta to every district, town and village whether in West, East or North Bengal & in order to constitute the Barisal committees, let Babu Surendranath Banerji go down in person aided by Mr. A. Chowdhury & Babu Bipin Chundra Pal, who, if summoned by Mr. Fuller or any Government official, shall refuse to have any dealings with them, until the former shall have publicly apologised for his disgraceful & ungentlemanly conduct and given guarantees against its recurrence. We will see whether even Mr. Fuller in his madness, will dare to touch these sacred heads guarded as they are by the love & trust of a nation of 40 millions. And if to punish this popular self-assertion, the rifles of England's mercenaries be indeed called into play, if Indian blood be shed, with those who shed it shall rest the guilt and on those who commanded it shall fall the Divine Vengeance. It will not come to that, for Heaven has not as yet deprived the British Government so utterly of its reason as to command or the British nation as to condone such an outrage. But the possibility of it should have no terrors for men vindicating their legal rights & the small measure of freedom the laws have allowed to them. The words Bande Mataram must be written—printed, would be better,—on every door in Barisal. Public meetings must be held as before & if they are dispersed by the police, the people must assemble in every compound where there is room for even fifty people to stand and record an oath never to submit or crouch down before the oppressor.

The actions of Mr. Fuller have throughout been characterized by the most cynical violence & disregard of legality. Illegally

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he has terrorised the people of Barisal, illegally he has abolished the right of public meeting, illegally he has banned the singing of the national anthem and sent emissaries to erase its opening words from the doors of private houses, illegally he has forbidden organisation for a lawful object. Let the authorities remember this, that when a Government breaks the Law, by their very act the people are absolved from the obligation of obeying the Law. But let the people on their side so long as they are permitted to do so abstain from aggressive violence, let them study carefully to put their oppressors always in the wrong; but from no legitimate kind of passive resistance should they shrink. This much their Mother demands from them. For what use to cry day and night Adoration to the Mother, if we have not the courage to suffer for the Mother?

It is a sweet & noble thing to die for motherland; and if that supreme happiness be denied to us, it is no small privilege to suffer illegal violence, arbitrary imprisonment & cruel oppression for her sake.

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Darkness in Light

20-August-1906

We regret to find our contemporary Light surpassing the most moderate of the moderatists in the timidity of its aspirations. "What the most ambitious of Indians have dared to hope for is that a day may come, it may be a century hence, when in the domestic affairs of their country they will enjoy some measure of freedom from autocratic control." Here is an inspiring ideal indeed! Hail, Holy Light! thou art indeed a fit candle to illumine a somnolent constitutionalist's repose!

Our Rip Van Winkles

20-August-1906

The development of sounder political ideas and the birth and growth of a new national energy has been so swift and wonderful that it is not surprising to find a number of our older politicians quite left behind by the rising tide. Stranded on their desert islands of antiquated political ideas, they look forlornly over the heaving tumult around them and strive piteously to imagine themselves still in their old carefully sheltered arena of mimic political strife and safe, cheap, and profitable patriotism. But the walls of the arena have been washed away, its very ground is being obliterated, and a new world of stern reality and unsparing struggle is rapidly taking its place. In the fierce heat of that conflict all shams must wither away and all empty dreams be dissolved. The issue has been fairly put between the Indian people and the alien bureaucracy. "Destroy or thou shalt be destroyed," and the issue will have to be fought out, not "it may be a century hence," but now, in the next two or three decades.

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We cannot leave the problem for posterity to settle nor shift our proper burdens on to the shoulders of our grandchildren. But our Rip Van Winkles persist in talking and writing as if Partition and Boycott and Sir Bampfylde Fuller had never been.

Indians Abroad

20-August-1906

India to hand this mail laments the exclusion of Indians from the representative system on which the new constitution in the Transvaal is to be based and plaintively recalls the professions and promises of the British Government at the time of the Boer war. The saintly simplicity of India grows daily more and more wearisome to us. Everybody who knew anything at all about politics understood at the time that those professions were merely a diplomatic move and the promises made were never meant to be carried out. We see no reason to lament what was always foreseen. What we do regret and blame is the spirit of Indians in the Transvaal who seek escape from the oppression they suffer under by ignoble methods similar in spirit to those practised by the constitutionalists in this country. The more the Transvaal Indians are kicked and insulted, the more loyal they seem to become. After their splendid services in the Transvaal war had been rewarded by the grossest ingratitude, they had no business to offer their services again in the recent Natal rebellion. By their act they associated themselves with the colonists in their oppression of the natives of the country and have only themselves to thank if they also are oppressed by the same narrow and arrogant colonial spirit. Their eagerness to dissociate themselves from the Africans is shown in Dr. Abdurrahman's letter quoted by India. All such methods are as useless as they are unworthy. So long as the Indian nation at home does not build itself into a strong and self-governing people, they can expect nothing from Englishmen in their colonies except oppression and contumely.

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Officials on the Fall of Fuller

20-August-1906

The seriousness of the blow which has fallen on the bureaucracy by the downfall of Shayesta Khan can be measured by the spite and fury which it has excited in such public organs of officialdom as the Englishman and the Pioneer. The letter of I.C.S. to the Pioneer which we extract in another column is a more direct and very striking indication of the feelings which it has aroused especially among the colleagues of the deposed proconsul. The Anglo-Indian press has for the most part grasped the fact that the resignation of Sir Bampfylde Fuller was a victory for the popular forces in Eastern Bengal. Had the new province allowed itself to be crushed by the repressive fury of Shayesta Khan or answered it only with petitions, like a sheep bleating under the knife of the butcher, bureaucracy would have triumphed. But determined repression met by determined resistance finally made Sir Bampfylde's position untenable. Neither Lord Minto who from the first supported the Fullerian policy nor Mr. Morley who has done his best to shield and protect the petty tyrant in his worst vagaries, deserves the angry recriminations with which they are being assailed. They have both acted in the interests of the bureaucracy and if they have made an error of judgment in throwing Sir Bampfylde to the wolves, it is because the choice put before them was a choice of errors. By maintaining their lieutenant they would have helped the revolutionary forces in the country to grow; by sacrificing him they have given fresh vigour and self-confidence to the people in their resistance to the Partition. There comes a time in all such struggles when whatever the Government may do, it cannot fail to weaken itself and strengthen the people. Such a time has come in India and all the rage of Anglo-India cannot alter the inevitable march of destiny.

Cow Killing: An Englishman's Amusements in Jalpaiguri

20-August-1906

A correspondent writes to us from Jalpaiguri;—"An Englishman, a forester, at Jalpaiguri has shot three cows, one of them

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belonging to the school Head Pandit. The open garden of the forester is near certain bungalows adjoining the school, and it appears that the cows strayed into the garden, whereupon the Saheb calmly proceeded to shoot them. This he did laughing and in spite of the remonstrance of another Englishman, his friend. On the Head Pandit consulting his neighbours, he was told to consider himself lucky that it was the cows and not he whom the Saheb elected to shoot. Perceiving the force of this remark and apprehensive about his service, the Pandit has swallowed and is trying to digest the loss and the mortification. I hear that when the bodies of the cows were being taken away, the Saheb was dancing with exultation."

We publish the above extraordinary story of wanton oppression with reservation, but Anglo-Indian vagaries of the kind are too common for us quite to disbelieve it. If it is a fact, we trust the sufferer will think better of it and seek redress; the fear of swift punishment is the only motive force that can keep these vagaries in check and every Indian who submits is partly guilty of the insults and oppressions inflicted on his fellow countrymen.

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Schools for Slaves

27-August-1906

Mr. John Morley from his seat in Parliament professes Liberal principles as the guiding star of the Government of India; in India itself the various Governments openly and deliberately enforce reaction. The head master of the Thana High School punished certain students for forming a Debating Club in which they discussed Swadeshi. Several of the guardians insisted on their boys vindicating their natural rights, whereupon the head master promptly suspended them. The guardians, following strict constitutionalist principles, appealed to the Bombay Government; but as was to be expected the Government upheld the head master's decision. In the course of its judgment the Government lays down the principle that in all Government and Government-aided schools the head master (in other words the Government) is to have full control over the conduct of the pupils out of as well as in the school premises and school hours. Conduct, be it remembered, includes political talk and opinions. A more nakedly tyrannical usurpation of authority it would be difficult to imagine. One thing is clear; that there is no longer any room in the Government schools for any but slaves and the sons of slaves.

By the Way

27-August-1906

It is sad to watch the steady intellectual degeneration of our once vigorous contemporary the Indian Mirror. Commenting on the formation of Labour Unions, the Mirror advises the promoters to make the suppression of strikes the principal object of their

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efforts! Certainly, the strike is the last weapon in the hands of labour and should not be used as the first. But the idea of organising Labour Unions to suppress strikes, is a masterpiece of unconscious humour. We shall next hear that Mahomedan Educational Conferences should be organised to discourage Mahomedan education, that the anti-circular boys should make it their chief object to put down picketing, and perhaps that a League is being formed with Babu Narendranath Sen at its head to "suppress" the Indian Mirror.

We do not think the amazing timidity of our political leaders can be paralleled in any other country in the world. Is a National Congress established? Its object, one would think, must be to concentrate the strength of the nation and fight its way to power. Oh by no means, it is only to advise and assist the Government! Is a National Council of Education instituted? Of course, it has arisen to rival and replace the alien-ruled University. Not at all; not at all; it is meant not to stand in opposition to but to supplement the old University! Does Labour rise in its strength and band itself into formidable combinations? Their work will be, then, to resist the greed and heartlessness of Capital and vindicate the claims of the toiler to just treatment and a man's wages for a man's work. O God forbid! These Unions are rather meant to suppress strikes and establish kindly relations between the employers and the employed! Are we, after all, one wonders sometimes, a nation of cowards and old women?

The excuse usually urged for these pitiful insincerities is that it is all diplomacy. The diplomacy of grown-up children! The diplomacy of the ostrich hiding its head in the sand? What a poor idea these "leaders" must have formed of the political intelligence of the British Government and of Englishmen generally, if they think they can be deceived by such puerile evasions. Bureaucracy and Anglo-India take advantage of these professions and laugh in their sleeves. Meanwhile the country loses the inspiration of

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great ideals, the exaltation of frank and glorious conflict, the divine impulse that only comes to those who know they are battling bravely and openly for the freedom of their country, not to men who cringe to the enemy and lie and palter with their consciences.

Truth and bold straight dealing we believe to be not only our noblest but our wisest policy in our struggle with the alien. Our leaders have no faith in the nation; they believe it is weak and impotent, and shufflings, evasions and shallow insincerities are the weapons of the weak. We, for our part, believe in the immense strength of the nation and demand that our leaders shall bring us face to face with the enemy. Still if they must have diplomacy let them give some diplomacy worth the name. If the shades of Cavour and Bismarck have leisure to listen to such senilities, what a smile of immortal contempt must pass over their lips as they watch the "diplomacy" of our leaders!

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The Mirror and Mr. Tilak

28-August-1906

The Indian Mirror, which is now the chief ally of Government among the Congress organs in Bengal, has chosen, naturally enough, to fall foul of Mr. Tilak. Our contemporary, it appears, has heard that some people propose to put forward Mr. Tilak's name as President of the next Congress, and it hastens to point out how extremely distasteful the idea is to all thoughtful and enlightened men, that is to say, to all whose views agree with the Mirror's. Mr. Tilak, we learn, has seriously offended our contemporary by giving honour to Mr. Bhopatkar on his release from jail; his speeches on the occasion of the Shivaji festival were displeasing to the thoughtful and enlightened men who congregate in the office of the Indian Mirror; and to sum up the whole matter, he is a man of extreme views and without "tact". Ergo, he is no fit man for the presidential chair of the Congress.

It is interesting to learn on this unimpeachable authority what are the qualifications which the moderate and loyalist mind demands in a President of the "National" Congress. It is not, apparently, the acknowledged leader of one of the greatest Indian races who can aspire to that post; it is a man of "tact",—one, in other words, who does not like to offend the authorities. It is not the great protagonist and champion of Swadeshi in Western India; it is a man of moderate views: one, let us say, who dare not look Truth in the face and speak out boldly what he thinks. It is not the one man whom the whole Hindu community in Western India delights to honour, from Peshawar to Kolhapur and from Bombay to our own borders; it is one who will not talk about Shivaji and Bhavani—only about Mahatmas. It is not the man who has suffered and denied

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himself for his country's sake and never abased his courage nor bowed his head under the most crushing persecution; it is one who by refusing to honour similar courage in others, dishonours the country for which they have suffered.

If this is the creed of our contemporary and those whose opinions it "mirrors", it is not the creed of the country at large. With the exception of a fast-dwindling minority of Anglophiles the whole of India has learned to honour the name of the great Mahratta leader and patriot. His social and religious views may not agree with those of the "enlightened", but we have yet to learn that the Congress platform is sacred to advanced social reformers, that the profession of the Hindu religion is a bar to leadership in its ranks. Mr. Tilak's only other offence is the courage and boldness of his views and his sturdiness in holding by them. He has dared to go to jail and honour those who follow his example,—the bold bad man! And yet we seem to have somehow or other a dim recollection of a venerable Congress leader named Babu Narendranath Sen figuring prominently at a meeting in which men and boys who had gone to jail for resisting the Government, were honoured and saluted as national heroes. Evidently we have been under an error! Evidently our contemporary is at heart a favourer of the doctrine of self-help and action. It is talking and writing against the Government that he condemns, but to act against the Government, rebellion against constituted authorities has Babu Narendranath's full approval. Wearing the outward guise of a loyalist, he is at heart revolutionary. Otherwise would he have presided at the 7th of August celebration and countenanced the raising of the national flag? Now, at last, we understand the policy of the Mirror.

Whether loyalism likes it or not, Mr. Tilak is now the leader of the Deccan, a man whom twenty millions look up to as their chief and head. If Mr. Mehta is the "uncrowned King" of Bombay City, Mr. Tilak is the uncrowned King of all Maharashtra. The attempt to exclude such a man from his rightful place and influence in the counsels of the nation, can only recoil on its authors.

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Leaders in Council

28-August-1906

The conference held in the Land-holders Association on Sunday seems to have been very select in its composition, the organisers confining themselves mostly to staunch congressmen or those who might be supposed to hold fast by Congress views. It must have been a disagreeable surprise to them to find that even in this small circle a strong opposition was offered to the renewal of a petitioning policy. Babu Motilal Ghose could not be excluded and the views of this veteran leader on the question of action versus resolution are well-known. But Babu Motilal was backed up by strong voices from the Mofussil, and we understand that it was only by the old plea of its being the very last time, that the conference was persuaded to agree to something in the shape of a memorial. We know that "last time" well. It was the very last time on the occasion of the Town Hall; it was the very last time at Barisal; and now again this long-lived old friend of ours crops up like the clown of the pantomime with his eternal smirk and his eternal "Here I am." Our leaders resemble English theatrical managers, when their audiences grow small. They declare that today is the last night of the piece; next day it becomes the very last night; then it is absolutely the last night, and so on till it is absolutely quite the very very last, last night of all. Meanwhile audiences increase and the shillings pour in.

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Loyalty and Disloyalty in East Bengal

30-August-1906

The Englishman and those who are evidently anxious to set the machinery of relentless state prosecutions against the leaders of the present national movement in this province, need not take so much trouble to prove that there is considerable disaffection and disloyalty in East Bengal which ought at once to be put down with a strong hand. Our contemporary must be far more simple-minded than what one should expect him to be, judging both from his general education and experience and his position as an intelligent observer and critic of current affairs, if he ever thought that there could be any real affection and loyalty to an alien despotism, such as the present Government in this country undoubtedly is, in the minds of the subject populations in India. Lord Curzon once declared that though differing in colour and culture, the Indians were as much human as the Britishers, and had the same sentiments and susceptibilities that the British people had. If the Englishman and his friends believe in this common humanity of the Indian, they have simply to place themselves mentally in the position of their "native fellow-subjects", to realise the kind of affection and loyalty for the present Government that can ever be felt by the people of this country. Indeed, loyalty as a feeling of personal love and regard for the sovereign is an extinct virtue in civilisation, and, if it is not found in countries where the sovereign belongs to the people, and lives and stands among them as the head of their State and the fountain of all social honour, and where the people always participate in his glory, his magnificence and his wealth,—each according to his status and qualification,—how much more rare must it be in a country like India whose sovereign belongs

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to a distant country and an alien race, who professes an alien religion, who is not related to the people by any ties of tradition or past historic associations, and in the glories and prerogatives of whose throne, as well as in the wealth and magnificence of whose empire, these people have neither lot nor part. To believe the barest possibility of any true loyalty in India is really to take the Indians to be very much less than human. But, in truth, nobody ever honestly believed in it. Loyalty has ever been a mere convenient tie in this country—convenient to the ruler because the reputation for profound loyalty of the Indian people keeps foreign enemies away; convenient to the ruled because like charity it covereth a multitude of political sins. But in truth no one ever really believed in this much-proclaimed virtue. No Englishman ever honestly believed in the truth of it. No Indian ever cherished it honestly himself. Both the rulers and the ruled have been playing at blind man's buff all these years with this great civic virtue, each seeking to make some political capital out of it.

That the British Government in India never set a two-pence value on the loyalty of their Indian subjects,—though they are always anxious to proclaim it from the housetops, as a magnificent charm to keep away the evil-eye—is proved by the entire history of their past transactions with us. The Arms Act surely does not prove England's faith in India's loyalty. The Frenchman, the German, the American, nay, even the Negro and the Hottentot,—indeed every foreigner can possess arms and bear them in India without a licence; the man who belongs to the country and who is most interested in its prosperity and peace, alone cannot do so. The systematic exclusion of the people of the land, however qualified they may be, from all positions of exceptional trust and responsibility in what ought, by the law of God and nature alike, to be their own Government, surely does not prove that English statesmen ever honestly believed in the allegiance of the Indian people to their rule. The methods of state-regulated education, which carefully eschew every training or text book or instruction that is calculated to quicken any genuine love of freedom or any noble patriotism in the pupils; the extreme anxiety of the authorities to train the youths of this

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country in habits of gentleness and subordination, while in their own country every form of manliness and even rowdyism as long as it does not strike against the very soul of social and civic orders are not only tolerated, but frequently encouraged by the leaders of public opinion and the custodians of public morals; the denial of the commonest right of free citizenship,—the right of free participation in public meetings having for their object the reform of the Administration,—to the commonest of public servants; the crusade against every form of patriotic efforts on the part of the people, such as are calculated to inspire them with devotion to their nation, all these go distinctly to prove at what value the much proclaimed loyalty of the people of this country is really rated by their foreign masters. The fact really is that loyalty in the sense in which the term is usually used,—either in the old sense of loving attachment to the person or throne of the sovereign, or even in the new and higher sense of devotion to the State which reveals and realises the highest civic ideals and aspirations of the subjects,—cannot naturally exist or grow in a country that is subject to the domination of another. No Englishman therefore honestly believes in it in India, however much he may be anxious to conjure it up in times of trouble or difficulty as a saving magic working for his safety and salvation. Loyalty, in the general acceptance of the term, has been a mere myth in British India; and the Englishman need not be at so much pains to disprove the presence of a thing in East Bengal that had never as yet existed in any part of the country subject to British rule. Disloyalty is want of loyalty, and there cannot be anywhere an absence of a thing,—as a new fact,—where that thing had never existed before.

But if loyalty is not possible in India in its present condition of servitude, what then is the secret of that unquestioning obedience to the authority of the present alien Government in the country, which alone makes it easy and possible for them to rule so vast a population with such slender means? The answer is plain and obvious: it is not affection, neither is it disaffection, both of which are active sentiments, but mere indifference, mere listlessness, the fatuous fatalism of the Hindu and the

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Mahomedan populations of India that keeps them so easily under British subjection. Not loyalty, not allegiance, but mere passive acquiescence,—that is the word which sums up the real attitude of the Indian people towards their foreign master and the outlandish civic order they have established in the country. This acquiescence is due to a general belief—now rapidly being undermined and destroyed by the open excesses and repressions of recent administrations—in the benevolence of the British despotism, itself the result of a strange hypnotic spell that British politicians and statesmen of the earlier generations had cast over the people. If by loyalty is meant this passive acquiescence to the existing civic order in the country, there is still considerable loyalty in the country, though the events of the past five or six years have done much to disturb even this passive sentiment in the people.

But there has always been another kind of loyalty also in this country, and that species of loyalty exists still among us, both in East Bengal and West Bengal, though it has been subjected during the last eight or nine months to a strain which would kill it altogether in any other country, and most of all in that country to which the Englishman himself belongs, and this kind of loyalty will last as long as the Government and those whose views the Englishman represents, do not themselves destroy it with their own hand. Loyalty in the radical sense of the term, derived from lex—law, and meaning obedience to law—has always been a cordial characteristic of our people; and in this sense people have always been loyal in this country. This loyalty—this extreme regard for law of the Indian population—has been the strongest bulwark of the present foreign despotism in this country. We are still loyal, as we have been in the past, in the sense of law-abiding. Had we not been loyal in this, the truest sense of the term, the history of British administration in every part of India would have to be very differently written indeed. In fact the Englishman ought not to forget that it is this extreme loyalty of the people that saved the situation created in Barisal and elsewhere by the lawless excesses of the executive Government during the last nine or ten months. Had our people

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been less law-abiding than they are, the whole country would have long ago been completely given over to riots and mob-rule, which it would tax the entire strength and resources of the Government to grapple with and conquer. The lawless excesses of the Executive and the Police in East Bengal during the last eight or nine months, are matters of common knowledge; and the Englishman knows it full well that there is no other country in the world where such wanton oppression and injustice would have been so quietly borne by the people as these have been borne in the New Province. To attribute this to the cowardice of the people would be an act of fatal folly on the part of the Government or their advisers. East Bengal, at least, has never been noted for such cowardice. It is not fear, but self-restraint due to considerations of larger and higher interests, and the command of their leaders that kept East Bengal so quiet under all these enormities during the last nine or ten months. But this loyalty also seems apparently to be giving way now, for it is useless to conceal the fact that a grim determination has gradually grown among the people to no longer suffer any illegal excesses, in the way they have been suffered so long. But even in this new spirit of resistance in the people there is no lack of regard for law, for this new determination means not to outrage but to protect the honour and dignity of the law itself, when both are openly outraged by those whose duty it is to protect them. If this be disloyalty, we freely admit this disloyalty exists, and is growing to great proportions in every part of the country; and the threats of the Englishman or the setting of the sedition-law in motion will not kill, but only increase this disloyalty the more.

By the Way

Lessons at Jamalpur

01-September-1906

The incidents at Jamalpur are in many ways a sign of the times. They reveal to us, first and foremost, as many incidents of the Swadeshi movement have revealed to us, the great reservoir of potential strength which the Congress movement has for so long a time left untapped. The true policy of the Congress movement should have been from the beginning to gather together under its flag all the elements of strength that exist in this huge country. The Brahmin Pandit and the Mahomedan Maulavi, the caste organisation and the trade-union, the labourer and the artisan, the coolie at his work and the peasant in his field, none of these should have been left out of the sphere of our activities. For each is a strength, a unit of force; and in politics the victory is to the side which can marshal the largest and most closely serried number of such units and handle them most skilfully, not to those who can bring forward the best arguments or talk the most eloquently.

But the Congress started from the beginning with a misconception of the most elementary facts of politics and with its eyes turned towards the British Government

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and away from the people. To flaunt its moderation and reasonableness before approving English eyes, to avoid giving offence to British sentiments, to do nothing that would provoke a real conflict, this was its chief preoccupation. It concerned itself with such things as Simultaneous Examinations, Exchange Compensation, with the details of administration and the intricacies of finance: it presumed to give the Government advice on its military policy, and it passed omnibus resolutions covering the whole field of Indian affairs. All the time it had nothing behind it that could be called strength, no tangible reason why the British Government should respect and give form to its irresponsible criticisms. The Government on its side took the measure of the Congress and acted accordingly.

Under the stimulus of an intolerable wrong, Bengal in the fervour of the Swadeshi movement parted company with the old ideals and began to seek for its own strength. It has found it in the people. But the awakening of this strength immediately brought the whole movement into collision with British interests, and the true nature of the Englishman, when his interests are threatened, revealed itself. The Swadeshi threatened British trade and immediately an unholy alliance was formed between the magistracy, the non-officials and the pious missionaries of Christ, to crush the new movement by every form of prosecution and harassment. The Trade Union movement threatens the tyranny of British Capital over Indian Labour, and at once British Capital responds by unprovoked lockouts, illegal dismissals and finally by "volleys of gunshot". The struggle is bound to increase in its intensity and the prospect it opens, is one which only the most courageous can face. But for us there is no choice. The faith in British justice has crumbled into the dust. Nothing can again restore it. Go back we cannot, halt we cannot, go on we must. It will be well for us if our leaders recognize the situation and instead of hesitation and timidity which will not help them, meet it with clear eyes and an undaunted spirit.

By the Way

01-September-1906

There is a limit to everything. There is also a limit to hero-worship and to self-laudation. It seems to us that limit was passed in the extraordinary proceedings of the Pandits' meeting which deified Babu Surendranath Banerji, and in the undignified effusion of the report which appeared in Babu Surendranath's own paper the Bengalee. A regular "abhishek" ceremony seems to have been performed and the assembled Brahmins paid him regal honours as if he had been the just and truthful Yudhishthira at the Rajasuya sacrifice. If Babu Surendranath wishes to be the king of independent Bengal, he should surely conquer his

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kingdom first and then enjoy it. Even Caesar refused the crown thrice; but Surendra Babu has no scruples. He accepted his coronation with effusive tearfulness; in the touching language of the Bengalee, "his mighty voice shook and he got choky".

But the thing passes a joke. Whatever differences of opinion we may have with Babu Surendranath, we have always recognized him as the leader of Bengal, the one man among us whose name is a spell to sway the hearts of millions. We do not like to see him making himself publicly ridiculous, for, by doing so, he makes the whole of Bengal ridiculous. Such performances are rather likely to diminish his prestige than increase it. But ever since the rise of a party which questions his methods and ideals, Surendra Babu has shown an uneasy desire to have his personal leadership proclaimed on the housetops and an almost hysteric tendency towards self-praise. The indecorous comparisons of himself with Christ and Gauranga, the tone of his Barisal speech and this coronation ceremony are indications which make us uneasy for our veteran leader. He should remember the last days of Keshab Chandra Sen and avoid a similar debacle.

It is time that public opinion should forbid this habit of self-laudation in our leaders. The Mahratta leaders have a much keener sense of the decorum and seriousness which public life demands. Recently a movement was set on foot in the Deccan to celebrate Mr. Tilak's birthday and pay to the great Mahratta leader almost the same honours as are paid to the memory of Shivaji in the Shivaji Utsav. The whole of Maharashtra prepared to go mad with a frenzy of hero-worship when everything was brought to a sudden end by prompt and imperative prohibition from Mr. Tilak himself. This entire absence of self-seeking and self-advertisement is one of the most characteristic features of Mr. Tilak's public conduct. We hope it will become a more general standard if not of character, at least of public etiquette throughout India.

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By the Way

03-September-1906

The Bengalee publishes an apologetic explanation of the Kamboliatola ceremony on which we passed a few strictures, more in sorrow than in anger, the other day. The defence seems to be that Babu Surendranath Banerji was bediademed neither with a crown of gems nor a crown of thorns, but only a harmless chaplet of flowers. Moreover, the ceremony was not in the nature of an abhishek or coronation but a shanti-sechan or homage of hearts from Bengal's assembled Pundits. We do not think the explanation betters things in any way. In whatever way we look at it, the whole affair was a piece of childishness which could have no object but to minister to personal vanity.

This same silly chaplet, it appears, represented the crown of success and might be likened to the laurel crown of the ancient Roman. Visions arise before us of our only leader wrapped majestically in an ancient toga and accepting on the Capitol the laurel crown that shall shield his head from the lightnings. But who is the hostile deity against whom the muttered mantras of the Brahmins were invoked to shield the head of our Surendra Caesar? Sir Jupiter Fuller is gone and no other Thunderer takes his place. We repeat, the whole affair was silly in the extreme and we hope it will not be repeated.

Mr. A. K. Ghose has gone to Jamalpur. That is well. Such affairs as the sanguinary outrage at Jamalpur demand that our strongest man should be himself on the spot, and Mr. A. K. Ghose has proved himself a leader of men, the greater because, unaided by supreme powers of oratory, he has by mere honest work and

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organizing power become the voice and the head of thousands of men.

The Anti-Circular Society is selling the clothes of the late Romakanta Roy as mementos of the deceased patriot for the Famine Fund. The object is good, but the method shows an amazing want of decorum. Romakanta was a young man of fervent patriotism but quiet and unostentatious in his nature. Is it right to hold up his memory to ridicule by this piece of absurd commercial sentimentalism? Hero worship in Bengal takes strange disguises.

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Partition and Petition

04-September-1906

There seems to be a recrudescence of the old and decadent praying mood once again in certain quarters, and attempts, we understand, are being made to induce the leaders of public opinion in the mofussil to join the Calcutta clique for sending a fresh representation to the Secretary of State for India, for the revocation or modification of the Partition of Bengal. The recent reply of the British Prime Minister to a question put to him by Mr. O'Donnell seems to be partly responsible for this recrudescence, which, we understand however, is mainly due to wire-pulling from Palace Chambers. Some of our own countrymen now in England also seem to be playing into the hands of our Parliamentary friends, who are clearly anxious to help their own Government out of a very uncomfortable and undignified position in which the present agitation in Bengal has clearly placed them. Similar hopes were held out by some of our British friends, about six months ago, and it was in consequence of these that people were induced to join the last Town Hall demonstration against Partition; and it was practically stipulated that that would be our last prayer on this subject to the Government. The same game, however, is going to be played over again. We do not know if a Town Hall meeting will be convened for this purpose; but advices from England seem to hold that no public meeting would at all be necessary, a carefully drawn-up petition, signed by a few leading men, and submitted, not through the local Government, because the matter affects two Provinces, and the Government of any of these would not be competent to receive it, but through the Government of India, would equally serve the purpose; as the Government in England is said to be favourably

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inclined to a reconsideration of the Partition, and a representation from Calcutta would be very helpful at this moment.

We have no doubt that it will be so; but why, in the name of commonest political wisdom, we ask, should we be so anxious to offer this help to the Government that is clearly seeking an honourable means of retreat from a very difficult and untenable position wherein its own perversity and folly have placed it? We are all anxious to have the Partition revoked, but we are so anxious not because Partition actually works irreparable ill to the country, for the ends of the authors of this evil measure have been completely frustrated already, and the political life of Bengal which it was their avowed intention to weaken or kill, has been made almost infinitely stronger than it ever was before or could possibly be in the near future,—by this very Partition itself. The outraged sentiments of the country have found relief in the consciousness of a new power among the people. Outrages wound only because they are a proof of the weakness and incapacity of the outraged; if this weakness is not felt, and this incapacity fails to be established, the wound also ceases to exist. This has happened in Bengal, and more particularly in East Bengal in connection with this Partition outrage; and there is a growing indifference in the country as regards the fate of this measure. People have found a larger and a more profitable object for their public life. They have commenced to grow into a vivid consciousness of their own strength; and they are, accordingly, growing more and more indifferent to what the Government may or may not do, either in regard to this or to any other matter. They know and feel that their fate lies in their own hands, and in the hands of God, who guides the destinies both of individuals and nations.

English Enterprise and Swadeshi

04-September-1906

The Anglo-Indian papers are nowadays repeatedly referring to the Jamalpur Railway workshop as a Swadeshi enterprise. The use of the word throws a good deal of light on the meaning

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of that Swadeshi which our benevolent Government so unctuously professes. The Jamalpur workshop does nothing for India beyond employing a number of coolies who are ill-paid and therefore underfed and a staff of Bengali clerks. It adds nothing appreciable to Indian wealth, on the contrary it diminishes it. All that can be said is that instead of taking 100 per cent of the profits out of India, it takes 90 per cent. This is precisely the meaning of Government Swadeshi—to provide a field for English capital, English skilled work in India and employ Indian labour, not out of desire for India's good, but because it is cheap. If the Government really desired India's good, it would provide for the training of educated Indians so that such work as is done in Jamalpur, might be executed by Indian brains and with Indian capital as well as by Indian hands. But we do not ask the Government to give us such training. It would be foolish to expect a foreign Government to injure the trade of its own nation in India. We must provide for our own training ourselves.

Sir Frederick Lely on Sir Bampfylde Fuller

04-September-1906

Sir Frederick Lely's was a name well known in Gujarat and nowhere else in India. He has now earned a cheap notoriety for himself by holding forth in the Times on Sir Bampfylde Fuller's dismissal. Sir Frederick is full of dismal forebodings on the effect of this dismissal, which has evidently shaken the foundations of British rule in India. One cannot help reflecting how weak, in that case, those foundations must be! Sir Frederick adorns his lamentations with an imaginative reference to people's tongues being cut out for speaking against Brahmins some short period before this particular Heaven-born's sacred boot soles hallowed the streets of Bombay! Evidently, Sir Frederick is brooding regretfully on the impossibility of adorning Belvedere with the tongues of Babu Surendranath Banerji and Babu Bipin Chandra Pal, red sacrifices to the stability of British rule. That might certainly simplify the task of Government,—or it might not.

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Jamalpur

04-September-1906

Our correspondent's report from Jamalpur gives the sober facts of the situation and clears away the mist of misrepresentation and wild rumour with which the Anglo-Indian journals have sought to obscure the incident. From the beginning the English version has been an attempt to throw the whole blame on the workmen by charging them with rioting before the gunshots. Their version has varied from day to day. With the exception of one or two minor details, the opposite version has been throughout clear, consistent and rational. There will of course be the usual cases and counter-cases and diametrically opposite statements sworn to in evidence. But we have ceased to take any interest in these futile legal proceedings. An Englishman assaulting an Indian may be innocent or guilty, but, as he cannot be punished, it does not matter an atom whether he is innocent or guilty. The fight has to be fought out to the end and the resort to law is no more than a persistent superstition.

By the Way

04-September-1906

The wailings of the Englishman for Sir Bampfylde Fuller do not cease. The Rachel of Hare Street mourns for the darling of her heart and will not be comforted. We wish our contemporary would realise that the rest of the world are heartily sick of this daily ululation. Deeply as we sympathise with his grief we cannot help thinking that it is indecently prolonged. Rest, rest, perturbed spirit, rest!

The Englishman makes, after his fashion, a curious use of the severe criticism on Babu Surendranath's Shanti-Sechan which have appeared in the Bengali press. He thinks that it means the "repudiation" of Surendra Babu and the abandonment of the Partition Agitation. Prodigious! Apparently the Englishman has yet to learn that the movement in Bengal was not created by

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any single man and does not depend on any single man. It is a great natural upheaval and the leaders are no more than so many corks tossing on the surface of a whirlpool. If one or more goes down, what does it matter to the whirlpool?

It is amusing to find Babu Bipin Chandra Pal represented as a fanatical worshipper of Surendra Babu. "When Babu Bipin Chandra finds it in his heart to condemn the editor of the Bengalee," cries the Englishman, "then indeed all is over." Shabash! The humours of Hare Street are mending.

There is another kind of humour which pervades the columns of the Indian Mirror, but it is not so pleasing as the Englishman's. The Mirror poses as a Nationalist organ, but its paragraphs and articles often breathe Anglo-Indian inspiration. Its comments on the official version of the Shantipur case are an instance. It even goes so far as to call on the Railway authorities to punish the "Bengali Stationmaster" because Mr. Carlyle complains of his conduct in the matter. We had to look twice at the top of the sheet before we could persuade ourselves that it was not an Anglo-Indian sheet we were reading.

Still worse is the paragraph on the Jamalpur affair. The Mirror calls on the promoters of the Railway Union not to do anything which will provoke the feelings of the workmen to a white heat. We had thought it was the gunshots of the European railway officials which had done that work. But no; in the eyes of the Mirror that seems to have been a harmless act. It is Mr. A. K. Ghose and Babu Premtosh Bose who are to blame. Yet the editor of this paper is one of our "leaders".

The Mirror farther gives hospitality to an amusing utterance of Kumar Kshitendra Deb, that renowned statesman who is

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standing for the Bengal Legislative Council. This Kumar first carefully differentiates true Swadeshi from false, the true being the kind of Swadeshi which allows Kumars and others to become Legislative Councillors, the false the kind of Swadeshi which doesn't. All this is to prevent misunderstanding about his views which he innocently imagines that the public are anxious to learn. We think our Kumar is rather ungrateful to the "false" Swadeshi, but for which he would have had rather less chance of becoming Legislative Councillor than the man in the moon. The worthy Kumar has no sympathy with martyrs naturally enough. We want, apparently, not martyrs but men who are determined to attain a position. No, thank you, Kumar, we have had too many of that kind already; the little change to martyrs will do no harm.

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The Times on Congress Reforms

08-September-1906

The pronouncement of the Times on the proposal of the Congress for a further reform and expansion of the Indian Councils is significant for the thoroughness with which the futility and impossibility of the entire Congress ideal is exposed by the writer. Mr. Gokhale took great pains last year in his address as President of the Congress to point out, in detail, how the present Council of the Indian Viceroy might be remodelled, without disturbing the present position of the Government. His idea is that the elected members of the Viceregal Council may well be increased from five to twelve, of whom two shall be elected by the Chamber of Commerce and the representative of some important industry, and ten by the different Provinces. The two representatives of commerce and industry will, Mr. Gokhale opined, be Europeans, as there shall be 10 Indian members elected to the Council, out of 25, the total strength of that body; and even if they voted together they would be in a permanent and absolute minority; and the only effect of any vote they might give against the Government would be a moral effect. This is Mr. Gokhale's position and programme; and neither the Times nor, we are afraid, anybody else outside the ranks of those who hold that everything that is unreal and moderate is the product of sound statesmanship, clearly sees what the gain either to the people or to the Government will be from the acceptance of this wise and cautious counsel. The ten Indian members will form HM's permanent Opposition in India: that is all; but a permanent Opposition has all the evils of irresponsible criticism without the advantages of a real Opposition which can some day hope to be the Government, and whom this possibility

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always makes sober and responsible. "The policy proposed by the Congress," says the Times, "is a policy for bringing the Government into disrepute without the safeguards which all popular constitutions provide; it is a policy for generating steam without the precaution of supplying safety-valves;" and the justice of this criticism cannot be honestly denied.

If Mr. Gokhale's programme does not guarantee any benefit to the Government, neither is it likely to confer any benefit on the people except, of course, on a handful of men who shall enjoy the luxury of being Hon'bles and get enlarged opportunities of recommending their friends, relatives and proteges for office under the Government. The people will take little interest in these Council-elections, because they will soon find out—as they have already done in Bengal—that the elected members cannot carry any popular measure successfully through the Council or oppose effectively even the most mischievous ones. Mr. Gokhale is not only anxious to keep the elected members perpetually in the minority, but though he wants them to be vested with the right of moving amendments on the Budget, the Viceroy must have the right of vetoing them even if they are carried. The fact is, there is absolutely no seriousness about the whole thing. It is all to be a mere child's play. Or, Mr. Gokhale thinks, perhaps, that by gradually securing these so-called rights, he will ultimately get real constitutional rights and privileges from his British masters, but he forgets that these masters have never in the past done anything that has directly affected their interests and status as a sovereign power, nor will they do any such thing in the future, unless, of course, they are compelled to do it, by apprehensions of some great loss or danger. As for the idea that this so-called reform in the Legislative Council will, in any way, make for popular freedom by educating the people, that also is evidently without any reasonable justification for its success; for, as the Times very justly points out, Mr. Gokhale's programme has no room for any real political education for the people. To quote it in full:—

"Nor is the policy one which offers any substantial advantage to the people of India; it gives them increased opportunities

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of criticism but no increase of responsibility; it does nothing to give the people that education in politics which is essential if... they are now for the first time to have some share in the management of their own affairs. By the scheme under consideration the leaders of Indian opinion would not acquire that sense of responsibility which necessarily comes to men who expect that they will shortly be in power themselves; they are to have opportunities for finding fault with the Government but they will never have to make their words good; they can with a light heart demand a reduction of taxation or denounce the Government for not putting a stop to famines, because they know that they can never themselves be called upon to prove that these reforms are practicable. It is the prospect of office which sobers and restrains a European Opposition! Is it wise to assume that Indian politicians will be moderate and without this restraint?"

And the justice of this criticism who will deny? Mr. Gokhale's programme if accepted by Government, can have only one effect on the growth of public opinion and political life in India: it will prove the utter futility of any half-measures like these to secure real and substantial rights for the people. Such an education through failure, was needed twenty-five years ago, when people still had faith in British shibboleths or had confidence in British character and British policy; it is absolutely needless and involves sheer waste of time and energy that have much greater calls on them for more substantial and urgent work now,—today when the people have already commenced to realise that their future must be shaped by themselves, without any help from their British masters, and indeed in spite of the most violent opposition that will, naturally, be offered by them. Mr. Gokhale's creed and his policy are anachronisms in the India of 1906; the one stands absolutely discredited with the people, the other is declared unwise and impracticable by the Government. The Congress must give these up, or continue as an effete anachronism in the country, or possibly turn by the logic of this creed and this policy, into a loyalist opposition to all true and forceful popular movement and propaganda

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in India. Can we afford to allow an institution that we have all served so faithfully all these years, and that may at once become an organised institution of popular deliberation and effective public life, to grow effete and useless? Much less can we afford to place it in the hands of the enemies of popular freedom. That is the question before the country now. The coming Congress in Calcutta will perhaps decide this question. Friends of popular freedom should understand this and gather their forces accordingly for saving the Congress from both these calamities.

By the Way

08-September-1906

The Mirror complains piteously that the country is in the hands of extremists on one side and ultra-moderates on the other, while the voices of sitters on the fence like the Indian Mirror go totally unheard. It is hard on our contemporary. But he should realise that a time has come in the history of the nation when men must take one side or the other, if they wish to count for anything in the making of the future. To preside at a boycott meeting and disparage the boycott, is a course which the politician concerned may reconcile with his own conscience, but it is not likely to increase the weight of his influence with his countrymen.

We are surprised to see the Pioneer join in the extraordinary can-can which the Englishman has been performing ever since the Fuller dismissal. We were accustomed to regard the Pioneer as a sober and well-conducted journal, though its political views are no less pernicious than the Englishman's; but it is surpassing Hare Street itself in journalistic high-kicks. "Beware, beware, Bengalis," it shouts, "if you rebel, we will exterminate you with fire and sword, we will outdo the atrocities we committed during the Mutiny; we are tigers, we are tigers! look at our claws." All this is very bloody indeed and paints the Pioneer red. But it does seem as if Anglo-India had gone clean mad. Such a pitiful

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exhibition will not increase the respect of the subject race for its rulers.

The Indian Mirror comes out with an article on the selfishness of Indian patriots. According to this self-satisfied critic Mr. T. Palit and the Indian Mirror are the only unselfish men in Bengal. Rajas Subodh Mallik and Brajendra Kishore of Gauripur are notoriety-hunters who have chosen to pay heavily in cash and land for the titles of Raja and Maharaja. Babu Shishir Kumar Ghose is a humbug who poses as an Avatar; Babu Surendranath Banerji is a humbug who poses as a Martyr; there is a third patriotic humbug somewhere who poses as a Hero,—we cannot fix this gentleman at present. The country does not want these gentlemen at all; it wants people who can dare and die for their country. Whether this dying is to come about by fire and sword, and the claws of the British tiger, as the Pioneer threatens, or by influenza, cholera or fright, is not clear. We gather, however, that Mr. Palit and Babu Narendranath Sen have entered into a league to dare and die for their country, and we rejoice to hear it. While waiting for this glorious consummation, we would suggest to the latter that he might expect his martyrdom with more meekness, and, secondly, that if he has to attack people, he might just as well cross his t's and dot his i's instead of employing the method of half-veiled allusions. It is a method which some people might call cowardly.

The Englishman still pegs away at his portentous discovery of a secret society with the romantic name Sonar Bangla. His knowledge about it increases every day. It is not a Chinsurah society, it appears, but a Calcutta affair which is especially active in Mymensingh. This ubiquitous monster seems to be under the direction of Tibetans; probably the Tashi Lama formed it when he came to Calcutta. For it appears that the word "Golden" is a piece of Oriental symbolism and is employed by the Tibetans to signify men who are sworn to die for this or that purpose.

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As a matter of fact, the word sonar is an ordinary Bengali term of pride and affection, no more mystic or symbolic than Shakespeare's "golden lads and girls". The Englishman seems determined to supply the absence of a good comic paper in Calcutta. Apparently its descent to anna-price has not increased its circulation.

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The Pro-Petition Plot

10-September-1906

It is impossible, we think, to condemn too strongly the attempt that is being made, by means of confidential circulars from Calcutta, to get up a fresh memorial to the Secretary of State for India, for the revocation or modification of the Partition of Bengal. We are strongly opposed, it is well known, to sending any fresh memorial on this subject, but this general objection apart, the methods that have been adopted to get up this new memorial are open to very serious objection, and it is to these that we desire to call public attention today. A telegraphic message was received in Comilla about the middle of last month from one of the Calcutta leaders asking the local leaders to send a delegate to a Conference that was proposed to be held on some urgent matters the following Sunday. What these urgent matters were was left to the imagination of the addressees to discover for themselves. Comilla strongly objected to be worked upon in this mysterious, if not masterly way from Calcutta, and wired back asking for definite and detailed information. No wire, we understand, was received in reply, but about a week later, just a few hours before the time fixed for the Conference, a printed letter, marked confidential, was received by Babu Ananga Mohan Ghosh, from the Bengalee office, containing excerpts from certain letters secured from London, which suggested that a fresh memorial should be sent to the Secretary of State for India for a reconsideration of the Partition of Bengal. One of these extracts said:—"What appeared absolutely hopeless four weeks ago appears hopeful now. There are indications that the Cabinet are willing to reconsider the Partition Question on its merits. There are indications that in due time the question, if properly urged,

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will be reopened. I am not at liberty to speak about Conferences I had just before leaving London. All that I can tell you is to advise you to have an influential and representative meeting, say, early in September, to adopt a strong, well-reasoned memorial, suggesting alternative schemes of Partition based on racial and linguistic grounds, and to submit it to the Secretary of State through the Indian Government. Bengal has worked splendidly during the last 11 months,—Bengal will have to work a little longer,—not hysterically, but rationally and strongly,—making it clear that she will not accept the present Partition. I believe redress is at hand."

Later on the writer, after quoting Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman's reply to Mr. O'Donnell, modified his previous advice regarding public meeting and said—"On second thought a simple memorial seems to be enough if influentially signed—a meeting is unnecessary."

This letter came from a high authority. But it is clear on the face of it that that high authority was playing into the hands of the Liberals interested in India. The enforced retirement of Sir B. Fuller was a distinct confession on the part of the Government of the failure of the policy which prompted the Partition scheme, and which subsequently came to be so closely associated with the late Lieutenant-Governor of East Bengal and Assam. This failure is distinctly due to the resistful attitude that has been assumed by the people of late, and in view of the complications with which the Government is threatened by the present anti-Partition and boycott agitation in Bengal, the authorities in England, as well as in this country, are evidently anxious to get out of the unpleasant and risky position wherein their own perversity has placed them. To do this honourably and without any loss of prestige, they want a plea for reopening the discussion of Mr. Morley's settled fact, and a fresh memorial from Bengal would find them this plea. This, it seems clear, is the meaning of the excerpts quoted by us above from the London letter, on the strength of which the Calcutta leaders want a fresh memorial to be got up. They might make the attempt, there is no reason why, if they are convinced that it is their duty

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to send a fresh memorial, they should not make this attempt. But what we object to is the secretiveness of the whole thing. Why have they tried to keep this new proposal from the public? Why should they arrogate to themselves the right of deciding, in consultation with a handful of men, as to what should be done in this matter? The Conference held in the Landholders' Association should have been an open Conference. But even at this closed Conference, the general opinion, if the reports that have reached us be correct, was decidedly against sending any fresh petition or memorial. It is said that Babu Motilal Ghose and others were distinctly opposed to the idea; and the words petition and memorial had to be dropped under pressure of this general opinion, especially among the mofussil delegates; all that was conceded by the Conference was that some suggestions might be sent. We do not know if the questions of the channel through which the suggestions were to be sent was raised at all. But whatever was decided by the Conference we find that a secret attempt is being made to send not suggestions, but a live, real memorial again to the Secretary of State for India on the Partition question. We do not respect official secrets, when public interests demand it, but widely publish them, and there is no reason why we should respect non-official secrets when their publication is called for in the interests of the public good. We, therefore, make no apology for publishing the following letter that has been addressed from the Bengalee Office, to the leaders of public opinion in the mofussil:—

Confidential

Bengalee Office.
70, Colootola Street, Calcutta.
29th August, 1906.

My dear——,

At a Conference held in the Rooms of the Landholders' Association on Sunday last, at which several delegates from the mofussil were present, it was resolved to submit a representation to the Secretary of State for reviewing the Partition of Bengal. It was agreed that the representation, if possible,

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should be forwarded early in September. The representation is being drawn up, and in the meantime I beg you will forward to the Bengalee Office as many signatures (including of course the signatures of the leading inhabitants in your District). The representation would ask for Bengal (old and new Province) being placed under a Governor and Council, or in the alternative, the Bengali-speaking population being placed under one and the same administration. I beg you will consider the matter as very urgent.

Yours sincerely,

It is clear thus, that a secret memorial is being got up to be sent again to the Indian State Secretary; and as this memorial will clearly be sent in the name and on behalf of the public, the public have just cause for complaint that in regard to such a vital question of policy they should have been left so entirely in the dark. There was a time when the people in general took really little or no interest in public questions of this kind; and in those days the getting up of such memorials in consultation with a few lawyers in the different districts, might have been justified; because they were about the only persons who took any interest in these public and political questions. The present Swadeshi agitation has, however, changed all this. We have called up the real nation out of its ancient slumber, and the masses have commenced to take a keen and possibly a more earnest interest in public questions than even the so-called educated classes. They have joined our meetings in their thousands and their tens of thousands, and have taken, during the last twelve months, an intelligent interest in our movements. What right have we now to ignore them in such momentous matters as the submission of a fresh memorial to the Secretary of State, which may radically change the face of the whole agitation? The tactics adopted by the Calcutta clique seem, therefore, to be absolutely vicious. They strike at the very root of those principles of Democracy upon which the national movement in India and especially in Bengal is professedly based. Democracy must have its leaders, and the leaders must exercise the right of guiding and shaping the

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opinions and activities of the Democracy. But to guide, to train, to shape and to control public opinion and public activities is one thing but to ignore or suppress the views and sentiments of the public is another. It is the autocrat alone who does or attempts to do so. And this pernicious autocratic tendency in the leaders of Bengal must at once be knocked relentlessly on the head, if the present movement is to realise the high promise that is in it. The old leaders in Calcutta and those who dance in the mofussil to their tune, must be made to understand this distinctly that they will not be permitted to speak and act in the name of the public without fully and frankly taking that public into their confidence in regard to all important public questions. Signs are not, indeed, wanting that the people will not suffer the tyrannies of their own leaders more patiently than they are prepared to suffer those of their foreign masters. The Comilla Resolution on this very subject of sending a fresh memorial to Government is significant as we pointed out yesterday. A similar Resolution, published in our telegraphic columns last Wednesday, has been adopted at a gathering of 20,000 men at Chittagong, in spite of the attempt made by some people to refer the matter to the local leaders. The question was asked whether a larger vote could be taken on this topic at any meeting of the local Association, and it was frankly answered in the negative. There were many men at this gathering who had come from the villages, and they all seemed clearly flattered by the fact that they were given such an opportunity of expressing their views on so important a matter, and this sense of satisfaction is a distinct guarantee of their future interest in public questions. Henceforth they will not look on our movements with their old listlessness and indifference. Is this a small gain? Are we to neglect such a result for small favours from the Government? What even if the Partition continues, if only we can arouse a real interest in the masses in our public and political agitations? If the masses once awake from their present torpor, they will be able to undo a thousand evil and obstructive measures like the Partition of Bengal. True statesmanship would prefer this quickening of public life and public spirit in the people to the revocation, as a favour, of even the most obnoxious and

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pernicious Government measure. But autocracy whether in the Government or in the governed, has no eye for the people; and it is, therefore, the greatest enemy of human progress everywhere, and should be ruthlessly exposed and knocked on the head by those who care for the advancement of the people and for their civic salvation.

Socialist and Imperialist

10-September-1906

Mr. Hyndman having appeared in print with one of his occasional strong diatribes against bureaucratic misgovernment in India, Mr. Theodore Morrison promptly takes up the cudgels against him. One need not quarrel with Mr. Morrison's discovery that there were great famines in India before the English came. Everyone knows that. What Mr. Hyndman contends is that India has been so impoverished by bureaucratic misrule, not a year passes without famine or acute distress prevailing in some part of the country. That is a position which is inexpugnable, and no burrowing in ancient history will overthrow it. Mr. Morrison thinks that Mr. Hyndman is playing into the hands of the reactionists. Whence this tender solicitude for reform on the part of the Aligarh Imperialist?

The Sanjibani on Mr. Tilak

10-September-1906

The Sanjibani pronounces in its last issue against Mr. Tilak, on the ground that he is unpopular. But unpopular with whom? With a certain section of the old Congress leaders. Is then unpopularity with a section to be a bar against filling the Presidential chair? If so, the circle of choice will become extremely limited; for just as there are some leaders who are unpopular with the ultra-moderate section, there are others who are unpopular with the advanced section. Mr. Gokhale, for instance, is by no means popular in his own country, the Deccan, especially since his notorious apology. His support of the boycott, qualified though

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it be, has somewhat rehabilitated him in the eyes of many, but he is still strongly distrusted by great numbers. Yet none dreamed of opposing his selection to the Presidential chair on the mere ground of a partial unpopularity. If, however, the Congress leaders are going to publicly proclaim such a principle, it will be applied freely on both sides and the treasured "unanimity" of the Congress will disappear.

Secret Tactics

10-September-1906

The telegram from our correspondent in Mymensingh, which we publish in another column, is extremely significant. It is now an open secret throughout the country that the Swadeshi movement has developed two distinct parties in the country. One of these desires to use Boycott as a political weapon merely in order to force on the annulment of the Partition and there finish; its quarrel with the bureaucracy is a passing quarrel and it is ready to be again hand in glove with the Government as soon as its turn is served; it still desires to sit on the Legislative Councils, figure on the Municipalities and carry on politics by meetings and petitions. The other party will be satisfied with nothing less than absolute control over our own affairs and is not willing to help the Government to put off the inevitable day when that demand must be conceded; it is therefore opposed to any cooperation with the Government or to the adoption of a suppliant attitude in our relations to the Government; it desires the Boycott as a necessary part of our economic self-development and by no means to be relinquished even if the Partition be rescinded. Here are definite issues which have to be fought out until some definite settlement is reached. We desire the issue to be fought out on a fair field, each party seeking the suffrages of the country and attempting to educate the great mass of public opinion to its views. Unfortunately, the Leaders of the older school are not willing to give this fair field. They prefer to adopt a Machiavellian strategy working in the darkness and by diplomatic strokes and secret coup d'état. They do not wish to work with

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the prominent and most militant members of the new school on the Reception Committee, they will not admit the country to their councils for fear the strength of the new school might increase, and they attempt to follow the example of the Fuller Government, to prevent them from holding public meetings. Recently the new school have put forward Mr. Tilak as the fittest name for the Presidentship, and the country has already begun to respond to the suggestion. The old leaders cannot publicly confess their reasons for not desiring Mr. Tilak, but they seem to be attempting cleverly to get out of the difficulty by bringing Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji over from England. We should have thought the Grand Old Man of India was a name too universally revered to be made the stalking-horse of a party move. But quite apart from this aspect of the question, we would draw attention to the indecorous and backstairs manner in which this important step is being made. It is the work of the Reception Committee to propose a President for the Congress; but the old leaders have been carefully avoiding any meeting of the Reception Committee and are meanwhile making all arrangements for the Congress and Exhibition secretly, unconstitutionally, and among a small clique. Had the name of Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji been proposed constitutionally in the Reception Committee, all would have been well; as it is, the most venerable name in India is in danger of being associated with a party stratagem carried through by unconstitutional means. Meanwhile, there is no reason why the meetings for Mr. Tilak's Presidentship should not be proceeded with; until the Reception Committee meets and Mr. Naoroji accepts an invitation from them the question remains open. But the attitude of the old leaders shows a settled determination to exclude the new school from public life. If that be so, the present year will mark a struggle for the support of the country and the control of the Congress which, however long it may last, can only have one end.

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By the Way

10-September-1906

The Indian Mirror sympathises with the strikers, but is quite opposed to the strike. Workmen should not combine to get their rights; they must, like good slaves, appeal to the gracious generosity of their masters! The spirit of the serf which governed our agitation in pre-Swadeshi days, still disports itself in the columns of the Mirror, naked and unashamed.

We confess the pother the Anglo-Indian press has raised over the matter, has surprised us. A certain amount of ridicule we expected, but that the Kamboliatola affair should be magnified into sedition and by people calling themselves sane! We are informed, though we can hardly credit it, that Hare Street has been at the expense of telegraphing columns of matter on the subject to England, apparently in order to convince the British public that Bengal has revolted and chosen a King. Verily, the dog-star rages.

Hare Street, having failed to impress the public with that fire-breathing seditious monster of Chinsurah, "Golden Bengal", turns sniffing round, nose to earth, for a fresh trail, and finds it in our own columns. We also, it appears, no less than Babu Surendranath and "Golden Bengal" have declared "open war" against King Edward VII; we wish to get rid of "British control". Beside this the manifesto of "Golden Bengal" fades into insignificance. That Indians should openly express their aspiration to govern themselves and yet remain out of jail is a clear sign that the British Empire is coming to an end.

The Statesman has at last come to the rescue anent the moral belabouring of Babu Surendranath Banerji for his Shanti-Sechan indiscretion. The Statesman sees two dangers looming through the dust which has been kicked up over the affair. One is that

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the ignorant peasantry may imagine a King has been crowned in India to whom they must give their allegiance. We confess, this alarming idea never occurred to us; and when we spoke of Surendra Babu as King of independent Bengal, we thought we were indulging in a harmless jest. The Statesman has opened our eyes. It is an alluring idea and captivates our imagination. But what has happened to our sober-minded contemporary? Has the madness of the Englishman infested even him that he should see such alarming visions?

The other danger is that the Anglo-Indian journals in their wild career may discredit constitutional agitation and play into the hands of the extremists. The extraordinary demoralisation of the Anglo-Indian press has indeed been painfully evident throughout the affair; but the Statesman does not see his friend's point of view. To Hare Street Babu Surendranath Banerji is not a moderate and constitutional leader, but a dangerous and fiery red revolutionist charging full tilt at British supremacy in India, with other revolutionists more or less scarlet in colour rushing on before or behind him. Hare Street has gone mad and, as is natural to a distracted John Bull, sees everything red. Sedition to the right of him, sedition to the left of him, sedition before and behind him, and through it all the Englishman like a heroic Light Brigade, charges in for King and motherland.

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A Savage Sentence

11-September-1906

We hope that an appeal will be preferred against the barbarous sentence passed on one Bipin Behari Modak for throwing acid,—so it is alleged,—in the face of an unpopular non-striker in the Howrah Office. To us the evidence on the defence side seems to be exceedingly strong nor can we discover any motive for the attack on the part of a man who had no connection of any kind with the strike. But then it was a strike case, and strike, in magisterial eyes, means Swadeshi and Swadeshi means sedition. So by a strict chain of judicial logic the accused is not only convicted but meted out a savage and merciless punishment. Whatever may be the fact as to this particular prosecution, it is certain that a taint of Swadeshi in any case seems to double and treble the guilt in the eyes of the magistracy. The spirit of Sir Bampfylde Fuller has not left the country with his body.

The Question of the Hour

11-September-1906

There is every sign that the issue on which the future of the national movement depends, will soon become very acute. Babu Bhupendranath Bose has put it with great frankness when he says that we must act in association with and not in opposition to the Government. In other words, the whole spirit which has governed the national movement, must be changed and we must go back to the policy of pre-Swadeshi days. This then is the issue before us. We declared a war of passive resistance against the bureaucracy on the 7th of August; and we understood that the struggle was not to end till such a regime as Lord Curzon's

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should be rendered for ever impossible in the future. Are we now to declare peace and alliance with the bureaucracy and blot out the last twelve months from our history? Babu Ananda Chandra Roy made the proposal a little while ago; a much more considerable politician makes it today. It is for the country to judge.

A Criticism

11-September-1906

Babu Naresh Chandra Sen Gupta, at a meeting of the Students' Union, made certain remarks upon the new party and the old. The spirit of the remarks was good, but the information on which they were based seems to be remarkably one-sided. He said, for instance: "The old leaders never forgot to take counsel with the new party; but the new party had spurned the old men." When, may we ask, except at Barisal where the new school was in a majority, did the old leaders take counsel with the new? Since then it has been the deliberate policy of the old leaders to exclude the new party from their counsels and some influential men among them have even declared that they will not work with the principal men of that party. We do not pretend to dictate to the old leaders or to the Congress or to any other public body; we wish to have an opportunity of pressing our views on the Congress as the views of increasing numbers in the country. The future is ours and we are content to conquer it by degrees. But the determination of the old leaders is to give us no foothold in the present. A great and growing school of politics cannot consent to be treated in such cavalier fashion.

By the Way

11-September-1906

Babu Bhupendranath Bose has, it appears, been writing to the Mofussil laying down the policy of the nation. Babu Bhupendranath is not going to allow Mr. Tilak to be President, because the said Tilak does not know navigation. Babu Bhupendranath is

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going to telegraph to Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji asking him to dance to Babu Bhupendranath's fiddling. Babu Bhupendranath is not going to allow the nation to act in opposition to the Government. Babu Bhupendranath as a loyal Legislative Councillor, will compel the people to act in association with the bureaucracy. Long live Babu Bhupendranath Bose, ally of England and Dictator of Bengal!

It is very natural for the Comilla people to enquire whether this remarkable pronouncement is Babu Bhupendranath's own particular balloon, or Babu Surendranath Banerji also is tempting the airy heights in his company. The mysteries of the secret conclave which attempts to direct the destinies of the national movement are carefully veiled from profane eyes, but it is generally understood that Babu Bhupendranath wields there a marvellous influence, the source of which it is difficult to understand. He is a successful attorney, a conspicuous figure in Calcutta society, a man of the world gifted with consummate business ability, a member of the Bengal Legislative Council, who aspires, it is believed, to the cool heights of Simla. In all this there is nothing which gives him a claim to lead in a great patriotic upheaval. Yet he is the power behind the throne.

Curiously yoked is this grey leader with the flying mane, thunderous neigh and stamping hooves of our great veteran war-steed. The one would gallop on with the national chariot, the other hangs back. The eye of the one is thrown forward, his ear pricks to the noise of the battle, his heart is in the future with the destiny of his nation. The eye of the other is cast backward, his ear pricks to the dulcet voices of Minto and Morley, his heart is in the past, in the august peace of the Legislative Council. But it is the slow horse that sets the pace. And hence we have Babu Bhupendranath Bose figuring as President-maker and policy-maker to His Majesty the lately awakened Democracy of Bengal.

The question is, will the people sanction the appointment of

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Babu Bhupendranath by himself to this important office? To the spirit of autocracy and government from behind the curtain, we shall always be opposed whether in the bureaucracy or in our own leaders. But if there is to be an autocrat, let him at least be one whose heart is wholly with the people.

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The Old Policy and the New

12-September-1906

Babu Bhupendranath Bose has issued a manifesto of his views in the Bengalee, in which he explains his letter to the Secretary of the People's Association at Comilla. That document, it seems, was a private letter, although it was obviously intended to produce a public effect, viz. to prevent the nomination of Mr. Tilak and to counteract the effect of Babu Bipin Chandra Pal's meeting and speeches in Comilla. However, we have now an authoritative statement of Babu Bhupendranath's "policy", and no further misunderstanding is possible. This policy is precisely what we expected; it might have been penned in the pre-Partition and pre-Swadeshi days and amounts simply to the old Congress programme. We are to solicit Government help and favours as before, to oppose its measures when they are bad, and, when they are very bad, to support this opposition "with the vital energy of the entire nation". But we are not to attempt to stand apart from the Government; we are not fit (because we have castes!) to stand among the self-governing countries of the world. We must therefore accept our subjection and wait for the golden days when we are thoroughly Europeanised, before we make any attempt to assert our national existence. At the same time, we may work out our own salvation in industrial matters, by such enterprises as the Banga Lakshmi Mill, in social matters by the abolition of caste, and even in educational matters by—but no, Babu Bhupendranath Bose has never been a friend of the National University idea. Such, when stripped of all verbiage, is the programme which Babu Bhupendranath sets before us, and since, in spite of his modest disclaimer, he has a commanding influence in determining the active policy of our leaders, his

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programme may be taken as the ultimate programme of his party.

We should like to know what Babu Bhupendranath precisely means by opposition to Government schemes. Except in extreme cases, so far as we understand him, he is opposed to bringing the vital energy of the nation to bear on the Government; and the only alternative policy is one of prayer and petition. It has been demonstrated repeatedly that prayer and petition have no appreciable influence on the British Government and that whatever slight influence it might have once had, has faded into nullity. It is only when the nation, finding its prayers and petitions rejected, begins to manifest its strength that the British Government inclines its ear and is graciously pleased to withdraw a circular, to dismiss a Fuller or to consider whether it can unsettle a settled fact. But Babu Bhupendranath argues that we cannot bring "the vital energies of the nation" to support opposition to any and every measure of Government. We are quite at one with him; but we cannot follow him in the strangely illogical conclusion he draws from this premise. He concludes from it that our right course is to trust to the broken weapon of remonstrance and futile petition in all but exceptional cases like the Partition. We conclude that our right course is not to waste unnecessary time over smaller matters, but to go to the root of the matter, the control over finance and legislation which is the basis of self-government and the first step towards autonomy.

The proposal of the old party is to use the great outburst of national strength which the Partition has evoked, in order to get the Partition rescinded, and then to put it back in the cupboard until again wanted. Such a policy will be absolutely suicidal. These outbursts can only come once or twice in a century; they cannot be evoked and ruled at the will of any leader, be he Surendranath Banerji or even a greater than Surendranath. Nor would such frequent outbursts benefit the country, but would rather, like frequent occasions of fever, weaken the nation and render it finally listless and strengthless. The problem for statesmanship at this moment is to organise and utilise the energy which has been awakened for an object of the first importance

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to our national development. The withdrawal of the Partition by itself will not improve the position of our race with regard to its rulers nor leave it one whit better than before Lord Curzon's regime. Even if the present Government were overflowing with liberal kindness, it cannot last for ever, and there is nothing to prevent another Imperialist Viceroy backed by an Imperialist Government from perpetrating measures as injurious to the interests and sentiments of the nation. The only genuine guarantee against this contingency is the control by the nation of its own destinies, and to secure an effective instalment of this control, should be the first aim of all our political action. No British Government will willingly concede anything in the nature of effective control. It can only be wrested from them by concentrating "the vital energies of the entire nation" into opposition to the Government and admitting of no truce until the desired end is secured. This is the kernel of the new party's policy and it differs entirely from Babu Bhupendranath's meaningless and futile programme.

Is a Conflict Necessary?

12-September-1906

The old leaders are now telling the country that there is no need of a conflict as their ideals are identical with those of the new party, and it is only the latter who are heating themselves into a passion about nothing. The other day, Babu Naresh Chandra Sen Gupta in perfect good faith, accepted this statement and declared it to the assembled students. But yesterday we learned that Babu Bhupendranath Bose insists on our working in association with the Government and not in opposition! This is emphatically not the ideal of the new party, for we are opposed to any accommodation with the Government which precedes or dispenses with the concession of effective self-government to the Indian people. We shall shortly make a succinct and definitive statement of our programme and demands; and if there is really no difference of ideals, if the whole quarrel is a misunderstanding and the old leaders are prepared not only to profess but to carry

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out those ideals in co-operation with the new party, the conflict will die a natural death. But it should be realised that without sincerity and frank openness no attempt at an understanding can be successful or worth making.

The Charge of Vilification

12-September-1906

A charge which is being freely hurled against the new party is that they, or at least an active section of them, indulge in "vile abuse" of the old leaders. We do not care to deny that some of our writers and speakers are unsparing and outspoken in their attacks on individual leaders and that sometimes the bounds are passed. But this is a common incident of any political controversy under modern conditions. Both sides are guilty of such excesses. The correspondence to which the Bengalee has been recently giving a large part of its space is often of a poisonous virulence and an almost absurd violence of misrepresentation and the chief vernacular organ of the old party has no better claims to "respectability" in this respect than the most outspoken exponent of a more extreme policy. It is merely party passion which tries to ascribe all the violence and vilification to one side. These are inevitable concomitants of a party conflict and it will not do for either side to affect a sanctimonious spotlessness of demeanour; for the affectation will not bear scrutiny.

Autocratic Trickery

12-September-1906

It is announced that Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji has accepted Babu Bhupendranath's offer of the Presidentship of the National Congress at Calcutta. No one was likely to oppose Mr. Naoroji as a President and had the proposal been brought forward constitutionally in the Reception Committee the supporters of Mr. Tilak would have consented to postpone his name till the next year. But the Secret Cabal which is managing affairs in defiance of all rule and practice, were determined to score a

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party success and to use Mr. Naoroji, without his knowledge, as a tool for their ignoble purpose. They would face the supporters of Mr. Tilak with an accomplished fact, which they must either accept or incur the odium of opposing an universally respected name. They have followed a similar method with regard to the Exhibition which they have practically sold to the Government for a price. In this way, the Reception Committee is being turned into a farce and when they allow it to meet, it will find itself without occupation as all its functions have been performed for it behind its back. It becomes therefore the imperative duty of all who have any desire for national control over the national assembly to demand a settled elective constitution not only for the Congress but for every Congress body and law for its procedure which the leaders shall not be allowed to violate unless they are prepared to face a public impeachment from the platform of the Congress.

By the Way

12-September-1906

The Englishman has been making all sorts of remarkable discoveries recently; its activity in this field is stupendous. Recently, it discovered the respectability of the Congress. Yesterday, it suddenly found out that Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji is an angel. A comparative angel, of course, but still an angel. He is pardoned all his wild and whirling speeches, his fiery denunciations of British rule, his immeasured expressions of condemnation; for will he not keep out Mr. Tilak from the Presidential chair of the Calcutta Congress? Why is it that the very name of this man, with his quiet manner of speech, his unobtrusive simplicity and integrity, his absence of noisy and pushing "patriotism", is such a terror to Moderate and Anglo-Indian alike? Far more tactful and measured in speech than Mr. Naoroji, the idea of him yet causes them an ague. It is because he is the one man among us who sees clearly and acts. The man of action in the Presidential chair of the Congress! The Anglo-Indian envisages the idea and sees in it the very image of his doom. Of course, it is the appearance of

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that wild new species, the "extremist", that is responsible for Mr. Naoroji's angelic transfiguration. There is a delightful flexibility about this word "extremist". It is imbued with a thoroughly progressive spirit and never stands still. Once quite within the memory of man, Babu Surendranath Banerji was an "extremist" but his scarlet coat is growing quite a dull and faded pink in these latter times. Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji was once denounced as a blatant extremist—that was the day before yesterday. But now that Mr. Shyamji Krishnavarma and his Home Rulers raise their wild heads above the terrified horizon, Mr. Naoroji is on a fair way to being admitted into the sacred fold of the "statesmanlike" and "moderate". A still worse species of fire-breathing monster has recently turned up in the Bengal extremist. And we look forward with blissful hope to the day when the Englishman will learn to respect the "notorious Bipin Chandra Pal" and embrace him tearfully as the sole remaining bulwark against more anarchic monsters than himself. The upshot is, that India progresses.

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Strange Speculations

13-September-1906

The Statesman, not content with lecturing the Bengali leaders, opens its news columns to curious speculations about the President of the next Congress. It is apparently not quite satisfied with Mr. Naoroji,—a natural sentiment, since, whatever the moderates profess, Mr. Naoroji is not one of them, though he may not go the whole way with the advanced school. Accordingly, the name of Nawab Sayyed Mohammed is thrust forward,—because he is a Mahomedan. The idea that the election of a Mahomedan President will conciliate the anti-Congress Mahomedans, is a futility which has been repeatedly exposed by experience. Mr. Rasul's presidentship at Barisal has not conciliated the following of the Nawab of Dacca; such nominations can only gratify those Mahomedans who are already for the Congress. The question this year for the Congress is, Swadeshi or no Swadeshi, Boycott or no Boycott, and no minor considerations can be admitted. A still more extraordinary piece of information is that Punjab will put up Lala Lajpat Rai against Mr. Tilak! We know, on the contrary, that Punjab is for Mr. Tilak and that Lala Lajpat Rai is the last man to countenance opposition to Mr. Tilak. In itself the candidature of Lala Lajpat Rai would not be unwelcome to the new party. He is one of those men who act, more than they talk, a man with a splendid record of solid patriotic work behind him and to him above all other belongs the credit of building up the Arya Samaj into the most powerful and practically effective organisation in the country. Were both Mr. Tilak and Mr. Naoroji to decline the Presidentship, Lala Lajpat Rai's would be the only other possible candidature.

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The Statesman under Inspiration

13-September-1906

An obviously inspired article appears in the Statesman in which a gallant attempt is made to misrepresent the issues before the country. It tries to convey the idea that the "extremists" have set up Mr. Tilak in opposition to Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji. As everybody is aware, it was not until Mr. Tilak's name was already put prominently before the country that the "moderate section", seeing no other way of avoiding the issue, bethought themselves of Mr. Naoroji. On the issue of representation or no representation our contemporary affects to be in doubt as to the position of the new party, and it discovers that the Bengali people are no longer unanimous against the Partition. How then can Mr. Morley reconsider the question? Need we inform the Statesman that the Bengali people are as unanimous against the Partition as they ever were and always will be? We do not doubt Mr. Morley's ability to find excuses for evading a concession which he has never meant to yield, unless his hand is forced. But the movement for a new representation is not only a contravention of the understanding which had existed among all parties since the last Town Hall meeting, but it was hatched in secret and engineered in secret. The country was not taken into confidence as to the motives or justification for this important departure. Had the old leaders acted straightforwardly in the matter and shown overwhelmingly strong reasons for the step, the leaders of the new party, although opposed on principle to the submission of new prayers and entreaties, might not have refused to countenance a strong and dignified representation which did not sacrifice in any degree the policy of Swadeshi and Boycott. Since they would not adopt this straightforward course, it is fair to conclude that the case for a new representation was too weak to be publicly presented. We have therefore every right to appeal to the country to maintain the policy hitherto successful. Tighten the grip of the Boycott, let both parties unite to give a new impetus to the Swadeshi; paralyse the two-headed administration of Bengal by every legitimate means of passive resistance—and the Partition will inevitably be rescinded or modified.

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A Disingenuous Defence

14-September-1906

The strictures which the extraordinary announcement made at Bhagalpur by Babu Surendranath Banerji has aroused, have compelled the Bengalee to offer a sort of apology or explanation for the unconstitutional action of the leaders. It was distinctly stated at Bhagalpur that Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji had accepted the Presidentship of the Congress. It follows therefore that the Presidentship was unconstitutionally offered to Mr. Naoroji by one or two individuals behind the back of the Reception Committee. It is now explained that Mr. Naoroji simply wired his willingness to accept the Presidentship offered to him. On this theory the offer was a private suggestion of individuals and the individuals made a public announcement of their private suggestion and its private acceptance, in order to compromise the Reception Committee and force its hands. The explanation therefore does not exculpate the authors of this stratagem; it only makes their action more disingenuous and tricky. No individual has any right to take privately the consent of Mr. Naoroji or another, as if the Presidentship depended on his choice. Until the Reception Committee has decided to whom it will offer the function, all that individuals, be they never so much leaders, have the authority to do is to put forward name or names for recommendation by the Committee. It is only after the Committee has made its decision that the person selected can be asked whether he is willing to accept the offer. If it is thought necessary to make sure of this beforehand, that also can only be done with the sanction or by the direction of the Committee. The fact that the Bengalee should have advanced such a puerile quibble to justify the conduct of Babu Bhupendranath is a proof

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that these "constitutional" leaders have no conception whatever of what constitutional action means. The plea that it had long been known Mr. Naoroji was coming to India and it was therefore thought fit to ask him to preside at the Congress, is one which will command no credit. When did this "fitness" occur to men who were proposing Harnam Singh and Mudholkar and everybody and anybody, but never Mr. Naoroji; although "it was known" that he was coming to India? Not until Mr. Tilak's name was before the country and they saw that none of the mediocrities they had suggested could weigh in the scale with the great Maratha leader. Not by these sophisms will the Calcutta autocrats escape the discredit of their actions.

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Last Friday's Folly

17-September-1906

Even at the risk of being branded as social reactionaries, we must, we feel, enter our protest against the notions and ideals that lay, evidently, under the so-called national dinner, celebrated at the Albert Hall on Friday last. The function, in itself, was too insignificant to deserve any notice. Two hundred and fifty men and boys meeting and dining together in public, regardless of caste-restrictions and old orthodoxy, is not even a new thing in Calcutta Society. Hindus and Mahomedans had dined publicly in Calcutta, on special occasions, before now. Dinners had repeatedly been given at the India Club in honour of prominent members in which members of all castes and creeds joined. Subscription dinners had been organised in honour of prominent public men, even outside that Club, the last one being less than two years old, when the friends of Sir Henry Cotton met him at a dinner at the Calcutta Town Hall. Babu Narendranath Sen organised a public dinner some years back, to celebrate the birthday of Buddha, where people of all castes and more than one creed, sat down on mats and dined together on simple loochie and dal. These dinners had all been publicly announced and publicly reported; but no one cared to publicly condemn them. Had last Friday's dinner been associated with some specific public function, or been held in honour of any particular public men, no one would have, we believe, taken any serious notice of it. The folly of it lay in the idea that interdining was a necessary condition of nation building in India; and it deserves condemnation for propounding the foolish and suicidal ideal that social and religious differences must first of all be destroyed before India can ever hope to realise her own true civic life.

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This is the Anglo-Indian and the British idea. It is the main plea upon which the present despotism supports and justifies itself. It is the plea upon which even our own old-school patriots proclaim the fatal doctrine that India is not, and will never for a very long period be, fitted for self-government, and, therefore, the strong hand of the foreigner must be over her, to prevent her various castes and creeds flying at each others' throats, and thus falling a prey to some other and infinitely worse foreign yoke, if the present one is removed; and that, therefore, the highest political wisdom demands that we should, as long as there are diversities of creeds and castes among us, cultivate with care the present servitude, trying to make it easy to bear for the nation, and profitable for the individual, by adopting the policy of "association with and opposition to the Government". This plea must be knocked on the head, therefore, before we can expect to make out a reasonable case for that propaganda of national freedom and autonomy which has been taken up by the new party in the country.

Those who say that caste and religious differences must first of all be destroyed before India can ever rise to the status of a nation, have very hazy and confused notions regarding the character and constitution of that nation. Our history has been different in many respects from the history of other peoples. The composition of the Indian people has been unique in all the world. Nations grew in the past by the accretion and assimilation of different tribes. This is an earlier process. But India has not been a mere meeting place of tribes, but a meeting place of grown up nations with developed social and religious lines of their own, and with original castes and types of cultures peculiar to them. The character and composition of the coming Indian nation, therefore, will differ very materially from those of the European nations, the process of unification among whom took place at a much earlier and comparatively more nebular stage of their growth. This is a fact which our old school politicians and social reformers do not seem as yet to have had any time to think of, and we are not hopeful that even now, after it is pointed out to them, in the plainest language possible, they will have the

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patience to do so and recognise this essential peculiarity of our infant national life. The nation-idea in India will realise itself, in all its departments, along what may be called federal lines,—it will be a union of different nationalities, each preserving its own specific elements both of organisation and ideal, each communicating to the others what they lack in either thought or character, and all moving together towards one universal end, both in civic and social life, progressively realising that end along its own historic and traditional lines, and thus indefinitely drawing near to each other, without, for an equally indefinite period, actually losing themselves in any one particular form of that life, whether old or new. The Mahomedan, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Christian in India will not have to cease to be Mahomedan, Hindu, Buddhist, or Christian, in any sense of the term, for uniting into one great and puissant Indian nation. Devotion to one's own ideals and institutions, with toleration and respect for the ideals and institutions of other sections of the community, and an ardent love and affection for the common civic life and ideal of all—these are what must be cultivated by us now, for the building up of the real Indian nation. To try to build it up in any other way will be impossible, whether that way be the way of the Brahmo, the Christian, or the propagandist Mahomedan. To make any attempt along any of these lines, will not make for but work against national unity; and the reckless men who organised this so-called national dinner will, if they persist in their folly, instead of bringing the different races and religions together, only help to arouse the opposition of orthodoxy everywhere, and drive the great forces that range always with orthodoxy to an attitude of open hostility to the great national movement, and bring about a reaction that will seek to accentuate those very differences and tighten those very bonds of caste and custom which in their unphilosophic and unscientific zeal they are trying by these wrong and obtrusive methods to obliterate and loosen. It is in this view that we condemn the folly that was perpetrated on Friday last under the name of a National Dinner.

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Stop-gap Won't Do

17-September-1906

Even India has sometimes a ray of light in the midst of its twilight obscurity and crass lack of insight. Thus saith the organ of the Cottons and Wedderburns: "Mr. Morley will not be Secretary of State for India for ever and a day. So long as he is at the helm, the prow of the ship will be set in the right direction. But what will happen when his controlling hand is removed?" Precisely so, Mr. Morley may set the prow in the right direction, but it is perfectly evident from his public statements that he is not prepared to travel fast or far; on the contrary he is utterly against any decision and effective treatment of the intolerable situation in India. He is simply going to repeat an experiment which has failed and is out of date. We shall therefore gain little during his lease of power—and afterwards? Who shall secure us against another Curzonian reaction? We therefore say that an instalment of effective self-government is the one thing which the Congress should insist on because it is the one thing which will make reaction impossible. We farther contend that an effective instalment of self-government not only ought to be but must inevitably be the first step towards complete autonomy. For the statement of these plain and indisputable truths we must, forsooth, be dubbed "seditionists" and "extremists", not only by Anglo-Indian papers for whose opinion we do not care a straw, but by Indian journals professing to be nationalist. There could not be a greater evidence of the dull servility of attitude, the fear of truth and the unworthy timidity which has become ingrained in our habits of mind by long acquiescence in servitude. If these things are sedition, then we are undoubtedly seditious and will persist in our sedition till the end of the chapter.

By the Way

17-September-1906

The Bengalee came out on Sunday with an extraordinary leader in which it appeals to its opponents to sink all personal differences and unite in one common cause. The better to further

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this desirable end it kicks them severely all round so as to bring them into a reasonable state of mind. The opponents of the Bengalee are all actuated by base personal motives; their organs of opinion are upstart journals trying to create a sensation; their championing of advanced political principles is a trick of the trade, etc. etc. And therefore the Bengalee appeals to them to be friendly, toe the line and follow faithfully in the wake of Babu Surendranath Banerji. Does our contemporary really think that this is the sort of appeal which is likely to heal the breach?

The praise and approval of the Anglo-Indian papers, says the Bengalee wisely, is a sure sign that we are on the wrong road. Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung. On this principle, we ought to go on our way rejoicing. If there is one pleasing feature of the present situation, it is the remarkable unanimity with which the Anglo-Indian Press has greeted our appearance in the field with a shriek of denunciation and called on Heaven and Earth and the Government and the Moderates to league together and crush us out of existence. Statesman and Englishman, Times and Pioneer, all their discordant notes meet in one concord on this grand swelling theme. The "moderate" papers of all shades, pro-Government or advocates of association with Government or advocates of association-cum-opposition, have all risen to the call. The Hindu Patriot rejoices at our lack of influence, the Mirror threatens us with the prison and the scaffold, the Bengalee mutters about upstart journals and warns people against the morass which is the inevitable goal, in its opinion, of a forward policy. Well, well, well! Here is an extraordinary and most inexplicable clamour about an upstart journal and a party without influence or following in the country.

The Statesman is taking its cue from the Mirror and is growing very truculent and minatory. It is not going to give us any quarter, this merciless "Friend of India", but will abolish, expunge and

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blot us out of existence in no time. It will not consent to support Indian aspirations unless we consent to perform harakiri. It will advise its friend Mr. Morley to make no concession, no, not even increase the number of our Legislative Honourables, until even the very scent of a "sedition" can no longer be sniffed in the Indian breezes.

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Is Mendicancy Successful?

18-September-1906

An apologia for the mendicant policy has recently appeared in the columns of the Bengalee. The heads of the defence practically reduce themselves to two or three arguments.

1) The policy of petitioning was recommended by Raja Rammohan Roy, has been pursued consistently since then and has been eminently successful—at least whatever political gains have been ours in the last century, have been won by this policy.

2) Supposing this contention to be lost, there remains another. Mere petitioning is bad, but when the petition is backed by the will of the community, resolved to gain its object by every legitimate means, it is not mendicancy but an assertion of a natural right.

3) Even if a petitioning policy be bad in principle, politics has nothing to do with principles, but must be governed by expediency, and not only general expediency, but the expediency of particular cases.

4) Then there is the argumentum ad hominem. The Dumaists petition, the Irish petition; why should not we?

We believe this is a fair summary of our contemporary's contentions.

We are not concerned to deny the antiquity of the petitioning policy, nor its illustrious origin. Raja Rammohan Roy was a great man in the first rank of active genius and set flowing a stream of tendencies which have transformed our national life. But what was the only possible policy for him in his times and without a century of experience behind him, is neither the only policy nor the best policy for us at the present juncture. We join issue with our contemporary on his contention that whatever we

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have gained politically has been due to petitioning. It appears to us to show a shallow appreciation of political forces and an entire inability to understand the fundamental facts which underlie outward appearances. When the sepoys had conquered India for the English, choice lay before the British, either to hold the country by force and repression, or to keep it as long as possible by purchasing the co-operation of a small class of the people who would be educated so entirely on Western lines as to lose their separate individuality and their sympathy with the mass of the nation. An essential part of this policy which became dominant owing to the strong personalities of Macaulay, Bentinck and others, was to yield certain minor rights to the small educated class, and concede the larger rights as slowly as possible and only in answer to growing pressure. This policy was not undertaken as the result of our petitions or our wishes, but deliberately and on strong grounds. India was a huge country with a huge people strange and unknown to their rulers. To hold it for ever was then considered by most statesmen a chimerical idea; even to govern it and keep it tranquil for a time was not feasible without the sympathy and co-operation of the people themselves. It was therefore the potential strength of the people and not the wishes of a few educated men, which was the true determining cause of the scanty political gains we so much delight in. Since then the spirit of the British people and their statesmen has entirely changed,—so changed that even a Radical statesman like Mr. Morley brushes aside the expressed "will of the community" with a few abrupt and cavalier phrases. Why is this? Precisely because we have been foolish enough to follow a purely mendicant policy and to betray our own weakness. If we had not instituted the National Congress we might have continued in the old way for some time longer, getting small and mutilated privileges whenever a strong Liberal Viceroy happened to come over. But the singularly ineffective policy and inert nature of the Congress revealed to British statesmen—or so they thought,—the imbecility and impotence of our nation. A period of repression, ever increasing in its insolence and cynical contempt for our feelings, has been the result. And now that

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a Liberal Government of unprecedented strength comes into power, we find that the gains we can expect will be of the most unsubstantial and illusory kind and that we are not to get any guarantee against their being withdrawn by another reactionary Viceroy after a few years. It is perfectly clear therefore that the policy of mendicancy will no longer serve. After all, cries the Bengalee, we have only failed in the case of the Partition. We have failed in everything of importance for these many years, measure after measure has been driven over our prostrate heads and the longed-for Liberal Government flouts us with a few grudging concessions in mere symptomatic cases of oppression. The long black list of reactionary measures remains and will remain unrepealed. We do not care to deny that in small matters petitioning may bring us a trivial concession here or a slight abatement of oppression there; even there we shall fail in nine cases and win in one. But nothing important, nothing lasting, nothing affecting the vital questions which most closely concern us, can be hoped for from mere mendicancy. To the contention of antiquity and success, therefore, our answer is that this antique policy has not succeeded in the long run, but utterly failed, and that the time has come for a stronger and more effective policy to take its place. To the other contentions of the Bengalee we shall reply in their proper order. This which is the true basis of the petitionary philosophy, has neither reason nor fact to support it.

By the Way

18-September-1906

The Englishman is at it again. His fiery imagination has winged its way over rivers and hills and is now disporting itself on airy pinions over far Sylhet. We learn from our contemporary that the British Government has been subverted in Sylhet, which is now being governed by a number of schoolboys who—horrible to relate—are learning the use of deadly lathi. This startling resolution is the result of Babu Bipin Chandra Pal's recent visit to Sylhet. To crown these calamities, it appears that Golden Bengal is circulating its seditious pamphlets broadcast. Its irrepressible

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emissaries seem not to have despaired even of converting the Magistrate to their views, for even he is in possession of a copy. We have, however, news later than the Englishman's. We have been informed from a reliable source that the Sylhet Republic has been declared and that Babu Bipin Chandra Pal is to be its first President.

The Englishman graciously accedes to the request of a correspondent who prays this "much-esteemed journal to accommodate the following lines". There are some gems from the delicious production which the accommodating Englishman has accommodated. "We should always beg the Government and not fight it for favours." Fighting for favours is distinctly good; but there is better behind. "It is impossible for us to obtain rights and privileges by fulminating acrimonious invectives on the Government and making the Anglo-Indian rulers the butt-end of mendacious persiflage and anathema." Shade of Jabberjee! The junior members of the Bar Library will enjoy this elegant description of themselves. "For ought I know most of the educated men are opposed to the despicable spread-eagleism of a coterie of raw youths, who having adopted European costumes and rendered their upper lips destitute of "knightly growth", give themselves all the airs of a learned Theban and range themselves against the British Government." This is a sentence which we would not willingly let die and we would suggest to the raw youths with the destitute upper lips that they might sit in council and devise means to preserve a literary gem which will immortalise them no less than the brilliant author. How infinitely superior is the true Jabberjee to the mock imitation. Even the author of the letter to Mr. Morley must hide his diminished head before this outburst.

"This attitude of the Extremists merely exposes their Boeotian stupidity. Let them lay to it, that if they do not yet refrain from the obnoxious procedure, they are sure to come to grief." We

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will lay to it, S. M. After such a scintillation of Attic wit and rumbling of Homeric thunder, our Boeotian stupidity finds itself irremediably reduced to Laconic silence. Truly, there seems to be some fearful and wonderful wild fowl in the ranks of the moderationists.

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By the Way

20-September-1906

The Statesman and the Indian Mirror appear to have entered into a Holy Alliance for the suppression of the extremists. The basis of this great political combination seems to be mutual admiration of the most effusive and affectionate kind. Mirror assures Statesman that he is a noble Anglo-Indian and a true and tried Friend of India; Statesman quotes Mirror's solemn lucubrations by the yard. It only needs the Hindu Patriot to join the league and complete the Triple Alliance. An Anglo-Indian paper, a Government journal masking under the disguise of an Indian daily, and the exponent of the most pale and watery school of "patriotism", would make a beautiful symphony in whites and greys. Such an alliance is most desirable: it would be a thing of artistic beauty and a joy for ever—and it would not hurt the new party.

We were a little surprised to find the Bengalee lending itself to the campaign. It chooses to insinuate that while the methods of the old party are extremely proper, sober and legal, those of the new party are outside the bounds of the law. In what respect, pray? We advocate boycott and picketing, but that is a gospel of which Babu Surendranath Banerji has constituted himself in the past the chief panda. We advocate abstention from Legislative Councils and other Government bodies, but so do the old leaders strongly recommend it—to East Bengal. We advocate the assertion by the people of their right to carry on the agitation in every lawful way,—but so did the old leaders at Barisal. We advocate abstention from all association with the

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Government, but such abstention has not yet been forbidden by law. We advocate the substitution of Indian agency and Indian energy in every department of life for our old state of dependency on foreign agency and energy. We advocate an organised system of self-development guided by a Council with regard to Bengal and an open democratic constitution for the Congress instead of the secret unconstitutional manipulations of a few leaders. We advocate finally, autonomy as the ideal and goal of our endeavours. Where is the illegality, if you please?

To listen to these excited people one would imagine we were calling on the teeming millions of India to rise in their wrath, fall upon the noble Anglo-Indian friends of the Mirror and with teeth, nails and claws drive them pell-mell into the Indian Ocean. All these imputations have, of course, a definite object and the excitement is a calculated passion. On one side to discredit our party with the timid and cautious, on the other to draw the attention of the bureaucracy and secure for us free lodgings from a paternal Government, seems to be the objective. Of neither contingency are we afraid; the new policy is not for those who tremble or who prefer their own safety and ease to the service of their country, and the fear of the Government we renounced long ago and have forgotten what it means. It is no use trying to awaken that dead feeling in our nature. We shall go on our way steadily and persistently, careless of defeat or victory, indifferent to attack or suffering, until we have built up such a nucleus of force and courage in India as will compel both moderate and official to yield to the demands of the people. But always within the bounds of the law, if you please, our friend of Colootola. We are a law-abiding people, even when we are extremists.

We have been severely attacked more than once for splitting up the country into two factions and thus marring the majestic unity of the national movement. We have already given our answer to that charge. Already before the Swadeshi movement

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the divergence of ideals had begun to declare itself and in several parts of India strong sections had grown up who were already dissatisfied with mendicancy and with the haphazard formation and methods of the Congress. Until recently the only course which seemed left to men of this persuasion was to hold entirely aloof from the Congress or else to attend it without taking any prominent part in its deliberations. But at the present time the aspect of things has greatly changed. The party predominates in the Deccan, is extremely strong in the Punjab and a force to be reckoned with in Bengal. It numbers among its leaders and adherents many men of ability, energy and culture, some of whom have done good service in the past and others are obviously among the chief workers of the future. They have a definite ideal which is not the ideal of the older leaders and definite methods by which they hope to arrive at their ideal. It is idle to expect that a party so constituted will any longer consent to be excluded from political life or from the deliberations of the Congress through which it may exercise a general influence over the country. The old party is anxious that we should take up the position of an insignificant "extremist" party, tolerated perhaps and sometimes made use of to frighten the Government into concessions, but not recognised. "Exist, if you please, but do not interfere with or oppose us," is their cry, "and do not try to assert yourselves in the Congress." Such a demand is ridiculous in the extreme. When there is a definite difference as to ideals and methods, it is too much to expect of any growing party that it shall not use every means to educate the people to their views and organise such opinion as has declared itself on their side. Nor is it reasonable to demand a considerable part of the educated community to banish itself from Congress or only attend as a mute and inert element. If the Congress is really a national body, it must admit all opinions and give them free facility for expressing their views and urging their measures. If, on the other hand, it is merely a gathering of moderates, it has no right to pose as a national body. The argument usually urged that the Congress has been built up by a certain class of people and with certain ideas and that therefore it should remain in the same

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hands and under the domination of the same ideas, is one which has no value whatever, unless we are to accept the Congress merely as a society for the cultivation of good relations with the Government. If it is a national assembly, it must answer to changes of national feeling and progress with the progress of the nation. We shall therefore persist in disseminating our ideas with the utmost energy of which we are capable and in organising the opinion of the country wherever we have turned it in the desired direction, for action and for the prevalence of our ideals. The only question that remains, is the question of united action. It is certainly desirable, if it can be brought about, that the action of the whole country in certain important matters should be united. But the very first condition of such unity is that all important sections of opinion should have the chance of expressing its views and championing its own proposals, before the united action to be taken is decided by a majority. It is for this reason that we demand an elective constitution and a Council honestly representing all sections, so that real unity may be possible and not the false unity which is all the old party clamours for. Their plan for united action is simply to boycott the new party and impose silence on it under penalty of "suppression". So long as they persist in that spirit, united action will remain impossible.

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By the Way

01-October-1906

To the onlooker the duel between the Statesman and the Englishman is extremely amusing. The interests of Anglo-India are safe in the hands of both; only they differ as to the extent to which the alien yoke should be made light. The Englishman advocates an open and straightforward course—to make the Indians feel that they are a conquered people—as helpless in the hands of the conquerors as was the dwarf of the story in the iron grip of the giant. The Statesman, on the other hand, wants to cover the heels of British boots with soft velvet. We, for ourselves, prefer an open course to a crooked policy.

The fun of the thing is that from consideration of methods they have descended to personalities. The Englishman credits the Statesman with the instinct to follow Mr. Surendranath Banerji with doglike fidelity. To this the Statesman replies—"Strange as it may appear to the Englishman, we are in the habit of forming our own opinions and of expressing them without any extraneous assistance—even from the Bar Library, or elsewhere. Mr. Banerji has certainly not done us the honour of tendering his help, nor have we found it necessary to invite it." We take our contemporary at his word. But we may be permitted to ask our contemporary if the paragraph about the New India to which we referred the other day was not written under some extraneous inspiration,—white or brown? Next, our Chowringhee contemporary boasts of his independent policy and fearless proclamation of it. "In order", says our contemporary, "to attain a wide circulation and a position of influence, it is not enough to

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follow the example which this journal set a quarter of a century ago by reducing its price to an anna. If the Englishman is ever again to become a force in journalism it must copy the Statesman in matters of greater importance than the mere cost of its daily issue. It must learn to have an honest and independent policy and to proclaim it fearlessly." And our contemporary seems to think that men's lapses like their civil claims are barred by limitation, or he has a very conveniently short memory, or how could he otherwise so soon forget the dangerous position he was placed in at the time of the Rent Bill controversy and the way out he found by removing Mr. Riach, the responsible editor?

After all we do not despair. There is yet some hope left for our contemporary, for he can still understand that—"it is possible for a newspaper, as for an individual, to err at times and honestly to advocate views which may be mistaken."

The Indian Mirror has, after all, found one good point in the armour of the "extremists", they will not stand any humbug, says our ancient contemporary; and no one will dare question the truth of his opinion, for he speaks clearly from personal experience.

Babu Surendranath Banerji is reported to have advised the youthful students of Bally "to keep themselves within the limits of law and never, in their excitement, run into excesses but always to serve their motherland with unflinching devotion, through good report and evil," and the old leader is right, because latest experience shows that Indian publicists and patriots have good reason to stand in fear of reports.

The Indian Mirror is surprised that we are resting on our oars when the Congress-bark should be fast sailing. The light that

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the Mirror is reflecting is both dim and antiquated in these days of radium and X-rays. Our information is that the "recognised" leaders are making arrangements for the Congress, though even the Mirror has not been taken into their confidence.

The old saw was that a mountain in labour produced a mouse. But the modern saw is that the Indian politicians in labour produce speeches and interviews. Somehow the information has leaked out that the Hon'ble Mr. Gokhale's recent visit to England has not been much of a success. Now Sir William Wedderburn comes to the rescue of the Bombay patriot and says that the Hon'ble gentleman had a series of interviews with eminent British politicians from the Prime Minister down to 150 pro-Indian MPs. Achievement indeed!

"Star to star vibrates light"—is there also a similar responsiveness between mind and matter, or else why should there be so fearful a tremor in mother earth, keeping time, as it were, to the nervous tremors of the bold British and the timid Indian heart, at the present Indian unrest in Bengal caused by Sonar Bangla and the Shanti-Sechan?

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By the Way

11-October-1906

Emerson and original sin have never as yet gone together. But Principal Herambachandra Moitra has achieved the impossible. Lecturing to a Bombay congregation on a Wednesday he solemnly declared that "even children themselves are not free from sin," and on the following Sunday discoursed on "Emerson". Poor sage of Concord!

Calcutta is going to have a Tower of Silence for the Parsis. The Patrika would, however, seem to hold that it is more needed by our own patriots. They evidently permit writing in that dreadful place.

A "veteran" laments the decay of manners among the people of this country, in the hospitable columns of the Pioneer. There was a time, only forty years ago, when on the approach of a European, Indian lads would cry "Gora ata Gora ata" and skid. When the same class of lads now "pass a European with a cigarette between their lips and stare him calmly in the face," and a "large number of natives salaam with their left hands" the world, or the British Empire, which means the same thing, must be nearing its end.

Bengal politicians seem determined to maintain the ancient reputation of the nation for its logical acumen and subtlety. The Barisal Conference resolved not to send any prayer or petition to

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Government; when the Conference was forcibly dispersed, the leaders sent a wire to the Viceroy on the ground that a telegram was surely not a petition. They have resolved not to approach the Lieutenant-Governors of the partitioned Provinces with any prayer or address, but may still draw their Honours' "serious attention" to various matters, public and personal, including the gift of a Deputy Magistracy to their sons. Surely a cosy place in the Executive Service is not a membership of the Legislative Council.

There is considerable indignation among the true "Friends of India" both in England and in this country, at the "political oration" delivered by Mr. Manmatha Chandra Mallik at the recent Tyabji memorial meeting in London. After this we shall be told that it would be sinful to discourse on religion at a commemoration service in honour of a Lord Bishop of Canterbury or to speak on science at a memorial meeting of a President of the British Association. We think at the recent Tyabji-Bose meeting in London, Babu Romesh Chandra Dutt must have discoursed, therefore, on the greatness of Islam, and Sir Henry Cotton on the saving grace of Brahmo-Theology. We anxiously await full reports of their speeches.

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The Famine near Calcutta

29-October-1906

The heartrending accounts of the famine received from Diamond Harbour by the Statesman, of which we print the latest elsewhere, ought to be [............] for those who think [..................] best and the present [........................] Government we could possibly have in India. Yet it is nothing compared to the grisly and terrible shape that Famine can take when it is in earnest. That grim occasional visitor of ours has, under the economical effects of the present rule, ceased to be occasional and taken up her home in our midst. But Bengal has not yet seen her unveiled face, and those of us who have seen the great famine on the other side of India, those terrible bare fields void of all but death, the fair plough-lands stripped of crops and of cattle, the dreadful corpses on roadside and field that had once been kindly living men and women, the listless moving skeletons who should have been merry children,—they most fervently of all will pray that no such sight will ever be repeated in their own province. Yet even what is happening is terrible enough. Miss Gillbert cries out against the cold indifference and heartless economy of the relief officer but that also is not new to those who saw the famine of 1899. We cannot expect more from the bureaucracy than a businesslike official relief; they are not our flesh and blood that they should feel for us as brothers. They will not admit famine until they are compelled and even then will organize relief with efficiency indeed but without bowels of feeling and with a cold businesslike economy. Nor can we expect them to fix the price of grain or prevent export, as the now deposed Holkar did in Indore to save his people. What we can expect from them, they do; to expect more would be folly. Meanwhile what are

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we doing ourselves? We have collected small sums of money through scattered agencies and distributed them to the stricken districts, we have made some attempt to send rice at cheap rates; but it is all so inadequate. It is the old, old lesson. There is the thought, there is the will, but there is not the organization. In Barisal there is organization and the famine has been manfully fought. In another part of the new province a still more efficient organization of the educated community kept down the price of food and saved the district. But why are these merely scattered exceptions! Because we have depended for all things on the bureaucracy and made no attempt to organize ourselves as a race to deal with our own problems.

Statesman's Sympathy Brand

29-October-1906

The design of the extended New Market was an achievement on which Mr. MacCabe, the Chief Engineer of the Corporation was congratulated by an Anglo-Indian contemporary. But Mr. MacCabe wrote to say that he was an engineer and not an architect and the credit of the design should be given not to him but to his Indian Assistant, Mr. Cavasjee. No sooner was the fact revealed that the work was done by an Indian than the Statesman recognised that the design was a replica which had for its original the Crawford Market in Bombay. This startling revelation has consoled our sympathetic contemporary and repaired the wounded vanity of Anglo-India. We cannot sufficiently admire the connoisseurs who delight in the peculiar flavour of the Statesman's friendly sympathy towards Indians.

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By the Way - News from Nowhere

29-October-1906

The Punjab journal, Light, has suggested that in order to safeguard the Congress the Standing Committee should be empowered to expel from the Congress ranks any uncomfortable and undesirable delegate, by three-fourths majority and with reasons given. This statesmanlike proposal has attracted great attention in Bombay and a meeting was held in Mr. D. E. Watcha's office yesterday to consider and give effect to it. Sir Pherozshah Mehta, resplendent with eternal youth, took the chair. After some discussion the proposal was passed and declared, on the spot, a fundamental law of the Congress constitution. It was decided, however, that the Bombay Committee alone should enjoy the power, Sir Pherozshah pointing out that Bombay was the only safe, loyal and moderate city in India and would remain so as long as he (Sir Pherozshah) was its uncrowned King. It was suggested, but timidly and in an awestruck whisper, that even Sir Pherozshah might not live for ever but the great man answered, "L'état? c'est moi" and "après moi le déluge" (The State? I am the State, and after me the deluge). As no one present happened to know French, this argument was considered unanswerable. An amendment to the effect that Madras and the United Provinces might also be given the power, under proper safeguards and restrictions, was overwhelmingly defeated, the majority being composed of Sir Pherozshah Mehta and the minority of all the other members present. It was next proposed that Mr. B. G. Tilak should be the first person declared disqualified from becoming a Congress delegate. A member present had the temerity to suggest that this proceeding would hurt the Congress and not Mr. Tilak. He was augustly commanded by the chairman to shut up, but as he still persisted the members rose in a body, hustled him out of the room, propelled him downstairs and then returned to their seats fatigued but with a

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consciousness of duty done. After this the proscription of Lala Lajpat was proposed and carried nem. con. Babu Bipin Chandra Pal was the last name suggested and carried uproariously, the members voting twice in their enthusiasm. The reasons alleged for these proscriptions have not been fully ascertained. Mr. Tilak was disqualified because he has been to jail and has no tact, Babu Bipin Chandra Pal because he is Babu Bipin Chandra Pal; I am unable to discover the precise reason alleged in Lala Lajpat Rai's case, but I believe it was because he was not Mr. Alfred Nundy. After the other members had left, Sir Pherozshah and Mr. Watcha constituted themselves into a public meeting, reconstituted the Standing Committee and elected fifty delegates for the Calcutta Congress.

There is little other fresh news from this quarter. The announcement of Mr. Morley's intended reforms in the Pioneer has created great excitement and it is understood that several petitions have reached Lord Minto protesting against the selection of a Gurkha prince and suggesting the petitioners' superior claims. Nawabzada Nasurullah Khan of Sachin and Nawab Salimullah of Dacca are among the claimants. It is also understood that Mr. K. G. Gupta has sent in his pretensions through the Bengal Government, but for this I cannot vouch. Much alarm has been created in royalist and moderate circles by the persistent attempts of Mr. Tilak to bring the merchants and mill-owners into the Swadeshi movement. The weather here is sultry but not thunderous. Fireworks are frequent.

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The Statesman's Voice of Warning

30-October-1906

The Statesman has been sadly uneasy and troubled ever since the appearance of the new party as a force in politics. Probably, it feels its secure and comfortable position as a [......] and worshipped patron of the Indian people threatened by the emergence of an obdurate and unpatronisable element. And it is at a loss how to deal with this unexampled situation. Sometimes fatherly, sometimes magisterial, now menacing, now superiorly argumentative, now solemnly exhortatory, this father Prospero tries to conjure the unwelcome spirit back to the [............]. Dissatisfied with the result, it has called in an ojha all the way from England. The warning of the liberal M. P. which the Statesman introduces with a flourish of trumpets contains at least one salutary truth which our countrymen would do well to take to heart. We are in the habit of attaching an absurdly exaggerated importance to Sir William Wedderburn and Sir Henry Cotton and the small group of so-called friends of India who figure so largely in the news sent over to this country. But in England these men do not figure largely. There is not one of them who can command the house or even get by his eloquence a decent number of members to listen to him; there is not one who has any influence with the Liberal Ministry; there is not one who can get a hearing from the country. Anyone who knows intimately the working of politics in England, will realise that such a group can get no substantial measure carried through the house. For practical purposes a single Bradlaugh would be worth the whole clan of them. The interest which the British press has recently been showing in India was not brought about by this insignificant clique, it is the Swadeshi, the boycott, the violent unrest in Bengal which

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have compelled the lordly Briton [...........................................] his [......]. There is only one process which can rouse him from his comfortable prosperous sleep and that is to prod him continually in the ribs, there is only one way to make him feed his cow as well as milk her and that is for the cow to kick over the pail and refuse to be milked. Flattery may please the Briton and it always delights him to play the lordly and generous patron, but he will take good care never to purchase this pleasure by the sacrifice of any substantial interest. For he is above all things a practical man of business. Tears and prayers do not move him, for he finds them [......] and contemptible. Abuse has not any lasting effect on him, for it wounds his self-respect without hurting his interests or awaking his fears. But the strong determined man who can make himself permanently unpleasant and ever dangerous, awakes his respect and seems to him a force to be reckoned with; in any tussle of interests he will try to cajole and outwit him, he will try to intimidate, bully and coerce him but, failing, he will finally concede what is wanted, shake hands and make friends. This is the simple psychology of the Briton which the Congress agitation has throughout ignored. Our agitation has been a wonderful feminine mixture of flattery, abuse, tears and entreaties; it is only from that we are trying the effects of strength and determination. For thirty years we have used the weapons of women; now, very late in the day, we are trying to use the weapons of men.

The Statesman's Liberal M.P. warns us against [............] change of trend. He [............] John Bull to us as a bull indeed, good-natured and magnanimous when unprovoked but chafing at any red rag of sedition and capable of showing a very nasty temper. We do not think he is right when he attributes Mr. Morley's refusal to unsettle the Partition to irritation at the methods employed in Bengal: for Mr. Morley himself gave quite a contrary reason; and though he did not probably reveal the more important reasons at the back of his mind, we do not suppose Mr. Morley would tell an unnecessary lie. But in the rest of his analysis, he may not be far from the truth. We cannot, however, draw the same lesson from the fact he alleges. "England

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is angry at your contumacy," cries the Statesman, "you, her once timid and obedient slaves; mend your ways then, before you are whipped; run and kiss the feet of Lord Minto." On the contrary, we say, persist without wavering in the course you have adopted. The generosity of John Bull when unprovoked is a passive generosity; it will give you ease if you [......] liberty; it will give you small privileges if you prefer these to the one great privilege of becoming a free nation; but it will expect in return the persistent drain of your wealth and manhood. On the other hand his chafing and nasty tempers are excellent signs. They mean that, for the first time, he has come to think the Indian problem a serious thing which demands handling; and we can predict how he will try to handle it. The Government will set themselves against the new school and the new methods and try to repress them by coercion; they will harass the organs of the new party; they will strike at the new method wherever they raise their head too aggressively. But on the other side they will make quiet advances to the old school of politics. They have already laid their hands on the Exhibition by the offer of a small bribe and, if the precedent unconstitutionally created by our leaders in Calcutta is condoned and repeated in future years, the Exhibition will be officialized. They will try also, by slower stages, to officialize the Congress. To most of our readers this may seem a startling and improbable prediction, but let them watch events and wait. The Legislative Councils will be "reformed"; the Congress, if purged of its "extremist" elements, will be recognized as a loyal and legitimate body, its views often consulted and its minor prayers often granted. The higher prizes or the services and the law will be more often given to Indians. Every effort will be made to gild the chains. But the essentials of autocratic rule, absolute control over legislation, over the executive, over the finances, will in no way be relaxed except under dire necessity. This is the traditional policy of Great Britain when faced with such a situation as now exists in India and it is the policy we may expect to see in play for the next few years if Mr. Morley remains at the India Office. How far it will succeed, will depend on the growth of the forward party which

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is determined to be satisfied with no concessions that will not give the people control over the essentials of Government. Only when John Bull fails to cajole and coerce will he finally come to terms unless indeed the Gods drive him mad and then neither the method of prayers nor the method of passive resistance will avail with him.

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Sir Andrew Fraser

30-October-1906

We are assured by the Hindu Patriot which has always played the part [of a] demi-official organ of Sir Andrew Fraser's Government, that Sir Andrew "has not the remotest idea of laying down the reins of his office before time"—and like the old man in the Arabian Nights he will, in spite of the repeated snubs he has received from his official superiors, continue to embarrass us for two more years. It matters little who rules the province. The policy of the bureaucracy is fixed and one individual in charge of the administrative machinery is as good as another. But the remarks of the Hindu Patriot are rather painfully amusing. The Patriot would not have taken any notice of the rumoured resignation of its patron "if our silence was not being widely construed as indicating the truth of the report". This is how the Patriot shamelessly proclaims to the world generally (and to Native chiefs and office-seekers specially) its close connection with the head of Government. Old Haris Chandra Patriot—"This is all remains of thee!" We are told by this connoisseur of sound administration "that its interests are safe in the hands of Sir Andrew Fraser." At least the interests of the Patriot are. We are next assured that Sir Andrew "loves the people, and the people love him". Sir Andrew may love the people,—he must love the post and the pay to come back after repeated rebuffs. But why talk of the people's love for him? The people cannot love a civilian who was made a Lieutenant-Governor because he had undertaken to support the partition of the Province. And the less the officialised Patriot talks of the people the better for all concerned. Since the dawn of the Sarvadhicary ascendancy it has been the aim and ambition of the Patriot to please Anglo-Indian officialdom. The weekly was converted into a daily to satisfy the literary fecundity of a Secretary and the way in which the Patriot behaved when the Victoria Memorial site was being discussed was a novel departure from that fixity of principles which alone can make people attach any value to the opinions of a paper. And a revaluation of property properly appropriated by Government for the purposes of a lunatic asylum should be enough to make additions to the existing "aristocracy".

By the Way - Necessity Is the Mother of Invention

30-October-1906

Archimedes is said to have set his inventive genius to work at the bidding of the Tyrant of Syracuse. When King Henry VIII was in a hurry to marry Anne Boleyne he is said to have addressed the following instructions to Lord Rochford:—"Take this doctor (Thomas Cranmer of Cambridge) to your country-house and there give him a study and no end of books to prove that I can marry your daughter." Such is the history of many an invention.

The London Times and the Pioneer of Allahabad seem to have received a commission from the Government of India to take occasional excursions into the region of History and Political Economy to prove that the foreign despotism in India cannot but make for the good of the people. The other day, we pointed out in these columns that the Allahabad Oracle has stumbled upon some economic and scientific theories to show that our complaint about the drain of wealth is only midsummer madness. He is perhaps still prosecuting his researches vigorously and will perhaps someday take us by surprise with inventions equally startling.

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Now is the turn for the Times of London. The Thunderer from his superior heights has let fall his thunder against our economic fallacies. He has enunciated the great truth that the impoverishment of a people has nothing to do with the cost of Government in their country. A Government may be a veritable leech but that is no reason why the people should be poor. The spirit of Ruskin is perhaps trembling in his place in heaven at this latest discovery of the orthodox school of economists. However close to the skin the shears may be applied, the lamb should not bleat. Heavy taxes need not matter much to the people, it is the manner of spending them that makes all the difference. Now, as it is admitted on all hands that the hard-earned money of the people has got them an efficient white administration, they have got their money's worth; and no sensible man can sympathise with their womanish complaints about impoverishment as the necessary result of a foreign domination.

It is the inherent defects of the industrial organisation of the country to which should be set down the poor output of wealth which is no doubt an indisputable fact. Instead of clamour against the expensive Government and the home charges, let your industries be directed by knowledge and intelligence and there will be plenty in the land.

We are thankful to the Times for such a simple solution of the poverty problem in India. The Times has, however, his misgivings about the capitalist organisation of the European type and have even some good words for those that obtain in our country. It is a strange logical performance, this article of the Times. It starts with one proposition and a few lines down we come across its contradiction. In this labyrinth of novel economic theories and their contradictions the poverty-stricken ryot has to find his way out. But there is some amusement to be had in watching the intellectual gymnastics performed by English publicists in their endeavour to justify the foreign despotism.

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Articles Published in Bande Mataram in November and December 1906

The Ideal

1) Bande Mataram - Nov 1. 1906

2) Prologue of Anandamath - do

Mr John Morley & his Policy

1) The Settled Fact Again - Nov 2. 1906

Mendicancy

1) By the Way - Nov 1. 1906

2) By the Way - Nov 5. 1906

3) Mr. Gokhale's Vision - Nov 13. 1906

The Two Schools

1) Dissensions (omitting last para) - Nov 9. 06

British Blessings

1) The Price of Peace - Nov 13. 1906

Self Help etc.

1) Self Depreciation - Nov 16. 1906

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The New Spirit

1) The New Spirit - Nov 19. 1906

Miscellaneous

1) A Scotch Sneer and Some Reflections - Dec 3. 06

2) Swadeshi Shakespeare - Dec 8. 06

3) do - Dec 24. 06 4.

4) Welcome to Mr. Naoroji - Dec 24. 06.

India's Mission

1) Mark of Low Civilisation - Dec 7. 1906

Swadeshi-Boycott

1) Swadeshi and Boycott - Dec 10. 1906

The Congress

1) The Results of the Congress - Dec 30. 1906

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The Man of the Past and the Man of the Future

26-December-1906

Two men of the moment stand conspicuously before the eyes of the public in connection with the present session of the National Congress. The advent of these two men close upon each other is full of meaning for us at the present juncture. Both of them are sincere patriots, both have done what work lay in them for their people and for the land that bore them; both are men of indomitable perseverance and high ability; but there the resemblance ends. One of them worn and aged, bowed down with the burden of half a century's toils and labours, comes to us as the man of the past, reminding us of a generation that is passing away, ideals that have lost their charm, methods that have been found to be futile, an energy and hope once buoyant and full of life but which now live on only in a wearied and decrepit old age phantomlike, still babbling exploded generalities and dead formulas. The other comes with his face to the morning, a giant of strength and courage bearing on his unbowed shoulders the mighty burden of our future. We do not know yet what will be the nature of Mr. Dadabhai's Presidential speech; it may contain Pisgah sights of the future, to a great extent it is likely to be the swan song of the dying past. From Mr. Tilak we expect no great speech and no sensational pronouncement, his very presence is more powerful than the greatest declamations; for it is not as an orator he stands prominent in spite of his clear incisive utterances, nor as a writer in spite of the immense influence which as the editor of the Kesari he exercises on the political ideal of Maharashtra, but as the man who knows what has to be done and does it, knows what has to be organized and organizes it, knows what has to be resisted and resists it. He is

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pre-eminently the man who acts, and action is to be the note of our future political energies.

Mr. Dadabhai on the other hand is the man who remonstrates; all his life has been spent in one energetic and unceasing remonstrance through books, through public speeches, through letters and writings in public print. Remonstrance, not action, was the note of our political energies in the past. Action was, according to the old gospel, the prerogative of the Government whether in India or in Great Britain and our only duty was to urge them to act justly and not unjustly, in our interests and not in their own. We expected them to be angels and remonstrated with them when they proved to be merely men; this spur of that remonstrance, it was hoped, would prick them or at least the home-bred of Englishmen to justify the angelic hues in which they had painted themselves, for our benefit. To the young generation these hopes nowadays seem so incredibly futile that they are tempted to wonder how men of ability and education, many of whom had studied something at least of history, could ever have cherished them. But when Mr. Naoroji began his career nothing more real and solid was possible. The falling in pieces of the Maratha Confederacy and the overthrow of the Sikh power had left the Punjab and the Deccan stupefied and apathetic; the rest of India was politically exhausted and inert. In such circumstances it was inevitable that the task of reviving the life of the nation should fall into the hands of a small class of men educated in English schools and in English ways of thinking. It was the one great service these men did to our country, that they accustomed us to hope once more and live politically. It was our misfortune rather than their fault that the hopes they proclaimed were delusive and the life they imparted meagre and superficial. Destitute of political experience they could not avoid basing their political creed on theories and ideals rather than upon facts; without any education but what the rulers chose to impart they had no choice but to borrow their theories and ideas from their English teachers; confined to English books and influence, cut off from the wide wholesome atmosphere of the world's culture they were obliged to accept Englishmen at their

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own valuation. They were for the most part men of talent and ability; and it requires more than talent and ability; it needs the eye of genius to dispense with the necessity of experience and see truth with a single intuitive glance.

The ideas on which our agitation in the nineteenth century proceeded were therefore fantastic and unfounded; its methods were unsuited to the realities of political life in this country, its spirit and aim were so purely Westernized as to preclude the possibility of seizing on the whole people and creating a new national life. The energy expended on it was therefore small, limited both in intensity and area; and the results it brought about were not even commensurate with the little energy expended. But two things were gained—the renewal of political activity in the country and of political experience. A renewed life might have been brought about in other ways and with greater power and reality; but for experience that long wandering in the desert of unrealities and futilities was probably indispensable. However that may be, Mr. Naoroji was among the small knot of able men who first set in motion the new political activities of the country. And one thing distinguished him above most of his fellows that while they wasted themselves on things petty and unreal, he seized on one great fact and enforced it in season and out of season on all who could be got to listen,—the terrible poverty of India and its rapid increase under British rule. It was necessary that a persistent voice should din this into the ears of the people; for what with the incessant pratings about British peace, British justice and the blessings of British rule on the one side and the clamour for Legislative Councils, Simultaneous Examinations, High Education and similar shams on the other, this one central all-important reality was in danger of being smothered out of sight. It was necessary for the nation but to realise its increasing poverty under British rule; only then could it take the next step and take to heart the fact that British rule and increasing poverty stood in the relation of cause and effect; last of all comes the inevitable conclusion that the effect could only be cured by the removal of the cause, in other words by the substitution of autonomy in place of a British or British-controlled

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Government. Mr. Naoroji's was the persistent voice that compelled the nation to realise the first two of these fundamental truths; Mr. Romesh Dutt and others powerfully assisted the result, but it was Mr. Naoroji who first forced the question of Indian poverty into prominence, and for this India owes him a debt of gratitude deeper than that due to any other of our older politicians dead or living. It is true that he has not been able to proclaim the third of the three connected truths consistently and frankly; especially have those of his utterances which were meant for purely Indian consumption, been marred by the desire to qualify, moderate and even conceal a plain fact, which though it was necessary, it might yet be dangerous to proclaim. Nevertheless it is something that a man of his age and traditions should at least have frankly declared that freedom from foreign rule must needs be the only governing ideal of Indian politics. The man who is responsible for that declaration ought to be no Moderate. His heart at least should be with us. That in India and in the Presidential chair of the Congress his voice also will be for us we cannot so confidently forecast. If it is, his venerable sanction will be a support to our efforts; if not, his reticence or opposition will be no hindrance to our final triumph. For that which Time and Fate intend, no utterances of individuals however venerable or esteemed, can delay or alter.

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The Results of the Congress

31-December-1906

The great Calcutta Congress, the centre of so many hopes and fears, is over. Of the various antagonistic or contending forces which are now being hurled together into that Medea's cauldron of confused and ever fiercer struggle out of which a free and regenerated India is to arise, each one had its own acute fears and fervent hopes for the results of this year's Congress. Anglo-India and Tory England feared that the Extremists might capture the assembly; they hoped that a split would be created, and, as a result, the Congress either come to an end and land itself in the limbo of forgotten and abortive things or else, by the expulsion of the new life and the new spirit from its midst, sink into the condition of a dead-alive ineffectual body associated with the Government and opposing it now and then only for form's sake. Liberal England represented by the Cottons and Wedderburns hoped that the unsustaining and empty concessions Mr. Morley is dangling before the eyes of the Moderate leaders might bring back the Congress entirely into its old paths and the new spirit be killed by the show of kindness. It feared that the National Assembly might see through the deception and publicly demand that there should be either substantial concessions or none at all. In India itself the Moderates feared that the forward party in Bengal might force through the Congress strong resolutions on Boycott and other alarming matters or else avenge their failure by wrecking the Congress itself, but they hoped that by an imposing show of ex-Presidents on the platform, by the reverence due to the age and services of Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji, by the dominant personality of the lion of the Bombay Corporation, by the strong contingents from Bombay city, Gujarat and other

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provinces still unswept by new brooms, by the use of tactics and straining in their favour all the advantages of an indefinite and nebulous constitution, they would quell the Extremists, prevent the bringing forward of the Boycott and keep absolute control of the Congress. The forward party hoped to leave the impress of the new thought and life on the Congress of 1906, to get entire self-government recognised as the ideal of the Congress and Swadeshi and Boycott as the means, and to obtain a public recognition of the new ideas in the Presidential address, but they feared that the realisation of such considerable results would be too much to hope for in a single year and a fierce and prolonged struggle would be needed to overcome the combined forces of conservatism, timidity, self-distrust and self-interest, which have amalgamated into the loyalist Moderate party. Such was the state of mind of the conflicting parties when the Calcutta Congress was opened on the 26th.

Today on the 30th, we can look back and count our gains and losses. The hopes of Anglo-India have been utterly falsified and the Anglo-Indian journals cannot conceal their rage and disappointment. The loudest in fury is our dear old perfervid Englishman which cries out in hollow tones of menace that if the Congress tolerates Boycott, the Congress itself will not be tolerated. The hopes and fears of Liberal England have been only partially fulfilled and partially falsified; the Congress has definitely demanded colonial self-government and it has accepted the offered concessions of Mr. Morley only as steps towards that irreducible demand; the new spirit, instead of being killed by kindness, has declared in no uncertain voice its determination to live. The fears of the Moderates have been falsified; no strongly worded resolutions have been passed: neither has the Congress been wrecked by the rapid development of contending parties in our midst. Their hopes too have been falsified. Nothing was more remarkable in the present Congress than its anti-autocratic temper and the fiery energy with which it repudiated any attempt to be dictated to by the authority of recognised leaders. Charges of want of reverence and of rowdyism have been freely brought against this year's Congress. To the first charge we answer that

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the reverence has been transferred from persons to the ideal of the motherland; it is no longer Pherozshah Mehta or even Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji who can impose silence and acquiescence on the delegates of the nation by their presence and authority, for the delegates feel that they owe a deeper reverence and a higher duty to their country. Henceforth the leaders can only deserve reverence by acting in the spirit of the chief servants of their country and not in the spirit of masters and dictators. This change is one of the most genuine signs of political progress which we have observed in our midst. The charge of rowdyism merely means that the Congress, instead of a dead unanimity and mechanical cheers, has this time shown lively signs of real interest and real feeling. It is ridiculous to contend that in a national assembly the members should confine themselves to signs of approval only and conceal their disapproval; in no public assembly in the world, having a political nature, is any such rule observed; and the mother of Parliaments itself is in the habit of expressing its disapproval with far greater vehemence than was done in this year's Congress. It was due to this growth of deep feeling and of the spirit of independence that the spells on which the Moderate leaders had depended, failed of their power to charm. The lion of the Bombay Corporation found that a mightier lion than himself had been aroused in Bengal,—the people.

For ourselves, what have we to reckon as lost or gained? No strongly worded resolutions have been pressed and we are glad that none have been passed, for we believe in strong action and not in strong words. But our hopes have been realised, our contentions recognised if not always precisely in the form we desired or with as much clearness and precision as we ourselves would have used, yet definitely enough for all practical purposes. The Congress has declared self-government on colonial lines to be its demand from the British Government and this is only a somewhat meaningless paraphrase of autonomy or complete self-government. The Congress has recognised the legitimacy of the Boycott movement as practical in Bengal without limitation or reservation and in such terms that any other province which

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feels itself called upon to resort to this weapon in order to vindicate its rights, need not hesitate to take it up. The Congress has recognised the Swadeshi movement in its entirety including the adoption of a system of self-protection by the people; within the scope of its resolution it has found room for the idea of self-help, the principle of self-sacrifice and the policy of the gradual exclusion of foreign goods. The Congress has recognised the necessity of National Education. The Congress has recognised the necessity of a Constitution and adopted one as a tentative measure for a year, which, crude, meagre and imperfect as it is, depends only on our own efforts to develop by degrees into a working constitution worthy of a national assembly. All that the forward party has fought for, has in substance been conceded, except only the practice of recommending certain measures which depend on the Government for their realisation; but this was not a reform on which we laid any stress for this particular session. We were prepared to give the old weakness of the Congress plenty of time to die out if we could get realities recognised. Only in one particular have we been disappointed and that is the President's address. But even here the closing address with which Mr. Naoroji dissolved the Congress, has made amends for the deficiencies of his opening speech. He once more declared self-government, Swaraj, as in an inspired moment he termed it, to be our one ideal and called upon the young men to achieve it. The work of the older men had been done in preparing a generation which were determined to have this great ideal and nothing less; the work of making the ideal a reality, lies with us. We accept Mr. Naoroji's call and to carry out his last injunctions will devote our lives and, if necessary, sacrifice them.

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Yet There Is Method in It

25-February-1907

The "Moderate" Indian politician aspires to be an Imperial citizen. His ambition has at last been screwed up to the point of seeking equality with his "colonial brother". His loyalty draws him towards the Empire and his politics draws him towards self-government and the resultant is self-government within the Empire. Colonies have been granted self-government within the Empire and it logically follows that if the Indians try, try and try again they too will gain their end because nothing is impossible to perseverance. Thus two birds will be killed with one stone. The ruling people, whose immense power can be turned against us any moment if they happen to be irritated, will be pleased with our desire not to break away from the Empire and, at the same time, the spirit of independence which is constantly urging us to demand a greater and greater measure of self-government will have its full play. Such a compromise, such a smooth scheme of accommodating comprehensiveness is being welcomed everywhere as suddenly revealed to a political prophet who is going the round of the country with the inviting message, "Come to me, all ye that are heavy-laden and I shall give rest unto you."

The talk of this colonial self-government or self-government within the Empire at a time they are going to have an Imperial conference of the Colonial Prime Ministers and have condescended to admit a representative of India to the same may very well entrap the unwary, specially when it comes from a personage who is said to have explained to the Secretary of State all that India needs in a five-minute interview. But the pretension of the frog to rank as a quadruped of the elephant class with the mere expression of a pious wish should receive a heavy shock on

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learning from Reuter that either Mr. Morley or his nominee will represent India at the coming Colonial Conference. This is quite in keeping with the system of representation that India enjoys. This is a further extension of the sham which we see here in the local Legislative Councils. This is but the continuation of the farce which is known as the Local Board or Municipal Board representation.

It is a favourable sign that when some leading moderate politicians are trying fresh and big doses of poppy on our people for the offence of giving a slight indication of self-consciousness, these smart shocks for regaining self-possession are coming of themselves. The spurious politics that has so long lived only on the delusion of the people has very nearly been found out and thus elaborate preparations are going on to give it a fresh lease of life. But when the gods want to destroy a thing no human efforts can avail. Mendicancy is no longer consistent with the stand-up position the Indians have taken up. The beggar knows only begging and bullying but his day-dreams surpass even those of Alanschar. The imposing ideal of self-government within the Empire with which begging politics has been making its last attempt to catch the fancy of the people will hardly survive such disenchanting strokes as the representation of India on the Colonial Conference by the Secretary of State himself or his own nominee.

If India is to be India, if her civilisation is to retain its distinctive stamp and extend its spiritual conquests for the benefit of the world at large it must be propped up with the strength of her own people.

To include India in a federation of colonies and the motherland is madness without method. The patriotism that wishes the country to lose itself within an Empire which justifies its name by its conquest—the colonies being no portion of the Empire in its strict sense—is also madness without method. But to talk of absolute independence and autonomy—though this be madness, yet there is method in it.

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Mr. Gokhale's Disloyalty

28-February-1907

Dear Bande Mataram,

You may reasonably ask me where I had been so long. My answer is that seeing the Extremists fare very well at the last Congress I thought I had some claim to a well-earned repose. When all India kindly took to my views and fought for them in the National Assembly I thought I could suspend my activity for a time.

But with Mr. Gokhale stumping the country to recover the lost ground and the Bengalee taking the brief of the all-powerful executive I cannot be a silent spectator of the cold-blooded deposition of Demos.

The Aga Khan too has entered the lists. Alarmed at the Extremists' talk of freedom from British control, the combined wit and wisdom of the country is making a dead set at this crazy class so that prudence and good sense may once more prevail in the land. The normal calm and the much-coveted peace has to a certain extent been restored to the country and what little of unrest still exists will pass away as soon as Mr. Gokhale will say "Amen."

Unlike the grave-diggers of Ophelia Mr. Gokhale wants to make the extinction of British autocracy in India quite an unchristian procedure. Here lies the Empire, good; here stands India, good; if India goes to this Empire and prays for its death, it is will she, nill she, she prays for something bad; but if the Empire comes to her and kills itself, she kills not the Empire: argal she is not guilty of disloyalty.

The Extremists want to bring the Empire to themselves, and not themselves to go to the Empire. What is more Christian

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and loyal? To make the Empire part with us as friends or to provoke it with childish demands of colonial self-government or self-government within the Empire?

Besides, does not Mr. Gokhale know the fable that by mere buzzing about the head of a Bull or even settling himself upon his head the gnat cannot at all inconvenience him, but though small it is by stinging only that he can arouse his attention.

In vain is Mr. Gokhale trying conclusions with people who have tried their remedies times without number and found them wanting.

Mr. Gokhale's patriotism is based on truth—he paints us as we are and warns us against the danger of too strong a stimulus in this our exceptionally weak condition.

Here he is like a wise physician who knows his patient.

But Mr. Gokhale being such an educated and enlightened reformer, with supreme contempt for Indian prejudices, superstitions and idolatry, should be the last man to trust to mere prayer and petition for the recovery of his patient.

When the Scotch asked the King of England to appoint a day of prayer and fasting for abating the fury of cholera when it raged there a few years back, the authorities in England pooh-poohed the idea and told them to attend to the recommendations of sanitary science.

Should not Mr. Gokhale be true to himself and ask the people to attend to the recommendations of political science excluding altogether from their programme the superstition of prayer? More in my next.

Yours sincerely,

By the Way

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The Comilla Incident

15-March-1907

The Comilla affair remains, after everybody has said his say, obscured by the usual tangle of contradictions. The Hindu version presents a number of allegations,—specific, detailed and categorical,—of attacks on Hindus, making up in the mass a serious picture of a mofussil town given over for days to an outbreak of brutal lawlessness on the part of one section of the Mahomedan community, a Magistrate quiescent and sympathetically tolerant of the rioters, and the final resort by the Hindu community to drastic measures of self-defence on the continued refusal of British authority to do its duty as the guardian of law and order. A Mahomedan report belittled the accounts of Mahomedan violence and presented picturesque and vivid details of Hindu aggressiveness; but as this version has since been repudiated, we have to turn to the official account for the other side of the picture. But the official account—well, the value of official statements is an understood thing all the world over. Is it not a political byword in England itself that no rumour or irresponsible statement should be believed until it had been officially denied? The official version of the Comilla incident published on the 9th March is hard to beat as a specimen of its class—it is a most amazingly unskilful production over which suppression of truth and suggestion of falsehood are written large and palpable; but it presents a beautiful and artistic picture of wanton and murderous Hindu violence, comparative Mahomedan moderation, and fatherly British care brooding dove-eyed and maternal-winged over its irreconcilably quarrelsome step-children.

If anyone should think our characterisation of this historical

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document too sweeping, we invite him to a careful study both of what it says and what it does not say. It commences with the statement that "a series of anti-Partition meetings were recently held here without incident and on 6th March Nawab Salimullah arrived from Dacca to hold counter-meetings." The insertion of the words "without incident" is admirable. It implies that there was violent irritation between Hindus and Mahomedans on the Partition question and the latter might have been expected to show their irritation by "incidents",—especially when the "inflammatory" speeches of Babu Bipin Chandra Pal and other firebrands are taken into account,—but they very considerately refrained. Thus Mahomedan moderation is contrasted with the Hindu aggressiveness which is presently to be related, and the way paved for throwing the whole responsibility on the anti-Partition agitation and aggressive Swadeshism. Then we are informed as a positive fact that a brick was thrown at the Nawab's procession and brooms held up in derision. "This led to some disturbance and a cloth shop was entered but not looted and two prostitutes' houses robbed." Let us pause over this delightful sentence. The outrageous assaults by the rioters which the Hindu accounts carefully specify, are all hidden away and glossed over under the mild and gentlemanly phrase "some disturbance"; the only specific instances which the Commissioner will acknowledge are the cloth-shop "incident" and the "incident" of the two prostitutes. But after all, what occurred in the cloth-shop? It was merely "entered",—admirable word!—the rioters were far too polite, honourable and considerate to loot it. They simply entered for the sheer joy of entering and perhaps of gazing ecstatically on bales of Swadeshi cloth! They also "entered" the houses of two prostitutes, but in this instance indemnified themselves for their trouble; still, the people robbed were merely prostitutes! It is thus suggested that the disturbance was of the most trifling character and the only sufferers a shopkeeper and two prostitutes; in fact, the whole thing was little more than an amiable frolic. Of the violent maltreatment not only of students and shopkeepers but of pleaders and other respectable citizens, of the forcible invasion of private houses

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and the attempts to break into or, let us say, "enter" women's apartments, there is not a word.

After this day of "entries" there is a blank in the official record until the next evening when "the Nawab's Secretary, a Parsi, was attacked while walking alone and severely beaten with lathis by some Hindus." The provocation alleged to have been given by Mr. Cursetji is carefully omitted, and we are asked to believe that an inoffensive Parsi gentleman out for an innocent and healthful evening walk was waylaid, when alone, and severely beaten because he happened to be the Nawab's Private Secretary. And the evening and the morning were the second day. On the third all was again quiet till that dangerous time, the evening, when an "unlicensed Mahomedan procession", greatly daring, took the air like Mr. Cursetji before them, apparently with the innocuous object of relieving their feelings and exercising their lungs shouting Allah-ho-Akbar. This explains a great deal; evidently the bands of hooligans ranging the streets and attacking people and "entering" houses were in reality "no such matter" except in vivid Hindu imaginations; they were merely "unlicensed Mahomedan processions" on innocent shouting intent. Some unknown person, however, fired upon this procession and killed a Mahomedan baker; and there, inexplicably enough, matters ended for the day. The shot, however, had a powerful effect upon the authorities; it seems to have stirred them up to some faint remembrance of the elementary duties of a civilised administration. Accordingly our martial Commissioner telegraphed, like Kuropatkin, for "reinforcements", and pending their arrival sent for the Mahomedan Sardars and Mullahs and "enlisted" their influence to keep the peace. In the name of reason and logic, why? The account shows that all the violence and lawlessness, if we except the trifling affairs of the unlooted shop and the looted prostitutes, proceeded from the Hindus. The Mahomedans, it seems, kept perfectly quiet until the night of this third day, when the only incidents were again of a trifling character; a man riding on the step of a carriage was "struck"; a Hindu peon was "struck", nothing more. We are ourselves "struck" by the mildness of the methods employed by these

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rioters; they do not break into houses, they merely "enter" them; they do not severely beat anyone as Mr. Cursetji was "severely beaten" by the Hindus; they merely "strike" a man or two in playful sort. Under the circumstances it is surely the leaders of the Hindu community who should have been enlisted "to keep the peace"—say, as special constables. However, in the end, the reinforcements arrived and the Commissioner busied himself in the fatherly British way, "inquiring personally into all allegations and endeavouring to bring the leaders of both parties together". On this touching scene the official curtain falls. Who shall say after this that "divide and rule" is the policy of the British bureaucracy in India?

We have said enough to expose thoroughly this ridiculous account of a very serious affair. It is the production not of an impartial official keeping the peace between two communities, but of a partisan in a political fight who looks upon the antiSwadeshi Mahomedans as allies "enlisted" on the side of the bureaucracy. In order to understand the affair we have to read into the official account all that it carefully omits; and for this we must fall back on the Hindu version of the incident. What seems to have happened, is clear enough in outline, whatever doubt there may be as to details. The popular cause was making immense strides in Comilla and the magnificent success of the District Conference had afforded a proof which could not be ignored. The redoubtable Nawab Salimullah of Dacca considered it his duty to his patron, the Assam Government, to stem the tide of nationalism in Tipperah. Accordingly he marched Comillawards with his lieutenants and entered the town in conquering pomp. That he ordered the sack of the conquered city, is probably no more than the suspicion natural to excited imaginations; but it is certain that his coming was immediately responsible for the riots. His whole history since he was shoved into prominence by his Anglo-Indian patrons, has been one long campaign against the Hindus with attempts to excite the passions and class selfishness of the Mahomedans and inflame them into permanent hostility to their Hindu fellow-countrymen. It is only within the territorial limits of the Nawab's

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influence that there has been any serious friction between Hindus and Mahomedans on the Swadeshi and Partition questions; but so far as it has gone, its immediate results have been not only friction but outbreaks of violence and lawlessness either in small as at Serajgunge or on a large scale as in Mymensingh. It is not therefore surprising that while the Conference at Comilla and the recent Swadeshi meetings came off without "incident", the Nawab should no sooner have set his foot in Comilla than a reign of violence and lawlessness began. At the same time it is probable that the suddenness of the outbreak was due to some immediate exciting cause. The brick story bears a suspicious resemblance to the incident which set Sir Bampfylde and his Gurkhas rioting officially at Barisal; but it is likely enough that a few individuals may have shown their feelings towards the Nawab in an offensive way. However that may be, it seems certain that the more rowdy elements of the Mahomedan population broke into lawless riot, attacked Hindus wherever they found them, broke into shops and private houses and brutally assaulted students, pleaders and other respectable Hindus, attempting even in some cases to enter the women's apartments.

Once begun, the affair followed familiar lines. As in Mymensingh, it commenced with an orgy of lawlessness on the part of ignorant low-class Mahomedans inflamed by the Nawab's antiHindu campaign. As in Mymensingh, local authorities would not at first interfere, although appealed to by Hindu gentlemen, and confined themselves to academic arguments as to the genesis of the outrages. As in Mymensingh, the Hindus, taken by surprise and denied the protection of the law, fell first into a panic and only afterwards rallied and began to organise self-defence. At Comilla, however, they seemed to have acted with greater promptitude and energy. The disturbances continued for three days at least; but by that time the Hindus had picked themselves together, the women were removed to a safe place where they could be guarded by bands of volunteers and the whole community stood on the defensive. Two or three collisions seem to have taken place, in one of which, possibly, Mr. Cursetji was roughly handled, in another a Mahomedan shot dead. By this time the

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Commissioner had realised that the policy of non-interference adopted by the British authorities, was leading to serious results which they cannot have anticipated. The military police were telegraphed for and other measures taken which came at least three days too late, since the mischief had been thoroughly done.

Divested of exaggeration and rumour, we fancy the actual facts will be found to amount to something like the above. We do not for a moment believe that the Hindus took aggressive action without serious and even unbearable provocation, any more than we believe that the riot was planned or ordered beforehand by the anti-Swadeshi section of the Mahomedans. We trust that the usual mistake of instituting cases and counter-cases will be avoided. If the Comilla nationalists wish the facts of the case to be known let them draw up a statement of their version with the evidence of the persons assaulted for the enlightenment of public opinion. The time ought to be now past, in Eastern Bengal at least, when appeal to the British courts could be either a remedy or a solace.

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British Protection or Self-Protection

18-March-1907

There are two superstitions which have driven such deep root into the mind of our people that even where the new spirit is strongest, they still hold their own. One is the habit of appealing to British courts of justice; the other is the reliance upon the British executive for our protection. The frequent recurrence of incidents such as the Mymensingh and Comilla disturbances will have its use if it drives into our minds the truth that in the struggle we have begun we cannot and ought not to expect protection from our natural adversaries. It is perfectly true that one of the main preoccupations of the executive mind has been the maintenance of order and quiet in the country, because a certain kind of tranquillity was essential to the preservation of an alien bureaucratic control. This was the secret of the barbarous system of punishments which make the Indian Penal Code a triumph of civilised savagery; of the licence and the blind support allowed by the Magistracy to a phenomenally corrupt and oppressive Police; of the doctrine of no conviction no promotion, which is the gospel of the Anglo-Indian executive, holding it better that a hundred innocent should suffer than one crime be recorded as unpunished. This was the reason of the severity with which turbulent offences have always been repressed, of the iniquitous and oppressive system of punitive Police and of the undeclared but well-understood Police rule that any villager of strong physique, skill with weapons and active habits should be entered in the list of bad characters. By a rigid application of these principles the bureaucracy have succeeded in creating the kind of tranquillity they require. The Romans created a desert and called the result peace; the British in India have destroyed the spirit and

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manhood of the people and call the result law and order. It is true, on the other hand, that there have been exceptions to the promptness and severity with which turbulence of any kind is usually dealt with; and the most notable is the supineness and dilatoriness, habitually shown by the authorities, in dealing with outbreaks of Mahomedan fanaticism and the gingerly fashion in which repression in such cases is enforced. Fear is undoubtedly at the root of this weakness. The bureaucracy are never tired of impressing the irresistible might of British supremacy on the subject populations; but in their own hearts they are aware that that supremacy is insecure and without root in the soil; the general upheaval of any deep-seated and elemental passion in the hearts of the people might easily shatter that supremacy as so many others have been shattered before it. The one passion which in past times has been proved capable of so upheaving the national consciousness in India is religious feeling; and outraged religious feeling is therefore the one thing which the bureaucracy dreads and the slightest sign of which turns their courage into nervousness or panic and their strength into paralysed weakness. The alarm which the Swadeshi movement created was due to this abiding terror; for in the Swadeshi movement for the first time patriotism became a national religion, the name of the motherland was invested with divine sacredness and her service espoused with religious fervour and enthusiasm. In its alarm Anglo-India turned for help to that turbulent Mahomedan fanaticism which they had so dreaded; hoping to drive out poison by poison, they menaced the insurgent religion of patriotism with the arming of Mahomedan prejudices against what its enemies declared to be an essentially Hindu movement. The first fruits of this policy we have seen at Mymensingh, Serajgunge and Comilla. It was a desperate and dangerous and might easily prove a fatal expedient; but with panic-stricken men the fear of the lesser danger is easily swallowed in the terror of the greater.

It should not therefore be difficult to see that the demand for official protection in such affairs as the Comilla riots is as unpractical as it is illogical. The object of modern civilised Governments in preserving tranquillity is to protect the citizen not

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only in the peaceful pursuit of his legitimate occupations but in the public activities and ambitions natural to a free people; the Government exists for the citizen, not the citizen for the Government. But the bureaucracy in India is only half-modern and semi-civilised. In India the individual,—for there is no citizen,—exists for the Government; and the object in preserving tranquillity is not the protection of the citizen but the security of the Government. The security of the individual, such as it is, is only a result and not an object. But the security of the Government, if by Government we understand the present irresponsible bureaucratic control, is directly threatened by the Swadeshi movement; for the declared object of that movement is Swaraj, which means the entire elimination of that control. To ask the bureaucracy, therefore, to protect us in our struggle for Swaraj is to ask it to assist in its own destruction.

This plain truth is obviously recognised by the officials of the Shillong Government. The attitude taken up by the Magistrates of Mymensingh and Comilla, was identically the same; they saw no necessity for interfering; the Hindus by their Swadeshi agitation had brought the Mahomedan storm upon themselves and must take the consequences. The unexpressed inference is plain enough. The bureaucratic "constitution", under which we are asked to carry on "constitutional" Government, assures us British peace and security only so long as we are not Swadeshi. The moment we become Swadeshi, British peace and security, so far as we are concerned, automatically come to an end, and we are liable to have our heads broken, our men assaulted, our women insulted and our property plundered without there being any call for British authority to interfere. The same logic underlies the imputation of the responsibility for the riot to Babu Bipin Chandra Pal's inflammatory eloquence, which was made, we believe, in both instances and in this last has received the support of the loyalist press. Whom or what did Bipin Babu inflame? Not the Mahomedans to attack the Hindus certainly,—that would be too preposterous a statement for even an Anglo-Indian Magistrate to make,—but all Indians, Hindus and Mahomedans alike, to work enthusiastically for Swadeshi

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and Swaraj. By raising the cry of Swadeshi and Swaraj, then, we forfeit the protection of the law.

Stated so nakedly, the reasoning sounds absurd; but, in the light of certain practical considerations we can perfectly appreciate the standpoint of these bureaucrats. Arguing as philosophers, they would be wrong; but arguing as bureaucrats and rulers of a subject people, their position is practical and logical. The establishment of Swaraj means the elimination of the British bureaucrat. Can we ask the British bureaucrat to make it safe and easy for us to eliminate him? Swadeshi is a direct attack on that exploitation of India by the British merchant which is the first and principal reason of the obstinate maintenance of bureaucratic control. The trade came to India as the pioneer of the flag; and the bureaucrat may reasonably fear that if the trade is driven out, the flag will leave in the wake of the trade. With that fear in his mind, even apart from his natural racial sympathies, can we ask him to facilitate the expulsion of the trade? On the contrary, the official representative of the British shopkeeper is morally bound, be he Viceroy, Lieutenant-Governor, Secretary of State or be he a mere common District Magistrate, to put down Swadeshi by the best means in his power. Sir Bampfylde thought violence and intimidation, Gurkha police and Regulation lathis the very best means; Mr. Morley believes Swadeshi can be more easily smothered with soft pillows than banged to death with a hard cudgel. The means differ; the end is the same. At present the bureaucracy have two strings to their bow—general Morleyism with the aid of the loyalist Mehtaite element among the Parsis and Hindus; and occasional Fullerism with the aid of the Salimullahi party among the Mahomedans. With the growth of the new spirit and the disappearance of a few antiquated but still commanding personalities, the former will lose its natural support and the latter will be left in possession of the field. But we know by this time that Salimullahism means a repetition of the outbreaks of Mymensingh, Serajgunge and Comilla, and the attitude of the Comilla heaven-born will be the attitude of most heaven-borns wherever these outbreaks recur. It is urgently necessary therefore that we should shake off

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the superstitious habit of praying for protection to the British authorities and look for help to the only true, political divinity, the national strength which is within ourselves. If we are to do this effectually, we must organise physical education all over the country and train up the rising generation not only in the moral strength and courage for which Swadeshism has given us the materials, but in physical strength and courage and the habit of rising immediately and boldly to the height of even the greatest emergency. That strength we must train in every citizen of the newly-created nation so that for our private protection we may not be at the mercy of a police efficient only for harassment, whose appearance on the scene after a crime means only a fresh and worse calamity to the peaceful householder, but each household may be a protection to itself and when help is needed, be able to count on its neighbour. And the strength of the individuals we must carefully organise for purposes of national defence, so that there may be no further fear of Comilla tumults or official Gurkha riots disturbing our steady and rapid advance to national freedom. It is high time we abandoned the fat and comfortable selfish middle-class training we give to our youth and make a nearer approach to the physical and moral education of our old Kshatriyas or the Japanese Samurai.

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The Berhampur Conference

29-March-1907

The Conference which meets at Berhampur tomorrow is the most important that has been yet held in Bengal, for its deliberations are fraught with issues of supreme importance to the future of the country. A heavy responsibility rests upon the delegates who have been sent to Berhampur from all parts of Bengal. For this is the first Provincial Conference after the historic twenty-second session of the Congress at Calcutta. At that session the policy of self-development and self-help was incorporated as an integral part of the political programme by the representatives of the whole nation, the policy of passive resistance was declared legitimate under circumstances which cover the whole of India, and it was decided that a constitution or working organisation should be created for the promotion throughout the year of the programme fixed by the Congress for the whole nation and by the Provinces for themselves. It rests upon the Berhampur Conference to see that proper provision is made for this executive work. We expect the delegates to realise the seriousness of the task that has been put in their hands and to appoint a Provincial Council which will command the confidence of the whole of Bengal and prove by its very composition that an earnest attempt will be made to harmonise all parties in working out so much of the national programme as has been assented to by all. Swadeshi, Boycott, National Education,—these are the three planks upon which all can take their stand. We do not disguise from ourselves the fact that on the last two of these questions there are very serious differences of opinion between the two schools now dividing public opinion. In the matter of Boycott, the difference has been one of greater or less thoroughness in

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practice and of the ultimate goal; but the necessity of Boycott has been recognised by all and there is no reason why any section should refuse to take part in the measures by which it can be made effective. National Education is regarded by one school as an educational experiment to be carried on side by side with Government education,—by the other as a great national cause, the progress of which is to culminate in a truly national system replacing or absorbing the Government schools and colleges. Nevertheless, the spread of the movement has been recognised as desirable by all and there is therefore no reason why measures with that view should not be concerted with general approval. We trust therefore that the delegates at Berhampur will give a mandate to the newly-formed council to organise Swadeshi and Boycott in a practical manner and devise means by which they can be rendered stringent and effective and to see that national schools be established in every district and national support be given to the Council of Education. If they fail to do this, they will have done considerably less than their duty.

But the duty of the delegates does not begin and end with arranging for the execution of the national programme as laid down by the Congress. The Congress deals only with accomplished facts. It set its seal of sanction on National Education and Swadeshi and legitimised the Boycott for all India in recognition of work which had already been commenced in Bengal. But there are other fields in which self-development and self-help are urgently necessary; and it remains for each province to initiate action in each of them successively according to its own circumstances and under the pressure of its own needs. Both the policy of self-help and the Boycott policy have taken shape as a national policy in Bengal as a result of the exceptional trend of events in our province. They are now travelling all over India. Swadeshi has been universally recognised, Boycott is a fact in Maharashtra as well as in Bengal and is now being publicly advocated in the North and in Madras. But Bengal cannot pause till the rest of India comes up with her,—she must still lead the way even if it be many miles in front. The very initiative she has taken will inevitably sweep her on, whether she wills it or not;

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for that exceptional trend of events which has carried her along, is nothing but the impulsion of a Divine Hand which is shaping through her the way of salvation for all India. That impulsion is not likely to cease; it is already pointing us to fresh departures. Since the Congress met, three new necessities have presented themselves for Bengal,—the necessity of National Arbitration Courts, the necessity of organised self-protection and the necessity of prevention of famine by self-help. The second of these is the one which we should, in our opinion, take immediately in hand; for it is likely to be urgently needed in the near future and in its absence the national movement will remain deficient in the first element of strength and its defencelessness will perpetually invite attack. If we are to proceed with the work of the nation in peace, we must immediately turn our attention to organising self-protection all over Bengal. The immediate need of the prevention of famine may be met by the suspension of grain-export of which the Bangabasi has made itself the champion; but this policy will have to be supplemented and regulated by permanent measures of a far-reaching kind. At present a Resolution approving of export suspension as a temporary measure urgently needed, ought to be sufficient. We do not suppose we need apprehend much difference of opinion on this head. The anti-national superstition of free trade ought to have perished out of Bengal by this time; for a subject nation self-preservation must be the first and dominating principle of its political economy. Neither should there be any opposition to the proposal for Arbitration Courts. Arbitration as a means of diminishing the curse of litigation has been advocated by the Congress and the only difference now is that instead of asking for it from an alien Government which fattens upon the very litigation that impoverishes us, we resolve to establish it for ourselves. We fear, however, that there may be serious difficulty in getting the all-important proposal of self-protection accepted. The attitude of the Moderate leaders in the Comilla matter was of evil omen.

We hope nevertheless that the delegates of the new school will strain every nerve to get these necessary items added to the working programme for the year. By choosing a place where the

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new spirit has not made headway and by fixing a date which will make it difficult for the East Bengal delegates to arrive in time, the managers of the Conference will probably have secured a large Moderate majority. We are not sorry that this should be so; for it will give us an opportunity of observing how the advantage gained by this tactical trickery will be used. The present Conference will decide whether the two parties can still hope to work together on the basis of the compromise arrived at in December, or whether, as in Japan, a determined fight for the possession of the national mind and guidance of national action is to precede the great work of emancipation. We shall willingly accept either alternative. If we can work together the work will be more rapid in the beginning and smoother; if, on the contrary, we have to settle our differences first, the work will be more energetic and more rapid in the end. Whatever the result, the forward party stands to win.

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The President of the Berhampur Conference

02-April-1907

When the Moderate caucus which arranges our Congresses and Conferences selected Srijut Deepnarain Singh to preside at Berhampur, they thought, no doubt, that they had hit upon a doubly suitable choice. As a young man and one known to be an ardent patriot he would not disgust Bengal by an ultra-moderate pronouncement; as a Zamindar he might be expected to have the fear of the Government before his eyes and to avoid giving open support to the ideas and programme of the New School. It was this latter apprehension, we believe, that lay at the root of the dissatisfaction expressed by some of ourselves at the choice. For our part we shared neither the hopes of the Moderates nor the fears of our own party. We happen to know something of Srijut Deepnarain Singh by report when he was in England and we could not believe that so much fire, sincerity and ardour had been quenched in so short a time or even subdued by his position as a rich man and a Zamindar. We confidently expected from him a pronouncement worthy of the occasion and we have not been disappointed. The spirit of true nationalism underlies his address as reported in substance; the programme of the New School, so far as it has yet taken concrete shape either in practice or in immediate urgency, has been accepted and the declaration for Boycott is satisfactorily clear and unmistakable. By bringing Srijut Deepnarain forward, it is probable that a real service will have been done to Bihar which is in bad need of men who can understand the drift of the times and direct the political activities of the province towards the future instead of trying to keep them clamped to a dead and rotting past. Bihar has a future of its own as a Hindi-speaking sub-race of

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our nationality; and in that United States of India, which the prophetic vision of the President has forecast, it will have its individual station. But in order to carry weight in that Union Bihar must take up its destinies and become an active force in the general movement towards independence. Whether the Biharis are wise in desiring administrative separation from Bengal under the present bureaucracy, it is difficult to say. For our own part, we are inclined to doubt whether Bihar is as yet quite strong enough to stand by itself unassociated with Bengal or the United Provinces in resistance to a bureaucratic oppression; but if the Biharis generally think themselves strong enough and desire to stand apart, we should be the last, professing the principles we do, to oppose the idea. Administrative arrangements have ceased to be of vital importance. But the attempt which has been made in recent times to estrange the Biharis from the Bengalis in spirit, is a more serious matter. There can be no ground of quarrel between the two peoples except such as arises from the unholy passion for Government service, places and favours; and this ignoble cause of dissension the new spirit will, we hope, destroy before long by making place and service a brand of dishonour rather than of distinction. Judging from Srijut Deepnarain's address we seem to have in him a Bihari of spirit, judgment and intellectual ability who has already grasped the future in anticipation and is likely to model the activities of his province in accordance with that larger vision and not under the stress of petty and evanescent interests. No province can advance under a more unerring guide or shape its activities to the demands of a more infallible ideal than this vision of an India united in its variety. Regional and communal individualities and activities cannot be blotted out from this vast country, but they can be harmonised into a dominating unity.

For the rest, it is curious to note how invariably the manoeuvres of the Moderates turned against themselves. This is indeed inevitable, for when Fate is against men, their likeliest measures and best-concerted combinations act to their own detriment. Dadabhai Naoroji was made President in order to dish the Extremists; yet it was this Moderate President who gave us the

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cry of Swaraj which the Extremists have made their own and which is stirring the blood of the nation to great actions and great ideals. Madras and the United Provinces were declared to be unanimous against Boycott in order to prevent the Boycott Resolution from passing through the Congress; but the only result has been to raise a storm of Extremism in South and North alike and set the cry of Boycott ringing from one end of India to the other. The shamelessly arbitrary action of the Moderate caucus at Allahabad has done more to kill the old and help the new than the free admission of the Boycotters could possibly have done. The selection at the last moment of Srijut Deepnarain as President in the hope of a "safe" address,—just as Berhampur was selected as a "safe" place—only resulted in a fresh testimony to the growth of the new ideas. How long will you try with these two-penny half-penny brooms of party manoeuvring to sweep back the ocean?

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Peace and the Autocrats

03-April-1907

Ever since the differences of opinion which are now agitating the whole country declared themselves in the formation of two distinct parties in Bengal, there has been a class of politicians among us who are never tired of ingeminating peace, peace, deploring every collision between the contending schools and entreating all to lay aside their differences and work for the country. It is all very plausible to the ear and easily imposes on the average unthinking mind. Union, concord, work for the country are all moving and sacred words and must command respect—when they are not misused. But what is it that these politicians ask us to do in the name of union, concord and work for the country? They ask us to sacrifice or stifle our convictions and silence the promptings of conscience in order to follow leaders whom we believe to have lost touch with the spirit of the times and "work together unitedly" in a line of action which we believe to be ruinous to the country. The demand has been made quite nakedly by enthusiastic adherents of Babu Surendranath Banerji that we should all follow the leaders blindly even when we disapprove of what they think, say and do. A more presumptuous demand or one more destructive of all political morality and honesty could not be made. There is such a thing as a political conscience, even if its existence is not recognised by the editor of the Bengalee; and expediency is not what that veracious journal declares it to be, the sole god of politics, but a subordinate guide, itself determined by higher considerations.

Of course, many of those who cry out for peace at any price, do not perceive all that is implied in their demand. Is it not possible, they argue, to have differences of opinion and yet

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work together? We should be the last to deny it. The whole system of party politics, for example, depends on the subordination of minor differences by those who are agreed on main and vital points. So long therefore as the differences are minor and either essentially or for the moment immaterial, there is no reason why there should not be complete unity for all practical purposes; but the moment vital differences arise, parties and party struggle become inevitable. The men of peace and unity are never weary of throwing Japan and England in our faces; but they seem not to have read the history of the countries which they offer us as our examples. Have they never heard of the struggle between Federalists and Imperialists in Japan or of the civil strife between Federalists and Unionists which preceded and made the way clear for her marvellous development? It was the time when American guns had broken open the gates of the country and she was in considerable danger from foreign aggression; yet this was the moment chosen by the most patriotic Japanese for a bitter party struggle attended by mutual assassination and ending in civil slaughter. And what was the point at issue? Simply, whether Shogun or Mikado should be leader and sovereign in Japan. Our wise men would have advised the Japanese to give up their differences and work together under the Shogun because he was "the recognised leader"; but the patriots of Japan knew that the question of Shogun or Mikado involved vital issues which must be settled at any cost; so with one hand they fended off the common enemy while with the other they fought out the question among themselves. This is the only solution to the difficulty which has arisen in India,—to present an united front to bureaucratic attacks while fighting out the question among ourselves. For this amount of concord one condition is absolutely required, that neither party shall call in the common enemy to injure or crush the other. There must be no suppression of telegrams defending a leader of one party from official imputations, no attempt by editorial paragraphs to implicate him as an instigator of disorder, no assistance at viceregal interviews in which the bureaucracy is invited to take strong measures against his propaganda.

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If it is argued that the differences dividing us are not vital, we entirely disagree. We are all agreed on one point, that the continuance of unmitigated bureaucratic despotism is ruinous to the country and a change is required; but beyond this point there is more difference than agreement. The new party is composed of various elements and there are minor differences of opinion and even of method among them; but they are all agreed in one unanimous determination to put an end to despotism, mitigated or unmitigated, and replace it by a free, modern and national Government. The old party is also composed of various elements,—ultra-loyalist, loyalist, ultra-moderate, moderate, and even semi-demi-extremist,—but they are all agreed on this main attitude, that while they aspire to colonial self-government they will put up with mitigated despotism for another century or two if vigorous petitioning will bring them nothing better. Here is a vital difference of ideal, aim and spirit; and it is necessarily accompanied by a vital difference in method. The new party is agreed on a policy of self-help and the organisation at least of passive resistance. The old party is agreed upon nothing except the sacred right of petitioning. Sir Pherozshah Mehta and the Bombay Moderates would confine our politics within those holy limits. Pundit Madan Mohan and the United Provinces Moderates are willing to add a moderate and inoffensive spice of self-help, Babu Surendranath and the Bengal Moderates will even admit passive resistance within narrow limits and for a special and temporary purpose. But the difference of all from the new party remains.

Where there are such serious differences and men wish to follow different paths, no lasting composition is possible. The party struggle must go on until the country has definitely accepted one or other of the alternative ideals and methods. Temporary working compromises are alone possible, and the soundness of even such compromises is conditional, firstly, on the candour and whole-heartedness with which they are undertaken on both sides, and secondly, on the carrying on of the party struggle strictly within the rules of the game. The present bitterness of the struggle is largely due to the disregard of these

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elementary conditions. National Education is an accepted part of the political programme in Bengal; yet all the best known and most influential of the Moderate leaders are either practically indifferent or passively hostile to the progress of the movement. Boycott is the cry of both parties within Bengal; yet the Moderate leaders did not hesitate to stultify the Boycott movement by the support they gave to the Swadeshi-Bideshi Exhibition. Moreover, our experience has hitherto been that the Moderates look on any compromise in the light of a clever manoeuvre to dish the Extremists or a temporary convenience to stave off unpleasant opposition for the moment.

The second condition is equally disregarded. So long as it is sought to suppress the new spirit by autocratic methods or dishonest manoeuvres, there can be no talk of peace or unity. The conduct of Pundit Madan Mohan Malaviya and his caucus at Allahabad has been both autocratic and dishonest. The delegates elected at the Railway Theatre were elected according to methods that have always been held valid by the Congress and there has never before been any question of the right of gentlemen nominated by a large public meeting to sit in Congress or Conference. Yet the Pundit and his crew chose by autocratic Resolutions of a temporary Committee which had received no power to alter the Congress constitution, to disallow the nominees of the Railway Theatre meeting! Even the British bureaucracy itself would have blushed to perpetrate so cynical and shameless a piece of autocracy. But these autocratic democrats had not even the courage of their autocracy. They tried first to exclude the elected of the people on the ridiculous plea that Mayo Hall would only hold a certain number and therefore—mark the logic of Moderatism!—this certain number must be composed of Malaviya Moderates and the Railway Theatre Forwards excluded; but they found that this trick would not serve. They then bolstered up their autocracy by the excuse that Allahabad must not be over-represented at the Conference. This excuse was a palpable trick since under the present rules it is impossible to prevent the place of the Conference from being over-represented. As a matter of fact among the few delegates who attended,

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Allahabad had an overwhelming majority. No sane man can expect concord and compromise between the parties while such trickery is considered a legitimate party manoeuvre. The penalty this time has been the failure of the Allahabad Conference. The penalty next time, unless the caucus learn wisdom, may be open war and the holding of two separate Conferences in the same province.

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Many Delusions

05-April-1907

In a country where subjection has long become a habit of the public mind, there will always be a tendency to shrink from the realities of the position and to hunt for roundabout, safe and peaceful paths to national regeneration. Servitude is painful and intolerable, servitude is killing the nation by inches, servitude must be got rid of, true; but the pains and evils of servitude seem almost more tolerable to a good many people than the sharp, salutary pangs of a resolute struggle for liberty. Hence the not uncommon cry, "The violent and frequently bloody methods followed by other nations are not suited to a gentle, spiritual and law-abiding people; we will vindicate our intellectual originality and spiritual superiority by inventing new methods of regeneration much more gentlemanly and civilised." The result is a hydra-brood of delusions, two springing up where one is killed. The old gospel of salvation by prayer was based on the belief in the spiritual superiority of the British people,—an illusion which future generations will look back upon with an amazed incredulity. God answers prayer and the British people are godlike in their nature; so why should we despair? Even now there are prominent politicians who say and perhaps believe that although there is no historical example of a nation liberated by petition and prayer, yet the book of history is not closed and there is no reason why so liberal and noble a nation as the British should not open a new and unprecedented chapter; a miracle which never happened before in the world's records may very well be worked for the sole and particular benefit of India! The petitionary delusion, however, though not yet killed, has been scotched; its lease of life is not for long.

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Another delusion of which Babu Narendranath Sen of the Indian Mirror, and the cultured and eloquent lady whom the Mahatmas have placed at the head of the new Theosophist Church, are the principal exponents, asks us to seek our regeneration through religion; only when we have become religiously and morally fit, can we hope to be politically free. In spite of the confusion of ideas which underlies this theory, it is one which has a natural charm for a religiously-minded people. Nevertheless it is as much a thing in the air as the petitionary delusion. If by religion is meant the nivritti-marga it is an absurdity to talk of politics and religion in the same breath; for it is the path of the few,—the saints and the elect—to whom there is no I nor thou, no mine or thine, and therefore no my country or thy country. But if we are asked to perfect our religious development in the pravritti-marga, then it is obvious that politics is as much a part of pravritti-marga as any other activity, and there is no rationality in asking us to practise religion and morality first and politics afterwards; for politics is itself a large part of religion and morality. We acknowledge that nothing is likely to become an universal and master impulse in India which is not identified with religion. The obvious course is to recognise that politics is religion and infuse it with the spirit of religion; for that is the true patriotism which sees God as the Mother in our country, God as Shakti in the mass of our countrymen, and religiously devotes itself to their service and their liberation from present sufferings and servitude. We do not acknowledge that a nation of slaves who acquiesce in their subjection can become morally fit for freedom; one day of slavery robs a man of half his manhood, and while the yoke remains, he cannot compass a perfect and rounded moral development. Under a light and qualified subjection, he may indeed develop in certain directions; but in what direction are we asked to develop? In the morality of the slave, the Shudra, whose dharma is humility, contentment, service, obedience? In the morality of the merchant whose dharma is to amass riches by honesty and enterprise and spend them with liberal philanthropy? In the morality of the Brahmin whose dharma is to prepare himself for the nivritti-marga by learning and holy

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exercises, to forgive injuries and accept honour or insult, wrong and injustice, with a calm and untroubled mind? It is obvious that we may develop far on these lines without coming at all nearer to moral fitness for freedom. Politics is the work of the Kshatriya and it is the virtues of the Kshatriya we must develop if we are to be morally fit for freedom. But the first virtue of the Kshatriya is not to bow his neck to an unjust yoke but to protect his weak and suffering countrymen against the oppressor and welcome death in a just and righteous battle.

A third delusion to which the over-intellectualised are subject is the belief in salvation by industrialism. One great danger of the commercial aspect of the Swadeshi movement is that many of our young men may be misled into thinking that their true mission is to go abroad, study industries and return to enrich themselves and their country. We would warn them against this pernicious error. This work is an admirable work and a necessary part of the great national yajna which we have instituted; but it is only a part and not even the chief part. Those who have never studied Japanese history, are fond of telling our young men that Japan owes her greatness to her commercial and industrial expansion and call on them to go and do likewise. Commercial and industrial expansion are often accompaniments and results of political liberty and greatness,—never their cause. Yet the opposite belief is held by many who should have been capable of wiser discrimination. We find it in the truly marvellous address of Srinath Paul Rai Bahadoor at Berhampur; there is a wonderful contrast between the canine gospel of submissive loyalty preached in the first part of the address and the rampageously self-assertive gospel of economic independence preached in its tail-end. "Whatever the advantages of political advancement, they sink into insignificance when compared with the blessings which industrial prosperity brings in its train,"—such is the gospel according to Srinath Paul Rai Bahadoor. It is so far shared by many less loyal people that they consider industrial prosperity as prior to and the cause of political advancement. The idea is that we must be rich before we can struggle for freedom. History does not bear out this peculiar delusion. It is the poor

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peoples who have been most passionately attached to liberty, while there are many examples to show that nothing more easily leads to national death and decay than a prosperous servitude. We are particularly thankful that British rule has not, like the Roman, given us industrial prosperity in exchange for political independence; for in that case our fate would have been that of the ancient peoples of Gaul and Britain who, buying civilisation and prosperity with the loss of their freemanhood, fell a prey to the Goth and Saxon and entered into a long helotage from which it took them a thousand years to escape. We must strive indeed for economic independence, because the despotism that rules us is half-mercantile, half-military, and by mortally wounding the lower mercantile half we may considerably disable the upper; at least we shall remove half the inducement England now has for keeping us in absolute subjection. But we should never forget that politics is a work for the Kshatriya and it is not by the virtues and methods of the Vaishya that we shall finally win our independence.

By the Way - Reflections of Srinath Paul, Rai Bahadoor, on the Present Discontents

05-April-1907

(THE ADDRESS OF A PERSPIRING CHAIRMAN RENDERED FAITHFULLY INTO THE ORDINARY ENGLISH VERNACULAR.)

Councillors, friends, Rai Bahadoors and others,
Gentlemen all, my bold and moderate brothers!
This Conference's revolutionary course
(By revolution, sirs, I mean of course
The year's,—not anything wicked and Extremist;)
Has brought us here, and like a skilful chemist
Mixed well together our victorious batches
Bearing triumphant scars and famous scratches
Of a year's desperate fight. Behold, the glooms

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Are over! See, our conquering Suren comes!
Dream not that when I talk of scars and fighting,
I really mean King Edward to go smiting
And bundle dear Sir Andrew out of Ind.
Nothing, nothing like that is in the wind.
Ah no! what has not Britain done for us?
Were we not savage, naked, barbarous?
Has she not snatched and raised us from the mire?
Taught us to dress, eat, talk, write, sneeze, perspire,
Like Europeans, giving civilisation
To this poor ignorant degraded nation?
Was not our India full of cuts and knocks?
'Twas Britain saved us from those hideous shocks.
No matter if our poor of hunger die,
Us she gave peace and ease and property.
Were't not for Clive, Dalhausie, Curzon, all,
You never would have heard of Srinath Paul.
But is this then good cause we should not meet,
Kiss their benevolent and booted feet,
Remonstrate mildly, praise and pray and cry,
"Have sympathy, great Minto, or we die"?
If he'll not hear, let then our humble oration
Travel with Gokhale to the British nation.
To be industrious, prayerful, tearful, meek
Is the sole end for which we meet this week.
Yet are there men, misunderstanding whites,
Who much misconstrue these our holy rites
Deeming it a bad criminal consultation
How best to free—O horrid thought!—our nation,
And send the English packing bag and baggage,
Polo and hockey stick, each scrap of luggage.
They think we are rank and file and proletariat
Fit to be throttled with the hangman's lariat.
Fie, sirs! that we should be confused with the mob,
We who with Viceroys and great men hobnob!
To be mistook,—Oh faugh! for the mere people,
Things that eat common food and water tipple,

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Mere men, mere flesh and blood!—we, the elect,
The aristocracy of intellect
To be thus levelled with the stinking crowd!
No, sirs, I dare pronounce it very loud,
We are the sober, moderate wise men, needing
Scope only to be famed for light and leading,
Full of co-operative amorous loyalty
To Minto, Morley and Britannic Royalty.
O some there are impatient and too wild,
To that Curzonian lash unreconciled,
Repudiate with violence unchancy
Our gospel proud of futile mendicancy.
Strange that they can't perceive the utility
And nobleness of absolute futility!
O sirs, be moderate, patient, persevering;
Shun, shun the extremists and their horrid sneering.
O sirs, from loyalty budge not an inch;
What if your masters love your throats to pinch?
It's pure affection. Even if they kick,
Is that sufficient reason to feel sick?
No, though they thrash and cudgel, kick and beat,
Cling like the devil to their sacred feet!
Where are we? Is this the French Revolution
Infects our sacred Ind with its pollution?
Is Minto Louis? Kitchener Duke Broglie?
Away, away with revolutionary folly!
What, is this France or Russia? Are we men,
Servitude to reject and bonds disdain?
No, we are loyal, good religious dogs,
Born for delightful kicks and pleasant shogs.
It is a canine gospel that I preach.
Be dogs, be dogs, and learn to love the switch.
Whatever the result, be loyal still
To Minto, Morley and their mighty will.
Be loyal still, my prosperous countrymen,
Nor heed the moaning of the million's pain.
For serfdom in our very bones is bred,

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And our religion teaches us to dread,—
Shivaji's creed and Pratap's though it be,—
More than the very devil disloyalty.
O constitutionally agitate your tails
And see whether that agitation fails.
The course of true love never did run smooth!
Morley will still relent,—that gracious youth.
Beg for new Legislative Councils, sirs,
Or any blessed thing your mind prefers.
The Shah's agreeable, why not the British?
Then there's Mysore—Great Scott! I feel quite skittish.
Local self-government we'll beg that's now
A farce,—(I'm getting quite extreme, I vow!)
And many other things. Prayers let us patter;
Whether we get them or not, can't really matter.
But one thing let me tell you, countrymen,
That clubs a boon and blessing are to men,
Where white with black and black can mix with white
And share a particoloured deep delight.
Great thanks we owe then, loyalists, to "Max",
Who his capacious brain the first did tax.
Behold the great result! Apollo Paean!
The holy club, the Indo-European!
Approach, approach the holy precincts, come
And chat with Risley of affairs at home;
With Fraser arm-in-arm like friends we'll walk,
To Luson and to Lee familiarly talk.
Mind! trousers and a hat. They keep good whiskey
And we shall feel particularly frisky.
As for Comilla, it was sad and bad,
But Minto's sympathy o'er that fell raid
Dropped like the gentle dew from heaven to heal;
No longer for our injured kin we feel.
And now think not of politics too much.
Three days or four is quite enough for such.
Much better done to store substantial honey
Of commerce, taste the joys that roll in money.

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Be rich, my friends! who cares then to be free
In hard uncomfortable liberty?
Of boycott talk but not of Swaraj, sirs,
And if of independence you'ld discourse,
Let it of economic independence be.
For that the law proscribes no penalty,
Nor will your gentle hearts grow faint and sick
At shadow of the fell policeman's stick.
What folly to disturb our comfort fatty
And cudgelled be with regulation lathi?
Such the reflections, sirs—Well, let it drop.
Don't hiss so much, dear friends! for here I stop.

BY THE WAY

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Omissions and Commissions at Berhampur

06-April-1907

The spirit of mendicancy has not been given much play in the proceedings of the Berhampur Conference and so far this year marks a distinctive advance. Last year's Conference was totally exceptional; and there could be no certainty that the victory, then won for reason and patriotism, would be permanent, for the mendicant spirit fled from the Conference Pandal before Kemp's cudgels and the triumph of the gospel of self-help was accomplished in an atmosphere of such excitement that even the chill blood of a Legislative Councillor was heated into seditious utterance. The very moment after the dispersal of the Conference the mendicant nature reasserted itself, justifying the maxim of the ancients, "Drive out Nature with a pitchfork (or a regulation lathi), yet it will come back at the gallop." But since then Nationalist sentiment in Bengal has grown immensely in volume; and although the Conference was held in a Moderate centre, in the peaceful and untroubled atmosphere of West Bengal, no positive mendicancy was permitted. There were, indeed, certain features of the Conference which we cannot view with approval. Last year the right of raising the cry of the Motherland wherever even two or three of her sons might meet, whether in public places or private, was asserted by the whole body of delegates in spite of police cudgels; this year the right was surrendered because Babu Baikunthanath Sen had pledged his personal honour to a foreign bureaucrat that there would be no breach of the peace. Since this plea was accepted by the delegates, we must take it that all Bengal has acknowledged the shouting of "Bande Mataram" in the streets to be a breach of the peace! Here is a victory for the bureaucracy. And yet the Chairman of the Reception Committee

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was not ashamed to include in his rotund rhetorical phrases congratulations on our triumph and our scars of victory. The private and personal honour of Babu Baikunthanath was set in the balance against the public honour of the delegates of Bengal, and the latter kicked the beam. It will be said that the position of Babu Baikunthanath as host precluded the delegates from doing anything which would compromise that estimable gentleman. We deny that Babu Baikunthanath stood in the position of host to the Conference, whatever may have been his relation to individual delegates; in any case the representatives of Bengal went to Berhampur not to eat good dinners and interchange kindly social courtesies, but simply and solely to do their duty by the country. We deny the right of any individual, whatever his position, to pledge a whole nation to a course inconsistent with courage and with honour. But the leaders seem to have accepted the plea with alacrity as a good excuse for avoiding a repetition of Barisal. "For such another field they dreaded worse than death." The incident shows the persistence of that want of backbone which is still the curse of our politics. In any other country the very fact that the delegates had been assaulted at one Conference for asserting a right, would have been held an imperative reason for reasserting that right at every succeeding Conference, till it was admitted. Unless we can show the same firmness, we may as well give up the idea of passive resistance for good and all.

Several of the Resolutions seem to us unnecessary in substance and others invertebrate in phrasing. We have no faith whatever in the Judicial and Executive separation nostrum; we do not believe that it will really remedy the evil which it is designed to meet. So long as the executive and judiciary are both in the pay of the same irresponsible and despotic authority, they will for the most part be actuated by the same spirit and act in unison; the relief given will only be in individual cases. Even that much relief we cannot be sure of; for the moment the functions are separated, it will become an imperious need for the bureaucracy to tighten their hold on the judiciary, and, with all the power in their hands, they will not find the task

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difficult. Already the High Court itself has long ceased to be the "palladium of justice and liberty" against bureaucratic vagaries, and the unanimity of the two Services is likely to be intensified by the so-called reform. It is quite possible that the separation will make things worse rather than better. One reform and one alone can secure us from executive oppression and that is to make the people of this country paymasters and controllers of both executive and judiciary. No patchwork in any direction will be of any avail. What for instance is the use of clamouring about the Road Cess when we know perfectly well that it was levied not for roads and other district purposes but as a plausible means of circumventing the Permanent Settlement? No one can deny that it is admirably fulfilling the purpose for which it was levied. It is absurd to think that the bureaucracy will be anxious to open out the country any further than is necessary for military and administrative purposes and for the greater facility of exploitation by the foreign trader and capitalist. The needs and convenience of the people are not and can never be a determining factor in their expenditure. For the same reason they cannot be expected to look to sanitation beyond the limit necessary in order to safeguard the health of Europeans and avoid in the world's eyes manifest self-betrayal as an inefficient, reactionary and uncivilised administration. Really to secure the public health and effectually combat the plagues that are rapidly destroying our vitality, swelling the death-rate and diminishing the birth-rate, would demand an amount of co-operation with the people for which they will never be willing to pay the price.

With the exception of these minor triflings and of one glaring omission beside which all its omissions and commissions fade into insignificance, the work of the Conference has on the whole been satisfactory. It is well that it has sanctioned the taking up of sanitation measures by popular agency; it is well that it has dealt with the question of arbitration and that it has approved of measures for grappling with the urgent question of scarcity and famine. But in failing utterly to understand and meet the situation created by the disturbances in East Bengal,

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the Conference has shown a want of courage and statesmanship which is without excuse,—we wish we could say that it was without parallel. We shall deal with this subject separately as its importance demands.

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The Writing on the Wall

08-April-1907

When things violent or fearful take place let no one be alarmed or discouraged—they also are "His goings forth". That there will be only the piping time of peace and we shall sing of the cuckoo and the spring is expecting something unnatural. An individual or a nation cannot rise to its full height except through trouble and stress. The stone block patiently submits to hammering, cutting and chiselling to be made into the statue which pleases the eye and gladdens the soul. If it could feel it certainly would say, "How dearly I have to pay for the beautiful transformation." This is the inexorable law of nature. Nature has not yet been known to relent in this respect. If you want to get anything grand and beautiful out of her you must go through the process through which a piece of stone passes before it is endowed with shape, beauty and meaning. The fertilising river rolls down stones, breaks through the impediments, rends asunder the surface of the earth before it bears on its bosom the argosies and crowns the bordering lands with plenty. Those who cannot look this sternness of nature in the face are not destined for things good, noble and high. If you want to grovel in the dust, indolence, ease and ignoble peace may do, but if climbing up the heights of glory is your ambition learn to encounter difficulties and dangers manfully. This is apt to be ignored and ridiculed as a copybook maxim. But it bears repetition times without number and when either an individual or a nation sets about anything earnestly it should start fully impressed with the truth of this copybook commonplace. The truth cannot be confirmed enough and thus the threats of the Anglo-Indian Press have hardly any terror for us.

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The Anglo-Indian Press whenever they find that their arguments are seen through, that what is at the back of their minds is at once discovered, that their professions and protestations are taken at their worth, fall to using threats and throw out dark hints as if the people do not know that they cannot regain their independence without a fearful struggle. The Anglo-Indian Press are really nervous at our getting at the truth about political salvation and their arguments about our weakness and incompetency backed by the opinion of the moderate school of politicians in the country are systematically alternated with the arguments of fire and sword. When they cannot coax us into acquiescing in servitude, they want to argue us into it and failing that too, they brandish the sword. The London Times, its namesake in Bombay, the Pioneer, the Englishman, all tried to win over the Congress suddenly changing their attitude of supreme contempt towards the National Assembly of a quarter of a century's standing. But as soon as the news that the extremist programme found favour with the 22nd National Congress was flashed across the seas the "Thunderer" at once cabled to us that India was won by the sword and will in the last resort be held by the sword. Since then these Anglo-Indian journals are trying both mild and violent ways. The more the desire for independence seems to be in evidence, the more the signs of the times point to that direction, the more they gnash their teeth, tear their hair and beat their breast. At every fresh proof of reawakening more blood is sent to their eyes and head. Their conduct gives the lie direct to the vaunted profession that the English people are everywhere the upholders, the representatives, the leaders of the two great interests of a people—Freedom and Justice. The demand of the Egyptian General Assembly has only provoked their laughter. The granting of a constitution to Persia is according to them a move in the wrong direction. They have given the Amir a taste of the flirtation of Western civilisation. They want to retain their spell over those whom they have already enthralled and are ever in quest of fresh victims. Surrender your life, your liberty, your birth-rights to the English nation, go on ministering to their comforts and pleasures and you are

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credited with common sense, prudence, intelligence and all other mental equipments. But if you think of making any strides in the direction of manhood—if you take it into your head to hold your own in the conflict of interests—if you show the least sign of walking with your head erect you are damned wretches fit for the jail gallows because it has been settled once for all in the wise dispensations of Providence, that you are to sow and they are to reap, that you are to buy and they are to sell, that you are to be killed and they are to kill, that you are to be deprived of arms while they are to be in their full possession, that you will use arms for nefarious purposes, while they will wield them to defend themselves. What else can these ridiculous effusions of the Calcutta Englishman mean?

"Diligent students of newspapers in this part of the world can hardly fail to have been struck by the fact that fire-arms are now being frequently used in the commission of crime. They have been produced in the case of riots, and within a few days no less than three cases have been reported of persons shot dead by others who ordinarily should not have been in the possession of rifles or guns. When a Maharaja, particularly a friend of Europeans and officials, is shot from behind a hedge and the Police Superintendent of a District has a bullet whistling over his head, the time has come to enquire by what means criminal or fanatical persons on this side of India manage to possess themselves of fire-arms. Recent cases in the Police Court show that it is by no means impossible for transfers of revolvers and the like to take place by private sale. Any unscrupulous or indigent European can sell a weapon to an Indian without the police being aware of the fact (how can they be aware?) and the question arises whether the punishment for a breach of this kind of the Arms Act should not be made absolutely deterrent. Further, as witness the case at Garden Reach, burglars and thieves are learning when they break into a house, that the most valuable property in it are not jewels or money, but guns, rifles, and revolvers. The latter have even been stolen from so secure a place as Fort William. All this points to the fact that a demand for weapons has suddenly arisen in Bengal. One would naturally like to know

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why. Some people will find no hesitation in accepting the reply that the demand has been caused by those Bengali newspapers and other preachers of sedition who proclaim that the people of this country ought to perfect themselves in military exercises and the use of arms. Bande Mataram yesterday boldly said that Indians must develop the virtues of the Kshatriya, the warrior caste. 'The first virtue of the Kshatriya is not to bow his neck to an unjust yoke but to protect his weak and suffering countrymen against the oppressor and welcome death in a just and righteous battle.' This kind of stuff, of course, is often harmless; but when we consider the lengths to which the boycotters have already gone, is it too much to suppose that some fanatics will go to some trouble in providing themselves with arms even if their courage halts there?"

But we reiterate with all the emphasis we can command that the Kshatriya of old must again take his rightful position in our social polity to discharge the first and foremost duty of defending its interests. The brain is impotent without the right arm of strength. India is now conscious of this long-forgotten truth. And the hand must hold up-to-date arms. And where the arms cannot be procured in a fair way people are driven to underhand methods, not to kill their own men as the Englishman designedly insinuates but to protect their life and limb, home and hearth, as they had to do at Comilla, as they will shortly have to do at Mymensingh. An awakened nation consults its necessity and proceeds to the invention. The song that nerves the nation's heart is in itself a deed. That song may lead to persecution but as the Punjabee has said, "Today we are in the firing line, but our recruits are at our back—ready to take our places the moment we drop down." This music can no longer be silenced and keeping time with it the coming Kshatriya is forging his thunder regardless of the fretting and fuming of the Englishman. The writings on the wall are getting distinct and the Englishman knows no peace.

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A Nil-admirari Admirer

09-April-1907

The splendid speech of Srinath Paul has at last found an admirer in the nil-admirari editor of the Indian Nation. What is more wonderful still is that the veteran cynic who had up to now directed all his energies in running down Surendranath has now suddenly discovered that "Surendranath is the most prominent man on this side of the country."

The poor President of the Conference, who had committed the unpardonable sin of differing from the omniscient editor of the Indian Nation in his ideas of nationalism, has come in for a liberal share of abuse.

He does not understand the difference in the ideals of the two parties; he fails to find wherein Mr. Tilak's nationalism differs from that of Mr. Gokhale. He fancies he had been cherishing and nursing the national spirit—and this disgust at the very name of the nation is the result. Even Homer nods; and the wise editor of the Indian Nation and his other compatriots have to be told that the supreme test of nationalism is a belief in the future of the nation and a love for it—with all its weaknesses.

As for the scurrility of the New Party organs we beg to remind this English scholar that even the genial smile of Addison cut the offending section of the public to the bone.

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Pherozshahi at Surat

10-April-1907

The methods of Moderate autocrats are as instructive as they are peculiar. The account of the characteristic proceedings of Sir Pherozshah Mehta at the Surat Conference, which we published in yesterday's correspondence columns, bears a strong family likeness to the ways of the Provincial Congress autocrats all India over. The selection of a subservient President who will call white black at dictatorial bidding; the open scorn of public opinion; the disregard of justice, of fair play, of constitutional practice and procedure, of equality of all before recognised law and rule, and of every other principle essential to a self-governing body; the arrogant claim on account of past "services" to assert private wishes, opinions, conveniences, as superior to the wishes, opinions and conveniences of the people's delegates; these are common and universal characteristics in the procedure of our autocratic democrats. The difference is merely in personal temperament and manner of expression. "The State? I am the State!" cried Louis XIV. "The country? I am the country!" cries Sir Pherozshah Mehta or Pundit Madan Mohan Malaviya or Mr. Krishnaswamy Aiyar, as the case may be. Only, as his personality is more robust, so is Sir Pherozshah's dictatorial arrogance more public, open and contemptuous than that of his compeers in less favoured Provinces. If the popular cause is to make any progress, if we are to show ourselves worthy of the self-government we claim, this strong-handed autocracy must itself be put down with the strong hand. As Mr. Tilak pointed out at Kolhapur, the object of the national movement is not to replace foreign autocrats by the Swadeshi article, but to replace an irresponsible bureaucracy by popular self-government.

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The most extraordinary of Sir Pherozshah's freaks at Surat was not his treatment of Sir Bhalchandra as if the President of the Conference were his tame cat,—for what else was the Knight of the Umbrella, pushed into a position to which he has no claims of any kind? Nor was it his exclusion of the Aundh Commission from consideration by the Conference; it is part of the orthodox Congress "nationalism" to exclude the Princes and Chiefs of India from consideration as if they were not an important part of the nation, and to leave them without sympathy or support to the tender mercies of the Foreign Office. Nor was it his turning the Conference into a tool for ventilating his personal grievances against Bombay officialdom. It was his action with regard to the question of National Education.

Let us consider one by one the pleas by which he managed to exclude this all-important Resolution from the deliberations of the Conference. They show the peculiar mental texture of our leaders and their crude notions of the politics which they profess. The first plea is that the Resolutions of the Congress are not binding upon the Conference. What then is the necessity or purpose of the Congress? As we understand it, the Resolutions of the Congress embody the opinions and aspirations of the united people of India; they put forward the minimum reforms which that people are agreed to demand from the Government or to effect for themselves. A Provincial Conference can go beyond these minimum reforms if the circumstances of the Province or the general opinion of the public demand it; it cannot diminish, ignore or go behind them without dissociating itself from the programme approved by the nation and breaking up all chances of an united advance. If these are not the relations of Congress and Conference, will Sir Pherozshah inform us what are the true relations? If the Conference does not exist in order to carry forward the national programme with whatever additions the Province may find necessary for its own purposes, does it then exist only in order to record the decrees and opinions of a few Provincial leaders?

The second plea was that Sir Pherozshah Mehta could not understand the meaning of National Education. At Ahmedabad,

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we remember, the Swadeshi Resolution was disallowed in the Subjects Committee because Sir Pherozshah Mehta would not know where he could get his broadcloth, if it were passed! The nation was not to resolve on helping forward its commercial independence, because Sir Pherozshah Mehta preferred broadcloth to any other wear. And now the people of Bombay are not to educate themselves on national lines because Sir Pherozshah Mehta does not know what a nation means nor what nationalism means nor, in fact, anything except what Sir Pherozshah Mehta means.

When, on a vote of the Subjects Committee, the Resolution was declared by the President to be lost, it seems to have been the opinion of a large body of the delegates that this was a misdeclaration. The obvious course was, under such circumstances, a count of votes by tellers on each side. But Sir Pherozshah was ready with his third plea that this would be to question the veracity of the President. We cannot too strongly insist that politics is not a social drawing-room for the interchange of courtly amenities. Where there is a question of constitutional right, to bring in personal arguments of this kind is to show that you have not grasped the elementary principles of democratic politics. The very first of these principles is that law rules and not persons,—the person is only an instrument of the law. The President or Chairman of a body sits there to keep order and see that law and rule are observed,—he does not sit there to make his own will the law. If therefore there is any question of a miscount, it is his bounden duty to see that immediate measures are taken to satisfy both parties as to its correctness and it is the natural right of the members to demand such a count. That right ought not to be waived in deference to the tender delicacy of a Chairman's self-love, nor has he or his friends any right to talk nonsense about his veracity being questioned or himself being insulted. Such mouthings show either a guilty conscience which cannot face public scrutiny or an entire moral unfitness for leadership in any constitutional proceedings.

We regret that the delegates at Surat did not insist on their rights. Sir Pherozshah Mehta came to Calcutta, prepared to do at

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the Congress precisely what he has now been doing at the Conference; but he found a spirit awakened in Bengal before which a hundred Pherozshahs are as mere chaff before the wind. It is a spirit which will tolerate no dictation except from the nation and from the laws which the nation imposes on itself. The progress of the National cause depends on the awakening of that spirit throughout India. Let there be only one dictator—the People.

A Last Word

10-April-1907

We publish in another column a letter from Srijut Kamini Kumar Chanda on the incidents of the Berhampur Conference, which is the last communication on the subject we shall allow in our columns. We quite agree that it would have been better if this unfortunate wrangle could have been avoided. Since, however, the veracity of our reporter had been impugned, we were bound to give him full opportunity of defending himself in his own fashion. We think his veracity has been vindicated by all impartial witnesses and our own inquiries have led us to the conclusion that the report was substantially correct in all important particulars and there is no point on which his statements have been disproved. Differences of impression on minor points will always exist among different observers of the same incident. Some, for instance, think that Mr. A. Chaudhuri raised his point about New India before the meeting was formally dissolved; others think it was after. The point is immaterial; the real question is—was Mr. Chaudhuri justified in raising the matter at all on such an occasion? We do not associate ourselves with the strong epithets which our reporter in his self-justification has applied to such incidents trifling as they were. Mr. Chaudhuri's action, for instance, was out of place; that is all. We see nothing to object to in his original report, which was an ordinary account, half-picturesque, half-humorous such as would be taken for granted in the Press of any other country.

Srijut Kamini Kumar takes us to task for quarrelling over such trifling personalities when there are such great questions to

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be fought out. We beg to point out that we have not quarrelled over them, but have simply given room for our reporter to vindicate his truthfulness as prominently as it had been impugned. So much protection every journal owes to its employees, so long as it is convinced of their bona fides. As to the good or bad taste shown in publishing these details that is a matter of opinion. Such accounts are published as a matter of course in the journals of every country where politics are a real part of life and an universal subject of interest; but in this country our public men are unused to criticism and as thin-skinned as women. We do not think their delicate and refined sensitiveness is a plant whose growth we have any call to encourage.

The question of the secrecy of the Subjects Committee proceedings is another matter altogether. This secrecy is never observed in practice; on the contrary, in the absence of free and healthy publicity, partial and altogether misleading reports are circulated which delude public opinion. If secrecy is to be observed, it must be done wholly and completely, by the mouth as well as by the pen. Even so, we should not have cared to break the pseudo-secrecy of these sittings if they had not been made the field for unconstitutional proceedings of every sort. In the twilight of the Subjects Committee every kind of breach of rule and irregularity and all sorts of tactics are employed to get a party advantage; and then in the public function the results are decorously passed in the full light of day as the unanimous opinion of the Congress or Conference. If we keep silence on these expedients which is what the caucus managers desire, they will continue to flourish unchecked; for it is only by exposure that abuses can be killed. We do not believe in shrouding discussions on public matters in secrecy; but if the constitutional practice of public bodies is strictly observed in these sittings, and free public discussion is allowed on matters of great importance in open Congress, then the secrecy of the Subjects Committee may become a fact and not a convenient fiction; but not till then. But in our view the simple expedient is to throw open the Subjects Committee proceedings to public view and all irregularities and personal outbreaks will receive a wholesome check.

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The Situation in East Bengal

11-April-1907

While commenting on the proceedings of the Berhampur Conference, we expressed our opinion that the leaders had been guilty of the most serious deficiency in statesmanship and courage in failing to understand and meet the situation created by the occurrences in Tipperah. Leadership in this country has hitherto gone with the fluent tongue, the sonorous voice, skill in dialectics and acute adroitness in legal draftsmanship. The leader has not been called upon to understand the great and urgent national needs or to meet the calls of a dangerous crisis. In the opposition-cum-cooperation theory these were functions of the alien Government, and the only duty of the popular leaders was to advise or remonstrate and look on at the results. The present position in Bengal is full of the uncertainty and confusion of a transition period when circumstances have changed and demand new qualities, new ideas and a new spirit in the people's chiefs; but the leadership still remains in the hands of the old type of politicians. This would not have mattered if the old leaders had been men of genius gifted with the adaptability to suit themselves to the new circumstances, the vision to grasp them and the courage to act. But none of these qualities seems to be possessed either by Babu Surendranath, the one man of genius among the older leaders, or by Mr. Gokhale, the one man of real political ability, much less by the lesser heads. The country has still to seek for leaders who shall be worthy of the new age.

The Comilla affair has revealed beyond all possible doubt the heart of the new situation. It ought now to be plain to the meanest intelligence that a struggle has begun between two great forces which must go on till one or the other is crushed

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or driven to surrender. Any attempt to disguise the fact is the merest futility. Our Moderate leaders thought when Fuller had been driven out of the country and Morley had taken up the reins of Government, the struggle need no longer be a struggle and could again be reduced to the proportions of a public debate between the Congress and the Government. Now again, they thought, a pleasant reversion to the old opposition-cum-cooperation politics may be gradually engineered. But the forces of reaction, opposed to us, understand politics better; they have seen that the fire of the new spirit is not a momentary blaze to be kindled and quenched at the will of individuals, but the beginning of an immense conflagration. Their policy is as astute as might be expected in such past masters of the art of politics. It is evidently to isolate the struggle and fight it out in East Bengal; to oppose and put down the new spirit after it had taken hold of the whole nation would be a task so difficult as to be a practical impossibility; to meet it in a single part of the country and crush it before it had time to spread effectively over all India, is obviously the wisest course. It is part of the policy also to attack it by localities even in the affected area and not as a whole, to destroy it before the defence has organised itself; and to use as instruments the Salimullahi sect of Mahomedans, while the Police confine themselves to keeping the ring.

The leaders may say that they thought the Comilla incident an unwelcome and deplorable outbreak which had happily been closed whether by the "secret" efforts of Babu Surendranath Banerji or by other less miraculous means. That they did think so, is probable and nothing could more damningly convict them of want of insight and even the smallest measure of political wisdom than such an inexcusable blunder. It was perfectly obvious that, as Comilla had not been the first incident of the kind, so also it would not be the last. Before the Conference met the disturbance at Mogra Hat was already in full course; and the details, reported in Babu Surendranath Banerji's own paper, were of the most glaringly unmistakable character. At Comilla there had been an outbreak of anti-national hooliganism coincident with the Nawab's visit; the authorities had practically refused

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to help the Hindus and had only interfered when the Hindus were getting the upper hand; and even then, the arrest and punishment of a few rioters was so casually and lightly done as to be absolutely useless for any deterrent effect while the might of the bureaucracy was centred upon the prosecution of alleged Hindu culprits in the shooting case.

Nevertheless the Comilla incident ended in a national victory. At Mogra Hat measures were taken to prevent a repetition of that victory. A Mahomedan Police official seems to have acted practically as the captain of the rioters; the Sub-divisional Officer tried to deprive the Hindus of the means of self-defence; attempts were made to prevent organisation of defence by volunteers; a Police force held the station to exclude help from outside for the Hindus, leaving the Mahomedan rioters a clear field for their operations. Finally when in spite of all these obstructions the Hindus were again getting the upper hand, the higher authorities appeared on the scene, the disturbance was quelled, and arrests and prosecutions of Hindus are now in full swing. This is the substance of the account given by the correspondents of the Bengalee and the Patrika, and not yet denied. If after this the leaders are still unable to understand the situation, the sooner they give up their leadership and attend to their spiritual salvation, the better for themselves and the country.

The situation in East Bengal puts three important questions to any intelligent leadership. Is East Bengal to be left alone to fight out the battle of nationalism while the rest of the country looks calmly on? Is reaction to be allowed to persecute local and disorganised forces of nationalism or is mutual defence to be organised? What measures are to be taken to prevent the efforts of the officials to give the matter the appearance of a Hindu-Mahomedan quarrel? What answer have the leaders to give to these questions? At Berhampur two measures only were taken,—an empty and halting Resolution of "sympathy" and a flamboyant call for a Defence Fund, to be utilised for we know not what purpose. It is not money that East Bengal needs, but practical assistance, guidance and leadership. These the leaders have proved themselves unable or unwilling to give. They will

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say perhaps that they have secured the "sympathy" of Lord Minto as well as of the Conference, and nothing further is necessary! It does not matter a jot whether the local officials are or are not acting on their own initiative in their singular attitude in East Bengal. The sympathy of Lord Minto has not prevented the repetition of the disturbances, and we have no confidence that it will prevent further repetitions which are now threatening. For effectiveness it seems to be on a par with the sympathy of the Berhampur Conference. The people can expect no protection from the alien bureaucracy which is interested in the extinction of nationalism. They can expect, it appears, neither help nor guidance from their own leaders. They are left alone to find out their own salvation. Be it so, then. Ourselves we will protect ourselves; unled and unassisted pave for the country its hope and its future.

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The Doctrine of Passive Resistance - Introduction

11-April-1907

In a series of articles, published in this paper soon after the Calcutta session of the Congress, we sought to indicate our view both of the ideal which the Congress had adopted, the ideal of Swaraj or self-government as it exists in the United Kingdom or the Colonies, and of the possible lines of policy by which that ideal might be attained. There are, we pointed out, only three possible policies; petitioning, an unprecedented way of attempting a nation's liberty, which cannot possibly succeed except under conditions which have not yet existed among human beings; self-development and self-help; and the old orthodox historical method of organised resistance to the existing form of government. We acknowledged that the policy of self-development which the New party had forced to the front, was itself a novel departure under the circumstances of modern India. Self-development of an independent nation is one thing; self-development from a state of servitude under an alien and despotic rule without the forcible or peaceful removal of that rule as an indispensable preliminary, is quite another. No national self-development is possible without the support of rajshakti, organized political strength, commanding, and whenever necessary compelling general allegiance and obedience. A caste may develop, a particular community may develop by its own efforts supported by a strong social organization; a nation cannot. Industrially, socially, educationally there can be no genuine progress carrying the whole nation forward, unless there is a central force representing either the best thought and energy of the country or else the majority of its citizens and able to enforce the views and decisions of the nation on all its constituent members. Because Japan had such a central authority, she was able in thirty years to face Europe as an equal; because we in India neither had such an authority nor tried

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to develop it, but supported each tottering step by clinging to the step-motherly apron strings of a foreign Government, our record of more than seventy years has not been equal to one year of Japan. We have fumbled through the nineteenth century, prattling of enlightenment and national regeneration; and the result has been not national progress, but national confusion and weakness. Individuals here and there might emancipate themselves and come to greatness; particular communities might show a partial and one-sided development, for a time only; but the nation instead of progressing, sank into a very slough of weakness, helplessness and despondency. Political freedom is the life-breath of a nation; to attempt social reform, educational reform, industrial expansion, the moral improvement of the race without aiming first and foremost at political freedom, is the very height of ignorance and futility. Such attempts are foredoomed to disappointment and failure; yet when the disappointment and failure come, we choose to attribute them to some radical defect in the national character, as if the nation were at fault and not its wise men who would not or could not understand the first elementary conditions of success. The primary requisite for national progress, national reform, is the free habit of free and healthy national thought and action which is impossible in a state of servitude. The second is the organization of the national will in a strong central authority.

How impossible it is to carry out efficiently any large national object in the absence of this authority was shown by the fate of the Boycott in Bengal. It is idle to disguise from ourselves that the Boycott is not as yet effective except spasmodically and in patches. Yet to carry through the Boycott was a solemn national decision which has not been reversed but rather repeatedly confirmed. Never indeed has the national will been so generally and unmistakeably declared; but for the want of a central authority to work for the necessary conditions, to support by its ubiquitous presence the weak and irresolute and to coerce the refractory, it has not been properly carried out. For the same reason national education languishes. For the same reason every attempt at large national action has failed. It is idle to talk of self

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development unless we first evolve a suitable central authority or Government which all will or must accept. The Japanese perceived this at a very early stage and leaving aside all other matters, devoted their first energies to the creation of such an authority in the person of the Mikado and his Government, holding it cheaply purchased even at the price of temporary internal discord and civil slaughter. We also must develop a central authority, which shall be a popular Government in fact though not in name. But Japan was independent; we have to establish a popular authority which will exist side by side and in rivalry with a despotic foreign bureaucracy—no ordinary rough-riding despotism, but quiet, pervasive and subtle, one that has fastened its grip on every detail of our national life and will not easily be persuaded to let go, even in the least degree, its octopus-like hold. This popular authority will have to dispute every part of our national life and activity, one by one, step by step, with the intruding force to the extreme point of entire emancipation from alien control. This and no less than this is the task before us. A Moderate critic characterised it at the time as an unheroic programme; but to us it seems so heroic that we frankly acknowledge its novelty and audacity and the uncertainty of success. For success depends on the presence of several very rare conditions. It demands in the first place a country for its field of action in which the people are more powerfully swayed by the fear of social excommunication and the general censure of their fellows than by the written law. It demands a country where the capacity for extreme self-denial is part of the national character or for centuries has taken a prominent place in the national discipline. These conditions exist in India. But it requires also an iron endurance, tenacity, doggedness far above anything that is needed for the more usual military revolt or sanguinary revolution. These qualities we have not as yet developed at least in Bengal; but they are easily generated by suffering and necessity and hardened into permanence by a prolonged struggle with superior power. There is nothing like a strong pressure from above to harden and concentrate what lies below—always provided that the superior pressure is not such as to crush the substance on

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which it is acting. The last requisite therefore for the success of the policy of self-development against the pressure of foreign rule is that the bureaucracy will so far respect its former traditions and professions as not to interfere finally with any course of action of the popular authority which does not itself try violently to subvert the connection of the British Empire with India. It is extremely doubtful whether this last condition will be satisfied. It is easy to see how the bureaucracy might put a summary end to National Education or an effective check on industrial expansion or do away arbitrarily with popular Arbitration Courts. It is easy to see how the temptation to resort to Russian methods on a much larger and effective scale than that of mere Fullerism might prove too strong for a privileged class which felt power slipping from its hold. We therefore said in our previous articles that we must carry on the attempt at self-development as long as we were permitted. What would be our next recourse if it were no longer permitted it is too early to discuss.

The attempt at self-development by self-help is absolutely necessary for our national salvation, whether we can carry it peacefully to the end or not. In no other way can we get rid of the fatal dependence, passivity and helplessness in which a century of all-pervasive British control has confirmed us. To recover the habit of independent motion and independent action is the first necessity. It was for this reason that after extreme provocation and full conviction of the hopelessness otherwise of inducing any change of policy in the older politicians, the leaders of the new school decided to form an independent party and place their views as an independent programme before the country. Their action, though much blamed at the time, has been thoroughly justified by results. The National Congress has not indeed broken with the old petitioning traditions, but it has admitted the new policy as an essential part of the national programme. Swadeshi and National Education have been recognized, and, in all probability, Arbitration will be given its proper prominence at the next session; Boycott has been admitted as permissible in principle to all parts of India though the recommendation to extend it in practice as an integral part of the national policy was

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not pressed. It only remained to develop the central authority which will execute the national policy and evolve with time into a popular Government. It was for this object that the New party determined not to be satisfied with any further evasion of the constitution question, though they did not press for the adoption of their own particular scheme. It is for this object that a Central National Committee has been formed; that Conferences are being held in various districts and sub-divisions and committees created; that the Provincial Conferences are expected to appoint a Provincial Committee for all Bengal. The mere creation of these Committees will not provide us with our central authority, nor will they be really effective for the purpose until the new spirit and the new views are paramount in the whole country. But it is the first step which costs and the first step has been taken.

So far, well; but the opposition of the bureaucracy to the national self-development must be taken into account. Opposition, not necessarily final and violent, will undoubtedly be offered; and we have not as yet considered the organization of any means by which it can be effectually met. Obviously we shall have to fall back on the third policy of organised resistance, and have only to decide what form the resistance should take, passive or active, defensive or aggressive. It is well known that the New party long ago formulated and all Bengal has in theory accepted, the doctrine of passive, or, as it might be more comprehensively termed, defensive resistance. We have therefore not only to organize a central authority, not only to take up all branches of our national life into our hands, but in order to meet bureaucratic opposition and to compel the alien control to remove its hold on us, if not at once, then tentacle by tentacle we must organize defensive resistance.

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The Doctrine of Passive Resistance - Its Object

12-April-1907

Organized resistance to an existing form of government may be undertaken either for the vindication of national liberty, or in order to substitute one form of government for another, or to remove particular objectionable features in the existing system without any entire or radical alteration of the whole, or simply for the redress of particular grievances. Our political agitation in the nineteenth century was entirely confined to the smaller and narrower objects. To replace an oppressive land revenue system by the security of a Permanent Settlement, to mitigate executive tyranny by the separation of judicial from executive functions, to diminish the drain on the country naturally resulting from foreign rule by more liberal employment of Indians in the services—to these half-way houses our wise men and political seers directed our steps, with this limited ideal they confined the rising hopes and imaginations of a mighty people reawakening after a great downfall. Their political inexperience prevented them from realising that these measures on which we have misspent half a century of unavailing effort, were not only paltry and partial in their scope but in their nature ineffective. A Permanent Settlement can always be evaded by a spendthrift Government bent on increasing its resources and unchecked by any system of popular control; there is no limit to the possible number of cesses and local taxes by which the Settlement could be practically violated without any direct infringement of its provisions. The mere deprivation of judicial functions will not disarm executive tyranny so long as both executive and judiciary are mainly white and subservient to a central authority irresponsible, alien and bureaucratic; for the central authority can always tighten its grip on the judiciary of which it is the controller and paymaster and habituate it to a consistent support of executive action. Nor will Simultaneous Examinations and the liberal appointment of Indians

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mend the matter; for an Englishman serves the Government as a member of the same ruling race and can afford to be occasionally independent; but the Indian civilian is a serf masquerading as a heaven-born and can only deserve favour and promotion by his zeal in fastening the yoke heavier upon his fellow-countrymen. As a rule the foreign Government can rely on the "native" civilian to be more zealously oppressive than even the average Anglo-Indian official. Neither would the panacea of Simultaneous Examinations really put an end to the burden of the drain. The Congress insistence on the Home Charges for a long time obscured the real accusation against British rule; for it substituted a particular grievance for a radical and congenital evil implied in the very existence of British control. The huge price India has to pay England for the inestimable privilege of being ruled by Englishmen is a small thing compared with the murderous drain by which we purchase the more exquisite privilege of being exploited by British capital. The diminution of the Home Charges will not prevent the gradual death by bleeding of which exploitation is the true and abiding cause. Thus, even for the partial objects they were intended to secure, the measures for which we petitioned and clamoured in the last century were hopelessly ineffective. So was it with all the Congress nostrums; they were palliatives which could not even be counted upon to palliate; the radical evil, uncured, would only be driven from one seat in the body politic to take refuge in others where it would soon declare its presence by equally troublesome symptoms. The only true cure for a bad and oppressive financial system is to give the control over taxation to the people whose money pays for the needs of Government. The only effective way of putting an end to executive tyranny is to make the people and not an irresponsible Government the controller and paymaster of both executive and judiciary. The only possible method of stopping the drain is to establish a popular government which may be relied on to foster and protect Indian commerce and Indian industry conducted by Indian capital and employing Indian labour. This is the object which the new politics, the politics of the twentieth century, places before the people of India in their resistance to the

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present system of government,—not tinkerings and palliatives but the substitution for the autocratic bureaucracy which at present misgoverns us of a free constitutional and democratic system of government and the entire removal of foreign control in order to make way for perfect national liberty.

The redress of particular grievances and the reformation of particular objectionable features in a system of government are sufficient objects for organized resistance only when the Government is indigenous and all classes have a recognised place in the political scheme of the State. They are not and cannot be a sufficient object in countries like Russia and India where the laws are made and administered by a handful of men, and a vast population, educated and uneducated alike, have no political right or duty except the duty of obedience and the right to assist in confirming their own servitude. They are still less a sufficient object when the despotic oligarchy is alien by race and has not even a permanent home in the country, for in that case the Government cannot be relied on to look after the general interests of the country, as in nations ruled by indigenous despotisms; on the contrary, they are bound to place the interests of their own country and their own race first and foremost. Organized resistance in subject nations which mean to live and not die, can have no less an object than an entire and radical change of the system of government; only by becoming responsible to the people and drawn from the people can the Government be turned into a protector instead of an oppressor. But if the subject nation desires not a provincial existence and a maimed development but the full, vigorous and noble realization of its national existence, even a change in the system of government will not be enough; it must aim not only at a national Government responsible to the people but at a free national Government unhampered even in the least degree by foreign control.

It is not surprising that our politicians of the nineteenth century could not realize these elementary truths of modern politics. They had no national experience behind them of politics under modern conditions; they had no teachers except English books and English liberal "sympathisers" and "friends of India".

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Schooled by British patrons, trained to the fixed idea of English superiority and Indian inferiority their imaginations could not embrace the idea of national liberty and perhaps they did not even desire it at heart preferring the comfortable ease which at that time still seemed possible in a servitude under British protection to the struggles and sacrifices of a hard and difficult independence. Taught to take their political lessons solely from the example of England and ignoring or not valuing the historical experience of the rest of the world, they could not even conceive of a truly popular and democratic Government in India except as the slow result of the development of centuries, progress broadening down from precedent to precedent. They could not then understand that the experience of an independent nation is not valid to guide a subject nation, unless and until the subject nation throws off the yoke and itself becomes independent. They could not realize that the slow, painful and ultra-cautious development, necessary in mediaeval and semi-mediaeval conditions when no experience of a stable popular Government had been gained, need not be repeated in the days of the steamship, railway and telegraph, when stable democratic systems are part of the world's secured and permanent heritage. The instructive spectacle of Asiatic nations demanding and receiving constitutional and parliamentary government as the price of a few years' struggle and civil turmoil, had not then been offered to the world. But even if the idea of such happenings had occurred to the more sanguine spirits, they would have been prevented from putting it into words by their inability to discover any means towards its fulfilment. Their whole political outlook was bounded by the lessons of English history, and in English history they found only two methods of politics,—the slow method of agitation and the swift decisive method of open struggle and revolt. Unaccustomed to independent political thinking they did not notice the significant fact that the method of agitation only became effective in England when the people had already gained a powerful voice in the Government. In order to secure that voice they had been compelled to resort no less than three times to the method of open struggle and revolt. Blind

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to the significance of this fact, our nineteenth century politicians clung to the method of agitation, obstinately hoping against all experience and reason that it would somehow serve their purpose. From any idea of open struggle with the bureaucracy they shrank with terror and a sense of paralysis. Dominated by the idea of the overwhelming might of Britain and the abject weakness of India, their want of courage and faith in the nation, their rooted distrust of the national character, disbelief in Indian patriotism and blindness to the possibility of true political strength and virtue in the people, precluded them from discovering the rough and narrow way to salvation. Herein lies the superiority of the new school that they have an indomitable courage and faith in the nation and the people. By the strength of that courage and faith they have not only been able to enforce on the mind of the country a higher ideal but perceive an effective means to the realization of that ideal. By the strength of that courage and faith they have made such immense strides in the course of a few months. By the strength of that courage and faith they will dominate the future.

The new methods were first tried in the great Swadeshi outburst of the last two years,—blindly, crudely, without leading and organization, but still with amazing results. The moving cause was a particular grievance, the Partition of Bengal; and to the removal of the particular grievance, pettiest and narrowest of all political objects, our old leaders strove hard to confine the use of this new and mighty weapon. But the popular instinct was true to itself and would have none of it. At a bound we passed therefore from mere particular grievances, however serious and intolerable, to the use of passive resistance as a means of cure for the basest and evilest feature of the present system,—the bleeding to death of a country by foreign exploitation. And from that stage we are steadily advancing, under the guidance of such able political thinking as modern India has not before seen and with the rising tide of popular opinion at our back, to the one true object of all resistance, passive or active, aggressive or defensive,—the creation of a free popular Government and the vindication of Indian liberty.

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The Doctrine of Passive Resistance - Its Necessity

13-April-1907

We have defined, so far, the occasion and the ultimate object of the passive resistance we preach. It is the only effective means, except actual armed revolt, by which the organized strength of the nation, gathering to a powerful central authority and guided by the principle of self-development and self-help, can wrest the control of our national life from the grip of an alien bureaucracy, and thus, developing into a free popular Government, naturally replace the bureaucracy it extrudes until the process culminates in a self-governed India, liberated from foreign control. The mere effort at self-development, unaided by some kind of resistance, will not materially help us towards our goal. Merely by developing national schools and colleges we shall not induce or force the bureaucracy to give up to us the control of education. Merely by attempting to expand some of our trades and industries, we shall not drive out the British exploiter or take from the British Government its sovereign power of regulating, checking or killing the growth of Swadeshi industries by the imposition of judicious taxes and duties and other methods always open to the controller of a country's finance and legislation. Still less shall we be able by that harmless means to get for ourselves the control of taxation and expenditure. Nor shall we, merely by establishing our own arbitration courts, oblige the alien control to give up the elaborate and lucrative system of civil and criminal judicature which at once emasculates the nation and makes it pay heavily for its own emasculation. In none of these matters is the bureaucracy likely to budge an inch from its secure position unless it is forcibly persuaded. The control of the young mind in its most impressionable period is of vital importance to the continuance of the hypnotic spell by which alone the foreign domination manages to subsist; the exploitation of the country is the chief reason for its existence; the control of the judiciary is

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one of its chief instruments of repression. None of these things can it yield up without bringing itself nearer to its doom. It is only by organized national resistance, passive or aggressive, that we can make our self-development effectual. For if the self-help movement only succeeds in bringing about some modification of educational methods, some readjustment of the balance of trade, some alleviation of the curse of litigation, then, whatever else it may have succeeded in doing, it will have failed of its main object. The new school at least have not advocated the policy of self-development merely out of a disinterested ardour for moral improvement or under the spur of an inoffensive philanthropic patriotism. This attitude they leave to saints and philosophers,—saints like the editor of the Indian Mirror or philosophers like the ardent Indian Liberals who sit at the feet of Mr. John Morley. They for their part speak and write frankly as politicians aiming at a definite and urgent political object by a way which shall be reasonably rapid and yet permanent in its results. We may have our own educational theories; but we advocate national education not as an educational experiment or to subserve any theory, but as the only way to secure truly national and patriotic control and discipline for the mind of the country in its malleable youth. We desire industrial expansion, but Swadeshi without boycott,—non-political Swadeshi, Lord Minto's "honest" Swadeshi—has no attractions for us, since we know that it can bring no safe and permanent national gain; that can only be secured by the industrial and fiscal independence of the Indian nation. Our immediate problem as a nation is not how to be intellectual and well-informed or how to be rich and industrious, but how to stave off imminent national death, how to put an end to the white peril, how to assert ourselves and live. It is for this reason that whatever minor differences there may be between different exponents of the new spirit, they are all agreed on the immediate necessity of an organized national resistance to the state of things which is crushing us out of existence as a nation and on the one goal of that resistance,—freedom.

Organized national resistance to existing conditions, whether directed against the system of government as such or against

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some particular feature of it, has three courses open to it. It may attempt to make administration under existing conditions impossible by an organized passive resistance. This was the policy initiated by the genius of Parnell when by the plan of campaign he prevented the payment of rents in Ireland and by persistent obstruction hampered the transaction of any but Irish business in Westminster. It may attempt to make administration under existing conditions impossible by an organized aggressive resistance in the shape of an untiring and implacable campaign of assassination and a confused welter of riots, strikes and agrarian risings all over the country. This is the spectacle we have all watched with such eager interest in Russia. We have seen the most absolute autocrat and the most powerful and ruthless bureaucracy in the world still in unimpaired possession of all the most effective means of repression, yet beaten to the knees by the determined resistance of an unarmed nation. It has mistakenly been said that the summoning of the Duma was a triumph for passive resistance. But the series of strikes on a gigantic scale which figured so largely in the final stages of the struggle was only one feature of that widespread, desperate and unappeasable anarchy which led to the first triumph of Russian liberty. Against such an anarchy the mightiest and best-organised Government must necessarily feel helpless; its repression would demand a systematic and prolonged course of massacre on a colossal scale the prospect of which would have paralysed the vigour of the most ruthless and energetic despotism even of mediaeval times. Only by concessions and compromises could such a resistance be overcome. The third course open to an oppressed nation is that of armed revolt, which instead of bringing existing conditions to an end by making their continuance impossible sweeps them bodily out of existence. This is the old time-honoured method which the oppressed or enslaved have always adopted by preference in the past and will always adopt in the future if they see any chance of success; for it is the readiest and swiftest, the most thorough in its results, and demands the least powers of endurance and suffering and the smallest and briefest sacrifices.

The choice by a subject nation of the means it will use for

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vindicating its liberty, is best determined by the circumstances of its servitude. The present circumstances in India seem to point to passive resistance as our most natural and suitable weapon. We would not for a moment be understood to base this conclusion upon any condemnation of other methods as in all circumstances criminal and unjustifiable. It is the common habit of established Governments and especially those which are themselves oppressors, to brand all violent methods in subject peoples and communities as criminal and wicked. When you have disarmed your slaves and legalised the infliction of bonds, stripes and death on any one of them, man, woman or child, who may dare to speak or to act against you, it is natural and convenient to try and lay a moral as well as a legal ban on any attempt to answer violence by violence, the knout by the revolver, the prison by riot or agrarian rising, the gallows by the dynamite bomb. But no nation yet has listened to the cant of the oppressor when itself put to the test, and the general conscience of humanity approves the refusal. Under certain circumstances a civil struggle becomes in reality a battle and the morality of war is different from the morality of peace. To shrink from bloodshed and violence under such circumstances is a weakness deserving as severe a rebuke as Srikrishna addressed to Arjuna when he shrank from the colossal civil slaughter on the field of Kurukshetra. Liberty is the life-breath of a nation; and when the life is attacked, when it is sought to suppress all chance of breathing by violent pressure, any and every means of self-preservation becomes right and justifiable,—just as it is lawful for a man who is being strangled to rid himself of the pressure on his throat by any means in his power. It is the nature of the pressure which determines the nature of the resistance. Where, as in Russia, the denial of liberty is enforced by legalised murder and outrage, or, as in Ireland formerly, by brutal coercion, the answer of violence to violence is justified and inevitable. Where the need for immediate liberty is urgent and it is a present question of national life or death on the instant, revolt is the only course. But where the oppression is legal and subtle in its methods and respects life, liberty and property and there is still breathing time,

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the circumstances demand that we should make the experiment of a method of resolute but peaceful resistance which while less bold and aggressive than other methods, calls for perhaps as much heroism of a kind and certainly more universal endurance and suffering. In other methods, a daring minority purchase with their blood the freedom of the millions; but for passive resistance it is necessary that all should share in the struggle and the privation.

This peculiar character of passive resistance is one reason why it has found favour with the thinkers of the New party. There are certain moral qualities necessary to self-government which have become atrophied by long disuse in our people and can only be restored either by the healthy air of a free national life in which alone they can permanently thrive or by their vigorous exercise in the intensity of a national struggle for freedom. If by any possibility the nation can start its career of freedom with a fully developed unity and strength, it will certainly have a better chance of immediate greatness hereafter. Passive resistance affords the best possible training for these qualities. Something also is due to our friends, the enemy. We have ourselves made them reactionary and oppressive and deserved the Government we possess. The reason why even a radical opportunist like Mr. Morley refuses us self-government is not that he does not believe in India's fitness for self-government, but that he does not believe in India's determination to be free; on the contrary, the whole experience of the past shows that we have not been in earnest in our demand for self-government. We should put our determination beyond a doubt and thereby give England a chance of redeeming her ancient promises, made when her rule was still precarious and unstable. For the rest, circumstances still favour the case of passive resistance. In spite of occasional Fullerism the bureaucracy has not yet made up its mind to a Russian system of repression. It is true that for India also it is now a question of national life or death. Morally and materially she has been brought to the verge of exhaustion and decay by the bureaucratic rule and any farther acquiescence in servitude will result in that death-sleep of centuries from which a nation, if it ever awakes at

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all, wakes emaciated, feeble and unable to resume its true rank in the list of the peoples. But there is still time to try the effect of an united and unflinching pressure of passive resistance. The resistance, if it is to be of any use, must be united and unflinching. If from any timidity or selfishness or any mistaken ideas of caution and moderation our Moderate patriots succeed in breaking the unity and weakening the force of the resistance, the movement will fail and India will sink into those last depths of degradation when only desperate remedies will be of any utility. The advocates of self-development and defensive resistance are no extremists but are trying to give the country its last chance of escaping the necessity of extremism. Defensive resistance is the sole alternative to that ordeal of sanguinary violence on both sides through which all other countries, not excepting the Moderates' exemplar England, have been compelled to pass, only at last "embracing Liberty over a heap of corpses".

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The Doctrine of Passive Resistance - Its Methods

17-April-1907

The essential difference between passive or defensive and active or aggressive resistance is this, that while the method of the aggressive resister is to do something by which he can bring about positive harm to the Government, the method of the passive resister is to abstain from doing something by which he would be helping the Government. The object in both cases is the same,—to force the hands of the Government; the line of attack is different. The passive method is especially suitable to countries where the Government depends mainly for the continuance of its administration on the voluntary help and acquiescence of the subject people. The first principle of passive resistance, therefore, which the new school have placed in the forefront of their programme, is to make administration under present conditions impossible by an organized refusal to do anything which shall help either British commerce in the exploitation of the country or British officialdom in the administration of it,—unless and until the conditions are changed in the manner and to the extent demanded by the people. This attitude is summed up in the one word, Boycott. If we consider the various departments of the administration one by one, we can easily see how administration in each can be rendered impossible by successfully organized refusal of assistance. We are dissatisfied with the fiscal and economical conditions of British rule in India, with the foreign exploitation of the country, the continual bleeding of its resources, the chronic famine and rapid impoverishment which result, the refusal of the Government to protect the people and their industries. Accordingly, we refuse to help the process of exploitation and impoverishment in our capacity as consumers, we refuse henceforth to purchase foreign and especially British goods or to condone their purchase by others. By an organised and relentless boycott of British goods, we propose to render the

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farther exploitation of the country impossible. We are dissatisfied also with the conditions under which education is imparted in this country, its calculated poverty and insufficiency, its antinational character, its subordination to the Government and the use made of that subordination for the discouragement of patriotism and the inculcation of loyalty. Accordingly we refuse to send our boys to Government schools or to schools aided and controlled by the Government; if this educational boycott is general and well-organized, the educational administration of the country will be rendered impossible and the control of its youthful minds pass out of the hands of the foreigner. We are dissatisfied with the administration of justice, the ruinous costliness of the civil side, the brutal rigour of its criminal penalties and procedure, its partiality, its frequent subordination to political objects. We refuse accordingly to have any resort to the alien courts of justice, and by an organised judicial boycott propose to make the bureaucratic administration of justice impossible while these conditions continue. Finally, we disapprove of the executive administration, its arbitrariness, its meddling and inquisitorial character, its thoroughness of repression, its misuse of the police for the repression instead of the protection of the people. We refuse, accordingly, to go to the executive for help or advice or protection or to tolerate any paternal interference in our public activities, and by an organized boycott of the executive propose to reduce executive control and interference to a mere skeleton of its former self. The bureaucracy depends for the success of its administration on the help of the few and the acquiescence of the many. If the few refused to help, if Indians no longer consented to teach in Government schools or work in Government offices, or serve the alien as police, the administration could not continue for a day. We will suppose the bureaucracy able to fill their places by Eurasians, aliens or traitors; even then the refusal of the many to acquiesce, by the simple process of no longer resorting to Government schools, courts of justice or magistrates' cutcherries, would put an end to administration.

Such is the nature of passive resistance as preached by the

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new school in India. It is at once clear that self-development and such a scheme of passive resistance are supplementary and necessary to each other. If we refuse to supply our needs from foreign sources we must obviously supply them ourselves; we cannot have the industrial boycott without Swadeshi and the expansion of indigenous industries. If we decline to enter the alien courts of justice, we must have arbitration courts of our own to settle our disputes and differences. If we do not send our boys to schools owned or controlled by the Government, we must have schools of our own in which they may receive a thorough and national education. If we do not go for protection to the executive, we must have a system of self-protection and mutual protection of our own. Just as Swadeshi is the natural accompaniment of an industrial boycott, so also arbitration stands in the same relation to a judicial boycott, national education to an educational boycott, a league of mutual defence to an executive boycott. From this close union of self-help with passive resistance it also follows that the new politics do not contemplate the organisation of passive resistance as a temporary measure for partial ends. It is not to be dropped as soon as the Government undertakes the protection of indigenous industries, reforms its system of education, improves its courts of justice and moderates its executive rigour and ubiquity, but only when the control of all these functions is vested in a free, constitutional and popular Government. We have learned by bitter experience that an alien and irresponsible bureaucracy cannot be relied upon to abstain from rescinding its reforms when convenient or to manage even a reformed administration in the interests of the people.

The possibilities of passive resistance are not exhausted by the refusal of assistance to the administration. In Europe its more usual weapon is the refusal to pay taxes. The strenuous political instinct of European races teaches them to aim a direct blow at the most vital part of the administration rather than to undermine it by slower and more gradual means. The payment of taxes is the most direct assistance given by the community to the administration and the most visible symbol of acquiescence and approval. To refuse payment is at once the most emphatic

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protest possible short of taking up arms and the sort of attack which the administration will feel immediately and keenly and must therefore parry at once either by conciliation or by methods of repression which will give greater vitality and intensity to the opposition. The refusal to pay taxes is a natural and logical result of the attitude of passive resistance. A boycott of Government schools, for example, may be successful and national schools substituted; but the administration continues to exact from the people a certain amount of revenue for the purposes of education, and is not likely to relinquish its claims; the people will therefore have doubly to tax themselves in order to maintain national education and also to maintain the Government system by which they no longer profit. Under such circumstances the refusal to pay for an education of which they entirely disapprove, comes as a natural consequence. This was the form of resistance offered by the Dissenters in England to the Education Act of the last Conservative Government. The refusal to pay rents was the backbone of the Irish Plan of Campaign. The refusal to pay taxes levied by an Imperial Government in which they had no voice or share, was the last form of resistance offered by the American colonists previous to taking up arms. Ultimately, in case of the persistent refusal of the administration to listen to reason, the refusal to pay taxes is the strongest and final form of passive resistance.

This stronger sort of passive resistance has not been included by the new party in its immediate programme, and for valid reasons. In the first place, all the precedents for this form of resistance were accompanied by certain conditions which do not as yet obtain in India. In the Irish instance, the refusal was not to pay Government taxes but to pay rents to a landlord class who represented an unjust and impoverishing land system maintained in force by a foreign power against the wishes of the people; but in India the foreign bureaucracy has usurped the functions of the landlord, except in Bengal where a refusal to pay rents would injure not a landlord-class supported by the alien but a section of our own countrymen who have been intolerably harassed, depressed and burdened by bureaucratic

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policy and bureaucratic exactions and fully sympathise, for the most part, with the national movement. In all other parts of India the refusal to pay rents would be a refusal to pay a Government tax. This, as we have said, is the strongest, the final form of passive resistance, and differs from the method of political boycott which involves no breach of legal obligation or direct defiance of administrative authority. No man can be legally punished for using none but Swadeshi articles or persuading others to follow his example or for sending his boys to a National in preference to a Government school, or for settling his differences with others out of court, or for defending his person and property or helping to defend the person and property of his neighbours against criminal attack. If the administration interferes with the people in the exercise of these legitimate rights, it invites and compels defiance of its authority and for what may follow the rulers and not the people are responsible. But the refusal to pay taxes is a breach of legal obligation and a direct defiance of administrative authority precisely of that kind which the administration can least afford to neglect and must either conciliate or crush. In a free country, the attempt at repression would probably go no farther than the forcible collection of the payments refused by legal distraint; but in a subject country the bureaucracy, feeling itself vitally threatened, would naturally supplement this legal process by determined prosecution and persecution of the advocates of the policy and its adherents, and, in all probability, by extreme military and police violence. The refusal to pay taxes would, therefore, inevitably bring about the last desperate struggle between the forces of national aspiration and alien repression. It would be in the nature of an ultimatum from the people to the Government.

The case of the English Dissenters, although it was a refusal to pay taxes, differed materially from ours. The object of their passive resistance was not to bring the Government to its knees, but to generate so strong a feeling in the country that the Conservative Government would be ignominiously brushed out of office at the next elections. They had the all-powerful weapon of the vote and could meet and overthrow

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injustice at the polling-station. In India we are very differently circumstanced. The resistance of the American colonists offers a nearer parallel. Like ourselves the Americans met oppression with the weapon of boycott. They were not wholly dependent on England and had their own legislatures in local affairs; so they had no occasion to extend the boycott to all departments of national life nor to attempt a general policy of national self-development. Their boycott was limited to British goods. They had however to go beyond the boycott and refuse to pay the taxes imposed on them against their will; but when they offered the ultimatum to the mother country they were prepared to follow it up, if necessary, and did finally follow it up by a declaration of independence, supported by armed revolt. Here again there is a material difference from Indian conditions. An ultimatum should never be presented unless one is prepared to follow it up to its last consequences. Moreover, in a vast country like India, any such general conflict with dominant authority as is involved in a no-taxes policy, needs for its success a close organization linking province to province and district to district and a powerful central authority representing the single will of the whole nation which could alone fight on equal terms the final struggle of defensive resistance with bureaucratic repression. Such an organization and authority has not yet been developed. The new politics, therefore, confines itself for the time to the policy of lawful abstention from any kind of co-operation with the Government,—the policy of boycott which is capable of gradual extension, leaving to the bureaucracy the onus of forcing on a more direct, sudden and dangerous struggle. Its principle at present is not "no representation, no taxation," but "no control, no assistance".

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The Doctrine of Passive Resistance - Its Obligations

In the early days of the new movement it was declared, in a very catching phrase, by a politician who has now turned his back on the doctrine which made him famous, that a subject nation has no politics. And it was commonly said that we as a subject nation should altogether ignore the Government and turn our attention to emancipation by self-help and self-development. This was the self-development principle carried to its extreme conclusions, and it is not surprising that phrases so trenchant and absolute should have given rise to some misunderstanding. It was even charged against us by Sir Pherozshah Mehta and other robust exponents of the opposition-cum-co-operation theory that we were advocating non-resistance and submission to political wrong and injustice! Much water has flowed under the bridges since then, and now we are being charged, in deputations to the Viceroy and elsewhere, with the opposite offence of inflaming and fomenting disturbance and rebellion. Yet our policy remains essentially the same,—not to ignore such a patent and very troublesome fact as the alien bureaucracy, for that was never our policy, but to have nothing to do with it, in the way either of assistance or acquiescence. Far from preaching non-resistance, it has now become abundantly clear that our determination not to submit to political wrong and injustice was far deeper and sterner than that of our critics. The method of opposition differed, of course. The Moderate method of resistance was verbal only—prayer, petition and protest; the method we proposed was practical,—boycott. But, as we have pointed out, our new method, though more concrete, was in itself quite as legal and peaceful as the old. It is no offence by law to abstain from Government schools or Government courts of justice or the help and protection of a fatherly executive or the use of British goods; nor is it illegal to persuade others to join in our abstention.

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At the same time this legality is neither in itself an essential condition of passive resistance generally, nor can we count upon its continuance as an actual condition of passive resistance as it is to be understood and practised in India. The passive resister in other countries has always been prepared to break an unjust and oppressive law whenever necessary and to take the legal consequences, as the non-Conformists in England did when they refused to pay the education rate or as Hampden did when he refused to pay ship-money. Even under present conditions in India there is at least one direction in which, it appears, many of us are already breaking what Anglo-Indian courts have determined to be the law. The law relating to sedition and the law relating to the offence of causing racial enmity are so admirably vague in their terms that there is nothing which can escape from their capacious embrace. It appears from the Punjabee case that it is a crime under bureaucratic rule to say that Europeans hold Indian life cheaply, although this is a fact which case after case has proved and although British justice has confirmed this cheap valuation of our lives by the leniency of its sentences on European murderers; nay, it is a crime to impute such failings to British justice or to say even that departmental enquiries into "accidents" of this kind cannot be trusted, although this is a conviction in which, as everyone is aware, the whole country is practically unanimous as the result of repeated experiences. All this is not crime indeed when we do it in order to draw the attention of the bureaucracy in the vain hope of getting the grievance redressed. But if our motive is to draw the attention of the people and enlighten them on the actual or inevitable results of irresponsible rule by aliens and the dominance of a single community, we are criminals, we are guilty of breaking the law of the alien. Yet to break the law in this respect is the duty of every self-respecting publicist who is of our way of thinking. It is our duty to drive home to the public mind the congenital and incurable evils of the present system of government so that they may insist on its being swept away in order to make room for a more healthy and natural state of things. It is our duty also to press upon the people the hopelessness of appealing to the

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bureaucracy to reform itself and the uselessness of any partial measures. No publicist of the new school holding such views ought to mar his reputation for candour and honesty by the pretence of drawing the attention of Government with a view to redress the grievance. If the alien laws have declared it illegal for him to do his duty unless he lowers himself by covering it with a futile and obvious lie, he must still do his duty, however illegal, in the strength of his manhood; and if the bureaucracy decide to send him to prison for the breach of law, to prison he must willingly and, if he is worth his salt, rejoicingly go. The new spirit will not suffer any individual aspiring to speak or act on behalf of the people to palter with the obligation of high truthfulness and unflinching courage without which no one has a claim to lead or instruct his fellow-countrymen.

If this penalty of sedition is at present the chief danger which the adherent or exponent of passive resistance runs under the law, yet there is no surety that it will continue to be unaccompanied by similar or more serious perils. The making of the laws is at present in the hands of our political adversaries and there is nothing to prevent them from using this power in any way they like, however iniquitous or tyrannical,—nothing except their fear of public reprobation outside and national resistance within India. At present they hope by the seductive allurements of Morleyism to smother the infant strength of the national spirit in its cradle; but as that hope is dissipated and the doctrine of passive resistance takes more and more concrete and organized form, the temptation to use the enormously powerful weapon which the unhampered facility of legislation puts in their hands, will become irresistible. The passive resister must therefore take up his creed with the certainty of having to suffer for it. If, for instance, the bureaucracy should make abstention from Government schools or teaching without Government licence a penal offence, he must continue to abstain or teach and take the legal consequences. Or if they forbid the action of arbitration courts other than those sanctioned by Government, he must yet continue to act on such courts or have recourse to them without considering the peril to which he exposes himself. And

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so throughout the whole range of action covered by the new politics. A law imposed by a people on itself has a binding force which cannot be ignored except under extreme necessity: a law imposed from outside has no such moral sanction; its claim to obedience must rest on coercive force or on its own equitable and beneficial character and not on the source from which it proceeds. If it is unjust and oppressive, it may become a duty to disobey it and quietly endure the punishment which the law has provided for its violation. For passive resistance aims at making a law unworkable by general and organized disobedience and so procuring its recall; it does not try, like aggressive resistance, to destroy the law by destroying the power which made and supports the law. It is therefore the first canon of passive resistance that to break an unjust coercive law is not only justifiable but, under given circumstances, a duty.

Legislation, however, is not the only weapon in the hands of the bureaucracy. They may try, without legislation, by executive action, to bring opposition under the terms of the law and the lash of its penalties. This may be done either by twisting a perfectly legal act into a criminal offence or misdemeanour with the aid of the ready perjuries of the police or by executive order or ukase making illegal an action which had previously been allowed. We have had plenty of experience of both these contrivances during the course of the Swadeshi movement. To persuade an intending purchaser not to buy British cloth is no offence; but if, between a police employed to put down Swadeshi and a shopkeeper injured by it, enough evidence can be concocted to twist persuasion into compulsion, the boycotter can easily be punished without having committed any offence. Executive orders are an even more easily-handled weapon. The issuing of an ukase asks for no more trouble than the penning of a few lines by a clerk and the more or less legible signature of a District Magistrate; and hey presto! that brief magical abracadabra of despotism has turned an action which five minutes ago was legitimate and inoffensive into a crime or misdemeanour punishable in property or person. Whether it is the simple utterance of "Bande Mataram" in the streets or an august assemblage

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of all that is most distinguished, able and respected in the country, one stroke of a mere District Magistrate's omnipotent pen is enough to make them illegalities and turn the elect of the nation into disorderly and riotous budmashes to be dispersed by police cudgels. To hope for any legal redress is futile; for the power of the executive to issue ukases is perfectly vague and therefore practically illimitable, and wherever there is a doubt, it can be brought within the one all-sufficient formula,—"It was done by the Magistrate in exercise of the discretion given him for preserving the peace." The formula can cover any ukase or any action, however arbitrary; and what British Judge can refuse his support to a British Magistrate in that preservation of peace which is as necessary to the authority and safety of the Judge as to that of the Magistrate? But equally is it impossible for the representatives of popular aspirations to submit to such paralysing exercise of an irresponsible and unlimited authority. This has been universally recognized in Bengal. Executive authority was defied by all Bengal when its representatives, with Babu Surendranath Banerji at their head, escorted their President through the streets of Barisal with the forbidden cry of "Bande Mataram." If the dispersal of the Conference was not resisted, it was not from respect for executive authority but purely for reasons of political strategy. Immediately afterwards the right of public meeting was asserted in defiance of executive ukase by the Moderate leaders near Barisal itself and by prominent politicians of the new school in East Bengal. The second canon of the doctrine of passive resistance has therefore been accepted by politicians of both schools—that to resist an unjust coercive order or interference is not only justifiable but, under given circumstances, a duty.

Finally, we must be prepared for opposition not only from our natural but from unnatural adversaries,—not only from bureaucrat and Anglo-Indian, but from the more self-seeking and treacherous of our own countrymen. In a rebellion such treachery is of small importance, since in the end it is the superior fate or the superior force which triumphs; but in a campaign of passive resistance the evil example, if unpunished, may be disastrous

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and eat fatally into the enthusiastic passion and serried unity indispensable to such a movement. It is therefore necessary to mete out the heaviest penalty open to us in such cases—the penalty of social excommunication. We are not in favour of this weapon being lightly used; but its employment, where the national will in a vital matter is deliberately disregarded, becomes essential. Such disregard amounts to siding in matters of life and death against your own country and people and helping in their destruction or enslavement,—a crime which in Free States is punished with the extreme penalty due to treason. When, for instance, all Bengal staked its future upon the boycott and specified three foreign articles,—salt, sugar and cloth,—as to be religiously avoided, anyone purchasing foreign salt or foreign sugar or foreign cloth became guilty of treason to the nation and laid himself open to the penalty of social boycott. Wherever passive resistance has been accepted, the necessity of the social boycott has been recognized as its natural concomitant. "Boycott foreign goods and boycott those who use foreign goods,"—the advice of Mr. Subramaniya Aiyar to his countrymen in Madras,—must be accepted by all who are in earnest. For without this boycott of persons the boycott of things cannot be effective; without the social boycott no national authority depending purely on moral pressure can get its decrees effectively executed; and without effective boycott enforced by a strong national authority the new policy cannot succeed. But the only possible alternatives to the new policy are either despotism tempered by petitions or aggressive resistance. We must therefore admit a third canon of the doctrine of passive resistance, that social boycott is legitimate and indispensable as against persons guilty of treason to the nation.

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The Doctrine of Passive Resistance - Its Limits

20-April-1907

The three canons of the doctrine of passive resistance are in reality three necessities which must, whether we like it or not, be accepted in theory and executed in practice, if passive resistance is to have any chance of success. Passive resisters, both as individuals and in the mass, must always be prepared to break an unjust coercive law and take the legal consequence; for if they shrink from this obligation, the bureaucracy can at once make passive resistance impossible simply by adding a few more enactments to their book of statutes. A resistance which can so easily be snuffed out of being is not worth making. For the same reason they must be prepared to disobey an unjust and coercive executive order, whether general or particular; for nothing would be simpler than to put down by a few months' coercion a resistance too weak to face the consequences of refusing submission to Government by ukase. They must be prepared to boycott persons guilty of deliberate disobedience to the national will in vital matters because, if they do not, the example of unpunished treason will tend to be repeated and destroy by a kind of dry rot the enthusiastic unity and universality which we have seen to be necessary to the success of passive resistance of the kind we have inaugurated in India. Men in the mass are strong and capable of wonder-working enthusiasms and irresistible movements; but the individual average man is apt to be weak or selfish and, unless he sees that the mass are in deadly earnest and will not tolerate individual treachery, he will usually after the first enthusiasm indulge his weakness or selfishness to the detriment of the community. We have seen this happening almost everywhere where the boycott of foreign goods was not enforced by the boycott of persons buying foreign goods. This is one important reason why the boycott which has maintained itself in East Bengal, is in the West becoming more and more of a failure.

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The moment these three unavoidable obligations are put into force, the passive resistance movement will lose its character of inoffensive legality and we shall be in the thick of a struggle which may lead us anywhere. Passive resistance, when it is confined, as at present, to lawful abstention from actions which it lies within our choice as subjects to do or not to do, is of the nature of the strategical movements and large manoeuvrings previous to the meeting of armies in the field; but the enforcement of our three canons brings us to the actual shock of battle. Nevertheless our resistance still retains an essential character of passivity. If the right of public meeting is suspended by Magisterial ukase, we confine ourselves to the practical assertion of the right in defiance of the ukase and, so long as the executive also confines itself to the dispersal of the meeting by the arrest of its conveners and other peaceful and legal measures, we offer no active resistance. We submit to the arrest, though not necessarily to the dispersal, and quietly take the legal consequences. Similarly, if the law forbids us to speak or write the truth as we conceive it our duty to speak it, we persist in doing our duty and submit quietly to whatever punishment the law of sedition or any other law coercive ingenuity may devise, can find to inflict on us. In a peaceful way we act against the law or the executive, but we passively accept the legal consequences.

There is a limit however to passive resistance. So long as the action of the executive is peaceful and within the rules of the fight, the passive resister scrupulously maintains his attitude of passivity, but he is not bound to do so a moment beyond. To submit to illegal or violent methods of coercion, to accept outrage and hooliganism as part of the legal procedure of the country is to be guilty of cowardice, and, by dwarfing national manhood, to sin against the divinity within ourselves and the divinity in our motherland. The moment coercion of this kind is attempted, passive resistance ceases and active resistance becomes a duty. If the instruments of the executive choose to disperse our meeting by breaking the heads of those present, the right of self-defence entitles us not merely to defend our heads but to retaliate on those of the head-breakers. For the myrmidons of the law have

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ceased then to be guardians of the peace and become breakers of the peace, rioters and not instruments of authority, and their uniform is no longer a bar to the right of self-defence. Nor does it make any difference if the instruments of coercion happen to be the recognized and usual instruments or are unofficial hooligans in alliance or sympathy with the forces of coercion. In both cases active resistance becomes a duty and passive resistance is, for that occasion, suspended. But though no longer passive, it is still a defensive resistance. Nor does resistance pass into the aggressive stage so long as it resists coercive violence in its own kind and confines itself to repelling attack. Even if it takes the offensive it does not by that mere fact become aggressive resistance, unless the amount of aggression exceeds what is necessary to make defence effective. The students of Mymensingh, charged by the police while picketing, kept well within the right of self-defence when they drove the rioters off the field of operations; the gentlemen of Comilla kept well within the rights of self-defence if they attacked either rioters or inciters of riot who either offered, or threatened, or tried to provoke assault. Even the famous shot which woke the authorities from their waking dreams, need not have been an act of aggression if it was fired to save life or a woman's honour or under circumstances of desperation when no other means of defence would have been effective. With the doubtful exception of this shot, supposing it to have been fired unnecessarily, and that other revolver shot which killed Mr. Rand, there has been no instance of aggressive resistance in modern Indian politics.

The new politics, therefore, while it favours passive resistance, does not include meek submission to illegal outrage under that term; it has no intention of overstressing the passivity at the expense of the resistance. Nor is it inclined to be hysterical over a few dozen of broken heads or exalt so simple a matter as a bloody coxcomb into the crown of martyrdom. This sort of hysterical exaggeration was too common in the early days of the movement when everyone who got his crown cracked in a street affray with the police was encouraged to lift up his broken head before the world and cry out, "This is the head of a martyr." The

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new politics is a serious doctrine and not, like the old, a thing of shows and political theatricals: it demands real sufferings from its adherents,—imprisonment, worldly ruin, death itself,—before it can allow him to assume the rank of a martyr for his country. Passive resistance cannot build up a strong and great nation unless it is masculine, bold and ardent in its spirit and ready at any moment and at the slightest notice to supplement itself with active resistance. We do not want to develop a nation of women who know only how to suffer and not how to strike.

Moreover the new politics must recognise the fact that beyond a certain point passive resistance puts a strain on human endurance which our natures cannot endure. This may come in particular instances where an outrage is too great or the stress of tyranny too unendurable for anyone to stand purely on the defensive; to hit back, to assail and crush the assailant, to vindicate one's manhood becomes an imperious necessity to outraged humanity. Or it may come in the mass when the strain of oppression a whole nation has to meet in its unarmed struggle for liberty, overpasses its powers of endurance. It then becomes the sole choice either to break under the strain and go under or to throw it off with violence. The Spartan soldiers at Plataea endured for some time the missiles of the enemy and saw their comrades falling at their side without any reply because their general had not yet declared it to be the auspicious time for attack; but if the demand on their passive endurance had been too long continued, they must either have broken in disastrous defeat or flung themselves on the enemy in disregard of their leaders' orders. The school of politics which we advocate is not based upon abstractions, formulas and dogmas, but on practical necessities and the teaching of political experience, common sense and the world's history. We have not the slightest wish to put forward passive resistance as an inelastic dogma. We preach defensive resistance mainly passive in its methods at present, but active whenever active resistance is needed; but defensive resistance within the limits imposed by human nature and by the demands of self-respect and the militant spirit of true manhood. If at any time the laws obtaining in India or the executive action

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of the bureaucracy were to become so oppressive as to render a struggle for liberty on the lines we have indicated, impossible; if after a fair trial given to this method, the object with which we undertook it, proved to be as far off as ever; or if passive resistance should turn out either not feasible or necessarily ineffectual under the conditions of this country, we should be the first to recognize that everything must be reconsidered and that the time for new men and new methods had arrived. We recognize no political object of worship except the divinity in our motherland, no present object of political endeavour except liberty and no method or action as politically good or evil except as it truly helps or hinders our progress towards national emancipation.

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The Doctrine of Passive Resistance - Conclusions

23-April-1907

To sum up the conclusions at which we have arrived. The object of all our political movements and therefore the sole object with which we advocate passive resistance is Swaraj or national freedom. The latest and most venerable of the older politicians who have sat in the Presidential chair of the Congress, pronounced from that seat of authority Swaraj as the one object of our political endeavour, Swaraj as the only remedy for all our ills, Swaraj as the one demand nothing short of which will satisfy the people of India. Complete self-government as it exists in the United Kingdom or the Colonies,—such was his definition of Swaraj. The Congress has contented itself with demanding self-government as it exists in the Colonies. We of the new school would not pitch our ideal one inch lower than absolute Swaraj,—self-government as it exists in the United Kingdom. We believe that no smaller ideal can inspire national revival or nerve the people of India for the fierce, stubborn and formidable struggle by which alone they can again become a nation. We believe that this newly awakened people, when it has gathered its strength together, neither can nor ought to consent to any relations with England less than that of equals in a confederacy. To be content with the relations of master and dependent or superior and subordinate, would be a mean and pitiful aspiration unworthy of manhood; to strive for anything less than a strong and glorious freedom would be to insult the greatness of our past and the magnificent possibilities of our future.

To the ideal we have at heart there are three paths, possible or impossible. Petitioning, which we have so long followed, we reject as impossible,—the dream of a timid inexperience, the teaching of false friends who hope to keep us in perpetual subjection, foolish to reason, false to experience. Self-development by self-help which we now purpose to follow, is a possible though

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uncertain path, never yet attempted under such difficulties, but one which must be attempted, if for nothing else yet to get free of the habit of dependence and helplessness, and reawaken and exercise our half-atrophied powers of self-government. Parallel to this attempt and to be practised simultaneously, the policy of organized resistance to the present system of government forms the old traditional way of nations which we also must tread. It is a vain dream to suppose that what other nations have won by struggle and battle, by suffering and tears of blood, we shall be allowed to accomplish easily, without terrible sacrifices, merely by spending the ink of the journalist and petition-framer and the breath of the orator. Petitioning will not bring us one yard nearer to freedom; self-development will not easily be suffered to advance to its goal. For self-development spells the doom of the ruling bureaucratic despotism, which must therefore oppose our progress with all the art and force of which it is the master: without organized resistance we could not take more than a few faltering steps towards self-emancipation. But resistance may be of many kinds,—armed revolt, or aggressive resistance short of armed revolt, or defensive resistance whether passive or active: the circumstances of the country and the nature of the despotism from which it seeks to escape must determine what form of resistance is best justified and most likely to be effective at the time or finally successful.

The Congress has not formally abandoned the petitioning policy; but it is beginning to fall into discredit and gradual disuse, and time will accelerate its inevitable death by atrophy; for it can no longer even carry the little weight it had, since it has no longer the support of an undivided public opinion at its back. The alternative policy of self-development has received a partial recognition; it has been made an integral part of our political activities, but not in its entirety and purity. Self-help has been accepted as supplementary to the help of the very bureaucracy which it is our declared object to undermine and supplant,—self-development as supplementary to development of the nation by its foreign rulers. Passive resistance has not been accepted as a national policy, but in the form of boycott it has

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been declared legitimate under circumstances which apply to all India.

This is a compromise good enough for the moment, but in which the new school does not mean to allow the country to rest permanently. We desire to put an end to petitioning until such a strength is created in the country that a petition will only be a courteous form of demand. We wish to kill utterly the pernicious delusion that a foreign and adverse interest can be trusted to develop us to its own detriment, and entirely to do away with the foolish and ignoble hankering after help from our natural adversaries. Our attitude to bureaucratic concessions is that of Laocoon: "We fear the Greeks even when they bring us gifts." Our policy is self-development and defensive resistance. But we would extend the policy of self-development to every department of national life; not only Swadeshi and National Education, but national defence, national Arbitration Courts, sanitation, insurance against famine or relief of famine,—whatever our hands find to do or urgently needs doing, we must attempt ourselves and no longer look to the alien to do it for us. And we would universalize and extend the policy of defensive resistance until it ran parallel on every line with our self-development. We would not only buy our own goods, but boycott British goods; not only have our own schools, but boycott Government institutions; not only erect our own Arbitration Courts, but boycott bureaucratic justice; not only organize our own league of defence but have nothing to do with the bureaucratic Executive except when we cannot avoid it. At present even in Bengal where Boycott is universally accepted, it is confined to the boycott of British goods and is aimed at the British merchant and only indirectly at the British bureaucrat. We would aim it directly both at the British merchant and at the British bureaucrat who stands behind and makes possible exploitation by the merchant.

The double policy we propose has three objects before it;—to develop ourselves into a self-governing nation; to protect ourselves against and repel attack and opposition during the work of development; and to press in upon and extrude the foreign agency in each field of activity and so ultimately supplant it.

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Our defensive resistance must therefore be mainly passive in the beginning, although with a perpetual readiness to supplement it with active resistance whenever compelled. It must be confined for the present to boycott, and we must avoid giving battle on the crucial question of taxation for the sole reason that a No-Taxes campaign demands a perfect organization and an ultimate preparedness from which we are yet far off. We will attack the resources of the bureaucracy whenever we can do so by simple abstention, as in the case of its immoral abkari revenue; but we do not propose at present to follow European precedents and refuse the payment of taxes legally demanded from us. We desire to keep our resistance within the bounds of law, so long as law does not seek directly to interfere with us and render impossible our progress and the conscientious discharge of our duty to our fellow-countrymen. But if, at any time, laws should be passed with the object of summarily checking our self-development or unduly limiting our rights as men, we must be prepared to break the law and endure the penalty imposed for the breach with the object of making it unworkable as has been done in other countries. We must equally be ready to challenge by our action arbitrary executive coercion, if we do not wish to see our resistance snuffed out by very cheap official extinguishers. Nor must we shrink from boycotting persons as well as things; we must make full though discriminating use of the social boycott against those of our countrymen who seek to baffle the will of the nation in a matter vital to its emancipation, for this is a crime of lèse-nation which is far more heinous than the legal offence of lèse-majesté and deserves the severest penalty with which the nation can visit traitors.

We advocate, finally, the creation of a strong central authority to carry out the will of the nation, supported by a close and active organization of village, town, district and province. We desire to build up this organisation from the constitution the necessity of which the Congress has recognized and for which it has provided a meagre and imperfect beginning; but if owing to Moderate obstruction this constitution cannot develop or is not allowed to perform its true functions, the organization and the

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authority must be built up otherwise by the people itself and, if necessary, outside the Congress.

The double policy of self-development and defensive resistance is the common standing-ground of the new spirit all over India. Some may not wish to go beyond its limits, others may look outside it; but so far all are agreed. For ourselves we avow that we advocate passive resistance without wishing to make a dogma of it. In a subject nationality, to win liberty for one's country is the first duty of all, by whatever means, at whatever sacrifice; and this duty must override all other considerations. The work of national emancipation is a great and holy yajna of which boycott, Swadeshi, national education and every other activity, great and small, are only major or minor parts. Liberty is the fruit we seek from the sacrifice and the Motherland the goddess to whom we offer it; into the seven leaping tongues of the fire of the yajna we must offer all that we are and all that we have, feeding the fire even with our blood and the lives and happiness of our nearest and dearest; for the Motherland is a goddess who loves not a maimed and imperfect sacrifice, and freedom was never won from the gods by a grudging giver. But every great yajna has its Rakshasas who strive to baffle the sacrifice, to bespatter it with their own dirt or by guile or violence put out the flame. Passive resistance is an attempt to meet such disturbers by peaceful and self-contained brahmatej; but even the greatest Rishis of old could not, when the Rakshasas were fierce and determined, keep up the sacrifice without calling in the bow of the Kshatriya. We should have the bow of the Kshatriya ready for use, though in the background. Politics is especially the business of the Kshatriya, and without Kshatriya strength at its back all political struggle is unavailing.

Vedantism accepts no distinction of true or false religions, but considers only what will lead more or less surely, more or less quickly to moksha, spiritual emancipation and the realization of the Divinity within. Our attitude is a political Vedantism. India, free, one and indivisible, is the divine realization to which we move,—emancipation our aim; to that end each nation must practise the political creed which is the most suited to

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its temperament and circumstances; for that is the best for it which leads most surely and completely to national liberty and national self-realization. But whatever leads only to continued subjection must be spewed out as mere vileness and impurity. Passive resistance may be the final method of salvation in our case or it may be only the preparation for the final sadhan. In either case, the sooner we put it into full and perfect practice, the nearer we shall be to national liberty.

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The Proverbial Offspring

12-April-1907

The great Mr. Morley has received the Viceroy's dispatch on the question of widening the powers of the Legislative Councils. It is long and important and requires his mature consideration, and he cannot therefore have it discussed in the Parliament. It has been prepared in secret, will be matured in secret, and then the official Minerva will see the light of the day in panoply. It will be born a settled fact. Rejoice, ye Moderates! The millennium is drawing nigh. The heart of Mr. Gokhale must be beating a little faster in anxious expectation. The tiresome voyages across the seas, his fervent appeals to the British public by day and his luminous conversations with Mr. Morley by night, are about to bear fruit. The mountain is in labour and will in due course produce the proverbial offspring.

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By the Way

30-August-1906

Diogenes in the Statesman indulges himself in a paragraph of grave advice to the "self-constituted" leaders of the Indian labour movement. For a philosopher, our friend takes singularly little trouble to understand the opponents' case. Neither Mr. A. K. Ghose nor Mr. Aswini Banerji nor any of their assistants

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proposes, so far as we know, to benefit labour by getting rid of English capital. What they do propose, is to get rid of the exceedingly unjust conditions under which Indian labour has to sweat in order to enrich alien capitalists. And by the way, as it were, they also propose to get rid of the habit of coarse insult and brutal speech which Englishmen have accustomed themselves to indulge in when dealing with "low-class" Indians.

Are the leaders of Indian labour self-constituted? One would imagine that men whom Indian workers naturally turn to in difficulty and who can organise in a few weeks so large an affair as the Railway Union, have vindicated their claim to be the national leaders of Labour. At any rate their constituents have very enthusiastically ratified their "self-constituted" authority. But perhaps Diogenes has been converted from cynicism to Vedanta, and sees no difference between the self of the railway employees and the self of Mr. A. K. Ghose. Still, the tub from which he holds forth is a small one, and he should not cumber one-sixth of his space with such cumber.

The rift between the Labourites and the Liberals grows daily wider. The alliance was never natural and cannot in its nature be permanent. But official Liberaldom will be foolish indeed if it declares war on Labour at the present juncture. The Socialistic element in England is quite strong enough to turn the Liberal triumph of 1905 into a serious disaster at the next elections. Nor are the Labourites likely to be frightened by Ministerial menaces. Mr. Winston Churchill and the Master of Elibank may thunder from their high official Olympus, but Mr. Keir Hardie will go on his way unscathed and unmoved. He knows that the future is with Socialism and he can afford to despise the temporary and imperfect fruits which a Liberal alliance promises.

For us English politics have small personal interest. From the Conservatives we can expect nothing but open oppression, from the Liberals, nothing but insincere professions and fraudulent concessions,—shadows calling themselves substance. Can we hope better things from Labour? Many whose judgment we respect, think that there is a real ally—that the friendship of Labour for India is sincere and disinterested. For the present, yes.

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But when Labour becomes a power and sits on front benches we fear that it will be as intolerant and oppressive as Conservatism itself. Australia is a Labour Commonwealth, and we know the attitude of the Australian working-man to Indians and Asiatics generally. India's hope lies not in English Liberalism or Labour, but in her own strong heart and giant limbs. Titaness, who by thy mere attempt to rise can burst these Lilliputian bonds, why shouldst thou clamour feebly for help to these pigmies over the sea?

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By the Way

13-April-1907

An old and venerable friend of our old and venerable friend the Indian Mirror weeps bitter tears over Raja Subodh Mallik. Subodh Mallik is a large-hearted and generous man, laments our friend's friend; but he is doing immense harm to himself and his country. Is he not partly responsible for the publication of that pernicious sheet, Bande Mataram, which attacks old and venerable gentlemen and old and venerable journals, and refuses to regard politics as a school for society manners? Has he not given a lakh of rupees to the National Council,—an institution for which the Indian Mirror cherishes a lively want of sympathy? We call on the young gentleman to repent of his sins, fall weeping on the capacious bosom of the Indian Mirror and devote the rest of his possessions to founding a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to obsolete papers and out-of-date politicians.

We will admit that much that was said and done at Berhampur on both sides was petulant and wanting in dignity. But was it worse than what happens in European Parliaments and political meetings when men are heated by conflict and passions run high? We trow not. Let us try to be perfectly courteous and superior to other nations by all means; but if we cannot, there is no reason for disingenuous concealment and a mere Pharisaic pretence of superiority. The Japanese have an excellent habit of keeping anger out of their speech and reserving all their strength for acts; they will express their disapproval of you with great plainness, indeed, but also with wonderful calmness and politeness. The

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Samurai used to rip up his enemy very mercilessly but also very politely; he did it as a duty, not out of passion. But of our emotional, sentimental race, so long accustomed to find its outlet in speech, nothing so heroic can be expected.

Still, we think the young men of the New party would do well to follow the example of the Japanese as far as possible. We should be absolutely unsparing in our attack on whatever obstructs the growth of the nation, and never be afraid to call a spade a spade. Excessive good nature, chakshu lajja (the desire to be always pleasant and polite), will never do in serious politics. Respect of persons must always give place to truth and conscience; and the demand that we should be silent because of the age or past services of our opponents, is politically immoral and unsound. Open attack, unsparing criticism, the severest satire, the most wounding irony, are all methods perfectly justifiable and indispensable in politics. We have strong things to say; let us say them strongly; we have stern things to do; let us do them sternly. But there is always a danger of strength degenerating into violence and sternness into ferocity, and that should be avoided so far as it is humanly possible.

Babu Bhupendranath Bose got little by his attempt to frown down the Government of Bengal in their own den over the bureaucratic temper of their replies to his interpolations. It is to be feared that the Government have little appreciation for the opposition-cum-co-operation gospel which their loyal subject not only preaches but practises with such fidelity and vigour. They like their water without salutary bitters. Babu Bhupendranath, however, insists on dealing with Sir Andrew Fraser like a father, and when he makes wry faces at the medicine, treats him to a painful and public spanking—whereupon Sir Andrew responds with a backhander in Bhupen Babu's fatherly face. The whole affair was most exquisitely ludicrous and futile. But Sir Andrew's was a nasty and stinging backhander!

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"The Hon'ble member himself has not infrequently, either on my invitation or of his own motion, discussed with me privately the propriety or wisdom of certain courses of action which he has followed. I have frankly given him my advice. He has sometimes taken it and he has sometimes rejected it. I should have considered it a grave breach of confidence, if, in either case, he had published it and had attributed his line of action to me."

So it appears that often when we have been hanging on the wise words of the popular and democratic leader, the influential adviser of Surendranath, the secret dictator of the Moderate caucus, it was really the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal to whom we listened and by whose counsel we were guided. The voice was the voice of Bhupen, but the thought was the thought of Andrew. These be thy gods, O Israel!

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The Old Year

16-April-1907

There are periods in the history of the world when the unseen Power that guides its destinies seems to be filled with a consuming passion for change and a strong impatience of the old. The Great Mother, the Adya Shakti, has resolved to take the nations into Her hand and shape them anew. These are periods of rapid destruction and energetic creation, filled with the sound of cannon and the trampling of armies, the crash of great downfalls and the turmoil of swift and violent revolutions; the world is thrown into the smelting pot and comes out in a new shape and with new features. They are periods when the wisdom of the wise is confounded and the prudence of the prudent turned into a laughing-stock; for it is the day of the prophet, the dreamer, the fanatic and the crusader,—the time of divine revelation when Avatars are born and miracles happen. Such a period was the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth; in such a period we find ourselves at the dawn of this twentieth century, the years of whose infancy have witnessed such wonderful happenings. The result of the earlier disturbance was the birth of a new Europe and the modernisation of the Western world; we are assisting now at the birth of a new Asia and the modernisation of the East. The current started then from distant America but the centre of disturbance was Western and Central Europe. This time there have been three currents,—insurgent nationalism starting from South Africa, Asiatic revival starting from Japan, Eastern democracy starting from Russia; and the centre of disturbance covers a huge zone, all Eastern, Southern and Western Asia, Northern or Asiaticised Africa and Russia which form the semi-Asiatic element in Europe. As the pace

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of the revolution grows swifter, each new year becomes more eventful than the last and marks a large advance to the final consummation. No year of the new century has been more full of events than 1906-07, our year 1313.

If we look abroad we find the whole affected zone in agitation and new births everywhere. In the Far East the year has not been marked by astonishing events, but the total results have been immense. Within these twelve months China has been educating, training and arming herself with a speed of which the outside world has a very meagre conception. She has sent out a Commission of Observation to the West and decided to develop constitutional Government within the next ten years. She has pushed forward the work of revolutionising her system of education and bringing it into line with modern requirements. She has taken resolutely in hand the task of liberating herself from the curse of opium which has benumbed the energies of her people. She has sent her young men outside in thousands, chiefly to Japan, to be trained for the great work of development. With the help of Japanese instructors she is training herself quietly in war, and science has made an immense advance in the organisation of a disciplined army, and is now busy laying the foundations of an effective navy. In spite of the arrogant protests of British merchants, she has taken her enormous customs revenue into her own hands for national purposes. By her successful diplomacy she has deprived England of the fruits of the unscrupulous, piratical attack upon Tibet and is maintaining her hold on that outpost of the Mongolian world.

Japan during this year has been vigorously pushing on her industrial expansion at home and abroad; she has practically effected the commercial conquest of Manchuria and begun in good earnest the struggle with European trade and her manufactures are invading Europe and America. Her army reorganisation has been so large and thorough as to make the island Empire invincible in her own sphere of activity. A little cloud has sprung up between herself and America, but she has conducted herself with her usual sang froid, moderation and calm firmness; and, however far the difficulty may go, we may be sure that she will

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not come out of it either morally or materially a loser.

In other parts of the Far East there have only been slight indications of coming movements. The troubles in the Philippines are over and America has restored to the inhabitants a certain measure of self-government, which, if used by the Filipinos with energy and discretion, may be turned into an instrument for the recovery of complete independence. Siam has purchased release from humiliating restrictions on her internal sovereignty at the heavy price of a large cession of territory to intruding France; but she is beginning to pay more attention to her naval and military development and it will be well if this means that she has realised the only way to preserve her independence. At present Siam is the one weak point in Mongolian Asia. Otherwise the events of this year show that by the terrible blow she struck at Russia, Japan has arrested the process of European absorption in the Far East.

But the most remarkable feature of the past year is the awakening of the Mahomedan world. In Afghanistan it has seen the inception of a great scheme of National Education which may lay the basis of a State, strong in itself, organised on modern lines and equipped with scientific knowledge and training. Amir Abdur Rahman consolidated Afghanistan; it is evidently the mission of Habibullah, who seems not inferior in statesmanship to his great father, to modernise it. In Persia the year has brought about a peaceful revolution,—the granting of Parliamentary Government by an Asiatic king to his subjects under the mildest passive pressure and the return of national life to Iran. In Egypt it has confronted the usurping rule of England with a nationalist movement, not only stronger and more instructed than that of Arabi Pasha but led by the rightful sovereign of the country. The exhibition of cold-blooded British ferocity at Denshawi has defeated its object, and, instead of appalling the Egyptians into submission, made them more determined and united. It is now only a question of time for this awakening to affect the rest of Islam and check the European as effectually in Western Asia as he has been checked in the East.

In this universal Asiatic movement what part has India to play? What has she done during the year 1313? In India too

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there has been an immense advance,—an advance so great that we shall not be able to appreciate it properly until its results have worked themselves out. The year began with Barisal; it closes with Comilla. The growing intensity of the struggle in Eastern Bengal can be measured by this single transition, and its meaning is far deeper than appears on the surface. It means that the two forces which must contend for the possession of India's future,—the British bureaucracy and the Indian people,—have at last clashed in actual conflict. Barisal meant passive, martyr-like endurance; Comilla means active, courageous resistance. The fighting is at present only on the far eastern fringe of this great country; but it must, as it grows in intensity, spread westwards. Sparks of the growing conflagration will set fire to Western Bengal, and India is now far too united for the bureaucracy to succeed long in isolating the struggle.

The second feature of the year has been the rapid growth of the Nationalist party. It has in a few months absorbed Eastern Bengal, set Allahabad and the North on fire and is stirring Madras to its depths. In Bengal it has become a distinct and recognised force so powerful in its moral influence that petitioning is practically dead and the whole nation stands committed to a policy of self-development and passive resistance. The Press a few months ago was, with the exception of a few Mahratti weeklies, one journal in the Punjab and the Sandhya and New India in Calcutta, almost entirely Moderate. The increase of Nationalist journals such as the Balbharat and Andhra Keshari in Madras, the Aftab in the North and ourselves in Calcutta, the appearance of local papers filled with the new spirit, the sudden popularity of a paper like the Yugantar and the extent to which the new ideas are infecting journals not avowedly of the new school, are indices of the rapidity with which Nationalism is formulating itself and taking possession of the country.

A third feature of the year has been the growth of National Education. The Bengal National College has not only become an established fact but is rapidly increasing in numbers and has begun to build the foundations of a better system of education. The schools at Rungpur and Dacca already existed at the

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commencement of the year; but immediately after the Barisal outrage fresh schools at Mymensingh, Kishoregunj, Comilla, Chandpur and Dinajpur were established. Since then there have been further additions,—the Magura School, another in the Jessore District, another at Jalpaiguri as well as a free primary school at Bogra. We understand that there is also a probability of a National School at Chittagong and Noakhali. No mean record for a single year. As was to be expected, most of these schools have grown up in the great centre of Nationalism, East Bengal.

Such is the record of Nationalist advance in India in 1313. It is a record of steady and rapid growth; and the year closes with the starting of a tremendous issue which may carry us far beyond the stage of mere beginnings and preparations. Long ago we heard it prophesied that the year 1907 would see the beginning of the actual struggle for national liberty in India. It would almost seem as if in the turmoil in Tipperah the first blow had been struck.

Rishi Bankim Chandra

16-April-1907

There are many who, lamenting the by-gone glories of this great and ancient nation, speak as if the Rishis of old, the inspired creators of thought and civilisation, were a miracle of our heroic age, not to be repeated among degenerate men and in our distressful present. This is an error and thrice an error. Ours is the eternal land, the eternal people, the eternal religion, whose strength, greatness, holiness, may be over-clouded but never, even for a moment, utterly cease. The hero, the Rishi, the saint, are the natural fruits of our Indian soil; and there has been no age in which they have not been born. Among the Rishis of the later age we have at last realized that we must include the name of the man who gave us the reviving mantra which is creating a new India, the mantra Bande Mataram.

The Rishi is different from the saint. His life may not have been distinguished by superior holiness nor his character by an ideal beauty. He is not great by what he was himself but by what

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he has expressed. A great and vivifying message had to be given to a nation or to humanity; and God has chosen this mouth on which to shape the words of the message. A momentous vision has to be revealed; and it is his eyes which the Almighty first unseals. The message which he has received, the vision which has been vouchsafed to him, he declares to the world with all the strength that is in him, and in one supreme moment of inspiration expresses it in words which have merely to be uttered to stir men's inmost natures, clarify their minds, seize their hearts and impel them to things which would have been impossible to them in their ordinary moments. Those words are the mantra which he was born to reveal and of that mantra he is the seer.

What is it for which we worship the name of Bankim today? What was his message to us or what the vision which he saw and has helped us to see? He was a great poet, a master of beautiful language and a creator of fair and gracious dreamfigures in the world of imagination; but it is not as a poet, stylist or novelist that Bengal does honour to him today. It is probable that the literary critic of the future will reckon "Kopal Kundala", "Bishabriksha" and "Krishna Kant's Will" as his artistic masterpieces, and speak with qualified praise of "Devi Chaudhurani", "Anandamath", "Krishna Charit" or "Dharmatattwa". Yet it is the Bankim of these latter works and not the Bankim of the great creative masterpieces who will rank among the Makers of Modern India. The earlier Bankim was only a poet and stylist—the later Bankim was a seer and nation-builder.

But even as a poet and stylist Bankim did a work of supreme national importance not for the whole of India or only indirectly for the whole of India, but for Bengal which was destined to lead India and be in the vanguard of national development. No nation can grow without finding a fit and satisfying medium of expression for the new self into which it is developing—without a language which shall give permanent shape to its thoughts and feelings and carry every new impulse swiftly and triumphantly into the consciousness of all. It was Bankim's first great service to India that he gave the race which stood in its vanguard such a perfect and satisfying medium. He has been

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blamed for corrupting the purity of the Bengali tongue; but the pure Bengali of the old poets could have expressed nothing but a conservative and unprogressing Bengal. The race was expanding and changing, and it needed a means of expression capable of change and expansion. He has been blamed also for replacing the high literary Bengali of the Pundits by a mixed popular tongue which was neither the learned language nor good vernacular. But the Bengali of the Pundits would have crushed the growing richness, variety and versatility of the Bengali genius under its stiff inflexible ponderousness. We needed a tongue for other purposes than dignified treatises and erudite lucubrations. We needed a language which should combine the strength, dignity or soft beauty of Sanskrit with the verve and vigour of the vernacular, capable at one end of the utmost vernacular raciness, and at the other of the most sonorous gravity. Bankim divined our need and was inspired to meet it,—he gave us a means by which the soul of Bengal could express itself to itself.

As he had divined the linguistic need of his country's future, so he divined also its political need. He, first of our great publicists, understood the hollowness and inutility of the methods of political agitation which prevailed in his time and exposed it with merciless satire in his "Lokarahasya" and "Kamala Kanta's Daftar". But he was not satisfied merely with destructive criticism,—he had a positive vision of what was needed for the salvation of the country. He saw that the force from above must be met by a mightier reacting force from below,—the strength of repression by an insurgent national strength. He bade us leave the canine method of agitation for the leonine. The Mother of his vision held trenchant steel in her twice seventy million hands and not the bowl of the mendicant. It was the stern gospel of force which he preached under a veil and in images in "Anandamath" and "Devi Chaudhurani". And he had an inspired unerring vision of the moral strength which must be at the back of the physical force. He perceived that the first element of the moral strength must be tyaga, complete self-sacrifice for the country and complete self-devotion to the work of liberation. His workers and fighters for the motherland are

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political byragees who have no other thought than their duty to her and have put all else behind them as less dear and less precious and only to be resumed when their work for her is done. Whoever loves self or wife or child or goods more than his country is a poor and imperfect patriot; not by him shall the great work be accomplished. Again, he perceived that the second element of the moral strength needed must be self-discipline and organisation. This truth he expressed in the elaborate training of Devi Chaudhurani for her work, in the strict rules of the Association of the "Anandamath" and in the pictures of perfect organisation which those books contain. Lastly, he perceived that the third element of moral strength must be the infusion of religious feeling into patriotic work. The religion of patriotism,—this is the master idea of Bankim's writings. It is already foreshadowed in "Devi Chaudhurani". In "Dharmatattwa" the idea and in "Krishna Charit" the picture of a perfect and many-sided Karma Yoga is sketched, the crown of which shall be work for one's country and one's kind. In "Anandamath" this idea is the key-note of the whole book and receives its perfect lyrical expression in the great song which has become the national anthem of United India. This is the second great service of Bankim to his country that he pointed out to it the way of salvation and gave it the religion of patriotism. Of the new spirit which is leading the nation to resurgence and independence, he is the inspirer and political guru.

The third and supreme service of Bankim to his nation was that he gave us the vision of our Mother. The new intellectual idea of the motherland is not in itself a great driving force; the mere recognition of the desirability of freedom is not an inspiring motive. There are few Indians at present, whether loyalist, moderate or nationalist in their political views, who do not recognize that the country has claims on them or that freedom in the abstract is a desirable thing. But most of us, when it is a question between the claims of the country and other claims, do not in practice prefer the service of the country; and while many may have the wish to see freedom accomplished, few have the will to accomplish it. There are other things which we hold

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dearer and which we fear to see imperilled either in the struggle for freedom or by its accomplishment. It is not till the motherland reveals herself to the eye of the mind as something more than a stretch of earth or a mass of individuals, it is not till she takes shape as a great Divine and Maternal Power in a form of beauty that can dominate the mind and seize the heart that these petty fears and hopes vanish in the all-absorbing passion for our mother and her service, and the patriotism that works miracles and saves a doomed nation is born. To some men it is given to have that vision and reveal it to others. It was thirty-two years ago that Bankim wrote his great song and few listened; but in a sudden moment of awakening from long delusions the people of Bengal looked round for the truth and in a fated moment somebody sang Bande Mataram. The mantra had been given and in a single day a whole people had been converted to the religion of patriotism. The Mother had revealed herself. Once that vision has come to a people, there can be no rest, no peace, no farther slumber till the temple has been made ready, the image installed and the sacrifice offered. A great nation which has had that vision can never again be placed under the feet of the conqueror.

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A Vilifier on Vilification

17-April-1907

Our Bombay contemporary the Indu Prakash is very wroth with the Nationalist party for their want of sweet reasonableness. He accuses them of rowdyism "which would put the East End rowdy to shame," and adds, "Their forte seems to be abuse, vilification, impertinence and superlative silliness, and these are exhibited alternately." It strikes us that the Indu Prakash has been guilty of "abuse, vilification, impertinence and superlative silliness" not alternately but in a lump within the brief space of these two sentences. This sort of phraseology is however part of the ordinary Moderate rhetoric which is usually the reverse of moderate in its temper. Unable to meet the Nationalists in argument, they make up for it in invective, denouncing them as "maniacs", "rowdies", "merest school boys". We have already answered the charge of rowdiness and we will only add here that violent personal attack is not confined to one party. But the Moderates have their own methods. They attack individual members of our party behind their backs or else in meetings to which the public are not admitted, like those of the Subjects Committee, but not usually in public. They vilify them in the correspondence columns of their papers and ignore them or only abuse the party generally in the leading articles. This they call the decency and "high dignity of public life". We prefer to call it want of straightforwardness and courage. The Indu thinks that personal attacks and violent outbreaks of temper have no part in English politics. This is indeed a holy simplicity; and it is not for nothing that the Bombay journal calls itself Indu Prakash, "moonshine". It is true, of course, that English politicians do not carry their political wranglings and

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acerbities into social life to anything like the extent that the Continental peoples do or we do in India; and this is a most praiseworthy feature of English public life. We do not agree with the Indu that the differences which divide us are smaller than those which exist between English parties; but small or great, we agree that they should not generate hatred, if it can be avoided. But if the Moderates are so anxious to avoid the acerbation of feelings, why should they not set the example? Let them avoid autocracy and caucus tactics, frankly recognise the Nationalists as a party whose opinions must be consulted, be conciliatory and constitutional in their procedure; and what the Indu misterms "Extremist rowdyism" will die a natural death.

By the Way - A Mouse in a Flutter

17-April-1907

Poor Mr. N. N. Ghose! When we dealt with him faithfully in our By the Way column, we did so in the belief that it would do him good; the wounds given by a friend are wholesome though painful. We expected that if we painted him in his true colours, he would recognise the picture, grow ashamed and reform; but it is possible we did wrong to pluck out so cruelly the heart of our Sankaritola Hamlet's mystery. Certainly we did not anticipate that the sight of his own moral lineaments would drive him into such an exhibition of shrieking and gesticulating fury as disfigures the Indian Nation of the 15th April. Such self-degradation by a cultured and respectable literary gentleman is very distressing, and we apologise to the public for being the cause of this shocking spectacle. We will devote our column today to soothing down his ruffled plumes. By the way, we assure Mr. Ghose that when we talk of his ruffled plumes we are not thinking of him in his capacity as a mouse at all. We are for a moment imagining him to be a feathered biped—say, a pelican

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solitary in the wilderness or else, if he prefers it, a turtle-dove cooing to his newly-found mate in Colootola.

What is it that Mr. Ghose lays to our charge? In the first place he accuses us of having turned him into a mouse. In the second place he complains that after turning him into a mouse, we should still treat him as a human being. "I am a mouse", he complains; "how can I have an arm of succour or a fully organised heart? I am a mouse, ergo I am neither a politician nor a cynic." We plead not guilty to both charges. We do not profess to have any magical power whatever and when we casually compared our revered contemporary to the mouse in the fable, we had not the least idea that we were using a powerful mantra which could double the number of Mr. Ghose's legs and change him into a furtive "rhodent". The rest of our remarks we made under the impression that he was still a human being; why he should so indignantly resent being spoken of as a human being, we fail to understand. No, when we made the allusion, we did not mean to turn Mr. Ghose into a mouse any more than when we compared him to Satan reproving sin we intended to turn him into the devil. But the Principal of the Metropolitan College seems as skilful in mixing other people's metaphors as in mixing his own.

If, after this explanation, he still persists in his "mouse I am and mouse I remain" attitude, we cannot help it. The worthy publicist seems to have had mice on his brain recently. The other day he discovered a winged or fluttering species of the rodent; now the mere mention of a mouse has engendered the delusion that he is one himself. We do not believe in the existence of fluttering mice,—but after Mr. Ghose's recent exhibition we can well believe in the existence of a mouse in a flutter. This time he seems to have discovered a new species which he calls "rhodents"! There was much discussion in our office as to this new animal. Some thought it a brilliant invention of the printer's devil; others opined that in his wild excitement the editor's

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cockney-made pen had dropped an "h"; others held that our Calcutta Hamlet, unlike the Shakespearian, cannot distinguish between a mouse and a rhododendron. A learned Government professor assures us, however, that rhodon is Greek for a rose and that Mr. Ghose has found a new species of mouse that not only flutters but flowers,—of which he believes himself to be the only surviving specimen. However that may be, we have learned our lesson and will never compare him to a "rhodent" again. A rose by another name will smell as sweet and a mouse by any other name will gnaw as hard.

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Simple, Not Rigorous

18-April-1907

The finale of the Punjabee case has converted a tragedy into a farce. The bureaucracy started to crush the new spirit in Punjab by making a severe example of its leading exponent in the Press. They have ended by acerbating public feeling in the Punjab and creating racial hostility—the very offence for which, ostensibly, the Punjabee is punished,—without gaining their ends. The ferocious severity of the sentence passed on Srijut Jaswant Rai has defeated its own object. Reduced in length from two years to six months in the Sessions Court, it has in the final appeal been reduced in its nature from rigorous to simple imprisonment. The upshot is that the Government enjoys the honour of entertaining two patriotic Nationalists with an unsolicited hospitality for the next six months. Meanwhile, the tone of the Nationalist Press will not be lowered by one note nor its determination to speak the truth without fear or favour affected even in the smallest degree. But the memory of the original sentence will remain; the gulf between the aliens and the people yawns yet wider. Incidentally the Punjabee has been endeared to all India by its boldness and readiness to suffer for the cause; its circulation has been largely increased and its influence more than doubled. Well done, most simple and rigorous bureaucracy!

British Interests and British Conscience

18-April-1907

"The demand for popular self-government must be resisted in the interests of Egypt"—this is the Pioneer's verdict on the National Movement in that unhappy land. We can understand

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why Egyptian aspirations must be stifled in the interests of the "protectors" of Egypt; but to say that this must be done in the interests of the children of the soil is indeed monstrous. The inordinate self-conceit of Englishmen very often betrays them into ludicrous absurdities. The Britisher fancies himself the Heaven-appointed ruler of the universe; and whoever ventures to stand in his way must be a nuisance, a rebel, a traitor. The whole history of Britain is a long struggle for liberty; and even the other day the British Premier could not help exclaiming: "The Duma is dead; long live the Duma." But whenever it is a question of Egypt or India where British interests are at stake, British greed overpowers British conscience and all sorts of monstrous arguments are fabricated to justify the suppression of popular movements. But the history of the British occupation of Egypt which began as a temporary measure and perpetuated itself as a piece of expediency, is quite well known and the world can no longer be deceived by journalistic falsehoods.

A Recommendation

18-April-1907

The Englishman has arrogated to itself the office of press-censor and has commenced to issue certificates of good conduct to our moderate contemporaries. Those that have not the good fortune to see with it eye to eye are branded as seditious. This is what it wrote in its yesterday's issue:—

"We regret that in a recent issue we confounded the two papers Swadesh and Swaraj, identifying the politics of the former with those of Bande Mataram and other journals of the same bilious tinge. As a matter of fact Swadesh is conducted with moderation and ability, and is by no means to be confused with the seditious sheets which are doing so much mischief in this country."

A critic who confounds the names of journals on which he sits in judgment, is a sight for gods and men; and we congratulate our Swadesh friend on the testimonial secured from so high a quarter. But is it solicited or unsolicited? The seditious rags may

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now envy the distinction. But will they be tempted to mend their ways? We would suggest a Kaiser-i-Hind for meritorious journals and recommend the Indian Mirror and the Indian Nation for the first two medals.

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An Ineffectual Sedition Clause

19-April-1907

We commented yesterday on the folly of the Punjab Government in prosecuting the Punjabee and the ridiculous and unenviable position in which the practical collapse of that prosecution has landed them. The absolute lack of courage, insight and statesmanship in the Indian Government has been always a subject of wonder to us. The English are an exceedingly able and practical nation, well versed in the art of keeping down subject races at the least expense and with the greatest advantage to themselves. It is passing strange to see such a race floundering about and hopelessly at sea in dealing with the new situation in India. There are three possible policies by which it could be met. We could understand a policy of Russian repression, making full use of the means of coercion their despotic laws and practice keep ready to their hand in order to stamp out the fire of nationalism before it had spread. We could understand a policy of firm repression of disorder and maintenance of British supremacy, coupled with full and generous concessions in the sphere of local and municipal self-government. We could understand a frank association of the people in the Government with provincial Home Rule as its eventual goal. The first policy would be strong and courageous but unwise; for, its only effect on a nation which has a past and remembers it would be to expedite the advent of its future. The second, if immediately undertaken, might be temporarily effective but could not for long satisfy national aspirations. The third is a counsel of perfection to which, fortunately for India's future greatness, Mr. Blair will hardly get his countrymen to listen. Nevertheless, any of these three would be a rational and sensible policy; but the present attitude of the Government is

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neither. It is an impossible mixture of timid and flabby coercion with insincere, grudging and dilatory conciliation. The Government looses a Fuller on the people and then at the first check withdraws him. It promises a reform and then hesitates and repents and cannot make up its mind to give it either promptly or frankly. It has stored up any number of legal brahmastras and nagapashas to bind down and destroy opposition, but it has not the courage to use them. It would like to crush the people, but it dare not; it feels it necessary to make concessions, but it will not. This is the way Empires are lost. The only instance of a coherent policy is in East Bengal where the bureaucracy has envisaged the situation as an unarmed rebellion and is treating it on the military principle of isolating the insurgent forces and crushing them with the help of local allies before the opposition can become organised and universal. It is an acute and skilful policy but it needs for its success two conditions—weakness, vacillation and cowardice on the part of the Calcutta leaders and want of tenacity in the strong men of East Bengal. But the situation in East Bengal is only a local symptom. In dealing with the general disease, the Government policy is mere confusion.

We may take its treatment of sedition as an instance. The clause dealing with sedition in the Penal Code is a monument of legal ferocity, but at present of futile ferocity. The offence is that of exciting contempt and hatred against the Government. The Government means the bureaucracy collectively and individually. Anything therefore in the nature of plain statement and strong comment on any foolish or arbitrary conduct on the part of an official or on any unwise or oppressive policy on the part of the Government, Viceregal or Provincial, or on any absurd or odious feature in the bureaucratic system, or any attempt to prove that the present administration is responsible for distress and suffering in India or that bureaucratic rule is doing material and moral injury to the people and the country, falls within the scope of this insane provision. For, such statements, comments and attempts must inevitably provoke contempt and "want of affection" in the people; and the writer cannot help knowing that they will have that effect. Yet these are things that fall within

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the natural duty of the journalist in every country which is not still in the Dark Ages.

The alternative punishments—the minor, running to two years' rigorous imprisonment, the major, to the utmost penalty short of the gallows,—are of a Russian ferocity. Yet this terrible sword is hung in vain over the head of the Indian journalist; for, mere imprisonment has no longer any terrors for Indian patriotism and really crushing penalties can only be imposed at the risk of driving the people to secret conspiracy and nihilistic forms of protest. The lower grades of the executive and judiciary are not affected by scruples, for they are neither called upon to consider ultimate consequences or exposed to external censure; but the higher one rises in the official scale, the greater is the deterrent effect of the fear of consequences and the fear of the world's censure. This is the reason why ferocious sentences like that on the Punjabee are minimised in successive appeals—a phenomenon an Anglo-Indian contemporary notices with great disgust. The clauses 124A and 153A are therefore weapons which the Government cannot effectually utilise and to employ them ineffectually is worse than useless. If the journalist is acquitted, it is a popular victory; if lightly sentenced, public feeling is irritated, not intimidated; if rigorously dealt with, a great impulse is given to the tide of nationalism which will sweep onward till this piece of civilised savagery ceases to pollute the statute-books of a revolutionised and modernised administration.

The Englishman as a Statesman

19-April-1907

The Englishman has a confused and wordy article in yesterday's issue which it considers especially fit "for such a time as this"; but the meaning is a little difficult to disentangle. Our contemporary has a dim perception that there is a "crisis" in the country, the nature of which it is unable to determine; but it is a very terrible sort of crisis, anyway—a monster horrible, shapeless and huge. "When it matures, influences may be shot forth into the country, and possibly also in Asia, if not also back into

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Europe through Russia, whose final issues no man can foresee." It acknowledges that there "are some hopes" in the hearts of the people "which it would be fatuous to mock, madness to ignore". So far as we can make out, the Englishman has discovered a very original way of respecting and recognising these hopes. It proposes to satisfy them by appointing a large number of non-official Europeans in Mr. Morley's new Legislative Councils along with the Nawab of Dacca and any other equally rare specimens bureaucratic research can discover among the "manlier races of the North who, if they grew turbulent, might prove more troublesome than populations of another class from further South, who, if more effeminate, are also more contented". The meaning of this extraordinarily slipshod rigmarole is that the Englishman has been frightened by the disturbances in Lahore which followed on the final conviction of the Punjabee and is also a little uneasy at the prospect of unwelcome changes in the Legislative Councils. Hence its unusual and unsuccessful attempt to overcome its customary "fatuity" and "madness". For our part we prefer the Englishman fatuous and mad to the Englishman trying in vain to be sensible. In its natural state it is at least intelligible.

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The Gospel according to Surendranath

22-April-1907

The appearance of Babu Surendranath Banerji as an exponent of the "New Nationalism" is a phenomenon which shows the spread of the new spirit, but, we fear, nothing more. We congratulate Babu Surendranath on his conversion to the New Nationalism, but we are not sure that we can congratulate the New Nationalism on its convert. Nationalism is, after all, primarily an emotion of the heart and a spiritual attitude and only secondarily an intellectual conviction. Its very foundation is the worship of national liberty as the one political deity and the readiness to consider all things well lost if only freedom is won. "Let my name be blasted," cried Danton, "but let France be saved." "Let my name, life, possessions all go," cries the true Nationalist, "let all that is dear to me perish, but let my country be free." But Babu Surendranath is not prepared to consider the world well lost for liberty. He wishes to drive bargains with God, to buy liberty from Him in the cheapest market, at the smallest possible price. Until now he was the leader of those who desired to reach a qualified liberty by safe and comfortable means. He is now for an unqualified liberty; and since the way to absolute liberty cannot be perfectly safe and comfortable, he wants to make it as safe and comfortable as he can. It is evident that his conversion to the new creed is only a half and half conversion. He has acknowledged the deity, but he is not prepared for the sacrifice. It is always a danger to a new religion when it receives converts from among strong adherents of the old, for they are likely to bring in with them the spirit of the outworn creed and corrupt with it the purity of the new tenets. If leaders of the old school wish to be accepted as exponents of

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the New Nationalism, they must bring to it not only intellectual assent, but a new and changed heart—a new heart of courage and enthusiastic self-sacrifice, to replace the old heart of selfish timidity and distrust of the national strength.

In the leading article of last Friday's Bengalee some very important admissions are made. The unlimited possibilities of the organised national strength of India are acknowledged without reservation. "There is no limit to what they can do. We at any rate would set no limits to their ambition.... We want our country to be as great in its own way as other countries are in theirs. And we are determined to secure our rightful place in the federation of humanity by methods which are least wasteful in their nature and would soonest bring us to the assured destination." The federation of humanity is one of those sounding phrases, dear to Babu Surendranath, which have no relation to actualities; but the rightful place of India among the nations, federated or unfederated, is one which cannot admit of any the least restriction on her liberty. And the description of the methods to be used at least rules petitioning out of court; for petitioning is certainly wasteful in its nature and would not bring us soonest,—nor, indeed, at allto our assured destination. There is more behind. "Where is the room for compromise in spiritual life? Nobody has a right to tell us in regard to a question like this, thus far you shall go and no farther. National expansion and self-realisation is a sacred duty which we cannot lay aside at the bidding of any authority above or below. The charter here is a charter from on high and no mundane authority has a right to undo it." All this is admirable. It is true that the writer in the next breath says, "We have no quarrel with anybody who does not stand in our way"—an obvious truism,—and invites the Government "not to block the way", promising it as a reward "a happy and not inglorious transformation at no distant date". But the bureaucracy knows, as well as the writer knows, that transformation is only an euphemism for translation to a better world, and there is not the slightest chance of its listening to this bland invitation. However, the fact stands out that Babu Surendranath has declared for absolute autonomy to be arrived

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at by methods which among other things, would soonest bring us to the assured destination.

Unfortunately the rest of the article is devoted to carefully undoing the effect of the first half. It is practically an attempt to controvert the position which we have taken up in this journal. Our position is that it is imperatively necessary for this nation to enter into an immediate struggle for national liberty which we must win at any cost; that in this struggle we must be inspired and guided by the teachings of history and those glorious examples which show how even nations degraded, enslaved and internally disunited, can rapidly attain to freedom and unity; and that for this purpose the great necessity is to awake in the nation a burning, an irresistible, an unanimous will, to be free. The Bengalee denies all these positions. We must win liberty, it holds, not by an immediate struggle but by a long and weary journey; not by heavy sacrifices, but in the spirit of a Banya by grudging, limited and carefully-calculated sacrifices. We are not to be guided by the concrete lessons of history, but by vague and intangible rhetorical generalisations about "our increased knowledge and wisdom, our enlarged affections and interests of the present day". We are to curb our will to be free by a "trained intelligence" which teaches us that we are not a homogenous nation and must therefore tolerate differences.

We will content ourselves at present with pointing out that the Bengalee's answer to us is neither objective nor self-consistent. We have tried to establish our position by definite arguments and appeals to well-known facts of human nature and human experience; the Bengalee simply denies our conclusions in general terms without advancing a single definite argument. We can only conclude that our contemporary has no definite arguments to advance. The confusion of his ideas is appalling. We are to choose for the attainment of liberty the method which will bring us soonest to our destination; but we must at the same time insist on making it a long and weary journey. We must have the determination to get liberty "at any cost"; but we must not carry out that determination in practice; no, in practice we must get it not at any cost but at the smallest cost possible.

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We must really ask the Bengalee to clear up this tangle of ideas and discover some definite arguments before it again asks the Nationalists to confine themselves to realising their ideas in practice and to abstain from "quarrelling with everybody who differs from them". It would be no doubt very gratifying to the Bengalee not to be quarrelled with, in other words, to escape from the annoyance of finding its intellectual positions and its methods assailed; but we cannot gratify it. So far as possible, our ideas are being realised in practice wherever Nationalism is strong; but for their full effectiveness they need the whole nation at their back and it is therefore our first duty to convince the nation by exposing pseudo-Nationalism in all its workings.

We shall meet the Bengalee's positions one by one hereafter. Meanwhile we take the liberty of offering one suggestion to Babu Surendranath Banerji. This veteran leader is a declared opportunist, who believes, as he has himself said, in expediency more than in principles. He seeks to lead the nation not by instructing it but by watching its moods and making use of them. Well and good; but even an opportunist leader must keep pace with public opinion, if he does not even go half a step in front of it; he must know which way it is going to leap before the leap is taken, and not follow halting some paces behind. The nation moves forward with rapidity; Babu Surendranath pants ineffectually after it. It is not by such hesitating pronouncements that he can retain the national leadership. The times are revolutionary, and revolutionary times demand men who know their own mind and are determined to make it the mind of the nation.

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A Man of Second Sight

23-April-1907

The tendency not to mince matters is in itself a virtue seldom appreciated by people who in consequence of long subjection cannot rate boldness in any form at its proper value. But to awaken boldness in a nation which has lost the sense of honour and self-respect, has always been the first engrossing effort of those political thinkers who meant to do their duty by the country honestly and sincerely. The capacity to look facts in the face and support a true grasp of the situation by a programme at once bold and heroic, has always met with a belated recognition when fallen nations have begun their first struggle towards emancipation. The charge of being wild and mischievous dreamers, cursed with satanic perversity and a rash haste to mislead and destroy, has invariably been laid at the door of people who tried to initiate great national revivals. The outburst of indignation with which the new school propaganda is being received in some quarters, is therefore perfectly natural. But it is not these unbelievers whom we want to reach and influence. The Pharisees and Philistines will ever dog our footsteps and try their best to dissuade us and to defeat us. They will even try to bring about the persecution of the true patriots; but this too none need fear; for suffering only makes men stronger to bring about the redemption of their country. Timidity at such times is dignified with the name of prudence, moderation and humanitarianism; but it is mere scum and dross which bubbles to the surface; meanwhile the true metal is being purified for use below. The process of purification is always accompanied by such surface impurities, but they only serve to bring truth and sincerity into bold relief. These politicians are intoxicated with the ideal of

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a prosperous serfdom and cannot realise how it eats into the very vitals of a nation. It is largely because the honour and emoluments of a selfish few, whom the alien bureaucracy seek to humour for victimising the rest, are brought into jeopardy that we hear such hysterical denunciations of the straightforward and fearless efforts of the Nationalists. "Let their conduct be such as not to savour of ingratitude to the benefactors. When we find so many broad-minded Englishmen fighting our cause in and out of Parliament, when we see a Viceroy showing every consideration to our feelings and sentiments, when we see a Secretary of State openly sympathising with our aspirations, when we see the administration of the country shaping itself to modern needs, when we see all these and many more signs of the bright future awaiting us—we should take heart to abandon petty querulous feelings and set ourselves earnestly to the task of self-preparation. Before we aspire to govern our country we must learn to govern our own selves."

Such are the ratiocinations and exhortations of the prophet of the Indian Mirror. His powers of vision evidently excel the ability of common men and amount to something more than second sight. He sees Englishmen fighting our cause in and out of Parliament, where the ordinary eye can only see a number of insignificant Members of Parliament asking questions which lead to nothing and advising an oppressed nation to wait in patience for a far-off millennium. He sees a Viceroy showing every consideration to our feelings and sentiments where common beings can only see a policy of insincere conciliation and tentative repression. He sees a Secretary of State openly sympathising with our aspirations where others can only see a Radical Minister professing liberalism and practising hidebound conservatism. He sees the administration shaping itself to modern needs where we poor mortals can only see an out-of-date and semi-civilized system, refusing to be modernized and reformed. This it is to be an occultist and dabble in white magic! And what does it all come to? That some slight and ineffectual reforms have been vaguely promised, whose only result will be to give a few more individuals the chance of getting name and

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fame at the expense of the country. The Mirror is in terror of losing this chance because of the spread of Nationalism; hence its hysterical appeals and chidings. The country is not likely to be diverted by these selfish and narrow-minded considerations from the mighty movement into which it is casting itself or held back from the great goal of national autonomy.

Passive Resistance in the Punjab

23-April-1907

We are glad to find that Passive Resistance is being boldly carried into effect in the Punjab. The recent demonstrations at Lahore which followed the Punjabee conviction have evidently come as a shock upon the white population. So long as the political ferment created by the new spirit was mainly confined to Bengal, Anglo-India comforted itself by saying that the Bengalis were an unwarlike race unlikely to cause real trouble. Their main uneasiness was lest the agitation should spread to the martial races of whom alone they are afraid and whom they lose no opportunity of flattering and trying to separate from the Bengalis. Englishmen respect and fear those only who can strike and, being a race without imagination or foresight, they are unable to realise that national character is not immutable or that the Bengalis, who could once fight both on sea and land, might possibly revert to the ancient type and put behind them their acquired timidity and love of ease. Now, however, their fears are being realised. Anglo-Indian journals had already begun to perceive the truth that there is a real unity in India and that "Lahore has become a political suburb of Calcutta." The Lahore demonstrations have carried the conviction home. Accordingly we find the Englishman groping about in an intellectual fog in search of such novelties as concession and reform, while in the Punjab itself the panic is taking the form of incipient terrorism. Sirdar Ajit Singh of the Lahore Patriots' Association has been doing admirable work among the masses. His most recent success has been to induce the Jat peasantry to boycott the Government canals as a protest against an iniquitous water-tax.

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As a result the Deputy Commissioner in imitation of the Fuller Administration, published this remarkable order,—"Ajit Singh of Lahore is forbidden to address any public meeting in Multan district. If he disobeys, he will be arrested." The only result was that Sirdar Ajit Singh addressed a meeting of 15,000 men in defiance of this ukase and the police stood helplessly by. We pointed out in our last article on Passive Resistance that Government by ukase would always be one of the methods the Government must instinctively resort to in order to snuff out our resistance and that it was the imperative duty of every patriot to resist such arbitrary orders. We are glad to see that the Punjab has promptly taken up the challenge thrown down by the bureaucrat.

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By the Way

24-April-1907

The Englishman and Mr. N. N. Ghose, faithful brothers-in-arms, were beside themselves with joy last week. What had happened? Had Nationalism by some divine miracle been suddenly blotted out of the land? Had the spirit of Nobokissen appeared to his devotee and admirer and prophesied the eternal continuance of the British domination in India? Or had Mr. N. N. Ghose been at last elected to the Legislative Council? No, but happy signs and omens, prophetic of these desirable events, have appeared in the political heavens. Hence this war-dance of victory in Hare Street and Sankaritola. The great Twin Brethren, the black Aswin and the white, the two heavenly physicians of our political maladies, have laid a joint finger on the national pulse and discovered that the fever of Nationalism is passing away and the patient returning to a healthy state of loyalty and contented servitude.

The epoch-making pronouncement of the Indian Mirror is the chief source of joy and comfort to these allied powers. The Mahatma of Mott's Lane has waved his wonder-working wand and Nationalism is no more. Narendranath has spoken; the British Empire is saved. It is not surprising that the discoveries made by the Indian Mirror should have awakened admiring wonder and delight in Hare Street, for they are certainly such discoveries as are only made once or twice in the course of the ages. The Mirror has discovered that all is for the best in the best of all possible Governments. It has detected liberalism in Mr. Morley's Indian policy and a passionate desire for reform in Anglo-India. And to crown all, it has found out that the

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Extremists,—those bold, bad, dangerous men,—represent a party which consists only of themselves. This is a discovery worthy of Newton or Kepler and it has naturally filled Hare Street with delighted awe. An ordinary man might ask, of whom else should the party consist? But such criticism would be profane in the face of so much occult knowledge.

The Englishman sits at the feet of Babu Narendranath Sen like a pupil, with lifted eyes full of childlike wonder and admiration. Mr. N. N. Ghose welcomes his neighbour on equal terms as a fellow-loyalist and fellow-discoverer. For Mr. N. N. Ghose has also been industriously discovering things, not only in natural history but in political science. The other day he discovered the surprising fact that Mr. Tilak and Lala Lajpat Rai do not belong to the new school of politics—a discovery which will certainly edify and astonish both the hearers of Lala Lajpat Rai's speeches and the readers of the Kesari. He has discovered too that the new school have no "constructive programme" and are do-nothing politicians. Unhappily, this is a discovery which Mr. N. N. Ghose is in the habit of making about his opponents and critics ever since he attacked Shambhunath Mukherji in language of astonishing coarseness; so it lacks the charm of novelty.

The Amrita Bazar Patrika has also become an object of Mr. N. N. Ghose's scientific investigations. He has discovered that this great organ of public opinion is returning to light,—in other words, that it was mad and is becoming sane. We do not precisely know why. The passages quoted from the Amrita Bazar Patrika merely repeat views which it has been insisting on for a long time past and the programme which it sets before the public is one in which the Amrita Bazar and the new school are in entire agreement. In the opinion of Mr. Ghose, however, this programme shows an insufficiently broad view, and he holds out an ominous threat of broadening Srijut Motilal Ghose's intelligence. For the present, however, "we reserve our suggestions"

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and the Amrita Bazar is spared this painful operation. In passing, Mr. Ghose informs a startled world that in regard to constructive works he has his own ideas! Evidently he has a "constructive programme" up his sleeve and is awaiting the dramatic moment for dazzling the world by its appearance. But for how long will he condemn us to hold our breath in awed expectation?

The Amrita Bazar finds occasion to condemn such effusive receptions as Babu Surendranath received at Rajshahi, and, in doing so, disclaims the charge of envy and jealousy which is usually brought against it when it criticises the moderate leader. Immediately the Indian Nation falls on its neck and weeps joyfully, "I too have been accused. Embrace me, my fellow-martyr." We doubt whether our contemporary will quite relish being put on a level with Mr. N. N. Ghose and the Indian Nation. Its editor is a recognised political leader and his paper has from early days been a power in the land, read and relished in all parts of India and even in England; but Mr. N. N. Ghose is only Mr. N. N. Ghose and the circulation of his weekly is—well, let us say, confined to the elect.

The Hare Street journal has undergone a startling transformation. It is trying to write sympathetically and pretending to have political ideas. This is rather hard on the unfortunate people who are compelled to read its outpourings; for the attempt to make some sense out of its leaders involves an agonising intellectual strain, which one naturally resents because it is not in the day's work. If our contemporary goes on much longer in this strain, we shall all have to go on strike and either petition the Government to pass prohibitive legislation or else organise passive resistance. As a sort of anti-popular Red Indian in war-paint and on the war-path, brandished tomahawk in hand and yelling wild and weird war cries, the Englishman is picturesque and amusing. But its new departure makes neither for instruction nor for entertainment.

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It followed up its great pronouncement, "For such a Time as this" with an almost equally fog-bound leader on "Swaraj". This document begins by entreating us to give up our political aspirations out of respect for the lamented memory of Professor Huxley. After paralysing our wits with this stroke of pathos, the Englishman, not to be outdone by the Mirror or the Nation, announces a political discovery of its own. Our moderate friends, it appears, have been labouring under a serious delusion. The Liberal party cannot give us reform even if it would, but there is one who can and will, and it is—the Government of India! Codlin's the friend, not Short. We congratulate our moderate friends on the delightful choice that is open to them. Minto's the sympathiser, not Morley—Minto will give you Swaraj,—the Englishman stands guarantee for it. But after bidding us kowtow to the Government of India because it alone can help or harm us, our contemporary with light-hearted inconsistency declares that our habit of kowtowing to those who can help or harm us, is the chief reason of our unfitness for Swaraj. It seems, on the other hand, that our behaviour is very disrespectful towards those who cannot help or harm us, e.g. Tommies, coolies and the Englishman. The Anglo-Indian rules India because of his paternal kindness to the coolie; until we too learn to enquire habitually into the state of the coolie's spleen with our boots and overwhelm him with vigorous and lurid terms of endearment in season and out of season, we shall not be fit for self-government. No wonder the Mirror asks us solemnly to lay our hands on our hearts and declare truthfully whether we are morally, mentally and physically fit for self-government. If this is the loyalist test, we answer sorrowfully, "No."

Political discoverers are not confined to this side of India. The Indu of Bombay is full of impotent wrath against Mr. Morley for prolonging Lord Kitchener's term and gives him a severe journalistic whipping for his misconduct. The Indu is extremely anxious, as a good moderate should be, for the safety of the British possessions in India; it has discovered that Lord Kitchener is

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not a good general and is capable of nothing more heroic than digging up dead Mahdis, so it clamours for a better general who will defend the British Empire more efficiently and spend less over it. Poor Mr. Morley! Even the Indu has found him out at last. We cannot expect our contemporary to realise that only in a free and prosperous India can defence be both effective and inexpensive. The present Government has to provide both against aggression from outside and discontent within, and this means a double expenditure. But what is the use of the Indu's shaking its moony fist in Mr. Morley's face and calling the darling of moderatism bad names? Much better were it done to send a petition with two lakhs of signatures for Lord Kitchener's recall, and, having done that,—sit content.

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Bureaucracy at Jamalpur

25-April-1907

The most recent accounts of the Jamalpur outrage emphasise the sinister nature of the occurrence and the defects in our own organisation which we must labour to remove. The most disgraceful feature of the riots has been the conduct of the British local official who seems to have deceived and betrayed the Hindus into the hands of the Mahomedan goondas. The nature of the attack, its suddenness and completeness, show beyond doubt that it had been carefully planned beforehand and was no casual outbreak either of fanaticism or rowdyism. It is impossible to believe that the Joint Magistrate, responsible for the peace of the country, was totally uninformed of the likelihood of an organised attack which was generally apprehended by the Hindus. Yet it is reported that the local official induced the Hindus to be present at the mela by a distinct pledge that they had nothing to fear from the Mahomedans, and then, in violation of his pledge, left them utterly unprotected for brutality and sacrilege to work their will upon them. If he had any inkling of the outbreak which was then in preparation, his action amounted to cynical treachery. Even if he was so imbecile as to be unaware of what was going on in his own jurisdiction, his failure to provide against the possibility of his pledge coming to nothing lays him open to the worst constructions. At the very least he showed a light-hearted disregard for his official obligations and his personal honour. His subsequent action was equally extraordinary. All the accounts agree in saying that the police were quite inactive until the anti-Swadeshists had their fill of plunder and violence and were making for the station. Even then, they confined themselves to depriving them of their lathis,

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—the mischief being done and further violence superfluous,—and with a paternal indulgence dismissed them to their homes unarrested. The only people arrested were a few of the Hindus who, if they were guilty of anything, can have only been guilty of self-defence. The accounts on which we base these comments are unanimous and have not up to the present moment met with any denial. We can only conclude therefore that, as at Comilla, the local officials looked with sympathy on the rioters as allies in the repression of Swadeshism, and acted accordingly. To stand by while the Mahomedans carry out that violent repression of Swadeshism which the sham Liberalism of the present Government policy forbids them to undertake themselves; to clinch this illegal repression by legal repression in the form of prosecution of respectable Hindus for the crime of self-defence; to strain every nerve to prevent outside help coming to the distressed and maltreated Swadeshists, and finally to save appearances by sending a few of the Mahomedan rioters to prison—a punishment which has no terrors for them, since they are all hooligans and some of them old jailbirds:—such has been the consistent attitude of the local officials. The only new circumstance in the Jamalpur incident has been the assurance given by the local official which amounted to a promise of protection and which alone made the outrage possible. For the last century the British have been dinning into our ears the legend of British justice, British honour, British truth. The belief in the justice of the British nation or of British Magistrates is dead. Generated by liberal professions it has been killed by reactionary practice. The belief in the personal honour and truth of individual Englishmen has somehow managed to survive; but it will not stand such shocks as the East Bengal bureaucrats have managed to administer to it. We would earnestly press upon the people of East Bengal the unwisdom of trusting to official promises or to anything but their own combination, organisation and the strong arm for their protection. We have already pointed out more than once what the Comilla officials took some pains to point out to those who applied to them for protection, that it is folly to raise the cry of Swadeshi and Swaraj and yet to expect protection from the

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bureaucrats whose monopoly of power the movement threatens.

Anglo-Indian Blunderers

25-April-1907

The Englishman has its own standing suggestion for the treatment of incidents like the Jamalpur disturbances. The theory is, the riots are the result of Mahomedan indignation at the Swadeshi Boycott; therefore Swadeshi is the cause of the whole trouble; therefore put down Swadeshi with the strong hand. No one knows better than the Englishman that the disturbances have been caused by the sinister alliance of Anglo-India with the Nawab of Dacca and his following, contracted to put down Swadeshi by fair means or foul. For our part we should welcome open oppression by the bureaucracy; it would be more honourable at least than local connivance at violence and brutal lawlessness, and it would be a pleasure to meet an open and straightforward opponent. But open or secret, direct or indirect, no measures whatever will succeed in crushing the insurgent national spirit. We wonder whether these complacent bureaucrats and exploiters have any idea of the growing mass of silent exasperation to which the present policy is rapidly giving shape and substance. Possibly, the idea is to force the exasperation to a head and crush it when it breaks into overt action,—the old policy of the English in Ireland. But we would remind these blundering Anglo-Saxon Machiavellis that India is not Ireland; it is easier to unchain the tempest than to decree to it what course it shall take and what it shall spare or what destroy.

The Leverage of Faith

25-April-1907

It is said of Guru Nanak that on the eve of his departure from the body he was asked to name a successor to his gadi. A great storm was raging at the time—the disturbance of nature synchronising with the passing away of a great spirit. Nanak was then sitting under a tree surrounded by his disciples. It was evening and the

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Guru perceiving that his chelas badly needed food and drink, asked his sons Shrichand and Lakshichand to go in quest of food. But the sons inherited none of the spiritual qualities of their father; they thought him to be no better than a maniac and were not inclined to take his request seriously; rather they mocked at the idea of a search for food when none could stir out of doors for the wild rain and storm without. Nanak then turned to a devoted disciple who simply enquired where he should go for food and was told that he had only to ask of the tree under which they were then sitting and it would give them all they required. The disciple did Nanak's bidding and, as the story goes, was rewarded with sufficiency of sweetmeats. Nanak went afterwards with his disciples to the riverside and when, on the way, they came across a dead body, he bade his sons partake of this strange food. His sons took the command as conclusive proof of their father's lunacy, but the disciple was prepared to obey unquestioningly and only paused to ask from where to begin, whether from the head or from the foot. Nanak, entirely satisfied with the steadfast faith of his disciple, named him the successor to his gadi in preference to his own sons.

It is not given to all to possess this heroic spiritual faith which all religious teachers have insisted on as the first preliminary to any difficult sadhana; but the moral underlying it is one which all experience justifies. Faith is the first condition of success in every great undertaking. It is no exaggeration to say that faith moves mountains. It is faith that makes the men of will and thought persevere in spite of apparently insurmountable difficulties. They start with a strong confidence in the ultimate success of a noble undertaking and are therefore never daunted by difficulties, however formidable. Faith is the one predominating characteristic of all great souls. The vision of faith penetrates into the remote future and turns the impossible into the possible. In the region of politics faith is the result of imagination working in the light of history; it takes its stand on reason and experience and aspires into the future from the firm ground of the past. Other nations have risen from the lowest depths of degradation—the weaknesses which prevent us

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from trying bold and effective remedies were common to all subject nations before us. It is by nerving the nation's heart with inspiring literature and inciting it to struggle for emancipation that freedom has been recovered. For a subject people there is no royal road to emancipation. They must wade to it through struggle, sacrifice, slaughter, if necessary. History suggests no short-cut. Why should it then involve a strain on our faith to believe that if we are only prepared for the necessary sacrifice, we also shall gain the end? Other nations also were weak, disunited and denationalised like ourselves. It is the rallying cry of freedom that combined their scattered units drawing them together with a compelling and magical attraction. Those who would win freedom, must first imbue the people with an overpowering conviction that freedom is the one thing needful. Without a great ideal there can be no great movement. Small baits of material advantages will not nerve them to high endeavour and heroic self-sacrifice; it is only the idea of national freedom and national greatness that has that overmastering appeal. We must not bend the knee to others but try to be worthy of our past—here is an ideal which, if set forth with conviction and power, cannot fail to inspire self-sacrificing action. We need faith above all things, faith in ourselves, faith in the nation, faith in India's destiny. A dozen men rendered invincible by a strong faith in their future have in other times spread the contagion of nationalism to the remotest corner of vast countries. Unbelief is blind—it does not see far ahead, neither stimulates strength nor inspires action. The lack of this faith has kept our moderate politicians tied down to a worn-out ideal which has lost its credibility. No man can lead a rising nation unless he has this faith first of all, that what other great men have done before him he also can do as well, if not better,—that the freedom other nations have won we also can win, if only we have the faith, the will.

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Graduated Boycott

26-April-1907

The opponents of the new spirit have discovered that boycott is an illusion. An entire and sweeping boycott, they say, is a moral and physical impossibility; and their infallible economic authority, Mr. Gokhale, has found out that a graduated boycott is an economic impossibility. They point to the failure of the thorough-going boycott in Bengal as a proof of the first assertion; the second, they think, requires no proof, for how can what Mr. Gokhale has said be wrong? This assertion of the impossibility of a graduated boycott is an answer to the reasoning by which Mr. Tilak has supported the movement in Maharashtra. In the first days of the movement Mr. Tilak published a series of vigorous and thoughtful articles in the Kesari on boycott as a political Yoga. He advocated the entire exclusion of British goods, the preference of Swadeshi goods at a sacrifice when they were attainable, and, when unattainable, the preference of any foreign goods not produced in the British Empire. To the argument that this programme was not immediately practicable in its completeness, he replied that as in Yoga, so in the boycott, "even a little of this dharma saves us from a mighty peril". The mighty peril is the entire starvation of the country by foreign exploiters and its complete and hopeless dependence on aliens for almost all articles of common use. Even a slight immediate diminution of this dependence would be a great national gain and could by degrees be extended until the full boycott policy became an accomplished fact. Mr. Tilak, with his shrewd practical insight, was able to see clearly that immediate and complete success of a thorough-going boycott was not possible in India but that a gradually efficacious boycott would naturally result from a

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thorough-going boycott campaign. What Mr. Tilak foresaw, is precisely what is happening.

The entire exclusion of British-made goods is the political aspect of the Boycott with which we do not deal in this article. Is it a fact that as an economic weapon a graduated boycott is impossible? Boycott may be graduated in several ways. First, by the gradual growth of the idea of excluding foreign goods a steadily increasing check may be put on the import of particular foreign articles and a corresponding impulse given to the use of the same articles produced in India. A Government by imposing a gradually increasing duty on an import in successive tariffs, may kill it by degrees instead of immediately imposing a prohibitive rate; the growth of the boycott sentiment may automatically exercise the same kind of increasing check. The growth of the sentiment will help on the production of the indigenous article and the increased production of the indigenous article will help on the growth of the sentiment. Thus mutually stimulated, Swadeshi and boycott will advance with equal and ever more rapid steps, until the shrinkage of the foreign import reaches the point where it is no longer profitable to import it. The process can only be checked by insufficiency of capital in the country available or willing to invest itself in Swadeshi manufacture. But the growth of the boycott sentiment will of itself encourage and is encouraging capital to invest in this direction; for so much boycott means so much sure market for the Swadeshi article and therefore an increase of capital willing to invest in Swadeshi manufacture. The increased production of the Swadeshi article in its turn means more money in the hands of the mercantile class and of investors in Swadeshi Companies and therefore more capital available for investment in Swadeshi manufacture. We fail to see how in this sense an automatically graduated boycott is impossible; on the contrary, it seems to us economically inevitable, provided only the boycott sentiment is increasingly embraced by the people.

Boycott may be graduated in another way. When the boycott was declared in Bengal, it was declared specially against cloth, sugar and salt and only generally against other articles.

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It is therefore the imports of English piece-goods, Liverpool salt and, though only to a slight extent, of foreign sugar into Bengal which have suffered. When this specific boycott has been proved effective, it may be extended to other articles. Thus the boycott may be graduated not only in its incidence on particular articles, but in its extent and range. The graduation of a specific boycott may be partly artificial and partly automatic. It is artificial when the leaders of the people preach an economic jehad against particular foreign goods and the people accept their decision. But this artificial boycott can only succeed when there is already an incipient industry in the corresponding Swadeshi article or some existing means of supply however partial, which may be stimulated or extended by the boycott. Liverpool salt has been affected because 'Karkach' is available; British piece-goods have been affected because there was already a mill industry and a handloom industry which have been enormously stimulated by the boycott, as is shown by the wholesale return of the weaver class to their trade in Bengal and by the increase in the number of weaving mills and the splendid dividends which the existing concerns are paying. On the other hand the campaign against foreign sugar has not been successful because the proper substitute is not available. Yarns have not been affected because the spinning industry in India is a negligible quantity while the demand for yarn has enormously increased. In time a jehad against foreign yarn will become feasible. But the specific boycott may also be automatic when the general sentiment of boycott attacks a particular article for which a substitute exists in the country. To take a small instance, the market for steel trunks sent ready-manufactured from England is decreasing to such an extent that failures of dealers in steel trunks are beginning to be recorded. Here again, we fail to see the impossibility of a graduated boycott. It is quite true that in the very beginning the increase of the stimulated Swadeshi article may not be sufficient to blot out entirely the increase in the import, and the superficial and hasty may proclaim the failure of the boycott. But by the growth of the boycott the increase of the Swadeshi article must progressively swell and the increase of the import must

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progressively shrink until it is turned into an actual decrease. The fact that the success of the boycott is progressive and not miraculous, need not frighten or disappoint any sensible and determined boycotter. It is true also that the growth of Swadeshi may actually stimulate for a time the import of particular foreign articles, such as machinery or yarns; but the stimulation is temporary and, as soon as part of our growing capital is free and willing to invest in new fields, the graduated boycott will naturally extend itself in these directions sooner than in others.

The theory therefore that a graduated boycott is impossible, seems to us to have no foundation either of facts or of reasoning. Whatever the fate of its use as a political weapon, its success as an economical weapon depends solely on the zeal with which it is preached and the readiness with which it is received by the people.

Instinctive Loyalty

26-April-1907

The Indian Mirror reflects nothing but its own self when it says:—"Nobody in the country, howsoever absorbed in the dreams of an Indian autonomy, wishes to see the British connection severed and the country left to her fate. This instinctive clinging to some sort of relation with England, in other words, this loyalty to the Crown of England, affords the best ground for optimism about a material improvement in the attitude of the Indian peoples towards their British rulers." There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the Mirror's philosophy. That a country cannot prosper in the true sense of the term unless it be left to its own fate is a truism with all right-thinking men. The publicists of the Indian Mirror type have a comfortable gospel of their own revealed to them by a study of their own needs rather than those of the country. No political thinker has as yet sought to controvert the truth that liberty is the essential condition of all-round progress in a nation. Prison life after some time comes to be liked as a matter of habit,—the jailor comes to be respected out of fear of the rod. But to

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describe such diseased and abnormal sentiments as normal and instinctive is to mistake a slave for a man. It is highly prejudicial to our returning sense of self-respect that papers like the Indian Mirror should still be able to preach the gospel of servility.

Nationalism, Not Extremism

26-April-1907

It is a curious fact that even after so many months of sustained propaganda and the most clear and definite statements of the new politics, there should still be so much confusion as to the attitude of the Nationalist party and the elementary issues they have raised. This confusion is to some extent due to wilful distortion and deliberate evasion of the true issues. The ultra-loyalist publicists especially, Indian or Anglo-Indian, are obliged to ignore the true position of the party, misnamed Extremists, because they are unable to meet its trenchant and irresistible logic and commonsense. But with the great majority of Indian politicians the misapprehension is genuine. The political teaching of the new school is so novel and disturbing to their settled political ideas,—or rather the conventional, abstract, second-hand formulas which take the place of ideas—that they cannot even grasp its true nature and turn from it with repugnance before they have given themselves time to understand it. The most obstinate of these misapprehensions is the idea that the new politics is a counsel of despair, a mad revolutionary fury induced by Curzonian reaction. We can afford to pass over this misapprehension with contempt, when it is put forward by foolish, prejudiced or conceited critics who are merely trying to bring odium on the movement or to express their enlightened superiority over younger politicians. But when a fair and scrupulous opponent honestly trying to understand the Nationalist position falls into the same error, we are bound to meet it and once more clear our position beyond misapprehension or doubt.

Some friends of ours have thought that we were unnecessarily harsh and even unjust in our criticism of Dr. Rash Behari Ghose's speech in the Supreme Legislative Council. They urge

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that Dr. Ghose at least presented the Extremist position with great energy, clearness, courage, and did it with the greater effect as one who himself stood outside our party. We have every respect for Dr. Rash Behari Ghose personally; he is perhaps the foremost jurist in India, a scholar and master of the English tongue, a mine of literature in possession of a style of his own, too rich and scholarly to be turned to such everyday uses as a Legislative Council speech. But eminence in law and literature do not necessarily bring with them a grasp of politics. Dr. Ghose has only recently turned his attention to this field and has not been long enough in touch with the actualities of politics to get a real grasp of them. It is therefore natural that he should be misled by names instead of penetrating beyond names to the true aspects of current politics. The ordinary nicknames of Moderate and Extremist do not properly describe the parties which they are used to label; and they are largely responsible for much confusion of ideas as to the real differences between the two schools. Dr. Ghose evidently labours, like many others, under the obsession of the word Extremist. He imagines that the essential difference between the parties is a difference in attitude and in the intensity of feeling. The Extremists, in his view, are men embittered by oppression which makes even wise men mad; full of passionate repining at their "more than Egyptian bondage", exasperated by bureaucratic reaction, despairing of redress at the hands of the British Government or the British nation, they are advocating an extreme attitude and extreme methods in a spirit of desperate impatience. The Extremist propaganda is, therefore, a protest against misgovernment and a movement of despair driving towards revolt. We are unable to accept this statement of the Nationalist position. On the contrary it so successfully represents the new politics to be what they are not, that we choose it as a starting-point for our explanation of what they are.

The new movement is not primarily a protest against bad Government,—it is a protest against the continuance of British control; whether that control is used well or ill, justly or unjustly, is a minor and unessential consideration. It is not born of a disappointed expectation of admission to British citizenship,

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it is born of a conviction that the time has come when India can, should and will become a great, free and united nation. It is not a negative current of destruction, but a positive, constructive impulse towards the making of modern India. It is not a cry of revolt and despair, but a gospel of national faith and hope. Its true description is not Extremism, but Democratic Nationalism.

These are the real issues. There are at present not two parties in India, but three,—the Loyalists, the Moderates and the Nationalists. The Loyalists would be satisfied with good government by British rulers and a limited share in the administration; the Moderates desire self-government within the British Empire, but are willing to wait for it indefinitely; the Nationalists would be satisfied with nothing less than independence whether within the Empire, if that be possible, or outside it; they believe that the nation cannot and ought not to wait but must bestir itself immediately, if it is not to perish as a nation. The Loyalists believe that Indians have not the capacities and qualities necessary for freedom and even if they succeed in developing the necessary fitness, they would do better for themselves and mankind by remaining as a province of the British Empire; any attempt at freedom will, they think, be a revolt against Providence and can bring nothing but disaster on the country. The Loyalist view is that India cannot, should not and will not be a free, great and united nation. The Moderates believe the nation to be too weak and disunited to aim at freedom; they would welcome independence if it came, but they are not convinced that we have or shall have in the measurable future the means or strength to win it or keep it if won. They therefore put forward Colonial Self-Government as their aim and are unwilling to attempt any methods which presuppose strength and cohesion in the nation. The Moderate view is that India may eventually be united, self-governing within limits and prosperous, but not free and great. The Nationalists hold that Indians are as capable of freedom as any subject nation can be and their defects are the result of servitude and can only be removed by the struggle for freedom; that they have the strength, and, if they get the will, can create the means to win independence. They hold that the choice is

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not between autonomy and provincial Home Rule or between freedom and dependence, but between freedom and national decay and death. They hold, finally, that the past history of our country and the present circumstances are of such a kind that the great unifying tendencies hitherto baffled by insuperable obstacles have at last found the right conditions for success. They believe that the fated hour for Indian unification and freedom has arrived. In brief they are convinced that India should strive to be free, that she can be free and that she will, by the impulse of her past and present, be inevitably driven to the attempt and the attainment of national self-realisation. The Nationalist creed is a gospel of faith and hope.

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Shall India be Free? - The Loyalist Gospel

27-April-1907

Liberty is the first requisite for the sound health and vigorous life of a nation. A foreign domination is in itself an unnatural condition, and if permitted, must bring about other unhealthy and unnatural conditions in the subject people which will lead to fatal decay and disorganisation. Foreign rule cannot build up a nation,—only the resistance to foreign rule can weld the discordant elements of a people into an indivisible unity. When a people, predestined to unity, cannot accomplish its destiny, foreign rule is a provision of Nature by which the necessary compelling pressure is applied to drive its jarring parts into concord. The unnatural condition of foreign rule is brought in for a time in order to cure the previous unnatural condition of insufficient cohesiveness; but this can only be done by the resistance of the subject people; for the incentive to unity given by the alien domination consists precisely in the desire to get rid of it; and if this desire is absent, if the people acquiesce, there can be no force making for unity. Foreign rule was therefore made to be resisted; and to acquiesce in it is to defeat the very intention with which Nature created it.

These considerations are not abstract ideas, but the undeniable teaching of history which is the record of the world's experience. Nationalism takes its stand upon this experience and calls upon the people of India not to allow themselves to fall into the acquiescence in subjection which is the death-sleep of nations, but to make that use of the alien domination which Nature intended,—to struggle against it and throw it off for unity,

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for self-realisation as an independent national organism. In this country, however, there is a class of wise men who regard the rule of the British bureaucracy as a dispensation of Providence, not only to create unity but to preserve it. They preach therefore a gospel of faith in the foreigner, distrust of our countrymen and acquiescence in alien rule as a godsend from on high and an indispensable condition for peace and prosperity. Even those whose hearts rebel against a doctrine so servile, are intellectually so much dominated by it that they cannot embrace Nationalism with their whole heart and try to arrive at a compromise between subjection and independence,—a half-way house between life and death. Their ingenuity discovers an intermediate condition in which the blessings of freedom will be harmoniously wedded with the blessings of subjection; and to this palace in fairyland they have given the name of Colonial Self-Government. If it were not for the existence of this Moderate opinion and its strange parti-coloured delusions we would not have thought it worth while to go back to first principles and show the falsity of the Loyalist gospel of acquiescence. But the Moderate delusion is really a by-product of the Loyalist delusion; and the parent error must be demolished first, before its offspring can be corrected. The Moderates are a hybrid species, emotionally Nationalist, intellectually Loyalist. It is owing to this double nature that their delusions acquire an infinite power for mischief. People listen to them because they claim to be Nationalist and because a sincere Nationalist feeling not infrequently breaks through the false Loyalist reasoning. Moreover by associating themselves with the Moderates on the same platform the Loyalists are enabled to exercise an influence on public opinion which would otherwise not be accorded to them. The gospel according to Sir Pherozshah Mehta would not have such power for harm if it were not allowed to represent itself as one and the same with the gospel according to Mr. Gokhale.

What then are the original ideas from which the Loyalist gospel proceeds? It has a triple foundation of error. First comes the postulate that disunion and weakness are ingrained characteristics of the Indian people and an outside power is necessary

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in order to arbitrate, to keep the peace and to protect the country from the menace of the mightier nations that ring us in. Proceeding from this view and supporting it, is the second postulate that there must be an entire levelling down and sweeping away of all differences; aristocrat and peasant, Brahmin and Sudra, Bengali, Punjabi and Mahratta, all must efface their characteristics and differences before any resistance to foreign domination can be attempted, even if such resistance were desirable. The third postulate is that a healthy development is possible under foreign domination and that this healthy development must be first effected before we can dream of freedom or even of becoming a nation. If these three postulates are granted, then the Loyalist creed is unassailable; if they are proved unsound, not only the Loyalist creed but the standpoint of the Moderates ceases to have any basis of firm ground and becomes a thing in the air. The Nationalist contention is that all these three postulates are monuments of political unreason and have no firm foundation either in historical experience or in the facts we see around us or in the nature of things. They are inconsistent with the fundamental nature of foreign domination; they ignore the experience of all other subject nations; they disregard human nature and the conditions of human development in communities. The Loyalist gospel is as untrue as it is ignoble.

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The Mask Is Off

27-April-1907

The Anglo-Indian journals are trying to assure the public that everything is quiet in Jamalpur under the shadow of the British sword. The accounts that are appearing in various Indian journals put a very different complexion on the situation. It appears, to begin with, that the Gurkhas who were called in to preserve the peace are being allowed in co-operation with local hooligans to break it. The case of image-breaking is being deliberately put off and the whole energy of the executive is devoted to terrorising the Hindus. Several pleaders, a Mukhtar, a Naib of Ramgopalpur and a Superintendent of the Gauripur estate along with other leading gentlemen of Jamalpur have been arrested. "The number of Mahomedan arrests", writes one correspondent, "is simply nil." Comment is hardly necessary. The alliance of the British bureaucracy with hooliganism stands confessed. To take advantage of Mahomedan riots in order to further terrorise by legal proceedings the assaulted Hindus, is the first preoccupation of the local magistrates. We have pointed out already that the procedure is to give scope and room enough for anti-Swadeshi violence and pillage and then to punish the Swadeshists for the crime of self-defence or even simply for the crime of being assaulted. The mask is off.

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Shall India be Free? - National Development and Foreign Rule

29-April-1907

In dealing with the Loyalist creed it will be convenient to examine first the general postulate before we can come to those which apply particularly to the conditions of India. The contention is that a healthy development is possible under foreign domination. In this view national independence is a thing of no moment or at least its importance has been grossly exaggerated. Nations can very well do without it; provided they have a good government which keeps the people happy and contented and allows them to develop their economic activities and moral virtues, they need not repine at being ruled by others. For certain nations in certain periods of their development liberty would be disastrous and subjection to foreign rule is the most healthy condition. India, argue the Loyalists, is an example of such a nation in such a period. The first business of its people is to develop their commerce, become educated and enlightened, reform their society and their manners and so grow more and more fit for self-government. In proportion as they become more civilised and more fit, they will receive from their sympathetic, just and discerning rulers an ever-increasing share in the administration of the country until with entire fitness will come entire possession of the status of British citizenship. The idea is that foreign rule is a Providential dispensation or a provision of Nature for training an imperfectly developed people in the methods of civilisation and the arts of self-government. This theory is a modern invention. Ancient and mediaeval Imperialism frankly acknowledged the principle of might is right; the conquering nation considered that

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its military superiority was in itself a proof that it was meant to rule and the subject nation to obey; liberty, being denied by Providence to the latter, could not be good for it and there was no call on the ruler to concede it either now or hereafter. This was the spirit in which England conquered and governed Ireland by the same methods of cynical treachery and ruthless massacre which in modern times are usually considered to be the monopoly of despotisms like Turkey and Russia. But by the time that England had fastened its hold on India, a change had come over the modern world. The Greek ideas of freedom and democracy had penetrated the European mind and created the great impulse of democratic Nationalism which dominated Europe in the nineteenth century. The idea that despotism of any kind was an offence against humanity, had crystallised into an instinctive feeling, and modern morality and sentiment revolted against the enslavement of nation by nation, of class by class or of man by man. Imperialism had to justify itself to this modern sentiment and could only do so by pretending to be a trustee of liberty, commissioned from on high to civilise the uncivilised and train the untrained until the time had come when the benevolent conqueror had done his work and could unselfishly retire. Such were the professions with which England justified her usurpation of the heritage of the Moghul and dazzled us into acquiescence in servitude by the splendour of her uprightness and generosity. Such was the pretence with which she veiled her annexation of Egypt. These Pharisaic pretensions were especially necessary to British Imperialism because in England the Puritanic middle class had risen to power and imparted to the English temperament a sanctimonious self-righteousness which refused to indulge in injustice and selfish spoliation except under a cloak of virtue, benevolence and unselfish altruism. The genesis of the Loyalist gospel can be found in the need of British Imperialism to justify itself to the liberalised sentiment of the nineteenth century and to the Puritanic middle-class element in the British nation.

The question then arises, has this theory any firmer root? Is it anything more than a convenient theory? Has it any relations

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with actual facts or with human experience? To answer this question it is necessary to distinguish between three kinds of liberty, which are generally confused together. There is a national liberty or freedom from foreign control; there is an internal liberty or that freedom from the despotism of an individual, a class or a combination of classes to which the name of self-government is properly given; and there is individual liberty or the freedom of the individual from unnecessary and arbitrary restrictions imposed on him either by the society of which he is a part or by the Government, whether that Government be monarchical, democratic, oligarchic or bureaucratic. The question at issue is, then, which, if any, of these three kinds of liberty is essential to the healthy development of national life; or can there be such development without any liberty at all?

The object of national existence, of the formation of men into groups and their tacit agreement to allow themselves to be ruled by an organised instrument of administration which is called the Government, is nothing else than human development in the individual and in the group. The individual, standing alone, cannot develop; he depends on the support and assistance of the group to which he belongs. The group itself cannot develop unless it has an organisation by means of which it not only secures internal peace and order and protection from external attack but also proper conditions which will give free play for the development of its activities and capacities—physical, moral, intellectual. The nation or group is not like the individual who can specialise his development and throw all his energies into one line. The nation must develop military and political greatness and activity, intellectual and aesthetic greatness and activity, commercial greatness and activity, moral sanity and vigour; it cannot sacrifice any of these functions of the organism without making itself unfit for the struggle for life and finally succumbing and perishing under the pressure of more highly organised nations. The purely commercial State like Carthage is broken in the shock with a nation which has developed the military and political as well as the commercial energies. A purely military state like Sparta cannot stand against

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rivals which to equal military efficiency unite a greater science, intellectual energy and political ability. A purely aesthetic and intellectual state like the Greek colonies in Italy or a purely moral and spiritual community like the empire of Peru are blotted out of existence in the clash with ruder but more vigorous and many-sided organisms. No Government, therefore, can really be good for a nation or serve the purposes of national life and development which does not give full scope for the development of all the national activities, capacities and energies. Foreign rule is unnatural and fatal to a nation precisely because by its very nature it throws itself upon these activities and capacities and crushes them down in the interests of its own continued existence. Even when it does not crush them down violently, it obstructs their growth passively by its very presence. The subject nation becomes dependent, disorganised and loses its powers by atrophy. For this reason national independence is absolutely necessary to national growth. There can be no national development without national liberty.

Individual liberty is necessary to national development, because, if the individual is unduly hampered, the richness of national life suffers and is impoverished. If the individual is given free room to realise himself, to perfect, specialise and enrich his particular powers and attain the full height of his manhood, the variety and rapidity of national progress is immensely increased. In so far as he is fettered and denied scope, the development of the nation is cramped and retarded. A Government which denies scope and liberty to the individual, as all foreign Governments must to a considerable extent deny it, helps to cramp the healthy development of the nation and not to forward it. The development of the individual is and must be an embarrassment to the intruding power unless the numbers are so few that they can be bribed into acquiescence and support by the receipt of honours, employment or other personal advantages. For development creates ambition and nothing is more fatal to the continuance of foreign rule than the growth of ambitions in the subject race which it cannot satisfy. The action of Lord Curzon in introducing the Universities Act was for the British

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domination in India an act of inevitable necessity, which had to be done some time or other. Its only defect from the Imperialist point of view was that it came too late.

Just as individual liberty is necessary for the richness and variety of national development, so self-government is necessary for its completeness and the full deployment of national strength. If certain classes are dominant and others depressed, the result is that the potential strength of the depressed classes is so much valuable force lost to the sum of national strength. The dominant classes may undoubtedly show a splendid development and may make the nation great and famous in history; but when all is said the strength of the nation is then only the sum of the strength of a few privileged classes. The great weakness of India in the past has been the political depression and nullity of the mass of the population. It was not from the people of India that India was won by Moghul or Briton, but from a small privileged class. On the other hand the strength and success of the Marathas and Sikhs in the eighteenth century was due to the policy of Shivaji and Guru Govind which called the whole nation into the fighting line. They failed only because the Marathas could not preserve the cohesion which Shivaji gave to their national strength or the Sikhs the discipline which Guru Govind gave to the Khalsa. Is it credible that a foreign rule would either knowingly foster or allow the growth of that universal political consciousness in the subject nation which self-government implies? It is obvious that foreign rule can only endure so long as political consciousness can be either stifled by violence or hypnotised into inactivity. The moment the nation becomes politically self-conscious, the doom of the alien predominance is sealed. The bureaucracy which rules us, is not only foreign in origin but external to us,—it holds and draws nourishing sustenance for itself from the subject organism by means of tentacles and feelers thrust out from its body thousands of miles away. Its type in natural history is not the parasite, but the octopus. Self-government would mean the removal of the tentacles and the cessation both of the grip and the sustenance. Foreign rule is naturally opposed to the development of the subject nation as a separat

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e organism, to the growth of its capacity for and practice in self-government, to the development of capacity and ambition of its individuals. To think that a foreign rule will deliberately train us for independence or allow us to train ourselves is to suppose a miracle in nature.

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Shall India Be Free?

30-April-1907

We are arguing the impossibility of a healthy national development under foreign rule,—except by reaction against that rule. The foreign domination naturally interferes with and obstructs the functioning of the native organs of development. It is therefore in itself an unnatural and unhealthy condition, a wound, a disease, which must result, unless arrested, in the mortification and rotting to death of the indigenous body politic. If a nation were an artificial product which could be made, then it might be possible for one nation to make another. But a nation cannot be made,—it is an organism which grows under the stress of a principle of life within. We speak indeed of nation-building and of the makers of a nation, but these are only convenient metaphors. The nation-builder, Cavour or Bismarck, is merely the incarnation of a national force which has found its hour and its opportunity, of an inner will which has awakened under the stress of shaping circumstances. A nation is, indeed, the outward expression of a community of sentiment, whether it be the sentiment of a common blood or the sentiment of a common religion or the sentiment of a common interest or any or all of these sentiments combined. Once this sentiment grows strong enough to develop into a will towards unity and to conquer obstacles and make full use of favouring circumstances, the development of the nation becomes inevitable and there is no power which can ultimately triumph against it. But the process, however rapid it may be, is one of growth and not of manufacture. The first impulse of the developing nation is to provide itself with a centre, a means of self-expression and united action, a chief organ or national nerve-centre with subsidiary organs acting

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under and in harmony with it. If the need of self-protection is its first overpowering need, the organization may be military or semi-military under a single chief or a warlike ruling class; if the pressure from outside is not overpowering or the need of internal development strongly felt, it may take the shape of some form of partial or complete self-government. In either case the community becomes a nation or organic State.

What, then, is the place of foreign rule in such an organic development? The invasion of the body politic by a foreign element must result either in the merging of the alien into the indigenous nationality or in his superimposition on the latter in a precarious position which can only be maintained by coercion or by hypnotizing the subject people into passivity. If the alien and the native-born population are akin in blood and in religion, the fusion will be easy. Even if they are not, yet if the former settles down in the conquered country and makes it his motherland, community of interests will in the end inevitably bring about union. The foreigners become sons of the country by adoption and the sentiment of a common motherland is always a sufficient substitute for the sentiment of a common race-origin. The difficulty of religion may be solved by the conversion of the foreigner to the religion of the people he has conquered, as happened with the ancient invaders of India, or by the conversion of the conquered people to the religion of their rulers, as happened in Persia and other countries conquered by the Arabs. Even if no such general change of creed can be effected, yet the two religions may become habituated to each other and mutually tolerant, or the sentiment of a common interest and a common sonhood of one motherland may overcome the consciousness of religious differences. In all these contingencies there is a fusion, complete or partial; and the nation, though it may be profoundly affected for good or evil, need not be disorganized or lose the power of development. India under Mahomedan rule, though greatly disturbed and thrown into continual ferment and revolution, did not lose its power of organic readjustment and development. Even the final anarchy which preceded the British domination, was not a process of disorganization but an acute crisis,—the

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attempt of Nature to effect an organic readjustment in the body politic.

Unfortunately the crisis was complicated by the presence and final domination of a foreign body, foreign in blood, foreign in religion, foreign in interest. This body remains superimposed on the native-born population without any roots in the soil. Its presence, so long as it is neither merged in the nation nor dislodged, must make for the disorganization and decay of the subject people. It is possible for a foreign body differing in blood, religion and interest, to amalgamate with the native organism but only on one of two conditions; either the foreign body must cut itself off from its origin and take up its home in the conquered country,—a course which is obviously impossible in the present problem,—or it must assimilate the subject State into the paramount State by the removal of all differences, inequalities, and conflicting interests. We shall point out the insuperable difficulties in the way of any such arrangement which will at once preserve British supremacy and give a free scope to Indian national development. At present there is no likelihood of the intruding force submitting easily to the immense sacrifices which such an assimilation would involve. Yet if no such assimilation takes place, the position of the British bureaucracy in India in no way differs from the position of the Turkish despotism as it existed with regard to the Christian populations of the Balkans previous to their independence or of the Austrians in Lombardy before the Italian Revolution. It is a position which endangers, demoralizes and eventually weakens the ruling nation as Austria and Turkey were demoralized and weakened, and which disorganizes and degrades the subject people. A very brief consideration of the effects of British rule in India will carry this truth home.

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Moonshine for Bombay Consumption

01-May-1907

The Calcutta correspondent of the Indu Prakash seems to be an adept in fitting his news to the likings of his clientele. He has discovered that the old party and the new are united not against the Government but against the Mahomedans. All are looking to the Government with a reverent expectation of justice from that immaculate source. We do not know who this antiMahomedan and pro-Government Calcutta correspondent may be; but we hope the Bombay public will not be deceived by his inventions. If there is one overmastering feeling in Bengal it is indignation with the Government for allowing or countenancing the outrages in the Eastern districts. Even the Loyalist organs are full of expressions of uneasiness and perturbed wonder at the inaction of the authorities while Moderate organs like the Bengalee and Moderate leaders like Babu Surendranath Banerji have expressed plainly an adverse view of the action and spirit of the Government. There is no doubt considerable resentment against men like Nawab Salimullah for fomenting the disturbances; but there is no deep-seated resentment against the low-class Mahomedans who are merely the tools of men who themselves keep safely under cover. The fight is not a fight between Hindus and Mahomedans but between the bureaucrats and Swadeshists.

The Reformer on Moderation

01-May-1907

The Indian Social Reformer has discovered that the Moderate programme needs revision. Moderation is defined by this authority as a desire to preserve the British Raj until social reform has

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accomplished itself, for the reason that an indigenous Government is not likely to favour social reform so much as the present rulers do. The Reformer would therefore like the Moderate programme to be modified in order to tally with its own definition of moderation. We presume that, in its view, the Congress instead of demanding Legislative Councils should ask for the forcible marriage of Hindu widows; instead of the separation of the judicial and executive, the separation of reformed wives from unreformed husbands or vice versa; instead of the repeal of the Arms Act, the abolition of the Hindu religion. This introduction of social details into a political programme is a fad of a few enthusiasts and is contrary to all reason. The alteration of the social system to suit present needs is a matter for the general sense of the community and the efforts of individuals. To mix it up with politics in which men of all religious views and various social opinions can join is to confuse issues hopelessly. It is not true that by removing the defects of our social structure we shall automatically become a nation and fit for freedom. If it were so, Burma would be a free nation at present. Nor can we believe that the present system is favourable to social reconstruction or that self-government would be fatal to it. The reverse is the case. Of course, if social reform means the destruction of everything old or Hindu because it is old or Hindu, the continuance of the present political and mental dependence on England and English ideals is much to be desired by the social reformers; for it is gradually destroying all that was good as well as much that was defective in the old society. With this programme of becoming a nation by denationalisation we have no sympathy. But if a healthy social development be aimed at, it is more likely to occur in a free India when the national needs will bring about a natural evolution. Society is not an artificial manufacture to be moulded and remodelled at will, but a growth. If it is to be healthy and strong it must have healthy surroundings and a free atmosphere.

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Shall India Be Free? - Unity and British Rule

02-May-1907

It is a common cry in this country that we should effect the unity of its people before we try to be free. There is no cry which is more plausible, none which is more hollow. What is it that we mean when we talk of the necessity of unity? Unity does not mean uniformity and the removal of all differences. There are some people who talk as if unity in religion, for instance, could not be accomplished except by uniformity. But uniformity of religion is a psychical impossibility forbidden by the very nature of the human mind. So long as men differ in intellect, in temperament, in spiritual development, there must be different religions and different sects of the same religion. The Brahmo Samaj was set on foot in India by Rammohan Roy with the belief that this would be the one religion of India which would replace and unite the innumerable sects now dividing our spiritual consciousness. But in a short time this uniting religion was itself rent into three discordant sects, two of which show signs of internal fissure even within their narrow limits; and all these divisions rest not on anything essential but on differences of intellectual constitution, variety of temperament, divergence of the lines of spiritual development. The unity of the Hindu religion cannot be attained by the destruction of the present sects and the substitution of a religion based on the common truths of Hinduism. It can only be effected if there is, first, a common feeling that the sectarian differences are of subordinate importance compared with the community of spiritual truths and discipline as distinct from the spiritual truths and discipline

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of other religions, and, secondly, a common agreement in valuing and cherishing the Hindu religion in its entirety as a sacred and inalienable possession. This is what fundamentally constitutes the sentiment of unity, whether it be religious, political or social. There must be the sense of a community in something dear and precious which others do not possess; there must be an acute sense of difference from other communities which have no share in our common possession; there must be a supreme determination to cherish, assert and preserve our common possession from disparagement and destruction. But the sentiment of unity is not sufficient to create unity; we require also the practice of unity. Where the sentiment of unity exists and the practice does not, the latter can only be acquired by a common effort to accomplish one great, common and all-absorbing object.

The first question we have to answer is,—can this practical unity be accomplished by acquiescence in foreign rule? Certainly, under foreign rule a peculiar kind of uniformity of condition is attained. Brahmin and Sudra, aristocrat and peasant, Hindu and Mahomedan, all are brought to a certain level of equality by equal inferiority to the ruling class. The differences between them are trifling compared with the enormous difference between all of them and the white race at the top. But this uniformity is of no value for the purposes of national unity, except in so far as the sense of a common inferiority excites a common desire to revolt against and get rid of it. If the foreign superiority is acquiesced in, the result is that the mind becomes taken up with the minor differences and instead of getting nearer to unity disunion is exaggerated. This is precisely what has happened in India under British rule. The sentiment of unity has grown, but in practice we are both socially and politically far more disunited and disorganized than before the British occupation. In the anarchy that followed the decline of the Moghul, the struggle was between the peoples of various localities scrambling for the inheritance of Akbar and Shahjahan. This was not a vital and permanent element of disunion. But the present disorganisation is internal and therefore more likely to reach the vitals of the community.

This disorganisation is the natural and inevitable result of

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foreign rule. A state which is created by a common descent, real or fictitious, by a common religion or by common interests welding together into one a great number of men or group of men, is a natural organism which so long as it exists has always within it the natural power of revival and development. But as political science has pointed out, a state created by the encampment of a foreign race among a conquered population and supported in the last resort not by any section of the people but by external force, is an inorganic state. The subject population, it has been said, inevitably becomes a disorganised crowd. Consciously or unconsciously the tendency of the intruding body is to break down all the existing organs of national life and to engross all power in itself. The Moghul rule had not this tendency because it immediately naturalised itself in India. British rule has and is forced to have this tendency because it must persist in being an external and intruding presence encamped in the country and not belonging to it. It is doubtful whether there is any example in history of an alien domination which has been so monstrously ubiquitous, inquisitorial and intolerant of any centre of strength in the country other than itself as the British bureaucracy. There were three actual centres of organised strength in pre-British India,—the supreme ruler, Peshwa or Raja or Nawab reposing his strength on the Zamindars or Jagirdars; the Zamindar in his own domain reposing his strength on his retinue and tenants; and the village community independent and self-existent. The first result of the British occupation was to reduce to a nullity the supreme ruler, and this was often done, as in Bengal, by the help of the Zamindars. The next result was the disorganisation of the village community. The third was the steady breaking-up of the power of the Zamindars with the help of a new class which the foreigners created for their own purposes,—the bourgeois or middle class. Unfortunately for the British bureaucracy it had, in order to get the support and assistance of the middle class, to pamper the latter and allow it to grow into a strength and develop organs of its own, such as the Press, the Bar, the University, the Municipalities, District Boards, etc. Finally, the situation with which British statesmen had to deal was this:

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the natural sovereigns of the land helpless and disorganised, the landed aristocracy helpless and disorganised, the peasantry helpless and disorganised, but a middle class growing in strength, pretensions and organisation. British statesmanship, following the instinctive and inevitable trend of an alien domination, set about breaking down the power it had established in order to destroy the sole remaining centre of national strength and possible revival. If this could be done, if the middle class could be either tamed, bribed or limited in its expansion, the disorganisation would be complete. Nothing would be left of the people of India except a disorganised crowd with no centre of strength or means of resistance.

It was in Bengal that the middle class was most developed and self-conscious; and it was in Bengal therefore that a quick succession of shrewd and dangerous blows was dealt at the once useful but now obnoxious class. The last effort to bribe it into quietude was the administration of Lord Ripon. It was now sought to cripple the organs through which this strength was beginning slowly to feel and develop its organic life. The Press was intimidated, the Municipalities officialised, the University officialised and its expansion limited. Finally the Partition sought with one blow to kill the poor remnants of the Zamindar's power and influence and to weaken the middle class of Bengal by dividing it. The suppression of the middle class was the recognised policy of Lord Curzon. After Mr. Morley came to power, it was, we believe, intended to recognise and officialise the Congress itself if possible. Even now it is quite conceivable, in view of the upheaval in Bengal and the Punjab, that an expanded Legislature with the appearance of a representative body but the reality of official control, may be given, not as a concession but as a tactical move. The organs of middle-class political life can only be dangerous so long as they are independent. By taking away their independence they become fresh sources of strength for the Government,—of weakness for the class which strives to find in them its growth and self-expression.

The Partition opened the eyes of the threatened class to the nature of the attack that was being made on it; and the

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result was a widespread and passionate revolt which has now spread from Bengal to the Punjab and threatens to break out all over India. The struggle is now a struggle for life and death. If the bureaucracy conquers, the middle class will be broken, shattered, perhaps blotted out of existence; if the middle class conquers, the bureaucracy are not for long in the land. Everything depends on the success or failure of the middle class in getting the people to follow it for a common salvation. They may get this support by taking their natural place as awakeners and leaders of the nation; they may get it by the energy and success with which they wage their battle with the bureaucracy. In Eastern Bengal, for instance, the aid of a few Mahomedan aristocrats has enabled the bureaucracy to turn a large section of the Mahomedan masses against the Hindu middle class; and the educated community is fighting with its back to the wall for its very existence. If it succeeds under such desperate circumstances, even the Mahomedan masses will eventually follow its leading.

This process of political disorganisation is not so much a deliberate policy on the part of the foreign bureaucracy, as an instinctive action which it can no more help than the sea can help flowing. The dissolution of the subject organisation into a disorganised crowd is the inevitable working of an alien despotism.

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Extremism in the Bengalee

03-May-1907

The Bengalee, excited by the news of a second outrage on the Hindu religion at Ambariya in Mymensingh, came out yesterday with a frankly extremist issue. We only wish that we could look on this as anything more than a fit of passing excitement; but the Bengalee is hot today and cold tomorrow. Nevertheless, what it says is true, and it is well and pointedly expressed:—

"Fifty years ago, such a revolting outrage, committed upon the religious susceptibilities of Hindus, would have resulted in grave complications and the Government would have left no stone unturned to propitiate the Hindu Chiefs and the Hindu population, and last, though not the least, the Hindu section of the Native Army. Today Government officials openly side, presumably with the approval of the head of the Provincial Administration, with those who break Hindu images, desecrate Hindu temples, plunder the houses and shops of Hindus and ravish Hindu women.

"Is this the sum total of our progress after a century and a half of British rule? Have we, Bengali Hindus, become so craven-hearted, so utterly incapable of self-defence, that the Government no longer thinks it necessary to avoid wounding our tenderest feelings or even to keep up appearances? Verily, a nation gets precisely the kind of treatment it deserves; and it appears that in the opinion of Mr. Hare—so far tacitly endorsed by Lord Minto—a nation of weeping and shrieking women as the Bengalis are regarded by their rulers, deserves only to be trampled underfoot. And recent happenings in the district of Mymensingh show that the Government has taken an exact measure of the Hindus of Bengal. For are they not the embodiment

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of patience and—propriety? They are too highly educated and reflective, you know, to do anything rashly and the native hue of their resolution is most reasonably and naturally and speedily sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. They may be quite right from their personal standpoint; but national heroes are not usually made of such stuff nor are national interests promoted by the wearers of soft raiment. The worship of Motherland is the sole privilege of those choice spirits who have the heart to incur sacrifice, the hand to execute the mandate of conscience, and the recklessness to hang propriety and prudence."

And the Bengalee complains that we do not even lift our little finger to protect our temples, our holy images and even our women from defilement and dishonour. All this is surprising enough in a Moderate organ; if set before anyone without any clue as to its source, it might all be taken as a verbatim extract from the editorial columns of the Bande Mataram.

"Is this the sum total of our progress after a century and a half of British rule?"—asks the Bengalee. This precisely and nothing else than this is the one inevitable result of British rule. Has it taken our contemporary so long to discover that foreign rule, and especially such a rule as that of the British bureaucracy which demands entire subordination and dependence in the subject people, can have no other effect than to emasculate and degrade? Loyalists may enumerate a hundred blessings of British rule—though, when closely looked at, they turn out to be apples of the Dead Sea which turn to dust and cinders when tasted,—none of them can compensate for the one radical and indispensable loss which accompanies them, the loss of our manhood, of our courage, of our self-respect and habit of initiative. When these are gone, merely the shadow of a man is left; and neither the veneer of Western culture, nor enlightenment, nor position, nor British peace, nor railways, nor telegraphs, nor anything else that God can give or man bestow can compensate for the loss of the very basis of individual and national strength and character. Social reform? What reform can there be of a society of lay figures who pretend to be men? Industrial progress? What will be the use of riches which may be taken from us at any

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time by the strong hand? Moral and religious improvement? What truth or value have these phrases to men who see their religion outraged before their eyes and whose wives are never safe from dishonour? Get strength first, get independence and all these things will be added unto you. But persist in your foolish moderation, your unseasonable and unreasonable prudence, and another fifty years will find you more degraded than ever, a nation of Greeks with polished intellects and debased souls, body and soul helplessly at the mercy of alien masters.

The Bengalee in these fiery paragraphs denounces for the moment prudence and moderation as mere weakness and cowardice. It recommends recklessness and asks us to lift our hands in defence of our temples, our holy images and the honour of our women. This is probably no more than a rhetorical outburst to relieve overcharged feelings. But if there is any seriousness at all in our contemporary's wrath, let him seriously consider what his appeal means. We are to rush to the defence of our temples, our holy images, the honour of our women. But who are "we"? Not surely the people of Eastern Bengal and Northern Bengal, who, outnumbered, overwhelmed, are struggling against overwhelming odds, and, in spite of weak points like Jamalpur, are not acquitting themselves ill. In West Bengal the Hindus are in overwhelming majority; in West Bengal there is a sturdy Hindu lower class; there are thousands of students who throng to Swadeshi meetings and parade at Swadeshi jatras and festivals. But West Bengal is under the spell of Babu Surendranath and his Moderate colleagues. Will Babu Surendranath give the word? Is he prepared to speed the fiery cross? Shall West Bengal pour into the East and North to help our kinsmen, to protect "our temples, our holy images and our women from defilement and dishonour"? If not, this momentary boldness and manliness is no more than a fire of straw which had better not have been kindled. To quote our contemporary,—"The worship of Motherland is the sole privilege of those choice spirits who have the heart to incur sacrifice, the hand to execute the mandate of conscience and the recklessness to hang propriety and prudence."

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Hare or Another

03-May-1907

Our Moderate contemporaries seem unable to understand that the misgovernment in Eastern Bengal is a natural result of British policy or rather of the peculiar position of the bureaucracy in India. That position can only be maintained either by hypnotising the people or terrorising them. The new spirit is unsealing the eyes of the people and breaking the hypnotic spell of the last century; especially in East Bengal the process of disillusionment has been fairly thorough. The bureaucracy is therefore compelled to fall back on the only other alternative, terrorism. But our Moderate friends will persist in believing that the policy in East Bengal is only the policy of individuals. They are therefore "demanding" the recall of Mr. Hare. "He has eclipsed", says the Bengalee, "the record of Aurangzeb as a persecutor of Hindus, without Aurangzeb's excuse of religious zeal.... He has made every Hindu hate British rule in the privacy of his heart." But will the recall of Mr. Hare be of any more effect than the recall of Bampfylde Fuller? For our part we had never any illusions on the point. We knew that what Sir Bampfylde began in his fury and heat of rage, Mr. Hare would pursue in cold blood and with silent calculation. Supposing the wish of the Bengalee's heart gratified and Mr. Hare sent home to the enjoyment of his well-earned pension, what then? A third man will come who will carry out the same policy in a different way. It is not Hare or Fuller who determines the policy of the Shillong Government, but the inexorable necessity of the bureaucratic position which drives them into a line of action insane but inevitable. They must either crush the Swadeshi movement or give up their powers wholly or in part to the people; and to the latter course they cannot be persuaded by any means which we have yet employed.

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Look on This Picture, Then on That

06-May-1907

Britain, the benevolent, Britain, the mother of Parliaments, Britain, the champion of liberty, Britain, the deliverer of the slave,—such was the sanctified and legendary figure which we have been trained to keep before our eyes from the earliest years of our childhood. Our minds imbued through and through with the colours of that legend, we cherished a faith in the justice and benevolence of Britain more profound, more implicit, more a very part of our beings than the faith of the Christian in Christ or of the Mahomedan in his Prophet. Officials might be oppressive, Viceroys and Lieutenant-Governors reactionary, the Secretary of State obdurate, Parliament indifferent, the British public careless, but our faith was not to be shaken. If Anglo-India was unkind, we wooed the British people in India itself. If the British people failed us, we said that it was because the Conservatives were in power. If a Liberal Secretary showed himself no less obdurate, we set it down to his personal failings and confidently awaited justice from a Liberal Government in which he should have no part. If the most Radical of Radical Secretaries condemned us to age-long subjection to a paternal and absolute bureaucracy, we whispered to the people, "Wait, wait; Britain, the true Britain, the generous, the benevolent, the lover and giver of freedom, is only sleeping; she shall awake again and we shall see her angelic and transfigured beauty." Where precisely was this Britain we believed in, no man could say, but we would not give up our faith. "Credo quia impossibile";—I believe because it is impossible, had become our political creed. Other countries might be selfish, violent, greedy, tyrannical, unjust; in other countries politics might be a continual readjustment

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of conflicting interests and clashing strengths. But Britain, the Britain of our dreams, was guided only by the light of truth and justice and reason; high ideals, noble impulses, liberal instincts, these were the sole guides of her political actions,—by the lustre of these bright moral fires she guided her mighty steps through an admiring and worshipping world. That was the dream; and so deeply had it lodged in our imaginations that not only the professed Loyalists, the men of moderation, but even the leading Nationalists, those branded as Extremists, could not altogether shake off its influence. Only recently Srijut Bipin Chandra Pal at Rajamundry told his hearers that those who thought the British Government would crush us if we tried by passive resistance to make administration impossible, held too low an opinion of British character and British civilisation. We fancy Srijut Bipin Chandra watching from the south the welter of official anarchy in East Bengal and the Punjab must have modified to a certain extent his trust in the bearing-power of British high-mindedness. We ourselves, though we had our own views about British character and civilisation, have allowed ourselves to speculate whether it was not just possible that the British bureaucracy might be sufficiently tender of their reputation to avoid extreme, violent and arbitrary measures.

That was the dream. The reality to which we awake, is Rawalpindi and Jamalpur. The events in the Punjab are an instructive lesson in the nature of bureaucratic rule. The Punjab has, since the Mutiny, been a quiet, loyal and patient province; whatever burdens have been laid on it, its people have borne without complaint; whatever oppression might go on, it gave rise to no such clamour and agitation as the least arbitrary act would be met with in Bengal. How have the bureaucracy treated this loyal and quiet people? What fruit have they reaped from their loyalty, the men who saved the British Empire in 1857? Intolerable burdens, insolent treatment, rude oppression. The Anglo-Indian cry is that disloyal Bengal has infected loyal Punjab with the virus of sedition. Undoubtedly, the new spirit which has gone out like a mighty fire from Bengal lighting up the whole of India, has found its most favourable ground in the Punjab; but

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a fire does not burn without fuel, and where there is the most revolutionary spirit, there, we can always be sure, has been the most oppression. The water tax, the land laws, the Colonisation Act legalising the oppressions and illegalities under which the Punjab landholders and peasantry have groaned, had generated the feeling of an intolerable burden, and when a few fearless men brought to the people the message of self-help, the good tidings that in their own hands lay their own salvation, the men of the Punjab found again their ancient spirit and determined to stand upright in the strength of their manhood. They committed no act of violence, they broke no law. They confined themselves to sending in a statement of their grievances to the Government and passively abstaining from the use of the Canal water so that the bureaucracy might not benefit by an iniquitous tax. The rulers of India know well that if passive resistance is permitted, the artificial fabric of bureaucratic despotism will fall down like the walls of Jericho before mere sound, with the mere breath of a people's revolution. To save the situation, they resorted to the usual device of stifling the voice of the people into silence. On a frivolous pretext they struck at the Punjabee. The only result was that the calm resolution of the people received its first tinge of fierce indignation. Then the bureaucracy hurriedly resolved to lop off the tall heads—the policy of the tyrant Tarquin which is always the resort of men without judgment or statesmanship. Lala Hansraj, one of the most revered and beloved of the Punjab leaders, a man grown grey in the quiet and selfless service of his country, Ajit Singh, the nationalist orator, and other men of repute and leading were publicly threatened with prosecution and imprisonment as criminals and an enquiry begun with great pomp and circumstance. Then followed a phenomenon unprecedented, we think, in recent Indian history. For the first time the man in the workshop and the man in the street have risen in revolt for purely political reasons in anger at an attack on purely political leaders. The distinction, which Anglo-India has striven to draw between the 'Babu class' and the people, has in the Punjab ceased to exist. It was probably the panic at this alarming phenomenon which hurried the Punjab Government

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into an extraordinary coup d'état, also unprecedented in recent Indian history. The result is that we have a strange companion picture to that dream of a benevolent and angelic Britain,—a city of unarmed men terrorised by the military, the leaders of the people hurried from their daily avocations to prison, siege-guns pointed at the town, police rifles ready to fire on any group of five men or more to be seen in the street, bail refused to respectable pleaders and barristers from sheer terror of their influence. Look on this picture, then on that!

And what next? It is too early to say. This much only is certain that a new stage begins in the struggle between democracy and bureaucracy, a new chapter opens in the history of the progress of Indian Nationalism.

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Curzonism for the University

08-May-1907

At last the Brahmastra which Lord Curzon forged for the stifling of patriotism through the instrumentality of the University, is to be utilised, and utilised to its full capacity. We all remember the particular skirmish in the first Swadeshi struggle in which Sir Bampfylde Fuller fell. Sir Bampfylde insisted on the disaffiliation of the Serajgunge Schools because the teachers and students were publicly taking part in politics. Lord Minto's Government refused to support him in this action because it was inadvisable, having regard to the troubled nature of the times, and Sir Bampfylde had to resign. Whatever stronger motives were behind Lord Minto's action, this was the ostensible occasion for a resignation which practically amounted to a dismissal. Now we find the same Government and the same Lord Minto outfullering Fuller and threatening in much more troubled times against all Government or aided or affiliated Colleges and Schools the action which Sir Bampfylde contemplated against only two.

The circular letter issued to the local Governments "with the object of protecting Higher Education in India" from any connection with politics, is an awkward and clumsily worded document such as we would not have expected from the pen of Sir H. Risley, but it manages to make its object and methods pretty clear. The object is to put a stop to the system of National Volunteers which is growing up throughout Bengal, to use the Universities as an instrument for stifling the growth of political life and incidentally to prevent men of ability and influence in the educational line from becoming a political power. This is how Lord Minto, presumably with the approval of Mr. John Morley, proposes to bring about these objects. The objects of

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their benevolent and high-minded attention are divided into four classes, schoolboys, college students, schoolmasters, professors, and for each a scientifically varied treatment is carefully prescribed.

For students in high schools, "In the interest of the boys themselves, it is clearly undesirable that they should be distracted from their work by attending political meetings or engaging in any form of political agitation. In the event of such misconduct being persisted in and encouraged or permitted by masters or managing authorities, the offending school can after due warning be dealt with—(a) by the local Government, which has the power of withdrawing any grant-in-aid and of withholding the privilege of competing for scholarships and of receiving scholarship-holders; (b) by the University, which can withdraw recognition from the school, the effect of which is to prevent it from sending up pupils as candidates for matriculation examination." Students in high schools are therefore to be debarred from all political education and brought up on an exclusive diet of Lee-Warner and Empire Day. Attending political meetings, outside school hours, mind you, and, it may be, with the full consent of the guardians, is to be reckoned as misconduct coming within the scope of school discipline. It is to be punished by the disciplining, that is to say, the flogging or expulsion of the boys. But what if the teachers or the managing authorities remember that they are men and not dogs who for a little food from the Government are ready to do its will just or unjust? What if they decline to do the Government's dirty work for it? Then the local magistrate appears on the scene and takes away the grant-in-aid and the privilege of competing for scholarships and of receiving scholarship-holders. But supposing there should still be found a Vidyasagar or two who would contemptuously spurn these bribes and prefer to keep his manhood? For that also this provident circular has provided. The school can be refused recognition, a refusal which will mean exclusion of its students from a college education. For this purpose the local Government will report to the University "which alone is legally competent to inflict the requisite penalty". But if this sole legal authority

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should decline to act on the report of the local Government? Then, it appears, there is another sole authority which is legally or illegally competent, the Government itself. The report is to be understood not as a report but as an order, and if it is disobeyed, the University "would fail to carry out the educational trust with which the law has invested it, and it would be the duty of the Government to intervene".

The next class is composed of university students. In their case the Government is not prepared to punish them, as a general rule, for merely attending political meetings. We take it that, in special cases, e.g. if it were a meeting addressed by Srijut Bipin Chandra Pal or Syed Haidar Reza or Mr. Tilak, they will not be punished. But if they take an active part in the meeting, then the need for discipline will begin. Any action which will bring undesirable notoriety upon their college, will be sufficient ground for Government interference. Picketing is of course forbidden to the student and so is open violence—such for instance as the defence of his father's house, person and property from Mahomedan goondas or of the chastity of his wife, sister or mother from violation by political hooligans.

The schoolmaster is mercifully treated. He is graciously conceded the right of having his own opinions and even of expressing them within limits set by the alien bureaucracy. "If, therefore, the public utterances of a schoolmaster are of such a character as to endanger the orderly development of the boys under his charge by introducing into their immature minds doctrines subversive of their respect for authority and calculated to impair their usefulness as citizens and to hinder their advancement in after life, his proceedings must be held to constitute a dereliction of duty, and may properly be visited with disciplinary action." In plain unofficial English the schoolmaster will be allowed to teach loyalty and subservience, but if he teaches patriotism, he must be suspended, degraded or dismissed. If he takes his pupils or encourages them to go to political meetings,—barring celebrations of the Empire Day,—he will, of course, be dismissed at once. Finally the College Professors, men like Srijuts Surendranath Banerji, Aswini Kumar Dutta, Krishna Kumar

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Mitra, are not to be altogether gagged, but their hands are to be bound. "If he diverts his students' minds to political agitation," as Srijut Surendranath has done for decades, "if he encourages them to attend political meetings or personally" conducts them to such meetings,—this is obviously aimed at Srijut Krishna Kumar Mitra and the Anti-Circular Society—"or if he adopts a line of action which disturbs and disorganises the life and work of the College at which he is employed",—whatever this portentous phrase may mean,—the College is to be disaffiliated or the offender expelled.

This ukase out-Russias Russia. Not even in Russia have such systematically drastic measures been taken to discourage political life and patriotic activity among the young. Not even the omnipotent Tsar has dared to issue an ukase so arbitrary, oppressive and inquisitorial. It means that no self-respecting patriot will in future enter or remain in the Government educational service in any position of responsibility; or if he remains, he will not be allowed to remain long. It means that the position of private schools and colleges will become unbearable and they will be compelled to break off connection with the Government University. It means, if there is a grain of self-respect left in the country, that the Government University will perish and a National University be developed. And for this reason we welcome the circular and hope that its provisions will be stringently enforced.

Incompetence or Connivance

08-May-1907

The question has been raised whether the action of the officials in Mymensingh amounts to incompetence or connivance. In face of the open partiality of these bureaucrats, their severity to Hindus and leniency to Mahomedans, it seems absurd to ask the question. To arrest the leading local Hindus en masse and leave the Mahomedans untouched, although influential local Mahomedans have been publicly charged by name with fomenting riots; to loot houses and cutcherries under the pretence of search with

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a Mahomedan mob at their back; to institute rigorous enquiry into the wounding of a Mahomedan and none into the death of a Hindu; to turn a deaf ear to appeals for help from threatened Hindus in the villages and delay action till the looting and outrage have been accomplished; to look on inactive in the face of a surging Mahomedan tumult and be on the alert when there is a rumour of Hindu retaliation;—all this is not incompetence, but connivance. We could have understood it, if the authorities had been equally supine and helpless in dealing with Hindus as with Mahomedans, but this is not the case. Compare the action of the Government in the Punjab with that of the Government in Bengal. In the Punjab, because there was a popular riot, all the leading Hindu gentlemen have been arrested on outrageous charges, the town held by cavalry, siege-guns pointed upon it, the police ordered to butcher any group of five to be seen in the streets or public places. If the East Bengal Nawabs and Maulavis had been similarly treated and similar measures taken in Jamalpur, we could have admired the impartial, if ferocious energy of the bureaucracy. Compare again the action in Bengal itself. A rumour is spread that the Hindus would attack the Mahomedan piece-goods shops in Comilla; at once Mr. Lees posts constables and himself stands on guard over the bazaar. A rumour is spread that the Jamalpur accused are coming up with an army of volunteers and the Gurkhas are out to receive them on the station. Compare this with the action against Mahomedan riot. "Armed police have been sent only after the occurrence. The authorities are taking no preventive measures. The Magistrate is sending Gurkhas and constables after everything has been finished." This phenomenon has been more than once repeated. "All shops at Bakshiganj, Mymensingh, have been looted and papers destroyed. The Image of Kali has been broken to pieces;" but "I hear that a regular enquiry is not taking place in the Bakshiganj case. Some of the accused who were arrested, have been let off. First informations have not been taken in all the cases." Or take this suggestive telegram from Rangpur District: "The rowdy Mahomedans of the locality gathered and looted Bakshiganj Bazar and the houses of several

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Hindu residents of Charkaseria. Females were outraged. The looting continued from noon to midnight." Looting of Hindus accompanied by outrages on their women may continue from noon to midnight, and no one thinks it his business to interfere; but a few Mahomedan shops were supposed to be threatened and a British Magistrate at once appears on the scene.

Soldiers and Assaults

08-May-1907

The Englishman has after much deliberation decided to open a fund in aid of the soldiers who the other day attacked an Indian and assaulted him and was fined Rs. 150 by the Magistrate. The appeal for help is made at the fag end of a long article which opens thus:—

"The private soldier in a large Indian town such as Calcutta has many disabilities and not less temptations. The nature of his occupation leaves him a certain amount of leisure, and it is not to be expected that he should be a man of sufficient culture to spend this leisure in literary pursuits. He sallies forth for a walk, during the course of which he is only too frequently the object of undesirable attention of both a quasi-friendly and an openly hostile kind. Our experience of the excellent Mr. Atkins goes to show that he is as a rule an extremely well-behaved man, chivalrous and kindly in his way, and certainly by no means a swaggering, hectoring bully. Yet he inevitably on occasion comes into unpleasant contact with the natives of the country."

Then the Hare Street journal says that petty dealers and hucksters take advantage of the soldier's ignorance of the language and other disabilities and attempt to cheat him, an "attempt which if discovered leads to the most natural resentment on the part of the victim. This resentment may be, in default of the power of vernacular expression, translated into action, but is the soldier to blame?" Certainly not. And as a white man, he has every right to assault the Indian who is, in the words of Kipling, the Banjo Bard of the Empire, no more than "half-devil, half-child". Belonging to a race that makes laws the soldier has

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the power to take the law into his own hand when dealing with "natives". And the Englishman is sure that "his behaviour is as a rule admirable and reflects credit on the man and the service." The man, of course, is worthy of the service. If attempts to cheat are to be punished with blows by the victim, why, Clive should have been the first Englishman to suffer at the hand of Omichand. We are sorry the wisdom of the Englishman was not shared by Justice Norris who tried the O'Hara case, nor by Lord Curzon who was constrained to punish an entire regiment for misconduct, nor by the Bengal Government in the matter of the Barrackpur shooting case. But we do not quarrel with the Englishman for supporting the soldiers. We are convinced misconduct on their part will not cease till we learn to retaliate. Our duty lies clear before us—to organize measures of self-defence and determine to have tooth for tooth and eye for eye.

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By the Way

09-May-1907

The Anglo-Indian Defence Association exists, we believe, in order to take up the cause of Anglo-Indians individually and generally, whether that cause be just or unjust, whether the individual be a good citizen or a criminal pursued by the law. It is not surprising that such a body should also be found championing the Mahomedan hooligans who, for the present, are the good friends, allies and brothers-in-arms of Anglo-India in its fight against Swadeshi. A certain Mr. Garth, said to be a son of the late Sir Richard Garth, Chief Justice and one of the cheap and numerous tribe of "Friends of India", was the oratorical hero of the occasion. This gentleman was delivered in Mango Lane on Monday of a speech which runs to more than a column of insults and misrepresentations against Swadeshi Bengalis. He informed a wondering world that things in East Bengal were quite the opposite of what the Bengali press reported. We do not exactly understand this phrase. Does Mr. Garth mean that it is the Mahomedans who are being plundered, their men wounded and injured, their women outraged, while the officials give their assailants a free hand and are busy repressing any attempt at self-defence? That would be the opposite of what the Bengali papers represent.

But Mr. Garth then assures the world—which ought by this time to be quite dumb with awe—that he, Mr. Garth, is quite satisfied of the absolute falsity of the charges against the local officials. He does not pretend—this easily-satisfied Mr. Garth—that there is a single fact or the smallest fragment of evidence to disprove these charges which the officials impugned have

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not tried and the Anglo-Indian journals have not been able to disprove. No, the inner consciousness, the subliminal self of Mr. Garth has assured the outer barrister in him of the innocence of Messrs. Clarke, Loghman and Co., and they are acquitted. Mr. Garth is equally cocksure that the Mahomedans did not begin any of the recent riots; no, it was the Hindus who went and compelled them to riot and plunder and worse, so anxious were the people of Jamalpur and Dewangunj to bring on themselves the worst outrages and insults. With such brilliant powers of insight and reasoning, Mr. Garth ought to have come much more to the front as a barrister than he has succeeded in doing.

The case for the Mahomedans as presented by this brilliant special pleader is that they were goaded to madness. In order to prove his point he makes no bones about falsifying history. The Hindus, he says, tried their hardest to get the Mahomedans to join with them but absolutely failed. When we remember the unanimity of Hindus and Mahomedans at the time of the Partition Agitation, we cannot but admire such fearless lying. Well, the Hindus failed and then they tried intimidation on the poor sellers of bideshi articles, who are all, if you please,—yes, one and all Mahomedans in Mr. Garth's pleasant romance. But still the Mahomedans would not lose their angelic patience, still they would not listen to the pipings of Hare Street. But at last the Hindus began to form bodies of volunteers and learn stick-play and sword-play. This was the last insult which drove the Mahomedans to madness. That Hindus should learn sword-play and stick-play is enough, in Mr. Garth's opinion, to justify outrage, plunder, murder, mutilation, and the violation of women. After this, he says, no wonder the Mahomedans began to ask their leaders, "What is this?" All this tumult and violence, all these Armenian and Bulgarian horrors under British rule, are only the inoffensive, patient, loyal Mahomedan's gentle way of asking his leaders, "What is this?"

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We have written the above in the very bitterness of our heart. It is clearer than ever that the unspeakable outrages inflicted on the Hindu community have the full moral support of the English in India. Officials allow them, Anglo-Indian papers sympathise with them, Anglo-Indian speakers defend them, and the speeches and writings in which they are defended, are full of intolerable insults to the whole Hindu population of Bengal. Yet we do not cease to buy the Englishman and Empire, we do not cease to give briefs to Mr. Garth and men of his kidney. We even hear that a prominent Swadeshi leader gave a brief to Mr. Garth the very next day after his speech, presumably as a reward for calling the whole Bengali Bar and Press a pack of liars. If it is so, we deserve every humiliation that can be inflicted on us.

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Lala Lajpat Rai Deported

10-May-1907

The sympathetic administration of Mr. Morley has for the present attained its records;—but for the present only. Lala Lajpat Rai has been deported out of British India. The fact is its own comment. The telegram goes on to say that indignation meetings have been forbidden for four days. Indignation meetings? The hour for speeches and fine writing is past. The bureaucracy has thrown down the gauntlet. We take it up. Men of the Punjab! Race of the lion! Show these men who would stamp you into the dust that for one Lajpat they have taken away, a hundred Lajpats will arise in his place. Let them hear a hundred times louder your war-cry—Jai Hindusthan!

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The Crisis

11-May-1907

The last action of the Minto-Morley Government has torn every veil from the situation and the policy of the British rulers. Whatever else may be the result of this vigorous attempt to crush Nationalism in the Punjab, it has the merit of clearing the air. We have no farther excuse for mistaking our position or blundering into ineffective policies. The bureaucracy has declared with savage emphasis that it will tolerate a meekly carping loyalism, it will tolerate an ineffective agitation of prayer, protest and petition, but it will not tolerate the new spirit. If the Indian harbours aspirations towards freedom, towards independence, towards self-government in his mind, let him crush them back and keep them close-locked in his heart; for from English Secretary or Anglo-Indian pro-consul, from Conservative or from Liberal they can expect neither concession nor toleration. Indian aspirations and bureaucratic autocracy cannot stall together; one of them must go. The growth of the new spirit had been so long tolerated in Bengal because the rulers, though alarmed at the new portent, could not at once make up their mind whether it was a painted monster or a living and formidable force. Even when its real nature and drift had become manifest, they waited to see whether it was likely to take hold of the people. They were not prepared for the enormous rapidity with which like a sudden conflagration in the American prairies, the new spirit began to rush over the whole of India. By the time they had realised it, it was too late to crush it in Bengal by prosecuting a few papers or striking at a few tall heads. For the new spirit in Bengal does not depend on the presence of a few leaders or the inspiration from one or two great orators. It has embraced the whole educated

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class with one unquenchable flame. If Srijut Bipin Chandra Pal were deported, and the Bande Mataram, Sandhya and other Nationalist journals suppressed, the fire would only become silent, pervading, irresistible. A hundred hands would catch the banner of Nationalism as it fell from the hands of the standard-bearer and a hundred fiery spirits rush to fill the place of the fallen leader. In Bengal, therefore, other measures have been adopted. But the moment the bureaucrats were sure that the fire had caught in the Punjab, they hastened to strike, hoping by the suppression of a few persons to suppress the whole movement. The first blow at the Punjabee was a disastrous failure. The second has been delivered with extraordinary precautions to ensure its success. The whole might of the British Empire has been summoned to drive it home. The pomp and prestige of its irresistible might, the tramp of its armies and the terror of its guns, the slow mercilessness of its penal law and the swift fury of its arbitrary statutes have all been gathered round two small cities, not to put down a formidable rebellion or effect the capture of dangerous military leaders, but to arrest a few respectable and unwarlike pleaders and barristers. Enveloped with a surge of cavalry under the mouths of British siege-guns, these fortunate individuals, most of whose names were till then hardly known outside their own province, have been hurried to British jails and one eminent pleader whirled out of India with a panic haste. All this pomp and apparatus can evidently have no object but to terrify the new spirit throughout India into quiescence by a display of the irresistible power of Britain. It is an emphatic warning from Mr. Morley and Lord Minto that they will not suffer the Indian to aspire to freedom or to work by peaceful self-help and passive resistance for national autonomy.

In this grave crisis of our destinies let not our people lose their fortitude or suffer stupefaction and depression to seize upon and unnerve their souls. The fight in which we are engaged is not like the wars of old in which when the King or leader fell, the army fled. The King whom we follow to the wars today, is our own Motherland, the sacred and imperishable; the leader of

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our onward march is the Almighty himself, that element within and without us whom sword cannot slay, nor water drown, nor fire burn, nor exile divide from us, nor a prison confine. Lajpat Rai is nothing, Tilak is nothing, Bipin Pal is nothing! these are but instruments in the mighty Hand that is shaping our destinies and if these go, do you think that God cannot find others to do His will? Lala Lajpat Rai has gone from us, but doubt not that men stronger and greater than he will take his place. For when a living and rising cause is persecuted, this is the sure result that in the place of those whom persecution strikes down, there arise, like the giants from the blood of Raktabij, men who to their own strength add the strength, doubled and quadrupled by death or persecution, of the martyrs for the cause. It was the exiled of Italy, it was the men who languished in Austrian and Bourbon dungeons, it was Poerio and Silvio Pellico and their fellow-sufferers whose collected strength reincarnated in Mazzini and Garibaldi and Cavour to free their country.

Let there be no fainting of heart and no depression, and also let there be no unforeseeing fury, no blindly-striking madness. We are at the beginning of a time of terrible trial. The passage is not to be easy, the crown is not to be cheaply earned. India is going down into the valley of the shadow of death, into a great horror of darkness and suffering. Let us realise that what we are now suffering, is a small part of what we shall have to suffer, and work in that knowledge, with resolution, without hysteria. A fierce and angry spirit is spreading among the people which cries out for violent action and calls upon us to embrace death. We say, let us be prepared for death but work for life,—the life not of our perishable bodies but of our cause and country. Whatever we do, let it be with knowledge and foresight. Let our first and last object be to help on the cause, not to gratify blindly our angry passions. The first need at the present moment is courage, a courage which knows not how to flinch or shrink. The second is self-possession. God is helping us with persecution; we must accept it with joy and use that help, calmly, fearlessly, wisely. On the manner and spirit in which we shall resist and repel outrage and face repression, while not for a moment playing into the

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hands of the adversary, will depend the immediate success or failure of our mission.

Lala Lajpat Rai

11-May-1907

We publish elsewhere the last letter we received from Lala Lajpat Rai previous to his sudden deportation. Great has been the good fortune of the Punjab leader in being selected as the first and noblest victim on the altar of Motherland. But for our part we may be pardoned if we indulge a feeling of regret and grief at the sudden parting from a friend. We have not been acquainted with Lajpat Rai for very long, but even these brief months of acquaintance and increasing friendship have been enough to make us feel the charm of his personality. There was always in Lajpat Rai a singular union of tenderness with strength, of quietness with fervour, a ready sympathy and kindly feeling which could not fail to attract. This sympathy and kindliness is evident in the warm phrases of appreciation he wrote to us. And there is a touch in his subscription to the letter which subsequent events have brought startlingly home to us—"an humble servant of the motherland, Lajpat Rai." Happy is he, for his Mother has accepted his service and given it the highest reward for which a patriot can hope, the privilege of not merely serving but suffering for her. When India raises statues to the heroes and martyrs of her emancipation, it will inscribe on his the simple and earnest phrase which remains behind to us as his modest boast and his sufficient message.

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Government by Panic

13-May-1907

One does not know precisely how to take the extraordinary accounts of the charges against Lala Lajpat Rai and the panic among Europeans which have been reaching us from the North. We used to think the English deficient in imagination, but the vivid and fluorescent powers of fancy which this panic has revealed, puts all our preconceived ideas to rout. Not only have the Government given vent to an outburst of poetical fancy beyond all parallel but they have insisted on staging and enacting their dramatic creation in real life. Sir Denzil Ibbetson reminds us of that great aesthetic realist, Nero, who made slaves and prisoners enact the parts of classic tragedy and had them actually stabbed or crucified or torn by real wild beasts to embody his mimic imaginations. Sir Denzil has conceived a splendid melodramatic tragedy called The Rebellion Forestalled or British Empire Saved and the Punjab Bar have been obliged to play the leading parts. The conception is admirable. An inoffensive pleader sitting among his briefs, to all appearance harmless, unmilitary, civilian, but in reality a masked Tamerlane, Napoleon or Shivaji, full of dark and tremendous schemes; a disarmed and helpless mob of workmen and peasants who are really a dangerous, well-equipped and well-organised army of a hundred thousand Jats capable of overthrowing the British Empire; a widespread and diabolically complex plot on the bursting point, Lahore Fort to be seized and, we presume, Lajpat to be crowned the first Punjabi Emperor of India,—when suddenly, lo and behold! the glorified and splendiferous figure of Sir Denzil Ibbetson appears, hurling lightnings and clothed in majesty, catches up the arch-conspirator in his mighty hand and a motor-car

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tosses him over the continent to Rangoon or the Andamans, envelops the rebel province in a cloud of cavalry and siege-guns and the British Empire—and incidentally Lahore Fort—is saved. A most admirably dramatic denouement! And to add the right Shakespearian touch of grotesque humour, we are told that this phantom army foreshadows its attack by throwing stones at the gate of Lahore Fort, whose feelings must have been deeply hurt by such contumelious behaviour—either as a sort of chivalrous warning to the garrison or as a symbolic rehearsal of the intended storm!

Are these the imaginations of sane men, or the diseased and distorted phantasmagoria which presents itself to bemused intellects in a Chinese opium-den? If it had been a little more plausible, we might have thought it a Machiavellian invention of Anglo-Indian statesmen to justify their instituting a Russian policy of repression. But a lawyer militarist leading an army of Indian peasants, Lahore Fort to be stormed by an unarmed mob with their fists—or with stones, the British Empire to be overthrown by this extraordinary army—the whole is a wild nightmare of panic-stricken brains. We are told that the Europeans were so panic-stricken, many of them passed the night on the railway platform, ready for flight. The Civil and Military Gazette also solemnly affirms that Lajpat Rai was an arch-rebel with a hundred thousand men under his orders and hints pretty plainly that the prompt action of Sir Denzil Ibbetson saved the British from a rebellion. And these are the men who think that they can go on ruling a nation of three hundred millions by mere repression and the terror of the sword, after the moral bases of their supremacy are gone! The great strong successful despots of the world were not men who started at every shadow and took every bush in the darkness for an enemy. Government by panic has never yet been a success and we doubt whether it will be any more successful in India than elsewhere. But here we find panic initiating a policy, bewilderment approving of it and alarm sanctioning it. Not only the Punjab Government, not only the "level-headed" Lord Minto, but even the austere and philosophical Mr. Morley has committed himself to government

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by panic. It is for us to take full advantage of the mistakes of our political adversaries.

In Praise of the Government

13-May-1907

We cannot sufficiently admire the vigorous and unselfish efforts of the British Government to turn all India into a nation of Extremists. We had thought that it would take us long and weary years to convert all our countrymen to the Nationalist creed. Nothing of the kind. The Government of India is determined that our efforts shall not fail or take too long a time to reach fruition. It will not suffer us to preach Nationalism to the people, but in its noble haste and zeal is resolved to preserve the monopoly of the Nationalist propaganda to itself. "Alone I will do it," they have evidently said to themselves, even as Louis XVI said to his people when he resolved to take the work of reform out of the hands of the States General into his own. The Government of India also has resolved to take the work of inculcating Nationalism into its own hands. There is no farther need of the inspiring oratory or compelling logic of a Bipin Chandra, the fine and vigorous lucidity and competent organisation of a Tilak, the attractive charm, self-sacrifice, moral force and steady quiet work of a Lajpat Rai. The Government will brush them aside and take their place. We cannot deny that the methods of the Government far excel our poor efforts. Our methods are long, wordy, weary, and when all is said and done, only half-effective; those of the Government are magnificent, brief, laconic, decisive, triumphantly effective. By its policy of leaving the Mymensingh Mahomedans for weeks together to inflict the utmost horrors of rapine and brigandage on a Hindu population sedulously disarmed and terrorised by official severity, they have convinced the country that the Pax Britannica is an illusion and no peace worth having which is not maintained by our own strength and manhood. By the deportation of Lala Lajpat Rai they have destroyed the belief in British justice. By their Resolution for the prohibition of meetings they have convinced everyone that we possess the right of free speech

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not as a right, not as a possession, but as a temporary and conditional favour depending for its continuance on despotic caprice. We await with confidence fresh developments of this admirable Nationalist propaganda.

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The Bagbazar Meeting

14-May-1907

We do not clearly understand what has been gained by the Bagbazar meeting held on Sunday under the auspices of the leading lights of Bengal. There were one or two speeches made which said certain obvious things and there were certain resolutions passed in which we condoled, sympathised, demanded and protested. But when the meeting dispersed, we were not one whit more forward than we had been a few hours before. What we want to know, what the country wants to know, is not what we think—there is no doubt or difference of opinion about that, everybody is thinking the same thing,—but what are we going to do? The right of public meeting is to be allowed to us in future only on sufferance; students of schools are not to be permitted to think about politics; students of colleges, schoolmasters, professors are to be suffered to take interest in politics only so long as they do not do or say anything unpleasant or objectionable to the authorities; Nationalist agitation has been practically forbidden on penalty of arrest, deportation or exposure to police or Mahomedan goondaism. What the Government means to do, is plain enough. It intends to put down Nationalism with the high hand and crush every attempt of the nation to raise its head, every aspiration to breathe, to grow and to live. The question now is, what do we mean to do in reply?

There were four subjects before the meeting on Sunday. The deportation of Lajpat Rai came first in importance, because it shows to what extremes the bureaucracy is prepared to go in order to crush Nationalism. Merely to express indignation and sympathy in answer to such a step, is absurd; it has all the bathos and futility of a foreseen commonplace. Of course we are

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indignant, of course we sympathise, but what afterwards? Have we no duty to perform except the expression of these very natural, unavoidable and entirely useless emotions? Yes, we demand that the charges against Lajpat Rai should be formulated and proved. From whom do we make this demand? In the case of the Natu brothers it was just possible that pressure in Parliament might induce the Government in England to undo what the Government in Bombay had done in a moment of panic. Here there is no such possibility. Mr. Morley has publicly identified himself with this act of arbitrary oppression and his mind is too stiff and rigid with age to change. The deportation of Lajpat Rai is therefore an action for which the Liberal Government has become responsible and, as such, is bound to have the support of almost the whole Liberal party, while it will certainly have the support of the whole Conservative party. Who then is likely to listen to this empty "demand"? We could have understood it, if the demand had been coupled with a resolution that the campaign of Boycott, Swadeshi and Swaraj should be pursued with tenfold vigour, that Srijut Bipin Chandra Pal should be asked to return to Madras and complete his programme with additions and Srijut Surendranath Banerji should proceed at once to the North for the same purpose and should take in Gujarat and the Central Provinces in his return journey, and that meanwhile every nerve should be strained to promote and organise the movement in Bengal. The resolution would then have had a meaning and the nation would have been inspirited to draw fresh resolve and energy from what would otherwise be a national calamity. As it stands, this "demand" rings hollow and savours of empty braggadocio.

The second question before the meeting was the state of things in Eastern Bengal, and here again the meeting dispersed after passing an utterly empty and unpractical resolution. There are various ways in which the situation might be met. It might have been resolved to arrange a meeting with the leading Mahomedans of Bengal and call upon them to dissociate themselves publicly from Nawab Salimullah and take active steps in order to put a stop to the anti-Hindu ferment which its misbegetters are

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now attempting to spread westward. Or, we might have decided in consultation with the Hindu Zamindars in the east to arrange adequate self-defence at every defensible point of the affected areas and withdraw the Hindu element from villages where they were too few to render a good account of themselves. This would either have compelled the hooligans to throw themselves upon well-defended points and meet the risk of a salutary defeat which they have hitherto avoided, or else left the conflagration to die for want of material to prey upon—unless it turned upon those who had kindled it. But merely to lament the situation and express an astonishment which nobody really feels at the action of the local authorities, is neither helpful nor sincere.

A third subject for consideration was the University Coercion Circular. This was a crucial point; from the way in which it was dealt with, the country could understand how far the sincerity and resolution of its leaders would go. It would perhaps be too much to expect of these gentlemen that they would respond to the insult that has been put upon them by a dignified resolution to sever connection with an enslaved and degraded University and take the education of the country into their own hands. In the present development of public feeling this would be perfectly practicable and we believe it would be welcomed with enthusiasm by the whole of Bengal; but it requires an amount of enthusiasm and courage which we have ceased to expect from the men who lead us. Surely, however, they might at least have definitely assured the public that they would offer a firm passive resistance to the provisions of the Circular and leave the Government, if it dared, to inflict the penalty of disaffiliation with or without the consent of the Senate. Even this was not done. "We protest," and there is an end of the matter.

The same course was followed with regard to the Ordinance restricting the right of public meeting. Under this Ordinance the Government reserves to itself the power of putting an extinguisher on the Nationalist agitation whenever and wherever it pleases. The agitation has been a public one and had nothing in it secret or underground; but if we submit to the Ordinance, it must lose its public character and adopt other methods. Are

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we prepared to accept this eventuality? We had given up petitioning as proved by experience to be futile and cannot return to it without acknowledging defeat and enslaving India for ever to the bureaucracy. Passive resistance has become our chosen weapon and this it is sought to strike out of our hands. We must, therefore, either oppose an organised passive resistance to this Ordinance, a resistance in which leaders like Srijut Surendranath must court imprisonment and deportation, or we must find other methods. It was light on this question that we expected from Sunday's meeting, but it has left us only darkness visible. It seems to be the policy of our leaders to "protest"—and submit.

A Treacherous Stab

14-May-1907

We have seldom read anything more disgraceful, more unpatriotic, more opposed to all ideas of decency than the sneering and ill-natured attack on Lala Lajpat Rai which the Tribune has chosen this particular moment to deliver. It is a time when all over India men of all shades of opinion, except the worshippers of the bureaucracy, are putting aside their differences with this modest and self-sacrificing patriot in order to express their unanimous fellow-feeling with him in his hour of trial. It is precisely this moment that the Tribune chooses for its stab at Lala Lajpat Rai who is no longer there to speak for himself. If this unseemly conduct is dictated by a desire to dissociate itself from the exiled patriot in order to save its own skin, it can only be characterised as the basest cowardice; if by envy, party spirit and secret jubilation at the removal of a powerful Nationalist, it is indecent and unpatriotic. In ordinary times the Tribune was free to criticise and abuse Lajpat Rai and nobody would have cared, but when a man is suffering for his country, no one pretending to be a patriot has a right to vent on him either a private spleen or a dislike on public grounds. We have our own differences with Mr. Gokhale and Srijut Surendranath Banerji, but were either of these leaders to become the objects of official persecution, we should consider ourselves eternally disgraced if we remembered

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anything but the one fact that he was suffering for the sake of our common Motherland. The sneers of the Tribune would not in themselves be worth noticing; it is as an example of the utter want of true patriotism that it calls for condemnation.

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How to Meet the Ordinance

15-May-1907

When we come to look at it closely, the new policy of the British Government in India is a real blessing to the country. We find ourselves in unexpected agreement with the Anglo-Indian Press in this matter. The Anglo-Indian Press is full of joy at these departures from pre-established policy and assevers in one chorus though in many keys, ekam bahudha, that it is the very best thing the bureaucracy could have done in the interests of its own continued supremacy. We will not question their authority in a matter in which they alone are interested, but we can certainly add that it is the very best thing the bureaucracy could have done in the interests of the country. Lord Minto ought therefore to be a very happy man, for it is not everyone whose actions are so blessed by Fate as to command equal approbation from the Englishman and the Bande Mataram.

Our reasons for this approval are obvious on the face of it. The great strength of British despotism previous to Lord Curzon's regime was its indirectness. By a singularly happy policy it was able to produce on the subject nations the worst moral and material results of serfdom, while at the same time it never allowed them to realise that they were serfs, but rather fostered in them the delusion that they were admirably governed on the whole by an enlightened and philanthropic people. We pointed out the other day that the relics of this superstition still lingered even in the minds of many thoroughgoing Nationalists of the new school. We did not indeed believe that the bureaucratic Government was a good government or the British people guided in their politics by enlightenment and philanthropy, but many of us believed that there were certain excesses of despotism of which

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they were not capable and that the worst British administration would not easily betray overt signs of moral kinship with its Russian cousin. We ourselves, although we were prepared for the worst and always took care to warn the people that the worst might soon come, thought sometimes that there was a fair balance of probabilities for and against frank downward Russianism. For such last relics of the old superstitions, for such over-charitable speculation there is no longer any room. The whole country owes a debt of gratitude to Sirdar Ajit Singh and the Bharat Mata section of the Punjab Nationalists for forcing the hands of the bureaucracy and compelling them to change definitely indirect for direct methods of despotism. It has cleared the air, it has dispelled delusions; it has forced us to look without blinking into the face of an iron Necessity.

The question may then be asked, what farther room is there for passive resistance? A Punjab politician is said to have observed, after the arrests of Lala Hansraj and his friends and the first development of violent insanity in the Punjab authorities, "I do not see why the people should go on any longer with open agitation." But, in our opinion, there is still room for passive resistance, if for nothing else than to force the bureaucracy to lay all its cards face upward on the table; the oppression must either be broken or increased so that the iron may enter deeper into the soul of the nation. There is still work and work enough for the martyr, before the hero appears on the scene. Take for instance the Coercion Ukase, the new ordinance to restrict the right of public meeting at the sweet will of the executive. It is obvious that the matter cannot be allowed to rest where it is. We would suggest to the leaders that the right policy to begin with is to ignore the existence of the Ordinance. So far as we understand, the Lieutenant-Governor of Shillong has been empowered to proclaim any area in his jurisdiction, but as yet no area has been proclaimed. This is therefore the proper time for the leaders to go to East Bengal and hold meetings in every District; and those who go, should not be any lesser men but the leaders of the two parties in Bengal themselves. We are inclined to think it was a mistake to recall Srijut Bipin Chandra Pal

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from Madras at this juncture; but since he has been recalled, it should be for a joint action in East Bengal against the policy of repression. If the bureaucracy lie low, well and good; it will be a moral victory for the people. But the moment any particular area is proclaimed, the leaders should immediately go there and hold the prohibited meetings as a challenge to the validity of the ukase, refusing to disperse except on the application of force by the police or the military. The bureaucracy will then have the choice either of allowing the Ordinance to remain a dead letter or of imprisoning or deporting men the prosecution of whom will so inflame the people all over India as to make administration impossible or of breaking up meetings by force. If they adopt the third alternative, the leaders should then go from place to place and house to house, like political Shankaracharyas, gathering the people together in groups in private houses and compounds and speaking to them in their gates, advising them, organising them. In this way the fire of Nationalism will enter into every nook and cranny of the country and a strength be created far greater than any which monster meetings can engender. How will the bureaucracy meet such a method of propagandism? Will they forbid us to congregate in our own compounds? Will their police enter our houses and force us to shut our gates to the guest and the visitor? Whatever they do, the country will gain. Every fresh object-lesson in bureaucratic methods will be a fresh impulse to the determination to achieve Swaraj and get rid of the curse of subjection. All that is needed to meet the situation, all that we demand of our leaders is a quiet, self-possessed, unflinching courage which neither the fear of imprisonment, nor the menace of deportation, nor the ulterior possibility of worse than deportation can for a moment disturb.

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Mr. Morley's Pronouncement

16-May-1907

The attitude assumed by Mr. John Morley in answer to the questions in Parliament about the latest act of mediaeval tyranny, cannot surprise those who have something more than surface knowledge of English politics and English politicians. Those who have been behind the scenes in English political life, know perfectly well that there sincerity is an element which does not exist. Professions, principles, ideals are the tinsel and trappings of the stage; each politician is an actor who has a part to play and plays it, certain set sentiments to mouth and mouths them. But the only reality behind is a mass of interests, personal interests, class interests, party interests, and the ruling principle of action is to "catch votes" and avoid the loss of votes. We have all noticed how persistently the Anglo-Indian Press out here talk of every movement as being artificial and the work of "professional agitators", and how persistently they refuse to credit the popular leaders, even when they are men of high moral worth like Lala Lajpat Rai, with sincerity. We generally put this down to the perverseness and wilful misrepresentation of a reptile press; the real truth is that they are judging us from their knowledge of their own country. They are perfectly well aware that in England politics is a huge piece of humbug; it professes to be a conflict of principles and is really a conflict of more or less sordid interests. They know that in England a sincere politician is a contradiction in terms. They are therefore unable to believe in the existence in India of a sincerity and reality for which their own country offers no precedent. The only exceptions to the general rule of insincerity are the novices in politics—the maiden innocence of whose souls is soon rubbed off by a few Parliamentary sessions,

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—and a handful of independent-minded eccentrics who have no chance whatever of rising to influence, much less to office. Occasionally a man of absolute sincerity like Mr. Bradlaugh breaks the record, but that is only once in half a century.

When Mr. John Morley entered politics, he entered as a literary man and austere philosopher and brought the spirit of philosophy into politics. His unbending fidelity to his principles earned him the name of Honest John, and this soubriquet, with the reputation for uprightness of which it was the badge, has survived long after the uprightness itself had perished in the poisoned air of office. No one can be long a Cabinet Minister in England and yet remain a man of unswerving principle. As Indian Secretary, Mr. Morley could not be expected to carry his philosophic principles into the India Office. On the contrary, there were several reasons why he should be even more reactionary than ordinary Secretaries of State. The Secretary of State does not represent India or stand for her interests; he represents England and his first duty is to preserve British supremacy; but Mr. Morley is also one of the foremost exponents of the most arrogant and exclusive type of enlightenment in nineteenth-century Europe, the scientific, rationalist, agnostic, superior type. As such, he was the last man to think well of or understand Asiatics or to regard them as anything but semi-barbarous anachronisms. Moreover, as the Bengalee's London correspondent pointed out this week, he is evidently showing signs of senile decay which is shown partly in his growing ill-temper and intolerance of contradiction, but most in the mental languor which prevents him from questioning or scrutinising the opinions and information served up to him by the India Office. The verbatim fidelity with which he reproduces whatever Anglo-India tutors him to say, is strikingly evidenced by his answers to Messrs. Rutherford and O'Grady. His remarks on the situation in East Bengal might have been taken for an extract from the Englishman's editorials or from the imaginative reports of the special correspondent of the Empire.

Mr. Morley makes no attempt to justify the arbitrary action he has sanctioned except on the plea of necessity, the tyrant's

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plea, which no one in former days would have held up more eloquently to condemnation and ridicule than Mr. Morley himself. He does not tell us why Lala Lajpat Rai was deported or what were the charges against him; probably he does not himself know, but simply accepted the assurance of the able and experienced Denzil and the level-headed Minto that the step was necessary. For they are the men on the spot, and Mr. Morley's conception of his position in the India Office is that he is there to act as a buffer between the men on the spot and adverse criticism. We need not discuss his utterances; they are merely faithful echoes of Anglo-Indian special pleading, in which there is nothing that is new and very little that is true. But the threat which he held out to the Moderate party is worth noting. For some time Mr. Morley and Lord Minto, with whom the Secretary of State rather superfluously assures us that he has an excellent understanding, have been talking big of some wonderful reform that they have up their sleeves and feverishly assuring the world that these fine things are all their very own idea and by no means forced on them by Indian agitation. And now we are told, or rather the Moderate leaders are told, that they will lose these pretty toys if they do not help the bureaucracy to put down "disorder", or, in other words, to put down Nationalism. Mr. Morley offers them a certain administrative reform if they can give up for themselves or can induce their countrymen to give up the aspiration towards freedom. The Anglo-Indian journals all take up the cry and the absolute insincerity of it is sufficiently shown by the fact that even so venomous, reactionary and antiIndian a print as the Englishman proses solemnly on the theme! The object of these threats is manifest. The sudden succession of coercive measures may for a moment have stunned the people, it may for a few days dismay the more timid, but it has certainly created a deep and settled exasperation throughout the country. The dismay is temporary, the exasperation will be permanent. Mr. Morley and Anglo-India hope to take advantage of the moment of dismay in order to half-bribe, half-intimidate the Moderate party into detaching themselves from any opposition to these coercive measures. This is a vain hope. For even to the

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meanest political intelligence two considerations will at once occur. The first is that there is such a thing as buying a pig in a poke. Even the simplest buyer will want to see the animal before he puts down its price, and even the most confiding Moderate will want to know what is this wonderful reform of Mr. Morley's before he sells the country's future and risks his influence with the people for its sake. But on this point Mr. Morley preserves as studious a silence as on the charges against Lajpat Rai. Again, Mr. Morley and Lord Minto have hinted that their measure is an instalment of self-government, yet Mr. Morley emphatically declares that he will never strip the bureaucracy of any means of repression they possess, however barbarous and antiquated. It is evident therefore that whatever "self-government" may be in store for us, it is a "self-government" in which executive despotism will remain absolutely undiminished and unmodified. We have heard of a despotism tempered by epigrams and a despotism tempered by assassination, but this is the first time we hear of a self-government tempered by deportations. We do not think any section of Indian opinion is likely to rise to this lure. The Bengalee has already rejected the one-sided bargain with scorn and even the Indian Mirror has received it without enthusiasm. Coerce, if you will,—we welcome coercion, but be sure that it will rank the whole of India against you without distinction of parties.

The Bengalee on the Risley Circular

16-May-1907

The Bengalee yesterday made its pronouncement on the Risley Circular which closes with the following remarks. "If the Government persist in their present career of folly, one of two things must happen. Either the official university will be absolutely supplanted by a comprehensive system of national education or, if that consummation cannot be easily realised, generations of young men will turn their energies and attention to active and practical, as distinguished from academic pursuits. We are not sure that either way the country will be a loser. And we know

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of no third alternative. One thing that we cannot think of is meek acquiescence. The country will not submit either to this resolution or to any other like it."

There is a certain note of weakness in the conditional way in which this is presented, which somewhat spoils the effect of the declaration. We cannot understand why we should wait to see whether the Government persist in their present career of folly. The policy of the Government in this educational matter is manifestly a deliberate policy undertaken with a definite object and there is no reason to suppose that they will not persist in it. This habit of waiting on the actions of the bureaucracy rests on a weak and mistaken principle. The victory both in war and politics rests with the side which can reply to attack by taking up the aggressive; a continual defence and waiting on the enemy's movements is weakening and demoralising. And why should a comprehensive system of National Education and the turning of young men to active and practical pursuits be mutually exclusive? Surely, increasing attention to technical, commercial and scientific instruction is a necessary part of any sound system of National Education. It is gratifying, however, to find that there is no intention of submitting to this resolution or any other like it. The bureaucracy in their frantic attempts to crush Nationalism, are doing their best to make anything but thoroughgoing Nationalism impossible.

What does Mr. Hare Mean?

16-May-1907

Writes the Indian Mirror:—"For one full week we have it constantly dinned into our ears that Mr. Hare intends to visit the scenes of disturbance. Yet he has not left Shillong as yet, and disturbances are as rife as ever. What does Mr. Hare mean?"

Even Homer nods; and even Mahatmas are at times slow to understand the significance of events. Our contemporary declines to accept the Jamalpur affairs as a link in a chain that has been forged by people interested in the suppression not so much of Swadeshi and Boycott as of the spirit of Nationalism. The

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Harrison Road case might have been a blow aimed at Boycott, for at that time the new spirit had not made itself prominently manifest in Bengal and other parts of India. But the Barisal barbarities left no room for doubt. Then came the Comilla excesses. Are we to believe that the Moslem population of East Bengal has really been deluded into the idea that East Bengal belongs to Salimullah? Are we, again, to believe that the British Government which now sees wraiths even in wreaths of smoke, contemplates with a sense of security, if not with satisfaction also, the growth of this idea in the truculent population of the province and the consequent growth of the influence and power of an ordinary Zamindar? Are we then to believe that the British Government is too weak to check the spread of rowdyism in East Bengal and the distribution of the "red pamphlet"? Then comes the deportation of the Punjab leader by the Government in a manner which reminds one of the conduct of "Cunning old Fury" in Alice in Wonderland, who wanted to play the parts of judge and jury to convict the defendant in a case in which he himself was the plaintiff. The crowning act comes from Mr. Morley, once extolled by the Friend of India as the beau ideal of a man and a politician, who expresses his determination "not to strip the Government of India of any weapon or law for the suppression of native disorders".

The Jamalpur affairs are only a link in the chain. Accept this view and the whole situation, as well as the attitude of the local officers will be clear. We need no longer fight shy of the real significance of things. Let us take things as they are and face the situation boldly irrespective of consequences to individuals in the discharge of their duties.

Not to the Andamans!

16-May-1907

It is evidently with a sigh of relief that the Indian Mirror learns the news that Lala Lajpat Rai is to be sent not to the Andamans but to Mandalay. It says:—"Soon after his arrest, it was reported widely that Lala Lajpat Rai was going to be taken to the

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Andamans. But instead of being sent to that penal settlement, he has been conveyed as a State prisoner to Mandalay in Upper Burma where there is a large fort. Mandalay is certainly a far better place than the Andamans." To those like us outside the esoteric circle—and they by no means form a microscopic minority—the distinction between the two places, on the present occasion, seems immaterial. Of course it needs no ghost to tell us that Mandalay is not the Andamans. But are not both places equally suited to the requirements of the Government? It was not the intention of the Government to remove Lajpat Rai to a particular place with a view to subject him to a particular kind of climate. In Mandalay in Upper Burma "where there is a large fort", the Punjab leader will not be allowed to do as he likes. The object of the Government in deporting him was to remove him from the scene of his labours and thus attempt to put a stop to his career of usefulness—call it political activity if you like. The first object the Government has succeeded in accomplishing by removing him to Mandalay. And it would have been equally accomplished by removing him to the Andamans. But the second object cannot be accomplished by such a removal. If the people are ready to carry on his work—which since his deportation it has become their sacred duty to do—the object of the Government will be frustrated. The work of an individual often becomes the work of a people, and such work reaches its glorious culmination only when it is taken up by the people at large from whom come the energy and the character of a nation. If the people are prepared to take up his work, then his deportation, which has given them an impetus, will prove but a blessing in disguise.

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The Statesman Unmasks

17-May-1907

We do not know why the paper which calls itself the Friend of India and usually puts on a sanctimonious mask of Liberalism, should have suddenly allowed its real feelings to betray themselves last Wednesday. Its attitude for some time past has been extremely ambiguous. During the height of the disturbances in East Bengal this Friend of India maintained a rigid silence on Indian affairs and discoursed solemnly day after day on large questions of European policy. Like the Levite it turned its face away from the traveller wounded by thieves and passed by. Since the deportation of Lajpat Rai, it has cared less and less to preserve its tone of affected sympathy until on the 15th it appeared as the apologist of despotism and the mouthpiece not of an idea or of a policy, but of the individual grievances of a self-seeking politician whose influence has waned to nothing because he could not satisfy the new demand for courageous and disinterested patriotism. Professing to be a Liberal paper, the Statesman has defended the despotic regulation under which Lala Lajpat Rai was deported,—a regulation opposed to all the fundamental principles of Liberalism; it has defended the Coercion Ordinance as a proof of the leniency and liberalism of bureaucratic rule in India. Calling itself a Friend of India, it has not scrupled to dissociate itself from its brother friends of India, the British Committee of the Congress, and sneer at them as ill-informed nobodies. After throwing the Congress, its principles and its friends overboard in this extraordinary manner, it has still the assurance to pose as the guide, philosopher and friend of the Moderate party and lecture them on the necessity of supporting the Government in its action with regard to Lala Lajpat Rai.

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The arguments with which the Statesman defends the deportation as a supreme act of Liberalism, are of a remarkable kind. First, deportation "is not really so bad as it sounds", because "the lot of the so-called political exile is considerably happier than that of the criminal in the common jail". Prodigious! A man is arrested without any charge being formulated against him, without trial, without any chance of defending himself, separated suddenly from his family and friends, his country, his work for religion, society and motherland, and relegated to solitary imprisonment in a distant fortress; yet because he is not treated as Mr. Tilak was treated, as a common criminal with the daily harassment and degradation which is part of the criminal's punishment, this remarkable Liberal organ goes into ecstasies over the leniency of the British bureaucracy. Injustice and arbitrary oppression, in its opinion, is an admirable thing so long as it is not accompanied with vindictive personal cruelty. We remember a correspondent of an Anglo-Indian print at the time of Mr. Tilak's sentence calling on the Mahrattas to admire the leniency of the British Government, because it treated him as an ordinary felon instead of impaling him or sawing him to pieces. The Statesman writes in the same spirit.

The second plea in defence of deportation is that no act of State is involved in the arrest, it is only a summary dealing under Municipal law. We do not know what to make of this rigmarole or what the Statesman understands by Municipal law or by an act of State. Municipal law may mean the laws and rules which govern municipalities, but we presume it is not the Lahore Municipality which deported Lajpat Rai; or it may mean the ordinary laws and regulations by which local authorities arrange for local administration and the preservation of the peace. But here is an extraordinary action, above the ordinary laws, which needs the sanction of the Government of India and the sanction of the Secretary of State, in which a political leader is arrested for mysterious political reasons and deported without trial. Yet this is municipal law, not an act of State! and since it is municipal law, no one need protest against it! Apparently an act of State in the Statesman's opinion is an illegal act which there is no statute

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to cover. Any action however tyrannical, if covered by a statute, ought to be borne without complaint by Indians as an act of great leniency and liberalism. Mark again the friendship of this friend of India and the liberalism of this Liberal.

A third plea is that "the action of the authorities in India, if contrasted with that of the average European Government, is leniency itself." So then, tyranny is quite justifiable if it can cite an example of another tyranny worse than itself! Let us remind the Statesman that the French and German bureaucracies are governments supported by the will of the people and that in the measures of stringency they adopt, they have the consent of the people behind them. And what have the police arrangements of Paris and Berlin to do with the punishment of a man without trial, a relic of mediaeval despotism of which no modern and civilised Government offers an example?

The real cause of all this special pleading for despotism is revealed in the latter part of the article. "Moderate men are apt to be pushed aside and their services forgotten by new men who seek to force the pace.A long apprenticeship to journalism, a weary plodding in the musty by-paths of the law, are the chief or only means by which power and influence can be gained." This is where the shoe pinches. Who is this apprentice to journalism who is being pushed aside by young and extreme journals? Obviously the Statesman itself. Who is this weary plodder in the musty by-paths of the law, who claims that only lawyers or, say, only solicitors have any right to be political leaders and whose "fame", if not his "fortune", has been affected by the new movement? It is plain enough now that the motive which so long actuated the Statesman was not liberal sentiment or high principles, but its own interest and influence. Since that interest was touched and that influence threatened by the increasing spirit of Swadeshism and self-reliance, the temper of this Friend of ours has been growing worse and worse until he has finally renounced his liberal principles and become a champion of bureaucracy.

The article closes with a curious attack which seems to be directed at Srijut Surendranath Banerji. "Violent speeches, inflammatory writings, a prosecution, a brilliantly unsuccessful

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defence, paragraphs in all the newspapers, questions by ill-informed nobodies in the House of Commons, the jail, the exit, fame and fortune, notoriety, maybe a seat in Parliament—here we have not altogether a fancy picture of the modern Political Rake's progress." This is, we are told, not altogether a fancy picture; in other words, with the exception of the last touch about the possible seat in Parliament, it is taken from life; and to whom can it be applied but Srijut Surendranath? For, obviously, no leader of the new school is meant, since no leader of the new school would aspire to a seat in Parliament. Yet after this ill-natured attack the Statesman yesterday had again the face to figure as the patron and counsellor of Srijut Surendranath and advise him to sacrifice his feelings of personal friendship and respect for Lala Lajpat Rai, his principles, his patriotism, his reputation as a political leader and his influence with the people in order to get the approbation of Mr. John Morley and the Statesman.

A more complete unmasking could not be imagined. The Statesman not only attacks the new school,—that would be nothing new—but turns round and rends his old associates, Srijut Surendranath, the British Committee, the friends of India in Parliament, renounces all liberal ideas and principles, throws off every disguise and stands forth naked and unashamed. We recommend this example of "friendship" to all Bengali customers of the Statesman's heavy goods, and would advise them either to cease patronising a dealer of such doubtful candour or to insist that the goods they get shall be of the pattern they have paid for.

Sui Generis

17-May-1907

The Morning Leader in casting about for reasons,—let us call them reasons, not excuses—for defending Mr. Morley's Russian policy, has discovered the fact that the case of India is sui generis, a thing apart which stands on its merits and to which ordinary principles cannot be applied. The Morning Leader need not have taken refuge in Latin in order to hide its embarrassment. All

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India, Moderate and Extremist alike, have begun to realise that the principles of Liberalism which are so loudly mouthed about in Westminster and on the hustings, are not meant to be applied to India. They may be applied to England and the Colonies but they are obviously unsuitable to a subject nation where the despotic supremacy of the white man has to be maintained, as it was gained, at the cost of all principles and all morality. Ireland also was sui generis once, until by moonlighting, Fenianism, dynamite and Passive Resistance she managed to break down the barrier and place herself on the same level with other nations. Yes, India is a case apart. In England politics is a question of parties. In India politics is a conflict of principles and of mutually destructive forces,—the principle of bureaucracy against the principle of democracy, the alien force of Imperialism against the indigenous force of Nationalism. Our relations with our rulers are not those of protector and protected, but of eater and eaten. As man and the tiger cannot live together in the same circle of habitation, so Indian Nationalism and bureaucratic despotism cannot divide India between them or dwell together in peace. One of them must go.

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The Statesman on Mr. Mudholkar

20-May-1907

Nothing can be more instructive than the way in which recent events have arrayed all Anglo-Indians, "liberal" or reactionary, on one side and on the other hand brought all Indian politicians, moderate or "extremist", nearer to each other. It shows that the profound division of interests creates an unbridgeable gulf between the aliens in possession and the people of the country in their different degrees of aspiration.

Apparent alliances between Anglo-India and any section of the people, can only be temporary adjustments of self-interest or of policy. When the crucial moment comes, each must return to his own camp and stand in sharply-defined opposition to his recent ally. We have had occasion to comment strongly on the recent unmasking of the Statesman. It was emphasised yesterday by the bitter and unscrupulous attack of that paper on Mr. Mudholkar. Mr. Mudholkar is the leading Moderate politician of the Berars, a man almost timid in his caution and one of the chief opponents of the new Nationalism. One would have thought therefore that the Statesman would have the decency at least to treat him with some affectation of respect. But Mr. Mudholkar is handled as roughly and hectored and lectured as insolently as if he had been a Tilak or a Bipin Pal. The attack is not only insolent; it is unscrupulous. The Statesman does not hesitate to misrepresent Mr. Mudholkar in order to serve its own ends. This is how it distorts Mr. Mudholkar's letter in one instance. "We read at the outset that the theory of provocation is ridiculous and absurd; but in the succeeding sentence Mr. Mudholkar impliedly admits that it was the conduct of a few indiscreet young men that furnished the immediate occasion of the riot.

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This, we believe, has now been definitely established." Anyone who takes the trouble to read Mr. Mudholkar's letter will see at once that he does not admit either impliedly or directly that there was provocation. He says, "Assuming what has yet to be proved, that the impassioned advocacy of Swadeshi goods by the National Volunteers was distasteful to the Mahomedans, how could it possibly serve as a provocation?" And proceeding with this assumption, he asks in the next sentence how this alleged indiscretion of a few young men at the Mela could produce so fearful a riot? We cannot credit the Statesman with sufficient dullness or ignorance of the English language as to suppose that its distortion of Mr. Mudholkar's argument is not deliberate.

And when, may we ask, was it "definitely established" that the indiscretion of a few Volunteers was the cause of the riot? We know that it is so stated by the correspondents of Anglo-Indian papers whose evidence, being mere hearsay, has no value whatever, and we presume that this is what they have been told by the police officials who are accused of complicity in leading the Hindus into a carefully-prepared trap. But the statements of the Hindus who were attacked, stand as yet uncontroverted by independent evidence and unrefuted by any reliable enquiry. The Statesman, feeling the weakness of its case, tries to justify the action of the Mahomedan rowdies by saying that there has been a rise of prices round about Jamalpur as the result of the Swadeshi agitation. This is, in the Statesman's view, sufficiently grave provocation! Well, possibly so. There has been, we know, an immense rise of prices all over India owing to the British occupation, to which the present rise of prices is absolutely nothing. Would that, in the Statesman's view, be sufficiently grave provocation for the whole of India to rise in riot or rebellion?

The Statesman has no real answer to Mr. Mudholkar's arguments. Its answer to him consists merely of a prolonged charge of exaggerated language. Mr. Mudholkar described the state of things in East Bengal by the words "anarchy, rapine, desecration, bloodshed". These words the Statesman stigmatises as "ludicrously inappropriate to the facts". Indeed? The facts are that for the space of several weeks village after village was plundered

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and property to the value of many lakhs looted; yet this is a state of things which we are not to be allowed to term rapine. During the same time images were destroyed, temples attacked and desecrated, a religious celebration forbidden by armed rowdies; yet all this did not amount to desecration! Life and person were unsafe, numbers of men were hurt, some so seriously as to be sent to the hospital, two or three were brutally murdered, yet the Statesman thinks there was no bloodshed. For this space of time life and property and the honour of women were unsafe over a large area, the Hindus had to flee from Jamalpur and in all neighbouring places to organise their own defence, panic and riot and outrage reigned supreme while the constituted authorities busied themselves repressing the community attacked and threatened, leaving a free hand to the rioters; but this is not to be called anarchy! No, all these, says this miraculous Friend of India, were mere ordinary local disturbances which would scarcely have attracted notice but for the profoundness of the Pax Britannica. Mark the opinions of your Friend, people of India. The desecration of your temples, the violation of your women, the wholesale plunder of your property are to him things that scarcely deserve to attract notice.

The Statesman again rebukes Mr. Mudholkar for exaggerating the riot at Rawalpindi which it holds to be a very ordinary affair, and thinks that because Mr. Mudholkar has exaggerated this and other matters, therefore Indians are unfit to be entrusted with the administration of their own affairs. Yet in the same article the Statesman justifies the deportation of Lala Lajpat Rai, even if he were innocent, because the occurrences in the Punjab were considered by the Government so serious that his removal was a necessity. Here is a consistent Friend of India! But if Mr. Mudholkar's exaggerated ideas of the Rawalpindi disturbances unfit his countrymen for self-government, still more do Sir Denzil Ibbetson's and the C. M. Gazette's yet more exaggerated ideas of the same occurrences show that Englishmen are unfit to rule India.

The only point that the Statesman successfully makes against Mr. Mudholkar is when it disproves his belief that such

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arbitrary and tyrannical proceedings are subversive of the principles of British law. This delusion of the Moderates ought now to be renounced. They have always laboured under the delusion that because the British Government as apart from its local instruments, acts within the law, it is therefore incapable of oppression. On the contrary, as the Statesman points out, the British laws give ample room and provide adequate weapons for methods of despotic repression which are often indistinguishable in kind, though less direct and brutal than Russian methods.

None, says the Statesman sanctimoniously, has laboured more devotedly than ourselves in the case of India's political emancipation. We have heard legends that have come down to us from the times of our fathers of occasional active help given by the Statesman to their constitutional agitation, but we do not know what it has done recently beyond promising reforms which never come and thriving on the support of the Indian public. Certainly this is not enough to entitle it to lecture one of the leaders of public opinion and revile him as a "ranter". We hope that Mr. Mudholkar will learn his lesson, cease to appeal to English rulers and English journals and address himself in future to his own countrymen. Let him join hands with us in training them into a strength which will be a far greater security against "anarchy, rapine, desecration and bloodshed" than the protecting arm of the bureaucracy or the friendship of the Statesman.

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The Government Plan of Campaign

22-May-1907

The bureaucracy is developing its campaign against Swadeshism with great rapidity and a really admirable energy and decision. Barisal was naturally the first district to be declared, and now we learn that Dacca, Mymensingh, Faridpur, Pabna, Rungpur and Tipperah, the Habiganj sub-division of the district of Sylhet and the Sudharam Thana in the district of Noakhali have also been proclaimed. Others, no doubt, will follow. All these districts have been selected for the prominence they have taken in the Swadeshi movement. It is significant also that in Bakarganj the proclamation has been attended by a Magisterial order which forbids the carrying of lathis and swordsticks between sunrise and sunset and the gathering of men in strength after nightfall. This can have no other effect than to prevent the Swadeshists offering an effective resistance in case of an attack being organised at night under orders from Dacca; for it is not likely that a lawless mob bent upon mischief would pay any heed to the Magisterial ukase. Meanwhile we have seen at Tangail a foreshadowing of the first line of attack on the students under cover of the Risley Circular. The objective of the authorities is clear enough. It is to prevent the promulgation and organisation of the Swadeshi and Swaraj sentiment in Punjab and Bengal. In the promulgation of Swadeshism we have used three great instruments, the Press, the Platform and the students. The Press by itself can only popularise ideas, it cannot impart that motive impulse of deep emotion and enthusiasm which is given by the direct appeal, the personal magnetism of a born speaker. But the work of the Platform in its turn is not sufficient in itself. The motive impulse created by the orator is apt to be evanescent,

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unless it is confirmed by daily insistence on the note sounded and the inspiring sight of the idea being actually carried into practice by devout and enthusiastic missionaries of the creed. In the Swadeshi agitation this part, the most important and necessary of the three, has been played by the students. It is they who have been the active missionaries of Swadeshism, carrying it into practice with the divine ardour and eagerness of youth, without the reserves of caution, temporising, doubt, half-belief with which colder age would have killed it in its birth; wherever they went, they have created a permanent Swadeshi atmosphere in which the tender plant of Nationalism could grow, could put forth leaf and bud, could flower into the religion of patriotism.

The English have a long experience in the art of political agitation and it could not take them long to discover where the strength of the agitation lay. But they were for a long time at a loss how to deal with it without losing their prestige and reputation as a strong and benign Government. They tried experiments and would not carry them out to the end. They took up a policy of direct and violent coercion in a limited area and then, alarmed at the noise and opposition created, dropped it like a hot coal. Next they tried the effect of a general attitude of "sympathy" and calm toleration covering with its specious and ample cloak a great deal of petty local persecution and secret undermining of Swadeshism. Meanwhile they were preparing the ground for an anti-Hindu campaign through the instrumentality of the Mahomedans which was only to be brought into use if the policy of "sympathy" failed. The policy of sympathy did fail and the local authorities were allowed to let loose the Mahomedan mob on the Hindus. Here again there was a failure or a very partial success. The first attempt at Comilla miscarried owing to the high spirit and good organisation of Comilla Swadeshism. The second blow at Jamalpur fell with tremendous effect, but the additional outbreak on the 27th upset the official apple-cart. It went much farther, probably, than was originally intended; for, possibly, the original intention was simply to teach the Swadeshi Hindus a lesson and perhaps to give an excuse for exceptional measures. But the second outbreak went too far. It drove the

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Hindus out of Jamalpur, it identified the officials publicly and unmistakably with the hooligans, it lit a fire that spread all over Bengal and created a commotion throughout India; it gave a stupendous impulse to the self-defence movement all over the province; it found a few scattered akharas and left the whole Hindu population feverishly drilling and standing on guard. Finally, it threatened to imperil Anglo-Indian trade by prolonging the disturbances into the critical part of the jute season. Moreover, the attempt of the officials to isolate Swarajism in East Bengal had failed. Swarajism had set fire to the Punjab, it had begun to permeate the United Provinces, it was spreading with great rapidity in Madras. Another year and the whole of India would have been submerged.

It was these circumstances, apparently, which led the Government to the resolution of grappling with the Frankenstein monster Lord Curzon had raised and of deploying all the powers and instruments of despotism for its suppression. The panic created by the Rawalpindi disturbance has only led it to unmask its batteries sooner and concentrate all its fire on Swadeshism with greater energy and rapidity than might otherwise have been the case. No direct attempt has yet been made to silence the Press, but we have no doubt it will be done, if the Government find that the deportation of Lala Lajpat Rai does not produce a permanent change in its tone. On the other hand, very effective measures have been taken against the Platform. The wholesale arrests in Rawalpindi, the monstrous charges brought against Lala Hansraj and others for no worse offence than being present at a public meeting which happened to be followed in point of time by a riot, the deportation of Lala Lajpat Rai are all measures of intimidation against the Platform. Lest these should prove insufficient, the bureaucracy has armed itself with powers which, if carefully used, will put an end to Swadeshi propaganda from the Platform and can in any case crush it by violent and persistent coercion. It is applied, on the familiar principle of localising opposition and crushing it in detail, to East Bengal and Punjab only, but can easily be extended, should occasion arise. Finally, by the Risley Circular it is sou

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ght to strike out of the hands of Nationalism its chief strength, the young and rising generation whose political activity in their student days means the creation of a new race of men whom it will be impossible to rule by despotic methods. If we submit, therefore, to these bureaucratic measures it means that the three potent instruments of our movement will be rendered useless for our purposes and Swadeshism is at an end. The bureaucracy will necessarily wait to see how we take its attack. If we submit, they will not incur unnecessary odium by pressing the measures too hard but will hold them in terrorem over us and apply them lightly wherever necessary. If we try to carry on the movement, they will carry on the campaign of Russianism to the bitter end, regardless of ulterior consequences, unless the developments are such as to convince them that the Russian method is useless or worse. Meanwhile, as is shown by the deputation of Mr. Beatson Bell to Mymensingh, efforts will be made to get the Mahomedan outbreak under control again, if for nothing else than in the interests of jute. The Anglo-Indian cry of "jute in danger" is one which cannot be ignored. Until the gathering in of the jute, there will probably be no farther Mahomedan turbulence except in sporadic instances. What will happen afterwards, will depend much on the course of events between. We may also expect other attempts besides the mere application of the Risley Circular to take the sting out of the volunteer movement.

Such is the prospect before us. It is high time that we should decide how we are to meet it. Our leaders have evidently abandoned the helm and are merely sitting tight watching the stormy waters roll. So poor is our organisation that even a meeting of mofussil and Calcutta delegates to consider the crisis has not been arranged. There is a talk, we learn from the Friend of India, of an extraordinary All-India Congress at which Mr. Gokhale and some other delegates will meet in Bombay under the aegis of Sir Pherozshah Mehta to protest against these new settled facts. All this will not help us and we must find out our own salvation. We shall devote the next few days to expressing our own opinion of the possibilities before us and we earnestly invite the attention and opinion of our readers upon them,—if they

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agree with us that there is still room for the open agitation for which we have always stood and which we still advocate.

The Nawab's Message

22-May-1907

If the Mahomedan community is to look for a leader, they should turn their eyes not towards the upstarts of Dacca, but to the scion of the historic house of Murshidabad; and if a contradiction is required of the lying and interested statement that the Hindus and Mahomedans have not lived as friends in the land of their birth, we cannot do better than bring into requisition the high-minded pronouncement of the Nawab of Murshidabad on the subject to which we so gladly give publicity elsewhere in our columns. The present rupture artificially created between the two communities is extremely painful to the Nationalists of both and this seasonable gospel of peace and goodwill should direct into the right path the patriotically disposed Mahomedans of the country. The Nawab's message is a convincing proof of the dissociation of all right-thinking Mahomedans from the hired hooliganism to which a number of unscrupulous Mahomedans have most unfortunately and disgracefully lent themselves.

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And Still It Moves

23-May-1907

What is the precise difference which the recent Government measures have made in the conditions of the Swadeshi movement? The first to be considered, because the most dramatic and striking of these measures, is the deportation of Lala Lajpat Rai. Has this deportation brought any really new element into the problem? When we began the movement, we were prepared, or at least we professed to be prepared, for the utmost use by the Government of all the weapons the existing law puts in its hand. We were prepared for press-prosecutions, we were prepared to go to jail on false charges, we refused to be appalled by regulation lathis, broken heads and Gurkha charges. Whatever use the Bengal Government might make of the repressive laws which stand on its statute books, to whatever advantage the local magistracy might turn their powers of government by ukase, we were prepared for everything, we started with the fixed determination to allow nothing to daunt us. Deportation was also a pre-existing weapon of repression available to the bureaucracy under the existing laws. The difference its use has made, is to bring in, in the place of provincial repression by the local government, imperial repression by the Government of India with the approval of the Secretary of State. It has also replaced the long and uncertain process of trial ending in a punishment of fixed duration by the swift and sudden process of kidnapping and a punishment—no, we apologise to the Friend of India, we should rather say a leniency of uncertain, perhaps life-long duration. One other element it has introduced which patriots have had to face in all other countries, but which falls on our heads for the first time,—the punishment of exile. To speak

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the truth, this is the one and only terror of deportation to Indian patriots. The Indian mind with its passionate attachment to the very soil of the mother-country, its deep reverent feeling that mother and motherland are more to be cherished than paradise itself, must feel the deprivation with a force which no European race, except perhaps the passionate and emotional Italian, could understand. In jail the floor we tread is at least made of Indian soil; when we exercise in the prison yard, the air that visits our cheeks is Indian air; the pulsation of Indian aspiration, Indian emotion, Indian life, Indian joys and sorrows beats around our prison walls and floods our hearts with the magnetic pervasiveness of which the air of India is more full than that of any other country. The bureaucracy blundered upon an ingenious way of striking us in a very vulnerable point when it hurried Lajpat Rai away to a remote corner of the world among alien men and cut him off from all sight of Indian faces and communion with Indian hearts. But what then? It is but one suffering the more, and the deeper the suffering the greater the glory, the more celestial the reward. We cannot suffer more than Poerio in his Neapolitan dungeon or Silvio Pellico in his Austrian fortress or Mazzini in his lifelong exile. It is with the lifeblood of a nation's best and the unshed tears that well up from the hearts of its strong men that the tree of liberty is watered. The greater the sacrifice, the earlier is its fruit enjoyed.

Yet it cannot be denied that the deportation came as a shock on the Moderates and as a surprise to the Extremists. It was a shock to the Moderates because of the source from which it came. They had never been able to shake off the idea that in the end Mr. John Morley, if not the sympathetic Lord Minto, would come to their help. To renounce that hope would be to reject the very keystone of the Moderate policy and turn their backs for ever on the illusions of thirty years. Even up to the moment almost of the deportation the Bengalee was clamouring for the recall of Mr. Hare and confidently expecting that his criminal inactivity in the East Bengal disturbances would be punished by a just and benign Secretary of State. On such high expectations the deportation came as a blow straight in the face

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and struck the Moderate party dumb and senseless for a moment. The heaviness of the blow it had received can be judged by the sudden violence of the Indu Prakash which exceeded in the fierce anger of its utterances any Extremist organ. There is no disguising the fact that the Moderate's occupation is gone. British rule has so unmistakably, finally, irrevocably declared itself as despotism naked and unashamed, a despotism moreover which is firmly resolved to remain despotic,—the fiction of a constitution has been so relentlessly exposed as a sheer mockery and constitutional agitation has thereby been rendered such a patent, elaborate and heartless farce that, although it will continue just as the snake continues to wriggle even after it has been cut into two, it has lost all life and all chance of carrying weight in the country. The temper of the Madras meeting, which a serious and influential paper like the Madras Standard asserts to have been composed mainly not of students but of adults, shows what the temper of the nation is likely to be. The deportation therefore has introduced a new element for the Moderate politician. His gods have failed him; the benign hand from which he expected favours, has treated him instead to a whip of scorpions; the face of flowers he worshipped has had its veil torn away and stands revealed as a grinning death's head. Moderation lies wounded to the death. It can no longer exist except as a pretence, an attitude. To the Nationalist the deportation came as a surprise because of the occasion for which it was employed. We knew that the benignant bureaucracy had this weapon in their armoury, that they had used it once and might well use it again; but we thought it had more respect for its prestige and more common sense than to waste it on an insufficient occasion. The Natus were deported because it was suspected that they were behind the Poona assassinations and that the assassinations themselves were part of an elaborate Maratha conspiracy. In the Punjab there was nothing but a riot; for the persistent wild rumours of the disarming of regiments and murder of Europeans have received no confirmation of any kind. Deportation, as directed against the Nationalist movement, was like the magic weapon of Karna which could be used only once

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with effect; it should therefore have been reserved for a supreme occasion when it might have averted, for the time at least, an incipient mutiny or formidable rebellion. It was used instead in a moment of panic to meet a fancied mutiny; it was used not against the formidable and indispensable leader of a great approaching rebellion; but against a boy-orator and a pleader of considerable influence who at the worst was no more than one of the many prophets of revolution. Meant for Arjuna, it has been hurled against Ghatotkach. This misuse deprives it of its utility; for as the Empire shrewdly pointed out the other day the trick of deportation cannot be successfully played twice; the second time it will be a direct help to the strong revolutionary forces which are growing in the country. To the Nationalists therefore the menace of deportation does not bring in any new element into the situation, except in so far as it hastens their work or brings the leaders as well as the rank and file to the touchstone of peril where their value will be tested.

The new element of deportation, therefore, so far as it is a new element, merely facilitates the work of Nationalism. There is no reason why it should modify our action in any essential feature. We may be told of course that we cannot afford to imperil the leaders on whom the progress of the movement depends. We answer that the safety of the leaders can only be assured by sacrificing the vitality and force of the movement, a price too heavy to pay; secondly where the will of a higher Power is active in a great upheaval, no individual is indispensable. The movement will not stop in the Punjab because Lajpat Rai is gone or Ajit Singh is hiding. Eppur si muove, "and still it moves", to its predestined end.

British Generosity

23-May-1907

There is no quality which the British race more persistently arrogates to itself, as if it were their monopoly, than truth and frankness. Yet by a strange ill-luck they have never been able to persuade anybody but themselves that they possess now or

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ever possessed these high and noble qualities. On the contrary, the epithet "perfidious Albion" in which the French summed up their experience of English character before the present "cordial understanding" and to which they may have to revert when it is over, expresses the general opinion of their fellow-Europeans on the British claim to an unique and superior righteousness. The conviction of British political hypocrisy, large promise-making when it suited them and large promise-breaking now that that suits them, is the final conclusion to which India has been driven on the same subject. There is another quality of which the English are equally proud, their fair-play and generosity to enemies. Here again the world's opinion of them does not coincide with their opinion of themselves. On the contrary, no nation is capable of greater meanness and venomous hatred in its treatment of the enemies and opponents who are so unfortunate as to fall into its hands. The generosity is reserved for those enemies who have beaten them in fight, like Washington, or with whom they have to come to an understanding after an equal struggle, like Botha. But towards others and specially for those who have put them in fear for their national existence or their supremacy or their commerce and then fallen into their power, they observe neither chivalry nor fairness nor truth. It was the British fair-play which in mediaeval times burned Joan of Arc at the stake and then for some centuries vilely slandered her character. It was British fair-play which pursued Napoleon during his lifetime with a campaign of slander and abuse of the most extraordinary vileness and then interned him in St. Helena and embittered his last days by the meanest pettiness and persecution. It was British fair-play which, in the early days of the Boer war avenged Majuba by an astonishing campaign of lies and abuse against the Boers, representing them as a race of dirty, brutal, cunning and uneducated semi-savages. We see the same national characteristic in the shameful vilification in which the Anglo-Indian Press have indulged against the patriot whose influence in the Punjab has put in fear for their empire and their trade. We waive the question whether Lajpat Rai was or was not really guilty from the standpoint of the bureaucracy,

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whether he was or he was not actively working against the continuance of British rule, as he certainly was actively working against the continuance of irresponsible bureaucratic despotism. But as to the personal character of Lajpat Rai, his personal uprightness, honesty, candour, his earnest diligence in working for the religious, social and political elevation of his country, his unostentatious self-sacrifice, his modest worth, his quiet courage, even his opponents have nothing but praise. Yet it is this man whom the Anglo-Indian papers have been vilifying as a rascally agitator, a braggart, a coward, a "mean specimen of humanity", whose influence was solely due to his having spent money freely on "agitation". We can only salute with reverence this fresh exhibition of British fair-play and generosity. But if the man was such a poor and inconsiderable specimen, how is it that you have treated him as if he were a second Napoleon, thinking even distant Mandalay not remote enough or strong enough to hold the mighty rebel? All this foul-mouthed brutality is a measure of the extraordinary panic into which the ruling race has fallen as the result of what the Statesman describes as no worse than a street row or an election fight. The tiger qualities of a ruling race, no doubt!

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An Irish Example

24-May-1907

The refusal of the Irish Parliamentary party under Mr. Redmond's leadership to have anything to do with the sham the Liberal Government has offered them in the place of Home Rule, is a step on which we may congratulate the Irish people. Had they been deluded into swallowing the bait which was devised for them with such unscrupulous skill by Mr. Birrell, they would have committed a false step of the worst kind and seriously compromised the Home Rule Movement. It is much better that Ireland should have to wait longer for any measure of self-government than that she should commit political suicide by accepting Mr. Birrell's Bill. We call it Mr. Birrell's Bill, but in reality it is Sir Antony Macdonnell's and has the stamp of "Liberal" Anglo-Indian upon it. Its object is obviously to kill the Home Rule Movement by kindness, to break up Irish unity and take the sting out of Irish Nationalism by a sham concession skilfully calculated to corrupt the natural leaders of the people. The measure proposed was a sort of bastard cross between a Colonial Parliament and an Indian Legislative Council. Its acceptance would have committed Irish politicians to the abandonment of the policy of Parnell and to co-operation in future with the British Government. The Irish people were openly told that the concession of further self-government would depend on the way in which they used this precious opportunity, in other words on their abandoning passive resistance and their principle of aloofness from Government and its favours and co-operating with it in a mutilated and ineffectual scheme of self-government. What would have been the result, if the Irish people had closed with this very bad bargain? They would not have got Home

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Rule which England is determined never to give them unless she has no other choice. The local self-government offered to Ireland would have been extended to Scotland and Wales and when Ireland demanded Home Rule, she would have been told to be satisfied with a measure of self-government which had satisfied the other parts of the United Kingdom. The British Government would by that time have broken the solid phalanx of Irish Nationalism and by the bribe of office, position and influence succeeded in detaching from the cause a great number of the natural leaders of the people, men of intelligence, ability and ambition, whose talents would be used by England in keeping the people contented and combating true Nationalism. In this way the great ideal of an Irish nation for which Emmett died, for which O'Connell and Parnell planned and schemed and which the Sinn Fein movement is making more and more practicable, would either have been entirely frustrated or postponed for another century. Instead of a separate nationality with its own culture, language, government the Irish would have ended by becoming a big English county governed by a magnified and glorified Parish Council. The same kind of bait was offered to the Boers, but that shrewd people resolutely refused to associate themselves with any form of self-government short of absolute colonial self-government. The same kind of bait is promised to the Moderates in India by Honest John and the honest Statesman, if they will only consent to dissociate themselves from the new spirit and all its works and betray their country. The Statesman says that Mr. Redmond has been forced to the refusal by the necessity of deferring to the Sinn Fein Party in Ireland, and hopes that the Indian Moderates will not commit the same mistake. Our sapient contemporary opines that the Nationalists in India are not really so strong as they seem and that the Moderate leaders, if they desire to betray the country, can do so with impunity, without losing their influence and position. Well, we shall see.

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The East Bengal Disturbances

25-May-1907

We have said that the deportation of Lala Lajpat Rai brings no new element into the situation beyond hastening the processes of Nationalism and bringing us from a less to a more acute stage of our progress to independence. The second disturbing element has been the culmination of the alliance between Salimullah of Dacca and the bureaucracy in the anarchy and the outrages in the Mymensingh district. These disturbances are now almost over for the time being, though we must take full advantage of the lull allowed to us, so as to put our house in order against a possible recrudescence after the jute season. We should now seriously consider how far these disturbances have altered the situation and what we should do in order to meet these new conditions. We must first notice that neither the disturbances themselves nor their cause are in their nature a new element in the situation. The Salimullahi campaign, the use of Mahomedan budmashes to terrorise Swadeshi Hindus, the official inactivity and sympathy with the lawbreakers, these have all been with us even before. The conclusions we arrived at at the time, the warnings and exhortations we addressed to the people have been proved to the hilt, justified beyond dispute, enforced in red letters of rapine, bloodshed and outrage. Our reading of the situation then was that no serious apprehension of trouble between Hindus and Mahomedans need be entertained except within that tract of country immediately under the influence of Nawab Salimullah,—Mymensingh, Dacca, Tipperah and possibly parts of Pabna. This is precisely what has happened. In Comilla the trouble was stopped before it could do real mischief, by the resolute spirit of the Hindus; in Dacca, in spite of small skirmishes, individual

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harassment and a minor outbreak or two, it never gathered to a head, because the great strength and early preparations of the Hindus overawed the prime movers and their instruments; Mymensingh alone felt the full force of the storm, while Pabna still hovers on the brink of it. It is not that the Nawab's campaign was not vigorously pursued in other parts. The Red Pamphlet has been ubiquitous throughout Eastern and Northern Bengal; the preachings of the Nawab's Mullahs have been as persistent, as malignant in Barisal, in Calcutta, in every strong centre of Swadeshism. But though there have been alarms and excursions even as far west as Allahabad and Benares, the campaign has for the present signally failed outside the limits of Nawab Salimullah's kingdom. This is a fact to be noted. We do not say that Salimullahism carries no dangers with it of general disruption and disunion between the two communities; an unscrupulous agitation of this kind aided by official backing is always dangerous. But in the rest of the country the blind faith in the Nawab and his Mullahs is absent and other conditions and forces exist which, if properly used by the Nationalists, will permanently counteract the promoters of disunion. Even of themselves, they have been sufficient to prevent the Mahomedans from siding with the self-elected leader against the Swadeshists.

But however limited the area of the disturbances might be, we warned the country that Comilla was not the first and would not be the last of such outbreaks and we called upon it to be ready in time to follow the example of the Comilla Hindus. Moderate politicians, blind leaders of the blind, were rejoicing over the end of the disturbances brought about, they said, by their mysterious efforts—and crying peace, peace where there was no peace. We pointed out that the Comilla affair was not an isolated outbreak, but part of a policy and we knew the men we had to deal with too well to suppose that they would be put off their machinations by a single defeat. Beaten at Comilla, they were certain to try their luck again in Mymensingh. We warned the country also that when the disturbances came, it would be idle to look for protection to the officials and the police. By announcing Swaraj as our ideal we had declared war against the existence

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of the bureaucracy and we could not expect the bureaucracy to help us by making our efforts to put it out of existence safe and easy. On the contrary the Nawab and his hooligans were, practically if not avowedly, the allies of the bureaucracy in their war against Swadeshism and must therefore command sympathy and helpful inactivity if not actual assistance from their friends. In all these respects our reading of the situation has been proved correct beyond cavil or dispute. The extent to which the Nawab has succeeded in turning the baser passions of the mob to his uses; the extent to which the Anti-Swadeshi army has gone in its outrages, not scrupling even to desecrate temples and violate women; the extent to which the officials carried their connivance with the excesses, an European police official actually leading the mob and the looting being carried on under the eyes of the police; these things were new, but the Salimullahi campaign itself, the use of the hooligans (our Indian Black Hundred), and the sympathy of the officials are elements which are old, of which the country had been warned and against which the leaders of the movement should have provided.

Even the extent to which these things were carried, was due entirely to a feature of the Mymensingh occurrences which we had already warned the country to avoid—the non-resistance of the Hindus of Jamalpur. There are some who say that the recent events in India are a proof of the impracticability of the Nationalist programme. We do not follow the reasoning of these logicians. The Jamalpur incidents and their sequel are a terrible proof of the soundness of the Nationalist ideas and the utter unsoundness of the Moderate theories of our relations with the bureaucracy and the best way of enforcing the Swadeshi propaganda. The people of Comilla followed the Nationalist programme with brilliantly successful results. They boycotted the courts, schools and every other element of the bureaucratic scheme of things and announced their intention of continuing the boycott so long as the Nawab of Dacca was allowed to remain in Comilla—and the Nawab was packed off without ceremony. They met force with force and the hooligan army of Anti-Swadeshism underwent a crushing defeat. On the other

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hand the people of Jamalpur did everything which the Nationalist programme excludes; they trusted to the promises of the alien, they chose to go to the mela unarmed, like defenceless sheep, relying not on their own strong arm but on the protection of the British shepherd. At the order of the alien they laid down the lathis they carried for self-defence, at the order of the alien they trooped to the mela, from which they had resolved to absent themselves, to be thrashed by Mahomedan cudgels. Then when their sheepish trustfulness had had its reward, that one lesson was not enough; again they trusted to British protection and sent away the volunteers who stood between them and further outrage. And when the second storm came, they could think of nothing better than wholesale flight from the field of battle. Throughout we see the working of the old political superstitions, the old unworkable compromise which tried to oppose the bureaucracy and yet co-operate with it, to combine vigorous opposition with meek submission, to build up a nation under the most adverse circumstances and against the strongest opponents and yet be, first and foremost, docile, peaceful and law-abiding. These superstitions exploded in the explosions at Jamalpur, and the conflagration that followed meant the collapse of a policy.

The hooligan disturbances in East Bengal bring therefore no new elements into the situation, but, like the deportation of Lala Lajpat Rai, merely make it more acute and hasten the processes of Nationalism. They create no new conditions, but they have caused certain truths to be newly appreciated. The first is that the Pax Britannica is Maya and, if we mean to be Swadeshists and Swarajists, we must rely in future not on British protection but on self-protection. The second is that, as we have long insisted, our present means of self-defence are inadequate and better means and organisation are a pressing need. The third is the seriousness and true nature of the Mahomedan problem which our older politicians have always tried to belittle or ignore. Anyone who wishes to deal successfully with the crisis in the country, must recognise these three lessons of experience and shape his methods accordingly.

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Newmania

25-May-1907

Yesterday the Special Correspondent of the Englishman finished his shilling shocker in many chapters, The Dreadful Boy Desperadoes of Dacca or The Violent Volunteers of Barisal. We have had many new things recently, the new Hinduism, the new School, the new Politics, the new Province, the new John Morley and now we have Newmania in the Englishman. The peculiarly delirious character of this disease can be easily understood from the Khulna telegram of the Secretary, People's Association. Mr. Newman had published from Barisal a peculiarly blood and thunder incident of the villainous drowning and stabbing of British goods by whiskerless young desperadoes of Khulna. The Magistrate of Khulna seems to have been so far taken in by the life-like vividness of Mr. Newman's style as to take this bit of heroic romancing quite seriously. He actually enquired into the alleged murder and sudden death and naturally found that nothing of the kind had happened. It is clear that we need a special liturgy for India. "From Denzil Ibbetson and deportation, from the stick of the Constable and the gun of the Gurkha, from sunstroke and the Civil and Military Gazette, from Pax Britannica and the Nawab of Dacca, from Sir Henry Cotton and Mr. Rees, from Fuller, Morley and Shillong Hare, Good Lord deliver us! From lesser plague and pestilence, from cholera and motor-cars, from measles and moderation, Good Lord deliver us! But most of all from the friendship of the Statesman and the ravings of Newmania, Good Lord deliver us!"

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The Gilded Sham Again

27-May-1907

The Statesman on Sunday came out with the startling fact that Mr. Morley has "finally formulated a workable scheme giving prominent natives a larger representation on the various bodies having effective control of Indian affairs". This is, we presume, the last and most authoritative of the special cablegrams with which the Statesman has been regaling us, for want of more substantial fare, ever since Mr. John Morley became Chief Bureaucrat for India. For, we are told, Mr. Morley will make an important announcement when introducing the Indian budget. We would call the attention of our readers to the wording of this portentous cablegram. There is going to be a larger representation on the bodies having effective control of Indian affairs, viz., the Legislative Councils and, perhaps, the Executive in which "natives" are at present unrepresented. Indians are not to be allowed any control over Indian affairs, they are only to be more largely represented on the bodies which have that control. They are to have a larger voice, but there is to be no guarantee that the voice will be at all effective. The share of Indians in the Government has up to now been vox et praeterea nihil, a voice and nothing more, and in the future also it is to be a voice and nothing more. We notice, moreover, that it is not the country, not the people of India which is to be represented, but only "prominent natives". We shall have a few more Gokhales, a few more Bhupendranath Boses, a few more Nawabs of Dacca on the Councils—and there an end. There will be a little manipulation of light and shade, an increase in the number of dark faces, and Mr. Morley and the Statesman will triumphantly invite us to rejoice at the "important advance that has been made in

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the direction of self-government". A hint has been given from another source that there will actually be a non-official majority of elected and nominated members. In other words Mr. Apcar, Mr. Gokhale and the Nawab of Dacca multiplied several times over will form a non-official majority in the Council. Is this the reform for which we are invited to give up Swadeshi, Nationalism and our future? Mr. Morley and the Statesman are grievously mistaken if they think that the newly-awakened spirit of Indian Nationalism can any longer be put off with a gilded sham.

National Volunteers

27-May-1907

Our Barisal Correspondent seems, like the Khulna Magistrate, to have taken the Englishman's Special Correspondent much too seriously. The fictions of Mr. Newman are too evidently fictions to deserve serious criticism. Whether they are the distortions of a panic-stricken imagination or actual inventions, we need not too closely enquire. They have a certain journalistic effectiveness and they serve the political ends of this paper whose efforts are wholly directed towards urging on the Government to a policy of thoroughgoing repression. Everybody in Bengal knows that previous to the disturbances in East Bengal there was no movement of the kind which has sent Mr. Newman into carefully calculated hysterics. There was a movement for physical training and the institution of akharas, which was by no means so widespread or successful as it should have been. There was also a custom which had first grown up in the Congress and naturally extended to Conferences and then to public meetings, of employing the services of young men in making the arrangements and keeping order. It is those only who bore the name of volunteers and they were never a standing organisation, but merely organised themselves for the occasion and broke up when it was over, nor had they any connection with the akharas. Finally, there was in the earlier days of the Swadeshi movement great activity among the young men in picketing and other means of moral suasion to

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enforce the boycott, but except in one or two places this has long fallen into desuetude except for occasional spasmodic attempts. Neither were the picketers ever formed into an organisation or termed volunteers. After the outbursts of anti-Swadeshi violence at Comilla and Jamalpur the young men spontaneously united to present a firm defence against hooligan outrage and this is the terrible phenomenon which has made Mr. Newman delirious. In his ravings he has mixed up all these loose threads and woven out of them a web fearful and wonderful. As a matter of fact hundreds of youths who are taking part in the defence of hearth and home, never entered an akhara or handled a lathi before, and are now first realising what they ought to have realised long ago, the necessity of physical exercise and training in self-defence.

With extraordinary ingenuity this imaginative Sherlock Holmes of Anglo-India has discovered that the Anti-Circular Society, the Bande Mataram Sampraday and the Brati-Samity,—harmless and peaceful relics of the first Swadeshi enthusiasm,—are separately and unitedly the organising centre of these terrible volunteers! We only wish our countrymen had shown themselves capable of forming such an organisation, deliberate, well-knit and pervasive. But we have still some way to travel before that becomes possible.

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The True Meaning of the Risley Circular

28-May-1907

We have seen that the effect of Lala Lajpat Rai's deportation is solely to bring the struggle between the bureaucracy and the people to a head and the leaders as well as the rank and file into the range of fire. We have also come to the conclusion that the disturbances in Mymensingh create no new problem but rather compel us to face as urgencies certain primary necessities we have too much neglected,—the necessity of no longer relying blindly on the purely hypnotic and illusory protection of the Pax Britannica which may at any moment fail us or be suspended; the necessity of an universal training in the practice of self-defence and a better organisation for mutual assistance; the necessity of recognising and practically grappling with the Mahomedan difficulty. But neither of these occurrences has really made impossible, or even altered the conditions of, our programme of defensive resistance.

The third fresh departure of the Government of India is the Risley Circular. This circular is only a more comprehensive and carefully studied edition of the Carlyle Circular. It brings therefore no unfamiliar element into the problem; but there is this very important difference, that while the Carlyle Circular was a local experiment hastily adopted to meet an urgent difficulty and dropped as soon as it was found difficult to work, the Risley Circular is a deliberate policy adopted by the Supreme Government, with full knowledge of the circumstances and of its possible effects, in the hope of striking at the very root of the Swadeshi movement. Everyone will remember the convulsion created by the Carlyle Circular. Its natural effect would have been to bring about an universal students' strike, and for a

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few days it seemed as if such a strike would actually take place. Unfortunately the movement immediately affected certain vested interests and the representatives of those interests happened also to be the political leaders to whom the country and the students especially were accustomed to look for guidance. The leading spirits among the young men in Calcutta were still immature and wanting in grit and tenacity; the influence on their minds of their old leaders was very powerful; the new men were comparatively unknown and influenced the course of events rather by the concrete directness of their views, the ardour of their feelings and the fiery energy of their speech and activity than by the weight of their personalities. The older leaders were, therefore, able by a strenuous and united effort of their authority to turn back the impetuous tide and dissipate the enormous motive-power which had been generated. They were too selfish to sacrifice their immediate interests, too blind and wanting in foresight to understand that the immediate loss and difficulty would be repaid tenfold by the inevitable effects of the movement. An universal educational strike at that moment, before the Government had become accustomed to the situation, would infallibly have unnerved the hand of power and brought about an almost immediate reconsideration of the Partition. Whatever the Government may say or do, it cannot afford to lose control of the education of the country; it cannot afford to hand over this immense mass of material, the India of the future, into the hands of the political leaders without the subtle control and check which membership of a Government University exercises, without the opportunity of unstringing the nerves of character and soul which the present system of education provides. The Government must keep its hold on the mind of the young or lose India. The magnitude of their blunder was dimly perceived afterwards by some of the leaders and one or two admitted it in private. We only recall that disastrous episode in order to lay stress on the fact that if again repeated the blunder will be worse than a blunder, it will be an offence against our posterity and a betrayal of the nation's future.

What is the position now? The Risley Circular is a desperate

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attempt of the bureaucracy not only to recover and confirm its hold on the student population and through them on the future, but to make that hold far more stringent, rigid, ineffugable than it ever was in the past. They do not care very much if certain academical ideas of liberalism or nationalism are imparted to the young by their teachers, but they desire to stop the active habit of patriotism in the young; for they know well that a mere intellectual habit untranslated into action is of no value in after life. The Japanese when they teach Bushido to their boys do not rest content with lectures or a moral catechism; they make them practise Bushido and govern every thought and action of their life by the Bushido ideal. This is the only way of inculcating a quality into a nation, by instilling it practically into the minds of its youth at school and College until it becomes an ingrained, inherent, inherited national quality. This is what we have to do with the modern ideal of patriotism in India. We have to fill the minds of our boys from childhood with the idea of the country, and present them with that idea at every turn and make their whole young life a lesson in the practice of the virtues which afterwards go to make the patriot and the citizen. If we do not attempt this, we may as well give up our desire to create an Indian nation altogether; for without such a discipline nationalism, patriotism, regeneration are mere words and ideas which can never become a part of the very soul of the nation and never therefore a great realised fact. Mere academical teaching of patriotism is of no avail. The professor may lecture every day on Mazzini and Garibaldi and Washington and the student may write themes about Japan and Italy and America without bringing us any nearer to our supreme need,—the entry of the habit of patriotism into our very bone and blood. The Roman Satirist tells us that in the worst times of imperial despotism in Rome the favourite theme of teachers and boys in the schools was liberty and tyrannicide;—but neither liberty nor tyrannicide was practised by the boys when they became men; rather they grew up into submissive slaves of the single world-despot. It is for this reason that the men of the new party have welcomed the active association of our students with political meetings,

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with the propagation and actual practice of Swadeshi, with the volunteer movement in its various forms,—not, as has been malevolently suggested, out of a turbulent desire to make use of unripe young minds to create anarchy and disorder, but because they see in this political activity in the young the promise of a new generation of Indians who will take patriotism earnestly as a thing to live and die for, not as the pastime of leisure hours. Nobody who believes that such patriotism is the first need of this country can consistently oppose the participation of students in politics. When Indian nationality is a thing realised and the present unnatural conditions have been remedied, then indeed this active participation may be brought under restriction and regulation; for then the inherited habit of patriotism, the atmosphere of a free country and the practice and teaching of the Bushido virtues within the limits of home and school life will be sufficient. But before then to submit to restrictions is to commit national suicide.

If our educated men do not understand this—as, indeed, with our want of direct political experience it is difficult for them to understand it,—our English rulers at least have grasped the situation. Study their circular and you will see what it means. School students are not even to attend political meetings nor school teachers to teach them patriotism. Why? Because at that age the mind is soft and impressionable and what is seen and heard, sinks deep and tends to crystallise not merely into fixed ideas, but into character. A teacher may by his personal influence and teachings so surround the minds of his students with the idea of the country, of work for the country, of living and dying for the country, that this will become the dominant idea of their minds and, if associated with any kind of patriotic discipline or teaching in action, the dominant note in their character. The attendance of schoolboys as volunteers at political meetings, their work in the reception and service of men honoured by the country for patriotic service, their active participation in semi-political, semi-religious utsavas are all part of such a patriotic discipline. It is this against which the efforts of the bureaucracy are being directed, by the Risley Circular, by the prohibition of

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the Shivaji utsava outside the Deccan, by the attack on our melas and other public occasions where such training is possible. For the same reason the active participation of College students in political meetings is forbidden. At the age of College students ideas may be modified, the intellect may be powerfully influenced by what they hear and see, but character can only be influenced and modified by action. And it is of character in action that the bureaucracy is afraid, not so much of mere ideas, mere speeches, mere writings. Let the College students attend political meetings and utsavas—that by itself will not hurt the bureaucracy; but let them not organise or take part in them, for that means the character affected, the habit of political action formed, the first elementary beginnings of service to the country commenced. Picketing and active participation in Swadeshi work is of course still more objectionable from the bureaucratic standpoint. For the same reason, again, College professors are forbidden to influence their students or lead them to political meetings: for that brings in the powerful impetus of leading and example and threatens the bureaucracy with the beginnings of organisation.

The Risley Circular, with its sanctimonious professions of anxiety for the best interests of students and guardians, is in reality a powerful attack on the growing spirit of Nationalism at its most vital point. As such we must understand it and as such resist it.

Cool Courage and Not Blood-and-Thunder Speeches

28-May-1907

It seems that our Local Columns Editor yesterday, seeing the name of Srijut Bipin Chandra Pal at the head of the report of the Shaktipuja meeting in Sobhabazar, thought it unnecessary to examine the matter closely. The report can hardly be correct. So far as we are aware, Srijut Bipin Chandra has come to no final conclusion on the question of holding or not holding public meetings in East Bengal at the present moment. The Nationalist leaders in Bengal are in consultation at present on the best way

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of meeting the new situation and until the opinions of all are known, no definite pronouncement on the matter of the Ordinance is likely to be made. If the report is correct, it appears that a gentleman from Madras got up at the end and made the occasion ridiculous by a blood-and-thunder speech about bombs and the Czar of Russia. We would advise all who have the cause at heart to refrain from such frantic flights of eloquence. The situation is serious enough in all conscience and we need all the statesmanship and courage there is among us to meet it. We must decide on a line of policy which will effectively and resolutely repel the determined onslaught the bureaucracy is making on the movement, while avoiding the mistake of playing into its hands. Cool courage is, as we have said before, the supreme need of the moment; exaggeration and unmeaning talk about bombs and human sacrifices can only weaken the seriousness of our action and hamper the hands of those who are trying to grapple with the problem before us. We would request the public neither to be depressed nor to lose their heads,—of both which contingencies there seems to be some danger,—but to remember that by their handling of the present crisis the people of Bengal will either keep or lose their political lead in the Nationalist movement.

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The Effect of Petitionary Politics

29-May-1907

We are glad to notice a ring of boldness and sincerity in all the writings of the Indu Prakash relating to the deportation of Lajpat Rai. We hope this tone will be an enduring change for the better. Mr. Gokhale's resort to the Anglo-Indian Press in preference to the Indian, on which its observations are very pertinent, is an example of the very common, almost inevitable effect of petitionary politics on patriotism. That a prominent leader of the Congress party should show such an unseasonable partiality for the Anglo-Indian Press whose recent campaign of misrepresentation and vituperation has been unpardonable in the eyes of every self-respecting Indian, is surprising at the first glance. But, in reality, it is the natural demoralising effect of the association cum opposition politics. The very basis of constitutional agitation is a reliance on the foreigner and a habit of appealing to him, which is the reverse side of a distrust and certain contempt for their own people. That this feeling should be, however unconsciously, betrayed by a man of Mr. Gokhale's position and character, is deplorable but inevitable. It is the logical outcome of that moderation and spirit of dependence which our contemporary has been so long preaching without perceiving, apparently, where its own dogmas led.

The Sobhabazar Shaktipuja

29-May-1907

We expressed yesterday our doubt whether the report of Bipin Babu's speech as sent in to us by a casual reporter and incautiously admitted into our columns, could possibly be correct. We

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are now in a position to state that Bipin Babu's remarks have been distorted in the process of summarising. We shall shortly be able to publish an authorised summary of the speech.

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The Ordinance and After

30-May-1907

We have pointed out in previous articles what we considered to be the individual effect of three of the measures of repression adopted by the bureaucracy in their fight with the Swadeshi movement. The review has led us to the conclusion that there is so far no new element in the situation beyond, on one hand, the clear and universal conviction that has been carried home to the people of the nature and extent of the resistance which we may expect from the bureaucracy and, on the other, the more urgent necessity of adopting certain measures for national defence and resistance which ought to have been taken before. The conditions of the problem have not been materially changed, but its acuteness has been enhanced. The persecution of Swadeshi leaders and workers is nothing new, but it has increased in scale and in the atrocity of the punishments—and it is being carried out not by local officials but by the Government of India. The attempt to break the back of the movement by restricting the action of students and teachers is nothing new, but it is now being taken up deliberately, systematically, not by a local administration, but by the Government of India. The utilisation by the bureaucracy of Nawab Salimullah and by Nawab Salimullah of hooligans to harass and, if possible, break the Boycott is nothing new, but the extent to which this sinister opposition has been carried and the wide space of country over which it has been attempted, is a new phenomenon. But there is one measure of the Government which is in itself a new phenomenon and seriously affects, if it does not entirely alter the whole situation. This is the Coercion Ordinance directed against public meetings. It would not be true to say that the ordinance was absolutely unforeseen.

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We at least had always held it extremely probable if not quite certain, that this and even more violent and crushing methods of coercion would eventually be adopted by the bureaucracy in its struggle for self-preservation. But we did not anticipate so rapid a development of coercive measures, or that they would reach their height, as they threaten to do under a professedly Radical and democratic Government. Not that we ever believed there was any essential difference between Liberals and Conservatives with regard to India, but there was a difference in their professions and we imagined that what the Conservatives would do immediately and without compunction, the Liberals would also do, but with hesitation and some show of reluctance. There has, however, been no slightest sign of reluctance. With alacrity and a light heart they have refused to India that right of free speech and free meeting which their political creed declares to be a common and fundamental right and to deny which is an act of tyranny. Nevertheless, though not expected so soon, the Coercion Ordinance was not a contingency which had altogether been left out of view.

What then is the new condition which it creates? One of immense importance. Up till now our whole programme with unimportant exceptions has fallen well within the law. We have worked against bureaucratic government, we have not worked against the law nor exceeded its restrictions in any of our methods. So careful have we been in this respect that the bureaucracy have been at a loss where to get a hold on the Swadeshi movement without losing their prestige and reputation, and in the end they have been obliged to throw their reputation overboard and allow the agents of their ally, the Nawab of Dacca, to create disorder so as to prepare the way for proclaiming the Swadeshi areas. This desire to keep within the law was not, as some of our disappointed adversaries suggested, born of fear or unwillingness to bear sacrifices for the country—for even without breaking the law many Swadeshi workers had to go to jail or undergo police and Gurkha violence, but part of a well-reasoned policy. To be able to keep within the law gives an immense advantage to a young movement opposed by a strong

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adversary in possession of all the machinery of legal repression and oppression; for it allows it to grow into adult strength before giving the enemy a sufficient grasp to strangle it while it is yet immature. Moreover, a nation which can show a respect for law even in the first throes of a revolution, has a better chance of enjoying a stable and successful government of its own when its chance comes. Nevertheless legality can never be the first consideration in a struggle of the kind we have entered upon, and if new laws are passed which offend against political ethics, which make our service and duty to our country impossible and to obey which would therefore be an unpatriotic act, they cannot possibly command obedience. Still more is this the case when the measure in question is not a law, but an executive ukase which may yet be prevented from passing into law. This can best be done by a widespread and quiet but determined passive resistance which will make the ukase inoperative without a resort to measures of the most extreme and shameless Russianism. We have not concealed our opinion that this is the course the country ought to adopt in the present juncture, if for no other reason, then because it is our duty as men, as citizens, as patriots.

We recognise, however, that much is yet to be said on the opposite side. The strongest argument against the course we have suggested, is that the bureaucracy evidently desire an immediate struggle. The course of events at Barisal, the recent outrageous insult to a prominent Swadeshi worker and the insolent harassment of the townspeople by the local officials and their underlings, are extremely significant. The attempt to provoke a struggle between the Hindus and Mahomedans culminating in the singular affair of the Barisal night panic which still calls for explanation, has been a failure. It seems that the police are now attempting to force on some demonstration which will give them an excuse for turning Barisal into a second Rawalpindi. The unprovoked blow given by a Gurkha to Srijut Satis Chandra Chatterji was obviously a prearranged affair, leaving the victim the choice between swallowing the insult and an act of retaliation which might have led to an émeute.

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We think that Srijut Satis Chandra on the whole did well to subordinate his feelings to the good of his country, but the odds were the other way, and the police must have known it. That in case of resistance even of the most passive kind, the police or military would not "hesitate to shoot", is extremely probable from the action of the Punjab authorities and the known attitude of the local officials in East Bengal. Would it then be wise for us, it is argued, to expose ourselves passively to the arrest and deportation of our leaders, the dragooning of our towns and villages, the utmost outrages on men and women and all the violent ills of despotic repression, without any certain gain to the country to set in the opposite balance? The question really turns on the precise strength of the movement at its present stage of growth. If it is already strong enough to bear extreme Russian repression without becoming unnerved and demoralised, the course we have suggested is the best, because it is the boldest. If not, it would be sounder policy perhaps to leave the bureaucracy to its Pyrrhic victory for a while and immediately turn all our energies to giving the movement the necessary strength,—in other words, the necessary organisation of men, money and means which it needs in order to cope with the bureaucracy on equal terms. The choice is between these alternatives.

A Lost Opportunity

30-May-1907

The London correspondent of the Bengalee has the following:—"It is a sign of the times that one of the yellow evening papers in recording the news of the arrest of Sir George Arbuthnot went on to assure its readers that Sir George has the entire sympathy of the financial community in London and that his arrest at the suite of a 'native' was directly to be attributed to the hostility towards Englishmen engendered by Bengali Babus." The Englishman must be biting its fingers with mortification at not having been first in the field with this brilliant idea. If it had only thought of sending its special correspondent to Madras at the time, we might not have had to wait for a London evening

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paper to shed the light of this brilliant and illumining idea on the Arbuthnot case. We wonder what our friends of Madras will think of this "entire sympathy of the financial community in London" for the Englishman of finance whom they so implicitly trusted and by whom they were so shamefully betrayed. Such sympathy is a sign of the times indeed.

The Daily News and Its Needs

30-May-1907

The Indian Daily News is extremely anxious to make capital out of the report of the Sobhabazar meeting and it lays down with great solemnity the points on which it does or does not want information from us. Since the success of the C. M. Gazette in bringing about the coup d'état in the Punjab, the whole Anglo-Indian Press seems to be suffering from an epidemic of swelled head. Our remarks on the subject were not to the address of our contemporary or dictated by any desire to enlighten its ignorance, but were meant simply to prevent any mistaken impression being created among our own people that the Nationalist leaders had abandoned passive resistance as the result of the policy of repression or favoured any idea of substituting for it aggressive Nihilism. Since, however, our contemporary is so benevolently anxious about the matter, we hope that yesterday's paragraph will appease his yearnings. Meanwhile we would suggest to him to put himself in communication with a Brahmin pundit and gather some information about the Amabasya and the worship of Raksha Kali.

Common Sense in an Unexpected Quarter

30-May-1907

It has given us quite a turn to find the following criticism of Mr. Morley's approaching "reforms" in the columns of India. "Tinkering with the Indian administrative machine will no longer avail. A thorough overhauling of its component parts has become imperative and unless the leaders of opinion in India are

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encouraged to play a part in the work of government in a manner which is altogether denied to them today, the last state of India will be deplorably and ominously worse than the first." Of course India is much behind the times in imagining that "encouragement" to the leaders of public opinion will meet the situation. The least that India now demands is the admission of the people of the country to the management of its own affairs. But it is at once surprising and gratifying to find that the organ of Palace Chambers has at last realised the necessity of a complete and revolutionary change in the whole system of administration. It quotes against Mr. Morley an admirable passage of his own writings in which this pregnant observation occurs. "A small and temporary improvement may really be the worst enemy of a great and permanent improvement unless the first is made on the line and in the direction of the second." Precisely so. This is the main reason, even apart from their insufficiency, that any mere administrative reforms are looked upon with suspicion by the Nationalist party. The great and permanent improvement India demands is an entire change of the principles of government in India, and a small and temporary improvement in details, leaving the principles untouched, would not be "on the line and in the direction" of the great improvement called for; it would be its worst enemy. Merely to temper absolute bureaucratic power by providing means for consulting the "leaders of public opinion" is a reform which would be the worst enemy of Indian self-government. We recommend this dictum of Mr. Morley, the philosopher, to Mr. Gokhale and other Moderates.

Drifting Away

30-May-1907

Bombay is nearer London than Calcutta; and while Mr. Gokhale during his visit to Calcutta tried to organise a special session of the Congress at Bombay, the people of Bombay are contemplating the holding of the next session of the Congress in London. The Gujerati writes:—

"The idea of holding the next session of the Indian National

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Congress in London is a good idea. Years ago a similar proposal was put forward. But it was not taken up by congressmen in right earnest. The extremists, who are sure to quote Mr. Morley's reply to the anti-partition memorialists in justification of their opposition to sending any petitions, will be probably also opposed to holding any session of the Congress in London. Excluding this class of Indians, the more thoughtful, sober-minded and responsible section of congressmen who form the majority, will be in favour of the idea, provided financial difficulties could be overcome and the most representative congressmen induced to visit England."

And it asserts that "a successful Congress session in London would be more fruitful especially at a juncture like the present than five sessions held in India". Fruitful in what respect? If our contemporary means fruitful in expenditure, humiliation and loss of self-respect, then we must agree with him. Why should the National Congress hold its session in London? The nation does not live in London and the root idea of a national movement is opposed to this continual theatrical supplication to the very people who are interested in preventing us from becoming a nation. While our contemporary confidently asserts that a successful session in London would be more "fruitful" than five sessions held in India, we, belonging as we do to that section which Mr. Romesh Dutt during his two hours' presidentship of the Congress saw routed by the Moderates, may be permitted to suggest that one such session will do more injury to the country and the cause than five years without a session of the Congress. The attitude of British statesmen, moreover, is not encouraging even to the Moderates who still think of getting rights marked "Made in Great Britain" in the same consignment with Liverpool salt or Manchester piece-goods. The hand on the dial will be put back if we leave the nation and check the growing spirit of self-help and self-exertion to go and beg for "rights" in England and spend on this fruitless act sums which we badly require for the long-neglected task of national organisation. "The time," says our contemporary, "has come when Congressmen in a body should face the British public." Possibly; but not to "plead the

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cause of India and her inhabitants in the very metropolis of the Empire". This idea about the British public is a pure superstition. The British public will never interfere with the action of its representatives and kinsmen in India and in the India Office, unless and until it finds itself in danger of losing its Empire in the East. The quarrel has to be fought out between the people of India and the Anglo-Indian bureaucracy and it must be fought out on the soil. To attempt to transfer the field of battle to London will be impracticable and harmful.

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The Question of the Hour

01-June-1907

The writer of "A Word of Warning" which we publish today has voiced an opinion which we find to be held by several Nationalists who have the success of the movement sincerely at heart. Our correspondent, however, lays himself open to some misinterpretation when he speaks of "the suicidal folly of an unarmed and disorganised nation trying to measure its strength with that of the best-organised power in the land". The kind of resistance which seems to be suggested here is something in the nature of rebellion and it goes without saying that such resistance for "an unarmed and disorganised nation" would be not merely foolish but physically impossible; an armed revolt without arms is an absurdity. But to measure our strength, in a very different way, with the bureaucracy, however well-organised the latter may be, is the whole purpose and principle of the Nationalist movement. Our position has always been that the potential strength of the people is far greater than the actual strength of the close oligarchy which governs them without regard to their wishes or interests and that this potential strength can only be educated, organised and welded into compactness and coherence by a direct struggle against the antiquated and semi-mediaeval system with which the country is still cursed in this twentieth century, when all other nations "from China to Peru" are busy modernising and humanising their governments and institutions. In the actual course of the struggle questions will always arise as between rigid applications of principle and concessions to policy and between the contending claims of sheer courage and courage tempered by calculation. We must remember that throughout the movement the immense advance we have made, is due to

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the enthusiasm for a great principle and the boldness,—in the opinion of many an almost foolhardy boldness,—with which we have met every fresh crisis. When the whole of Bengal flung itself into a passionate struggle with the bureaucracy, it was not from any consciousness of strength, for neither the people nor the rulers had any idea of the latent possibilities of political strength in the country. It was in a moment of uncalculating anger that Bengal took up the policy a few daring spirits suggested and was amazed to find that in doing so it had discovered itself and begun a new era of Indian history. The real point at issue now is whether it will or will not be wise to make a frontal in preference to a flank attack on the coercion ukase. We have defied an ukase before, but it was then the ukase of local officialdom and of doubtful legality. The present ukase is the deliberate act of the Government of India and the Secretary of State, and its legality is as undoubted as its political immorality. The question therefore is whether we shall persist in carrying on our movement rigidly within the pale of the law, however oppressive the law may be, or follow the example of the Irish and the English Nonconformists by passive resistance to the law itself with a view to bringing about its repeal. The answer really hangs upon the possible next move of the bureaucracy and our preparedness to meet it. If the bureaucrats try to break our resistance as at Rawalpindi by wholesale arrest, deportation and police and military violence, as well as the still more questionable methods we have seen in operation in East Bengal, shall we still be able to persist, and, if not, what will be our next course? This is the question which has given pause for a moment to the active prosecution of the Nationalist campaign, since it involves a serious issue of policy which must be settled before concerted action can take place. For if the ukase is to be passively resisted, the opposition must be offered in concert and ubiquitously. A sporadic resistance will be ineffectual and give the advantage to our adversaries.

We again repeat that in our opinion the boldest course is the best. If we thought, as the Anglo-Indian papers affect to think, that the movement was the result of our own efforts, a mere

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human creation, we might be of a different opinion. But throughout we have been conscious that our own efforts and the impulse given or the work done by leading men, whether Moderates or Extremists, have been so small, petty and inefficient that they are absolutely insufficient to explain the extraordinary results. The machinery has been absurdly inadequate, the organisation nil, the means at our disposal pitiably small, the real workers few and mostly obscure, and yet the Indian world has stood amazed and the Anglo-Indian aghast at the vast and incommensurate results of an apparatus so inefficient. We believe, therefore, that Divine Power is behind the movement, that the Zeitgeist, the Time-Spirit, is at work to bring about a mighty movement of which the world at the present juncture has need, that that movement is the resurgence of Asia and that the resurgence of India is not only a necessary part of the larger movement but its central need, that India is the keystone of the arch, the chief inheritress of the common Asiatic destiny. The Mongolian world, preserving the old strong and reposeful civilisation of early Asia, flanks her on the right and has already arisen. The Mahomedan world, preserving the aggressive and militant civilisation of Islam, flanks her on the left and in Egypt, in Arabia, in Persia, is struggling to arise. In India the two civilisations meet, she is the link between them and must find the note of harmony which will reconcile them and recreate a common Asiatic civilisation. Viewing the movement in this larger light we believe that as its progress and development has been in the past, so it will be in the future above ordinary human calculations, with only one thing certain about it, that no external force can frustrate it and no internal intrigue divert. Neither John Morley nor Denzil Ibbetson nor Nawab Salimullah, neither false friend nor open enemy, nor even our own mistakes and weakness can come in its way, but rather they are unconsciously helping it on and working for it. In this belief we are willing to take any risk and meet any expense of our blood and our labour for the great end. To husband our men or our resources and try to buy liberty in the cheapest market, would be a false and foolish economy. Lajpat Rai has been swallowed up in the maelstrom and hundreds more

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will follow him, but their disappearance will make no difference either to the strength of the movement or its velocity. Still it will move.

But, subject to this confidence and readiness to throw our all into the gulf, we recognise the necessity of relying on our human judgment to guide us in perplexity, leaving it to the Power behind to make our mistakes as useful, perhaps more useful to the final success than our wiser judgments. On one thing only we must lay fast hold, on the triple unity of Swadeshi, Boycott and Swaraj. These must be pursued with unremitting energy, and so long as we hold fast to them, we cannot go far wrong.

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Regulated Independence

04-June-1907

Never before were the utter helplessness and the deplorable demoralisation of the Native Princes of India more clearly demonstrated than at the present moment when our political ideas and ideals are undergoing such a change. Writes the Daily News:—"It is gratifying to learn that some of the Native States are following in the wake of the Government of India for the suppression of sedition, if not political agitation altogether. News comes from Srinagar that His Highness the Maharaja of Kashmir is about to issue a proclamation warning his subjects against the pitfalls of the so-called nationalist agitation. We do not doubt that his brother rulers in the Punjab will emulate so good an example." Some of us were at a loss to understand the cause of the Daily News's jubilation. Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code runs as follows:—"Whoever by words either spoken or written, or by signs, or by visible representation, or otherwise brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards His Majesty or the Government established by law in British India, shall be punished with transportation for life." So sedition in Kashmir is not sedition in British India; and by the attempts of the Kashmir durbar to suppress sedition one naturally understood attempts to suppress the endeavours of Kashmir subjects to bring into hatred and contempt or excite or attempt to excite disaffection towards the Kashmir durbar. But the Proclamation removed our doubt. We are asked to believe that the Maharaja of Kashmir, with a wonderful tact for self-effacement, was anxious only to protect the Government established by law in British India. The Maharaja's tender solicitude for the safety of the Power which

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had sold Kashmir to his ancestor and had, only the other day, condemned him unheard, was amazing indeed. But the matter did not end here. Following close upon the issuing of the Proclamation a durbar was held in Kashmir. Sir Francis Younghusband made a speech and the thanks of the British Government were conveyed to the Maharaja. The Maharaja, we are told, was so greatly affected that he could hardly find words to express his feelings, which is hardly wonderful considering the circumstances. He was able only to say that the tradition of his house was one of loyalty to the British Government. "This," says the Hindu Patriot, "is as it should be."

We cannot understand the logic of the "oldest native paper in India". Why should it be so? Did not the founder of the Kashmir house pay a very heavy price for Kashmir! True to a disgraceful understanding with the British Government, of which both parties ought to have been ashamed, Golab Singh—to quote Sir Thomas Holdich,—"deserted his Sikh masters and paid for Kashmir with money looted from the Lahore treasury". So it was only "give and take".

But these pathetic and miraculous happenings appear more intelligible—and less pathetic—when we realise that though the voice is the voice of Jacob, the hands are the hands of Esau. And this fact becomes patent when we find that Kashmir does not present an isolated instance of such zeal on the part of Native Chiefs to safeguard the interests of the bureaucracy. If Kashmir can be made useful to suppress sedition, the Maharaja of Coochbehar can at least help in putting down the boycott. On the occasion of the distribution of prizes to the students of the Jenkins School the Maharaja of Coochbehar said that "schoolboys were ciphers in politics", and warned them against the danger of rushing into the whirlpool of politics, or joining in any political movement. Boys must read and play and ought never to concern themselves with matters beyond their grasp, and about which, on account of their age and inexperience, they have not the capacity to form sound, mature and correct opinions. With Swadeshism His Highness declared his full sympathy but he "was totally, entirely and absolutely against boycott".

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If anything approaching the boycott movement was seen in his territory His Highness gave in clear, emphatic and unequivocal language to understand that he would adopt very stringent measures to put it down. It is a pity that it should have been made necessary for the Maharaja to be so clear, emphatic and unequivocal and we can only extend to him our heart-felt sympathy.

But we cannot hold these Indian princes responsible for all they do or say. Their so-called independence is nothing more than a mere name. Though Lord Curzon called them his "colleagues and partners in the task of Indian administration" the truth was better expressed by Lord Dufferin who characterised the independence enjoyed by them as a "regulated independence", regulated by whom and to what extent it is superfluous to say. The incubus of the British Resident is always there. And the results of his intervention—often disastrous to the Chiefs—were thus summed up by the Gaekwar of Baroda in the Nineteenth Century in 1901—"Uncertainty and want of confidence in the indigenous Government is promoted. The influence of the Raja, which is indispensable for the individuality of the States, is thereby impaired. The ruler being discouraged slackens his interest in the continuity of his own policy." Then, of course, there are the annual visitations to relieve the States of their superfluous wealth and prove to the people that their Chief is no better than a pigmy before the vicegerent of the King of England.

The attitude now taken by these Chiefs towards the spirit of Nationalism that is re-creating India, shows merely the degree to which the bureaucracy is determined directly and indirectly to stamp out the spirit. They have greater advantages in the States than in their own territory, for they can make the measures more thoroughgoing and rigorous than in British India and they can at the same time, through the Anglo-Indian Press, point to this rigour as a proof of the superior liberalism of British bureaucracy as compared with a native rule. This is indeed killing two birds with one stone.

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A Consistent Patriot

04-June-1907

Even Homer nods, and even the Hindu Patriot makes slips at times. Referring to the endeavours of the Kashmir Durbar to suppress "sedition" the Patriot wrote on the 22nd May:—

"The Maharaja of Kashmir's demonstration of fidelity is worthy of note. After upsetting the old law of the State against European settlements and earning thanks from the Masonic brotherhood for the great concession made to them, His Highness is extirpating from his dominions all sorts of 'undesirables' in a right autocratic spirit. But his brother chiefs do not seem ready to follow his noble example, and excepting the 'enlightened' Maharaja of Mysore, they may not care to do so. The Maharaja of Kashmir however is in right earnest. He has prohibited public and even private meetings of a revolutionary character, and is the pet of the bureaucracy for playing this sort of masterly activity."

But this attempt to imbibe the spirit of the age, perhaps, got a rude shaking from some quarter and the Patriot seized the first opportunity to rectify its "mistake". On the 30th it again referred to the subject and remarked:—

"The Maharaja of Kashmir's loyalty and anti-sedition measures have elicited from the Viceroy a tribute of warm appreciation. A grand durbar was held at Srinagar to proclaim the Viceroy's message of thanks. Sir Francis Younghusband, late of the Tibet Mission, delivered a sombre sermon bristling with references to the efforts of the Maharaja to keep down sedition, and overflowing with advice and good words which no doubt went straight and deep into His Highness' heart and found a comfortable lodgement there. The Maharaja was so greatly affected that he could hardly find words to give vent to his feelings. He was able only to say that the tradition of his house was loyalty to the British Government. This is as it should be."

This indeed is as it should be. And it reminds us of the Hindu Patriot's sudden change of opinion in the matter of the site for the proposed Victoria Memorial Hall and other instances of the remarkable versatility and impressionability of this great organ of private opinion.

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Holding on to a Titbit

04-June-1907

When the Anglo-Indian Press has got a hold or thinks it has got a hold upon an opponent, it holds on to it like grim death. This peculiarity is shared by its pets and proteges. Sometime ago a vernacular paper in Maharashtra published an alleged interview with Mr. Gokhale in which that carefully moderate politician was actually represented as using expressions which might be taken for an incitement to rebellion. Mr. Gokhale repudiated the interview but the Nawab of Dacca and his Secretary of Comilla fame still persist in calmly ignoring the repudiation and attributing expressions to Mr. Gokhale which he never used. A similar spirit is being shown with regard to Srijut Bipin Pal's repudiation of the Shaktipuja report. The Englishman, flattered probably by being preferred to the Daily News, was gracious enough, in a paragraph full of the most outrageous and insufferable impertinence, to acknowledge that Bipin Babu should not be held responsible for the "sins of the Bande Mataram". Yesterday, however, it published lengthy letters in which its correspondents still insisted on this vicarious punishment. The Daily News also seems to have been piqued by not being noticed and tries to belittle the effect of Bipin Babu's disclaimer. It even proposes to extend the principle of vicarious punishment much farther and make Bipin Babu responsible for the alleged utterances of a Madrasi speaker whom it gratuitously assumes to be his "associate". We presume the Anglo-Indian journals consider themselves superior to the ordinary etiquette in such matters as observed in other countries; otherwise we should have imagined that a disclaimer by a public man of unauthorized reports of his utterances ought to be regarded as final. Whatever responsibility remains for the publication, now rests entirely on the Bande Mataram whose shoulders are quite broad enough to bear its own burdens unassisted. We have made our own explanation to the Indian public in this matter and we are quite indifferent whether Anglo-India official or unofficial is satisfied with it or not.

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Wanted, a Policy

05-June-1907

A silence has fallen on the country since the inauguration of a new repressive policy by the bureaucracy, a silence broken only by Coconada riots on one side and talk of a special Congress session on the other. Srijut Surendranath Banerji has gone to Simultala to think over the situation and other leaders are thinking over it wherever they happen to find themselves. The only gentleman in authority who has come forward publicly with a policy is Srijut Bhupendranath Bose and we are grieved to find that the country has received this honourable and legislative gentleman's proposals with the supreme contempt of neglect. It is natural that our adversaries should exult over this silence and point to it as an evidence of complete demoralisation, and it is natural that those of us who are not in constant touch with the mofussil should also feel the silence burdensome and talk of demoralisation. We do not believe that the country is demoralised. On the contrary we believe that circumstances have taken an extremely favourable turn. There is, to begin with, an immense revolution of opinion all over Bengal which has brought all but the inveterate loyalists to understand the situation and face realities. Secondly if our information from the mofussil is correct, the people, the rank and file, are by no means cowed down, but rather from every part we hear news of men girding themselves for real work, now that the outer expression of our feelings is hampered and our hopes and aspirations driven in upon themselves. We are especially glad to find in West Bengal, so long apathetic, new stirrings of life and resolution. Nevertheless, in a certain small section there is undoubtedly bewilderment, hesitation and something like panic and we would be glad to believe that these feelings

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are not shared by any of our leaders or at least by those who have hitherto arrogated to themselves leadership and the credit for all the work that has been done. One cannot help thinking that they are, some of them, in the predicament of the Homeric heroes;—"They feared to take the challenge, to refuse it they were ashamed."

If they are not demoralised, if their hearts and hopes are as high as ever, they should take some trouble to show it. On the other hand, if they are demoralised, if they are suffering from sinkings and searchings of the heart, they ought to take some trouble to hide it. The words of the Mahabharata apply with particular force.

"Never should a prince and leader bow his haughty head to fear,
Let his fortune be however desperate, death however near.
If his soul grow faint, let him imprison weakness in his heart,
Keep a bold and open countenance and play on a hero's part.
If the leader fear and faint, then all behind him faint and fear.
So a king of men should keep a dauntless look and forehead clear."

What the country wants is a pronouncement of policy—it need not be a detailed or indiscreet pronouncement but at least a lead is wanted. The bureaucracy has altered its front and changed its plan of campaign. Will it be enough to modify our old policy to meet a new but surely not unexpected situation or will it be necessary for us also to change our plan of campaign? One thing at least is certain, we in Bengal have no intention of giving up Swaraj, no intention of giving up Swadeshi, no intention of giving up Boycott; to this the Bhupendranaths and the others must make up their mind. If any leader tries to lower this triple banner of the cause, he forfeits his reputation and his position from that date. The country has no intention of withdrawing from a single essential position that has once been occupied.

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Although we can make no claims to leadership, we have, as a responsible organ of public opinion, the duty of laying our views before the people and we have not failed to do so to the best of our ability. The policy we advocate now is the policy we have always advocated, the policy of the organisation of Swaraj and passive resistance. To push forward Swadeshi, to push forward National Education, to take up Arbitration in earnest and for the effective working of this positive side to create what we have not up till now created except in certain districts,—a compact, well-managed, earnest organisation; on the other hand, to follow a rational, effective and steady system of Boycott, and passively to oppose Government repression at every turn, to disregard the Risley Circular, to disregard the bureaucratic intimidation of the Press, to disregard or circumvent if we cannot disregard the Coercion Ordinance, to meet with silent contempt the danger of deportation and the threat of imprisonment; this is the policy we would favour if there are men in Bengal bold enough and steadfast enough to carry it out. Doubtless there are other dangers more serious than any that have yet threatened us, but if we lower the tone of the movement on account of anticipated calamities which may never happen, we may stand charged before posterity with the crime of sacrificing the future to vain and timid imaginations. Here again the wisdom of Vidula has a word in season for us; "Make not great thy foeman by thy terrors, panic eyes behind." The bureaucracy will use every method to kill the movement, guile as well as terrorism; they will try to bribe us with remedial measures as well as to bludgeon us with ordinances; they will wave the sword at us whenever we make the slightest movement and use it on occasion. Our future depends on our surmounting both inducement and intimidation. Let us take possible dangers into consideration, by all means, and provide against them, never run our heads against them wantonly and without occasion; but to be turned from our path by possible dangers is neither true manhood nor true prudence. The path to Swaraj can never be safe. Over sharp rocks and through thick brambles lies the way to that towering and glorious summit where dwells the Goddess

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of our worship, our goddess Liberty. Shall we dare to aspire to reach her and yet hope to accomplish that journey perilous with unhurt bodies and untorn feet? Mark the way; as you go it is red and caked with the blood of those who have climbed before us to the summit. And if that sight appals you, look up and forget it in the glory of the face that smiles upon us from the peak.

Preparing the Explosion

05-June-1907

The Simla Government has again opened wide its mouth of thunder and another Resolution has issued from its capacious jaws. This time, as we had expected, it is aimed at the Press. The Resolution is full of sound and fury signifying little. It has been decided to institute, if necessary, a campaign against the liberty of the Press and throttle it as effectually as the liberty of speech has been throttled by the Coercion Ordinance. But the Simla Government seems to be ashamed of having to do all this repressive work with its own viceregal hands and therefore it gracefully retires behind the curtain and asks the local governments to take the stage. That is all. At the same time the Press is a necessity to the foreign rulers and the Platform is not; they are therefore unwilling, we take it, to apply the same absolute gag to the Press as they have applied to the Platform. They are trying first the effectiveness of the threat of prosecution. "Look, there is the policeman Andrew, (or the policeman Denzil, as the case may be). Mind you, behave yourself. He has orders to run you in if you don't." This is a fair translation into vernacular English of Sir Herbert Risley's latest literary effort. We hardly think it will have much effect on the tone of the Press, unless our publicists are cursed with a much greater timidity than we give them credit for. A crop of Press prosecutions may therefore be confidently expected. If that is not sufficient, other measures will be used. And when they have silenced the Press and the Platform, Anglo-India will no doubt exult over its victory and avow wonderingly how easy it was to quell this absurd agitation. There is not enough statesmanship among these heaven-born

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rulers to perceive that they are playing into the hands of the most revolutionary section of opinion in India. Ajit Singh in his exile may rejoice, for his work is being done for him far more effectually than he could have done it himself. National feeling is like certain explosives which need resistance in order to be effective; unresisted they explode harmlessly and mildly into the air, but resisted, repressed and confined they become devastating forces and annihilate the substance that resists and confines them.

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A Statement

06-June-1907

Mr. John Morley has committed himself in the House of Commons to a trenchant and unqualified statement that the whole blame for the disturbances in East Bengal lies upon the Hindus who, by a violent and obstreperous boycott attended with coercion and physical force, have irritated the Mahomedans into revolt. Whether Mr. Morley made this statement out of a sweet trustfulness in the man on the spot or relying upon his philosophical judgment and innate powers of reasoning does not concern us at all. Everyone knows that the statement is untrue. The boycott was no doubt the final cause of the hooliganism in the East just as the Russian revolutionary movement was the final cause of the excesses of the Black Hundred, but it was in no way the immediate and efficient cause. It was the final cause in this sense that its first success compelled Sir Bampfylde Fuller to look about for a counteracting influence and he found it in the Nawab of Dacca and the use that could be made of the Nawab's position to help on a breach between the Mahomedans and Hindus. That is the whole and sole connection of boycott with the Mymensingh disturbances. The rest followed by a natural course of evolution. Sir Bampfylde favoured the Mahomedans and depressed the Hindus, the Nawab excited his co-religionists against their fellow-countrymen. There was no concealment about this policy, no pretences. Sir Bampfylde Fuller openly declared that of his two wives the Mahomedan was his favourite and his favouritism was gross, open, palpable. He flourished it in the face of the public instead of concealing it. The Nawab of Dacca has also openly preached to his co-religionists about the wrongs they have suffered at the hands of the Hindus and called upon them

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to separate themselves from that evil and injurious connexion. There has been no concealment whatever about his anti-Hindu campaign. After the disappearance of Sir Bampfylde from the scene of his exploits, the philo-Mahomedanism of the Shillong Government was no longer openly flourished in the face of the public but it was steadily continued in practice. The alliance of Anglo-India with the Nawab was from the beginning made the most of by the Englishman which for some time carried on a very active philo-Mahomedan and anti-Hindu crusade in its columns and did its best to stir up enmity between the two communities. So there came the first Mymensingh disturbances, the Comilla riots and finally the supreme conflagration that started from Jamalpur. That conflagration was brought about by Maulavis preaching outrage and plunder in the name of the Nawab of Dacca and the Government, an imputation which the Nawab of Dacca has made no attempt to repudiate, though, it is said, he has been challenged to do so in answer to his hollow professions of a desire to bring about amity between the two communities, while the Shillong Government has repudiated it only tardily and indirectly if at all, and only after the full mischief had been done. In all the incitements urged by the Maulavis and by the authors of the notorious Red Pamphlet, there has been no mention of a violent enforcement of the boycott on the Mahomedans, neither has any such connexion been established by any of the judicial proceedings which have hitherto been concluded. The theory of Mr. John Morley is therefore a dead thing and of no farther interest to any human being.

Of course the bureaucracy will go on playing with the bones of this dead scarecrow; it will wage war on Swadeshism on the plea that it leads to disorder; but that is only because, like all bureaucracies, it is sublimely indifferent to reason and fact and public opinion. It has served its turn by the fiction which it foisted through the mouth of Honest John on a loudly applauding though somewhat befogged House of Commons and it does not care even if the fiction is disproved a thousand times over. It will go on acting as if the fiction were a fact. We do not see therefore the utility of the statement which a majority of

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the Bengal leaders have published and which we hear is to be telegraphed or has been telegraphed to England. If the object is to set ourselves right in the opinion of the world, well, that is an innocent amusement. If it is to convince Mr. John Morley, it is a futility. It is absurd to suppose that Mr. John Morley at his age is going to allow himself to be convinced. He is far too old and wise to admit inconvenient facts. The statement contains a number of facts which all Bengal knows, which all India is sure to believe and all officialdom sure to deny. Beyond that the statement, a very able one in its way, merely encourages the consumption of stationery, patronises a printing-press, startles the Empire and enriches the Telegraph Office. Was it worth while?

Law and Order

06-June-1907

The Government of India is up and doing to restore law and order in the land. What is this law? What is this order which seems to have disappeared from our midst and which the bureaucracy is calling back with deportation and prosecution and almost daily ordinances and ukases? The Britisher's word is law, his very presence and existence in the land a signal for the suppression and suspension of manly or patriotic activities. Reconciliation with foreign despotism is perfect order. Doing the Britisher's bidding is law. It is the height of impertinence to be begging and asking. It is criminal to insist on the undoing of bureaucratic actions. To cry "Thy will be done" is loyalty and patriotism. To wish for our eternal serfdom is prudence and peacefulness. To think ourselves irremediably unfit is wisdom and moderation. To imagine ourselves a nation is madness. To love our country is superstition. To work for its emancipation is treason. To harbour any such sentiment is sedition. Thus the new nationalism is subversive of law and order, religion and morality, justice and fair play, obedience and discipline. The law again is that some shall sow and others reap, that some shall buy and others sell, that some shall bleed and others fatten, that some shall order and others obey, that some shall rule and

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others submit, that some shall teach and others learn. The new nationalism with its boycott and Swadeshi, national education and Swaraj, seeks to invert this order and needs to be put down. It is here in our non-conformity to the bureaucratic conceptions of our duties that law and order have been disturbed and not in Eastern Bengal and Rawalpindi as they have been trying to make out. There were riots before this more fearful and far-reaching in their consequence but not followed by such systematic repression supported by everyone from the Secretary of State to the commonest civilian.

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Defying the Circular

07-June-1907

It will not be long now before the Colleges open and the students begin to return to Calcutta; the moment they come the struggle for the possession of the youth of the country must begin. The bureaucracy has thrown out the challenge and there is every sign that it will be taken up. Men of all parties, except the party of Mr. N. N. Ghose which, as it consists of only one man, need not concern us, are agreed that to acquiesce in the Circular is out of the question. If there is any difference of opinion, it is as to the best method of defying it, and that is not a matter of primary importance. For our own part, we have expressed ourselves in favour of an educational strike, because that is the most straightforward, the most masculine and the most aggressive form of passive resistance of which the occasion allows. We hold that in order to rise the nation must get into the habit of offering challenges rather than receiving them and when it is behind, it must take the swiftest and most direct form of demonstration open to it. Passive resistance can be carried on in an inert and passive spirit of mechanical reaction against pressure from above, or it may be carried on in an active and creative spirit, it may take the initiative instead of being driven; it may assail the citadels of the enemy instead of merely defending its own. What India needs especially at this moment is the aggressive virtues, the spirit of soaring idealism, bold creation, fearless resistance, courageous attack; of the passive tamasic spirit of inertia we have already too much. We need to cultivate another training and temperament, another habit of mind. We would apply to the present situation the vigorous motto of Danton, that what we need, what we should learn above all things is to dare and

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again to dare and still to dare.

Nevertheless we recognise that to leap at once from an overpoweringly tamasic condition of mind into the rajasic, the active, restless, bold and creative, is not easy for a nation and if we cannot have the best method, we will accept the second best, so long as the principle of resistance is maintained. A general defiance of the Circular will obviously make it unworkable, unless the Government is prepared to disaffiliate schools and Colleges freely and give up its control of education. It is possible, of course, that they may do so in the hope of bringing the country to its knees by drawing home the conviction that it cannot take in hand its own education. But this will be a dangerous game to play; for the only thing that is needed to make the institution of a widespread and comprehensive system of national education possible and indeed eminently practicable, is the generation of an enthusiasm such as was beginning to gather force after the Carlyle Circular. A stern and bitter struggle between the people and the bureaucracy is the one thing that is likely to generate such an enthusiasm. National education is by no means impracticable or even difficult, it needs nothing but a resolute enthusiasm in the country and the courage to take a leap into the unknown. This courage is common in individuals but not in nations, least of all in subject nations; and yet when the fire is lit, it is perhaps subject nations more than any other which are found ready to take the leap.

We do not believe the bureaucracy will be willing to drive matters to such a crisis. It is more likely that they will use the Circular to harass the opposition and overcome our resistance by instituting measures of petty persecution wherever they can do it without upheaving the whole foundation of the educational system in Bengal. All that is demanded from us is therefore a persistent resolution to make the Circular unworkable regardless of loss and sacrifice. We must take every opportunity of challenging the Circular and testing the resolution of the bureaucracy and the campaign must be carried on simultaneously all over Bengal, if not in other parts of India as well. But it is Calcutta which must give the signal. Indeed, Calcutta has already given the signal. Meetings have been held in which teachers and students have

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attended and taken an active part; more meetings of the kind will be held and when the Colleges reopen, there must be a general defiance of the ukase. Once Calcutta leads the way, East Bengal will respond and West Bengal follow the general example. The Risley Circular must go the way of its predecessor.

By the Way - When Shall We Three Meet Again?

07-June-1907

The Statesman, which seems now to be the mouthpiece of the bureaucracy, published a semi-official communique to the effect that prosecutions are being launched against three of the journals in Bengal which have been the most violent in their recent utterances. This pleasant news opens the way to a most interesting line of speculation and we would suggest that one of our contemporaries, say, the Sandhya, might start a plebiscite or a prize-competition for the correct list of the fortunate victims. The prize would of course be given to the competitor who got the right names in the right order. It would be interesting to know whether the impressions of the people and of the Bengal Government tallied on this knotty question. If we ourselves are to be one of the recipients of this Government distinction, we must petition the authorities beforehand—even at the sacrifice of our principles—that the three editors may be allowed to share the same cell and assist each other at the same oakum picking or other exhilarating occupation in store for us, so that we may support each other "under the burden of an honour into which we were not born". Always provided that the editor of the Indian Nation is not one of the three.

The Empire is very much hurt that the Indian papers have not taken any notice of the Viceroy's magnanimous though somewhat belated refusal to sanction the Punjab Colonisation Bill.

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Our contemporary thinks that we kept silent out of pure cussedness. This is unkind. Could not our dear white brother—or our dear green brother, we should say—realise that there were other reasons, honourable or natural, for this unanimous hush. It might have been out of sheer awe, it might have been out of a choked emotion. Some scruples of delicacy, some feelings of the "sorrow rather than anger" sort, perhaps even excessive loyalty may have stopped the flow of utterance. For instance, supposing in the rush of our gratitude one were to let slip unpleasant hints about the relation between the Rawalpindi row and the Viceroy's sudden and stupendous magnanimity! Who would like to hurt our sympathetic Viceroy's feelings by such ungracious truths! Or again supposing the Bengal papers were contrasting silently events in the Punjab and Bengal? They do present a remarkable contrast. In Bengal we have agitated for two years—first with repeated petitions, with countless protest meetings, with innumerable wails and entreaties from press and platform; but that could not help us, insult and ridicule were our only gain. Then we tried every lawful means of concrete protest, every kind of passive resistance within the law to show that we were in earnest. Result,—nil. But in Punjab they petitioned and protested only for a few weeks and then—went for Europeans, their persons, their property and everything connected with them. Result—the water tax postponed, the Colonisation Bill cancelled. Of course, as loyal subjects such as the Empire wants us to be we must regard the contrast with sorrow rather than with anger. But if we were publicly to mention these matters, might not our feelings and even our motives be misunderstood? Might it not even happen that Police-Constable Andrew would run us in, under his new-old powers for sedition? And how could a loyal Press expose itself to such misunderstanding? The Empire will surely agree with us, on reflection, that silence was best.

It is a new and gratifying feature of present-day politics to find the Englishman reporting Bengali meetings in the Calcutta squares with a full appreciation of their importance. The meeting

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in College Square at which Srijut Krishna Kumar Mitra presided has been favoured as well as Srijut Bipin Chandra Pal's meeting at Beadon Square. As to the accuracy of the reports we have our doubts, for the Bengali gentleman who reports for our contemporary is afflicted with the idea that he is very humorous, and there is nothing so fatal to accuracy as a sense of humour. We would not object to this amiable delusion, or the particular style of the reporter's wit, if it did not so persistently recall to us the imperial citizen of the British metropolis out on a spree who thinks it a huge joke to tickle his fellow citizens with a peacock's feather or to comment on their possession of hair or the origin of their headgear with other light and cutting sarcasms. However, we note with satisfaction that teachers and students attended the meeting, that a teacher presided, another spoke and a student seconded a resolution. We too await with interest the action of the authorities in the matter.

Our venerable friend the Indian Mirror has solemnly assured us that it should be understood that no Government, Conservative or Liberal, will countenance violent methods, such as the Extremists have hitherto employed. For this surprising information, drawn no doubt from occult sources, much thanks. But still we cannot help inquiring, who the devil ever asked them to? No one in his senses, or out of them, either, ever dreamed of calling upon any Englishman to support the Extremist policy. We note with interest that the Mirror considers Boycott, Passive Resistance, National Education, Arbitration and physical training to be "violent" methods. On the other hand we find Srijut Narendra Nath Sen's signature affixed to the recently issued statement in which the use of violent methods in Bengal is denied. Hail, holy light, divine reflective Mirror!

The breathless speed with which the Statesman is legislating and administering the affairs of the nation, makes one's head whirl. One day the Simla Government, no doubt laying heads together

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with Mr. John Morley, issues a notice handing the Press over to the tender mercies of the local administrations, but with a rider that this is in the nature of a warning to the Press to behave itself and the effect will be watched before action is taken. After watching the effect for the space of twenty-four hours the Statesman issues an order from Darjeeling to prosecute any three papers out of the long list of English and vernacular publications in Bengal, the selection to be made on the principle of the loudest first. Before the Press has recovered from this shock, while everybody from the Englishman down to the Mihir Sudhakar is brooding over his past sins and preparing for the arrival of the police with handcuffs, while even the Mirror and the Nation are trying to banish uncomfortable memories of an indiscreet article or two on the Jamalpur outrages, lo and behold, the Statesman in its Viceregal Council at Simla is forging a new Act which shall provide for the gagging of the Press without the trouble of a prosecution. We know that these are the days of the electric tram and the motor car, and telepathy and wireless telegraphy, but really this is overdoing it. A little slower, please.

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The Strength of the Idea

08-June-1907

The mistake which despots, benevolent or malevolent, have been making ever since organised states came into existence and which, it seems, they will go on making to the end of the chapter, is that they overestimate their coercive power, which is physical and material and therefore palpable, and underestimate the power and vitality of ideas and sentiments. A feeling or a thought, Nationalism, Democracy, the aspiration towards liberty, cannot be estimated in the terms of concrete power, in so many fighting men, so many armed police, so many guns, so many prisons, such and such laws, ukases, and executive powers. But such feelings and thoughts are more powerful than fighting men and guns and prisons and laws and ukases. Their beginnings are feeble, their end is mighty. But of despotic repression the beginnings are mighty, the end is feeble. Thought is always greater than armies, more lasting than the most powerful and best-organised despotisms. It was a thought that overthrew the despotism of centuries in France and revolutionised Europe. It was a mere sentiment against which the irresistible might of the Spanish armies and the organised cruelty of Spanish repression were shattered in the Netherlands, which brought to nought the administrative genius, the military power, the stubborn will of Aurangzeb, which loosened the iron grip of Austria on Italy. In all such instances the physical power and organisation behind the insurgent idea are ridiculously small, the repressive force so overwhelmingly, impossibly strong that all reasonable, prudent, moderate minds see the utter folly of resistance and stigmatise the attempt of the idea to rise as an act of almost criminal insanity. But the man with the idea is not reasonable, not prudent,

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not moderate. He is an extremist, a fanatic. He knows that his idea is bound to conquer, he knows that the man possessed with it is more formidable, even with his naked hands, than the prison and the gibbet, the armed men and the murderous cannon. He knows that in the fight with brute force the spirit, the idea is bound to conquer. The Roman Empire is no more, but the Christianity which it thought to crush, possesses half the globe, covering "regions Caesar never knew". The Jew, whom the whole world persecuted, survived by the strength of an idea and now sits in the high places of the world, playing with nations as a chess-player with his pieces. He knows too that his own life and the lives of others are of no value, that they are mere dust in the balance compared with the life of his idea. The idea or sentiment is at first confined to a few men whom their neighbours and countrymen ridicule as lunatics or hare-brained enthusiasts. But it spreads and gathers adherents who catch the fire of the first missionaries and creates its own preachers and then its workers who try to carry out its teachings in circumstances of almost paralysing difficulty. The attempt to work brings them into conflict with the established power which the idea threatens and there is persecution. The idea creates its martyrs. And in martyrdom there is an incalculable spiritual magnetism which works miracles. A whole nation, a whole world catches the fire which burned in a few hearts; the soil which has drunk the blood of the martyr imbibes with it a sort of divine madness which it breathes into the heart of all its children, until there is but one overmastering idea, one imperishable resolution in the minds of all beside which all other hopes and interests fade into insignificance and until it is fulfilled, there can be no peace or rest for the land or its rulers. It is at this moment that the idea begins to create its heroes and fighters, whose numbers and courage defeat only multiplies and confirms until the idea militant has become the idea triumphant. Such is the history of the idea, so invariable in its broad lines that it is evidently the working of a natural law.

But the despot will not recognise this superiority, the teachings of history have no meaning for him. He is dazzled by the

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pomp and splendour of his own power, infatuated with the sense of his own irresistible strength. Naturally, for the signs and proofs of his own power are visible, palpable, in his camps and armaments, in the crores and millions which his tax-gatherers wring out of the helpless masses, in the tremendous array of cannon and implements of war which fill his numerous arsenals, in the compact and swiftly-working organisation of his administration, in the prisons into which he hurls his opponents, in the fortresses and places of exile to which he can hurry the men of the idea. He is deceived also by the temporary triumph of his repressive measures. He strikes out with his mailed hand and surging multitudes are scattered like chaff with a single blow; he hurls his thunderbolts from the citadels of his strength and ease and the clamour of a continent sinks into a deathlike hush; or he swings the rebels by rows from his gibbets or mows them down by the hundred with his mitrailleuse and then stands alone erect amidst the ruin he has made and thinks, "The trouble is over, there is nothing more to fear. My rule will endure for ever; God will not remember what I have done or take account of the blood that I have spilled." And he does not know that the fiat has gone out against him, "Thou fool! this night shall thy soul be required of thee." For to the Power that rules the world one day is the same as fifty years. The time lies in His choice, but now or afterwards the triumph of the idea is assured, for it is He who has sent it into men's minds that His purposes may be fulfilled.

The story is so old, so often repeated that it is a wonder the delusion should still persist and repeat itself. Each despotic rule after the other thinks, "Oh, the circumstances in my case are quite different, I am a different thing from any yet recorded in history, stronger, more virtuous and moral, better organised. I am God's favourite and can never come to harm." And so the old drama is staged again and acted till it reaches the old catastrophe. The historic madness has now overtaken the British nation in the height of its worldwide power and material greatness. In Egypt, in India, in Ireland the most Radical Government of modern times is bracing itself to a policy of repression. It thinks

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England has only to stamp her foot and all the trouble will be over. Yet only consider how many ideas are arising which find in British despotism their chief antagonist. The idea of a free and self-centred Ireland has been reborn and the souls of Fitzgerald and Emmett are reincarnating. The idea of a free Egypt and the Pan-Islamic idea have joined hands in the land of the Pharaohs. The idea of a free and united India has been born and arrived at full stature in the land of the Rishis, and the spiritual force of a great civilisation of which the world has need, is gathering at its back. Will England crush these ideas with ukases and coercion laws? Will she even kill them with maxims and siege-guns? But the eyes of the wise men have been sealed so that they should not see and their minds bewildered so that they should not understand. Destiny will take its appointed course until the fated end.

Comic Opera Reforms

08-June-1907

Mr. Morley has made his pronouncement and a long-expectant world may now go about its ordinary business with the satisfactory conviction that the conditions of political life in India will be precisely the same as before. We know now what are the much-talked-of reforms which are to pave the way for self-government under an absolute and personal rule and to quiet Indian discontent. Let us take them one by one, these precious and inestimable boons. They are three in number, a trinity of marvels; an advisory Council of Notables, enlarged Legislative and Provincial Councils, admission of one or two Indians to the India Council.

An advisory Council of Notables—we can see it in our mind's eye. The Nawab of Dacca, the Maharaja of Darbhanga, the Maharajas of Coochbehar and Kashmir, the Raja of Nabha, Sir Harnam Singh, a few other Rajas and Maharajas (not including the Maharaja of Baroda), Dr. Rash Behari Ghose, Mr. Justice Mukherji, a goodly number of non-official Europeans, the knight of the umbrella from Bombay, etc. etc. with Mr.

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Gokhale bringing up the tail as the least dangerous of those whom Mr. Morley felt that he must reluctantly call "our enemies". And what will the business of this illustrious assembly be? It will find out what the opinion of the country is (on which the members will be better authorities no doubt than a highly inconvenient Press) and inform the Government; they will also find out the meaning of the Government (if that be humanly possible) and inform the country. We suppose it would be seditious to laugh at a Secretary of State, for is he not part of the Government established by law? So we will merely say that the right place for this truly comic Council of Notables with its yet more comic functions is an opera by Gilbert and Sullivan and not an India seething with discontent and convulsed by the throes of an incipient revolution.

As to the "enlarged" Legislative Councils, we can say little. Mr. Morley does not enlighten us as to their composition but he has explicitly said that the official majority will be maintained—a piece of information, by the way, which the Bengalee's "Own Correspondents" forget to cable out to Colootola. That is enough for it means that the Legislative Councils are to be precisely what they were before, only bigger. The people are not to be given any effective control or check on the management of their own affairs. We had gilded shams before; they will be bigger shams with more gilt on them, but still shams and nothing but shams.

Finally, Mr. Morley says that the time has come when it will be really quite safe to have an Indian or even two (what reckless daring!) on the India Council. Really? A year or two ago, we suppose, it would have been very dangerous,—indeed, brought the Empire down with a sudden crash. So Mr. Romesh Dutt and Justice Amir Ali's expectations may at last be satisfied and we shall have two Indian tongues in the Council of India. We wish them luck; but for all the use they will be to India, they might just as well be in Timbuctoo or the Andamans. Indeed they would probably be of much more use in the Andamans.

We find it impossible to discuss Mr. Morley's reforms seriously, they are so impossibly burlesque and farcical. Yet they

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have their serious aspect. They show that the British despotism, like all despotisms in the same predicament, is making the time-honoured, ineffectual effort to evade a settlement of the real question by throwing belated and now unacceptable sops to Demogorgon. We shall return to this aspect of the subject hereafter.

Paradoxical Advice

08-June-1907

Mr. G. C. Bose, principal and proprietor of the Bangabasi College, has published a short signed article in the Bangabasi in which he sets forth very emphatically what he considers to be the duty of the students and their guardians in this critical moment. Mr. Bose is an educationist pure and simple who has never mixed himself up in politics, unlike another well-known principal whose weekly incursions into politics are more remarkable for their manner than for their matter. If therefore Mr. Bose had confined himself to the educational aspect of the question and the extent to which students may permissibly interest themselves in politics, we should have had nothing to say. Unfortunately Mr. Bose has allowed himself to be tempted by the prevailing political atmosphere outside his true province. He refrains from discussing the merits of the Risley Circular and merely advises the public to leave no stone unturned to get the circular withdrawn but to refrain scrupulously from defying it while it is in force. This is very much like telling us to leave no stone unturned to get our dinner cooked but at the same time refrain scrupulously from lighting a fire. Everyone, even the veriest political tyro, can see that if we submit to the circular it will remain with us in perpetuity; no amount of representations such as it is now proposed to send to the Government, will get the circular recalled. Our only chance of getting rid of it is to make it a dead letter by a general refusal to abide by it. Mr. Bose represents a vested interest which will be seriously inconvenienced by an educational strike or a general refusal to abide by the circular and we fear the natural anxiety to avoid

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this inconvenience has blinded him to this very simple political fact. But will the student class listen to Mr. Bose's dulcet pipings? The wave of Nationalism in the land is surely not so spent, but will rise the higher for the obstacles thrown in the way of its advance.

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An Out-of-Date Reformer

12-June-1907

Time was and that time was not more than two years ago and indeed even less, when the reforms which Mr. Morley has announced would have been received in India by many with enthusiasm, by others with considerable satisfaction as an important concession to public feeling and a move, however small, in the right direction. Today they have been received by some with scorn and ridicule, by others with bitterness and dissatisfaction, even by the most loyal with a cold and qualified recognition. Never has an important pronouncement of policy by a famous and once honoured statesman of whom much had been expected, delivered moreover under the most dramatic circumstances possible and as a solution of a trying and critical problem, fallen so utterly flat on the audience which it was intended to impress. The outside world amazed at a change so sudden and radical may well ask what are its causes. The true cause is, of course, the revolution which has been worked in Indian opinion and Indian feeling in these two years. British Liberalism stands where it was and refuses to move forward. Indian opinion has advanced with enormous strides to a position far in front. The British Liberal has perhaps, from his standpoint, some reason for complaint. He had formed a sort of agreement with the section of Indian opinion which then dominated Indian politics. On our side we were to assure him of the permanence of the British control, to acknowledge our present unfitness for self-government and to accept perpetual subordination and dependence as an arrangement of Providence. On his side he has engaged to give us progressive alleviations of our subject condition, gradually increasing compensations for the renunciation

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of our national future; these he was prepared to concede to us by slow degrees according to his own convenience and ability. Nor was the prospect denied to India of becoming after the lapse of many centuries a trusted servant of England or even something very like an adopted son. The bargain was one-sided, but the political leaders had an overpowering sense of their own weakness, of the superior excellence of British civilisation, and of the unshakable might of Britain. They had too a profound trust in the justice of England and the genuineness of English Liberalism. They believed that the Liberal offers of small rights and privileges were made not as a bargain or out of a shrewd calculation of advantages and disadvantages, but from the sense of justice and from a true sympathy with liberal aspirations all over the world. They were therefore ready to take gratefully and contentedly whatever small mercies were conceded to them.

Now the spirit of the people has changed. From a timid and easily satisfied dependence on the alien they have passed at once to a passionate and determined assertion of their separate national existence and a demand for an immediate recognition of their right to control their own affairs. It is not surprising that the old Friends of India should be alarmed and indignant at the change or that they should call upon the older leaders whom they know and think they can influence, to drive the Extremists out of their councils, return to their old allegiance and observe the terms of the contract. "We are where we were, we still offer you the same terms;" they cry, "you shall have your reforms, but on the old conditions, the permanence of British control, the repression of all turbulent aspirations, dissociation from the forces of disorder and revolution." So they cry to the Moderate leaders to turn back and retrace their steps, and by main force to bring back India with them to the standpoint of twenty years ago. It is a vain cry. If the Moderate leaders wished to go back, they would have to go back alone as men without a following, lost leaders, prophets whose power had passed out of them. The force which has swept the country forward is a force no man has created and which no man can control. As well ask a man who has become adult to return to the age of childhood as IndiaPage

The British Government is like Tarquin with the Sibyl; the terms it has refused will no longer be offered to it. It might have purchased contentment, a new lease of Indian confidence and a long spell of ease at a very small price only three or four years ago. Now at a price ten times as high it will be able to purchase at the most a short truce in a war which must be fought to the end. Mr. Morley recognised this fact when with an indiscreet frankness he referred to the educated class in India as "our enemies". A long era of repression and reaction culminating in Curzonism has opened the eyes of the Indian people. They have learnt that not only were the reforms of Liberal Viceroys and Governments small and ineffective in themselves, but that they were held on a precarious tenure. Mr. Morley or another might give "rights" and "privileges" of a dubious character, but the power of Liberalism in modern England is apt to be brief and succeeded by long periods of pure Imperialism in which those rights and privileges will surely be taken away or nullified. They have discovered also that the support they might expect from Liberalism is of a very limited and meagre nature and that, when in office, Liberal and Conservative are for India synonymous terms. The struggle which began with the Partition has generated a new ideal and a newborn Nationalism has sprung in a few days almost to its full stature. There was no chance therefore that any reform would be acceptable which did not ensure popular control, make reactionary legislation by despotic Viceroys impossible and open the way to Swaraj. And even if Mr. Morley's reforms had had any chance of being acceptable, it was ruined by the series of repressive measures which preceded them. Reforms simultaneous and compatible with the deportation of popular leaders, the prosecution of popular journals, the persecution of students and teachers and the prohibition of public meetings were of so patent a hollowness that the most moderate and loyal were compelled to receive them with a bitter scepticism. And as if to drive the moral home, the speech in which the reforming statesman introduced his measures was couched in the sour and autocratic spirit of a reactionary bureaucrat contemptuously

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doling out sops to the rabble to an accompaniment of hardly-veiled menace and insult. Mr. Morley has been unanimously complimented by the Liberal Press in England on his courage in coupling repression with reforms, kicks with bread-crumbs. For ourselves we are struck by his singular want of sagacity and of even an elementary knowledge of human nature and the feelings which govern great masses of men. As well might we call the policy of a Louis XVI or a Czar Nicholas courageous. The courage may or may not be there, but there can be no doubt of the unwisdom.

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The Sphinx

14-June-1907

Sir Henry Cotton has developed a sudden love for Lala Lajpat Rai. Though he has, like all Anglo-Indians—official or ex-official,—condemned and condemned unheard Ajit Singh, his love for Lajpat Rai knows no abating. He asked Mr. Morley to confirm his statement of the 6th June, that Lajpat Rai's speeches had greatly dominated sedition in India and had been published broadcast, even on the floor of the House. The statement shows that Mr. Morley thinks he knows more about Indian affairs than we Indians do; and his reference, obviously, was to Members of the Parliament like Sir Henry Cotton who tease the Secretary of State for India with inconvenient questions about Indian subjects. With characteristic conceit Mr. Morley replied that he should be very unlikely to make a statement without providing himself with fair and reasonable confirmation. It was surely such "fair and reasonable confirmation" that enabled him, the other day, to make an assertion about the proposed Victoria Memorial Hall which even the perverse ingenuity of the Anglo-Indian Press could not support. And it was surely such fair and reasonable confirmation that made him beat a retreat on the present occasion with the sage remark that nothing would be more injudicious than to lay the facts on the table. Only deeds of darkness need be afraid of light. And people may be pardoned if they dare suspect that the fair and reasonable confirmation was as real as Mr. Morley's reforms so often advertised by himself as well as by the Statesman. Next when Mr. Mackarness asked whether it was intended to formulate a definite legal charge against Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh and also what the length of their banishment and confinement would be, Mr. Morley said

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that he was unable at present to state the intentions of the Government of India. It seems that as far as questions on matters Indian are concerned the British House of Commons is as good as the Indian Legislative Councils. The reason is not far to seek. The British public have absolute faith in the infallibility of the "man on the spot" in India to maintain India for their benefit and they are ready and willing to give them a free hand in their dealings with the people of the country. Had it been otherwise—had the British taxpayer been guided by considerations other than those of advantage to Great Britain to take an intelligent interest in Indian affairs the Sphinx would have found himself bound to speak. Yet to these people our deluded Moderate friends must go and spend the money of poverty-stricken India in the vain attempt to "educate" them—with a view to get political rights and privileges! What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!

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Slow but Sure

17-June-1907

Commenting on Mr. Morley's Budget Speech the Statesman remarks—"It is to be hoped that the new concessions will be received in no carping spirit, and that there will be a resolute determination to make the best of them. Under English rule, wherever it is found, reforms are almost invariably slow and gradual. England abhors a revolution, or even the logical working out of a principle—unless it be very gradually. It proceeds by compromises and half-measures. But this cautious policy has been justified by results. The advance, if slow, is sure, and a persistent well-reasoned agitation seldom fails to achieve its end. An example of the success which rewards perseverance is to be found in Mr. Morley's announcement that a Committee has been appointed to examine the distribution of the costs of the Indian Army as between the War Office and the Indian taxpayer."

So the Indian is asked to accept the so-called concessions in no carping spirit, not to demand more like Oliver Twist but to remember that beggars must not be choosers. But why should Englishmen interested in India be so anxious to confer concessions on Indians who in their present self-respecting mood are not likely to appreciate the generosity of the donors? New India—the India that has showed itself prepared to suffer sacrifices and brave dangers for political rights—has rejected as obsolete the methods of mendicant agitation and it is too late in the day to try to delude it with gilded toys and useless tinsel. Why waste your energy in granting "concessions" when none is wanted? After imparting this sage advice the Statesman proceeds to present a prose rendering of Tennyson's well-known description of England as the land

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"Where Freedom slowly broadens down
From precedent to precedent".

In the case of countries conquered by England "reforms" slowly broaden down from Circulars to Ordinances. The bond is tightened and the lingering sparks of the spirit of self-help sought to be extinguished. It is useless to argue, for John Bull is—as our Friend admits—never logical. Yet we are advised to wait and suffer in silence till the millennium arrives and in the meantime to feel grateful for chance droppings from the basket of the bureaucracy. Let no Indian ask the inconvenient question—How long are we to wait? For that will be sheer impudence not to be brooked.

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The Rawalpindi Sufferers

18-June-1907

The bureaucracy which has decided upon coercion as the most effective means of crushing the growing national spirit in India must necessarily turn the machinery of judicial administration also to its advantage. We have observed on previous occasions that a certain portion of the positive laws enacted by the British Government has been designed not so much to secure the rights and interests of the people as to repress their free manhood. There is a popular saying that almost every action of a man can be construed as an offence according to the Penal Code. This attempt to penalise many natural human activities in a conquered country, should have long ago convinced us of the true spirit of official-made British law but we instead have lived in a Fool's Paradise and run for safety to the institutions and professions of the foreigner, obstinately blind to the manner in which they illustrate the British genius for "ruling" subject races. Where the ordinary law does not cover all the conceivable offences against the interests of the foreigner ordinances and ukases can easily be invented to put a stop to undesirable activities as we have lately seen. Thus the bureaucratic machinery grinds slow or grinds fast, but grinding is its object. In the ordinary course of things we do not become immediately conscious of its baneful consequence; but when the bureaucracy is face to face with an adverse force or interest it at once sets itself to the work of repression with all its demoralising consequences. Viewed in this light what is being described as unprecedented and "humanity-staggering" police violence and police licence in the alleged Rawalpindi riot case, is no more than natural and expected. The tales of police oppression while inducing the most whole-hearted sympathy

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with the noble sufferers have not the least feature of novelty in them. The Patrika is very much affected by the severe distress of the alleged rioters now on their trial; and moved by softer feelings, it has appealed to Lord Minto who according to our contemporary is "goodness personified" to come to their rescue. The Patrika is no doubt actuated by the very best of motives but our contemporary should remember that such nervousness while doing no good to the sufferers is demoralising to our firmness and high spirit. So far as the accused are concerned the die is cast. Suffer they must; their only care now must be so to suffer that their martyrdom may be a strength and inspiration to their countrymen. If their heroic and manful conduct during the trial and their readiness to face the grim sequel of a conviction puts courage into other hearts, then only will it be said that they have not suffered in vain. Otherwise there is not much on the credit side of the account. The duty of the publicist at such a time, is to seek to brace the nerves of the martyrs and not to take away from the merit of their service to the country by any advocacy humiliating in form or abject in spirit. The public attitude at such a time reacts on that of the sufferer and if we give way to weakness at the report of their sufferings, we set them a bad example. We also have been moved and not merely by feelings of grief and pity, at the dim, but only too sinister and significant hints of what is going on behind the decent show of a fair and public trial.

But this is not a time when we should give vent to feminine emotions. To try to rouse pity in the rulers is as unprofitable as it is unworthy of our manhood and of our cause and in these rough and still only superficially civilised descendants of the old sea-robbers it can only excite a deep contempt towards us and increase their arrogance. If we must show our grief and pity let it be in substantial help to the victims or their relatives. If we must pray, let it be not to the goodness personified of any "sympathetic" repressor, but to the goodness unpersonified of the Power that makes and breaks kings and viceroys, empires and dominations. Let us pray to Him to give our brothers in Rawalpindi a stout and cheerful heart and a steadfast courage

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so that in the hour of their trial they may do nothing common or mean upon that memorable scene, and that we too, if our turn comes to suffer such things or worse for our country, may so bear ourselves that our country may profit by our sufferings. This is the only prayer that befits us in this hour of the new birth of our nation. For all that the country suffers now or will suffer hereafter are but the natural birth-pangs of a free and regenerated India.

Look on This Picture and Then on That

18-June-1907

The telegram sent us by our Mymensingh Correspondent about the decision in the case of the author of the notorious "Red Pamphlet" is significant. It is rumoured that Ibrahim has been let off on signing a personal recognizance bond for rupees one thousand, and nobody knows where the trial took place. If the rumour is true, then one is to understand that a downright vilifier of the Hindus who has attempted to outrage all that is considered sacred by the Hindus in Hindusthan and has put a premium on violence and lawlessness, has committed no serious offence. On the other hand in the case of Maulavi Liakat Hussain application for an adjournment was granted only on the Maulavi having furnished two sureties for Rs. 5,000 each and a personal security for Rs. 10,000. And we all know that Maulavi Liakat Hussain preached union between Hindus and Mahomedans and always expressed himself against the policy of sowing the seeds of discord between the followers of the two great religions in India. What is more it is not known if Ibrahim is himself worth Rs. 1,000 while the gentlemen who have stood sureties for Maulavi Liakat Hussain are worth much more than Rs. 10,000. The sharpness of the contrast makes comments superfluous.

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The Main Feeder of Patriotism

19-June-1907

There are many people who admit the superiority of Eastern civilisation, who recognise its humanitarian and socialistic aspect, who are not blind to its predominating feature of spirituality, who admire the absence of a militant Materialism in it, who praise the way in which it has balanced the interests of the different classes in the society, who are conscious how much attention it gives to the higher needs of humanity. But still patriotism is not a living and moving impulse with them. Apart from the natural attachment which every man has to his country, its literature, its traditions, its customs and usages, patriotism has an additional stimulus in the acknowledged excellence of a national civilisation. If Britons love England with all her faults, why should we fail to love India whose faults were whittled down to an irreducible minimum till foreign conquests threw the whole society out of gear? But instead of being dominated by the natural ambition of carrying the banner of such a civilisation all over the world, we are unable to maintain its integrity in its own native home. This is betraying a trust. This is unworthiness of the worst type. We have not been able to add anything to this precious bequest; on the contrary we have been keeping ourselves and generations yet unborn from a full enjoyment of their lawful heritage. For Eastern civilisation though it is not dead, though it is a living force, is yet a submerged force, and that not because it has no intrinsic merit but because it has been transmitted to a class of people devoid of a love for things their own. It seems as if they have no past to guide, instruct or inspire them. They are beginning, as it were, with a clean slate and what is worse, a foreign poetaster is calling upon his

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countrymen to take charge of them as "half devil, half child". Is not the humiliation sufficient to disturb our self-complacency?

We make no appeal in the name of any material benefit. No desire for earthly gain can nerve a people to such superhuman activity as the eager hope of maintaining their greatness and glory. We must first realise that we are great and glorious, that we are proud and noble, and it is through voluntary prostration that we are being stamped into the dust. No material ideal of riches and prosperity has ever made a nation. But when the sense of honour has been touched, when the consciousness of greatness has been reawakened, then and then only have the scattered units of a fallen nation clustered round one mighty moral force.

What is now considered by political thinkers to be the chief incentive to conquest? What is the meaning of the imperial sentiment which is "now dominating every English breast"? "If we ask ourselves," says one writer, "seriously the question why we glory in the magnitude of our empire, it may be answered: partly because we think it adds to our riches, partly because we enjoy the sense of power and dominion, partly because we cling to old traditions and remember the great deeds of history; but beyond and above all these elements of satisfaction we feel that throughout the whole British empire we enforce those ideas of justice, personal freedom and religious toleration which are the results of the constitutional struggles of centuries." We are not concerned here with the discussion whether the Britisher's boast is well or ill-founded, but rightly or wrongly this sentiment has taken possession of him and he is invincible under its influence. For we find the same explanation in Mill. Sidgwick also in his Elements of Politics harps on the same strain. "Besides the material advantages," he says, "there are legitimate sentimental satisfactions derived from justifiable conquest which must be taken into account. Such are the justifiable pride which the cultivated members of a civilised community feel in the beneficent exercise of dominion and in the performance by their nation of the noble task of spreading the highest kind of civilisation, and a more intense though less elevated satisfaction—inseparable

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from patriotic sentiment—in the spread of the special type of civilisation distinctive of their nation, communicated through its language and literature, and through the tendency to catch its tastes and imitate its customs which its prolonged rule, specially if, on the whole, beneficent, is likely to cause in a continually increasing degree."

Thus, according to Sidgwick, physical expansion proceeds from a desire for spiritual expansion and history also supports the assertion. But why should not India then be the first power in the world? Who else has the undisputed right to extend spiritual sway over the world? This was Swami Vivekananda's plan of campaign. India can once more be made conscious of her greatness by an overmastering sense of the greatness of her spirituality. This sense of greatness is the main feeder of all patriotism. This only can put an end to all self-depreciation and generate a burning desire to recover the lost ground.

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Concerted Action

20-June-1907

We publish in another column a letter from a correspondent signing himself "Organised Co-operation", in which a very elaborate plan is sketched out for ascertaining the opinion of the nation and following out in unison the programme arrived at. The scheme is, we fear, more elaborate than practicable. If the suggestion originally put forward by the Nationalists of the creation of Congress electorates had been adopted, such a plebiscite might have been possible; as it is, the necessary machinery does not exist. Moreover, such an all-India plebiscite covering the whole field of politics, even if it were possible, would neither be useful nor necessary. The national programme has already been fixed by the Calcutta Congress and there is no need of a further plebiscite to decide it; in Bengal at least it has been universally accepted, with additions, and reaffirmed by the District Conferences and District Committees appointed to carry it out. Our correspondent seems to have misapprehended the nature and object of a plebiscite. A plebiscite can only be on a single definite and supreme issue, the decision of which is so important that the ordinary representative assemblies cannot undertake the responsibility of a final decision. A plebiscite on a whole programme is an impossibility. Neither would it be binding. Bengal, for instance, is practically unanimous for Boycott. If the majority of votes went against Boycott, would Bengal accept the decision and tamely submit to repression? Or if the majority were for Boycott, would Bombay City agree to carry out the decision? We sympathise with the hankering for united action but united action is only possible in so much of the programme as all are agreed upon; it is

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not possible in those matters on which opinion is still widely divided.

The Bengal Government's Letter

20-June-1907

The Statesman has recently become a confirmed sensation-monger and treats the public continually to its thick-coming opium visions. It has recently brought out a sensational statement about Government proceedings against the Nationalist Press in which a Bengal Government letter to three Calcutta journals received almost a fortnight ago, the recent Police raid on the Keshab Press, the Bande Mataram's posters and some luxuriant imaginings of the Statesman's own riotous fancy have been mingled together in wild confusion. We were one of the recipients of the Bengal Government's letter, and if we have not written on the subject, it is simply because the letter was marked confidential. Now, however, that the matter has got abroad, we may as well correct certain inaccuracies which have appeared not only in the Statesman's bit of romancing, but in the Amrita Bazar Patrika's correction. It is entirely untrue that on Monday afternoon or any other afternoon, evening or morning "a notice was served upon the proprietors, editor, manager and printer of this paper to the effect that proceedings would be adopted against them under section 124A and the other sections dealing with seditious publications, unless they moderated their tone". On Saturday before last, if our memory serves us, we received a communication from the Bengal Government addressed to the Editor, Bande Mataram, in which we were informed that the Lieutenant-Governor had had under consideration certain articles (not specified) recently published in our paper "the language of which was a direct incitement to violence and breach of the peace". This sort of language the Bengal Government was determined to put a stop to, but before taking action they were gracious enough to give us a warning to mend our ways. That is all. It is not true either that a conference was held with the directors or that the manager interviewed the legal

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advisers of the Company in connection with the notice. No such conference or interview was held for the simple reason that none was necessary. The Editorial Department is solely responsible for the policy of the paper and they have no need to consult lawyers about their duty to the public. The Amrita Bazar Patrika is therefore wrongly informed when it says that legal opinion has been taken and given in the matter. It is true that legal opinion is being taken by the Company, but it is on a point of law which arose previous to the receipt of the Bengal Government's letter and is entirely unconnected with it. The Statesman has also absurdly distorted the "proceedings against the Yugantar and Nabasakti". No proceedings have been instituted. The police while searching the Keshab Press for manuscripts in connection with the pamphlet Sonar Bangla—which has, by the way, no connection with the Hare Street mare's nest—stumbled on the forms of the Yugantar then being printed. The Keshab Press is being proceeded against, but it is doubtful whether anything will be done to the Yugantar, as the printing of a paper in part or whole at another press in emergency is so common an occurrence that, even if it be a technical offence, which is not certain, to prosecute it would be purely vindictive. In any case the Yugantar business is not, as the Statesman represents, the first step in a campaign against the Nationalist Press. Our own position is very simple. The articles to which the Bengal Government refers, are, we presume, those in which we called upon the Hindus to defend their temples and their women from insult and outrage. Every Hindu paper at the time did the same, even the Indian Mirror and the Indian Nation, and we do not think we did anything more than our plain duty to our countrymen. The Lieutenant-Governor, however, takes exception not to the purport of our articles but to their language—which was less violent than what English papers would have used if a similar campaign of outrage on European women had been in progress. Be that as it may, the occasion has passed and until it is repeated, the question of complying or not complying with the warning does not arise. We merely note it and pass on.

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British Justice

21-June-1907

There has been much to edify and instruct in the recent antics of the bureaucracy and, in the light of the object lessons they present, the people of India have been revising old ideas and outworn superstitions with a healthy rapidity. The belief in British liberalism, in the freedom of the Press, in the freedom of the platform, in the Pax Britannica, in the political honesty of Mr. John Morley and many other cherished shibboleths have departed into the limbo of forgotten follies. But the greatest fall of all has been the fall of the belief in the imperturbable impartiality of British justice. There are two kinds of strain which no empire, however firmly bound in triple and quadruple bands of steel, can long bear; the strain of a burden of taxation which the people no longer find bearable and the strain of a series of perversions of justice which destroy all faith in the motives of the governing authorities. Justice and protection between man and man, between community and community, between rulers and ruled is the main object for which States exist, for which men submit to the restrictions of the law and to an equitable assessment of the expenses of the machinery which provides for protection and justice. But if the assessment of the expenses is grossly unjust, if the expenses themselves are exorbitantly high, if the revenue is spent on ways of which the taxpayers do not approve, then protection and justice are bought at a price which is not worth paying. And if in addition the protection is denied and the justice withheld, then the very object of the existence of a State ceases to be satisfied and from that moment the governing power, unless it can retrace its steps, is doomed by the inevitable operation of nature.

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The bureaucrats who misgovern us at the present moment have totally forgotten these simple truths. Otherwise we would not have witnessed such scandalous scenes as are now being enacted at Rawalpindi or the gross infringements of equity and justice which are of frequent occurrence in Bengal. The amazing incidents of the Rawalpindi riot case are such as have hardly been paralleled in British India. The refusal of bail, which was the first scandal, has evidently become a part of bureaucratic policy. It is a sound principle of procedure that bail should not be refused except under exceptional conditions, such as the probability of the accused absconding, otherwise in a protracted case an innocent man may suffer seriously for the sole offence of being accused. In the Rawalpindi case there was not the least possibility of men like Lala Hansraj, Gurdas Ram or Janaki Nath absconding from justice and the apprehension of further riots in a city commanded by siege-guns and crowded with military was a contemptible and hollow pretence. Yet without hearing the case, on the mere statement of the prosecuting officials, the Chief Court of the Punjab, supposed to be the highest repository of impartial British Justice, prejudged the accused, declared them guilty and refused bail. This is British law and British justice! Again in the course of the present trial, although it was proved beyond dispute that the prisoners were suffering terribly in health as the result of a detention in which they are being deliberately subjected to unnecessary discomfort and privation, although, if there was ever any shadow of justification for the refusal of bail, even that shadow had by this time utterly vanished, yet on the strength of the airy persiflage of a Civil Surgeon the relief to which they were entitled was refused. This gentleman held the view that the sufferings of the accused were not due to their detention and seems to be of the opinion that men of means and gentle nurture are rather in the habit of shedding several pounds of flesh off and on without apparent cause. And so the unfortunate martyrs, for the crime of being patriots, are punished with a long term of imprisonment before any offence has been proved against them. This too is British law and British justice. From the point

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of view of the executive it may no doubt be said that since the accused have to be punished whether they are guilty or innocent, it does not much matter whether their punishment begins before or after their conviction. That is good reasoning from the point of view of a bureaucratic executive, but not from that of a judicial authority. The refusal of bail to the Rawalpindi pleaders is one of the most deadly of the many wounds which the bureaucracy have been recently dealing to their own moral prestige and reputation for justice. The same spirit has been shown in the refusal of bail to Pindi Das, editor of India, and to Lala Dinanath of the Hindustan. In the latter case there is absolutely no excuse whatever for the refusal, except the vindictive fury of bureaucratic persecution which will omit no means however petty and base to make its opponents suffer.

But the most glaringly, paradoxically unsound case of all has occurred in our own midst. Srijut Girindranath Sen received at the hands of British justice a sentence of monstrous severity for a trifling offence. This same British justice being moved to set aside the conviction and sentence, was graciously pleased to give the accused a chance of disproving the offence, but at the same time, in the plenitude of its justice and wisdom, refused to give him bail. In other words it admitted that the accused might be innocent, but at the same time decided that he must undergo a monstrously disproportionate punishment for a trifling offence of which it was admittedly doubtful whether he ever committed it! And then when the punishment had been served out, British justice lent a gracious and leisurely ear and admitted that this Swadeshi Volunteer Captain was very probably innocent, but as he had suffered punishment for his innocence, it was not necessary to go any further into the matter. This too is British law and British justice. If all this does not convince the Indian people that the British sense of justice is most marvellous and unique and sui generis and without any peer or parallel in the world, it must indeed be hard-hearted and dull of soul. For our part we are ready to acclaim British justice with hymns of adoration and praise. Hail, thou ineffable, incomprehensible, indescribable,

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unspeakable British Justice! Hail, thou transcendent mystery. Tubhyam bhuyistham nama uktim vidhema.

The Moral of the Coconada Strike

21-June-1907

That the weapon of passive resistance is sometimes a match even for sword and bayonet, not to speak of milder instruments of repression, is being evidenced in the strike of the shipping coolies at Coconada. We may have to resort to this means of protest for some time to come until the Britishers so far forget themselves as to begin firing on strikers and boycotters—a contingency for which the country should now learn to be prepared. If the despot still entertains some doubt as to the working of the time-spirit, it should be set at rest by the instinctive resort of the Coconada coolies to a wholesale strike as an effective protest against the arrest of some of their own people for alleged participation in a riot. The drafting of the military and the punitive police to the locality has perhaps strengthened their firmness. The Englishman while alarmed at this unexpected combination among the lower class, hopes that the strike is not political in its character. This comfortable deduction has provoked a sort of subdued laughter from the Madras Hindu. Events alone make men wise. The opinion that is today punished and ridiculed as mere heresy, has its ratification tomorrow in experience. Our moderate contemporary now sees eye to eye with the Nationalists when it says, "If once the lower classes of the people begin to know and feel their real strength and power, it will be difficult to predict the results that would follow. No prudent administrator would, in our opinion, tempt the bringing into play of the capacity for combination which the lower strata of people have. They cannot be cowed down into submission with half the ease and celerity with which the educated classes can be brought down by the display of military strength." The whole plan of Nationalist campaign rests on the basis of this potential strength of the people which does not require for its reawakening years of mass education as is contended by the

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Moderates, but only tangible instances of bureaucratic highhandedness. Education in the ordinarily accepted sense is not a very effective means of national regeneration, as the Hindu itself admits. The responsiveness of untampered and unsophisticated nature, its want of calculation and its speedy decision have to be turned to advantage.

Thus the Coconada strike comes handy with its moral to dispel another of our superstitions.

The Statesman on Shooting

21-June-1907

While Mr. John Morley was being cross-examined by the Nationalist and Labour members in Parliament and was answering in his usual style of Demigod plus Aristides the Just plus Louis XIV of France plus the Archangel Gabriel, the tiger qualities of an imperial race suddenly awoke in the breast of Sir Howard Vincent and roared out, "Why not shoot Lajpat Rai?" In that single trenchant sentence the warlike Knight gave a sudden illuminating expression to the heart's desire of all Anglo-India and two-thirds of England. It was not decorous, it was not politic, but it was frank and sincere. Yesterday the Friend of India noticed the incident with great sympathy for Sir Howard Vincent's feelings, but it could not altogether approve of applying his panacea just at present. The Friend, however, looks forward to a day when the shooting will begin; it invites the attention of the Indian reactionaries—whoever they may be—to this bloodcurdling Howard Vincent war-whoop and warns them that this is the prospect before them if a Tory Government comes into power while the present unrest continues. By its Indian reactionaries the Friend probably means not Nawab Salimullah and the Mihir Sudhakar, but the Democratic Nationalist party in India; for the Friendly language must be usually interpreted by contraries, and it is quite natural for one who calls the Statesman a Friend of India to call democracy and nationalism reactionary. Let us assure the Friend however that the Nationalist party have from the beginning envisaged the possibility of the shooting

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being started; they did not need a Howard Vincent to open their eyes to it. The defenders of the established order of things have attempted almost every form of Russian repression except the taking of life. Deportation, condemnation without trial, punishment before conviction, flogging, the gagging of press and platform, police hooliganism, the employment of a Black Hundred, brutal personal persecution in jail and hajat, have all been attempted though not as yet on the Russian scale. When all these methods have been found ineffective, it is quite possible that the order "do not hesitate to shoot" may go out; already in the Punjab the threat has been used to prevent public meetings. The Friend of India is greatly mistaken if he thinks that his menaces will have any better effect than his abuse and cajolings: it is a wild dream for him to hope that any power can make Indian Nationalism fall down and kiss the feet of Archangel John.

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Mr. A. Chaudhuri's Policy

22-June-1907

Mr. Ashutosh Chaudhuri has used the opportunity given to him by his selection for the chair of the Pabna Conference to make a personal pronouncement of policy. This is the second time that Mr. Chaudhuri has had an opportunity of this kind, the first being the Provincial conference at Burdwan. On that occasion he made a pronouncement which indicated a new departure in politics and created some flutter in the Congress dovecotes. It would not be accurate to say that the Burdwan pronunciamento influenced the course of affairs; the propounder of the new policy, if such it could be called, had not sufficient weight of personality to become the leader of a new party, nor was his policy either definite enough or sound enough to attract a following. But it had a certain importance. It was the immature self-expression of ideas and forces which had been gathering head in the country and groping about for means of entry into the ordinary channels of political action and expression. It was rather the prophecy of a new turn in Indian politics than itself a policy already understood and matured. The prophet himself was perhaps the one who least understood his own prophecy. The confusion of his ideas was shown soon afterwards by his identifying himself with the old current of Congress politics and thus turning his back on the two main positions in his Burdwan speech, the repudiation of mendicant politics and the dictum that a subject nation has no politics. He left it to others to develop the political ideas he had dimly and imperfectly outlined and give them a definite shape embodied in a clear political programme. Still more forcibly is this lack of comprehension evidenced by Mr. Chaudhuri's attempt to revert, with modifications, to his

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Burdwan ideas even after the momentous changes of the last three years. He has once more reverted to his dictum that a subject nation has no politics; he once more proposes that we should give up our political agitation; once more he puts forward self-help as a substitute. When he spoke at Burdwan, industrial expansion was the idea of the day and Mr. Chaudhuri offered it to us as a substitute for political mendicancy. Today Swadeshi, Boycott and National Education are the ideas of the day and Mr. Chaudhuri offers them as a substitute for the struggle for Swaraj.

We do not wish to overrate the importance of Mr. Chaudhuri's pronouncements. Mr. Chaudhuri is not a political leader with a distinct following in the country who are likely to carry out his ideas. He is a sort of Rosebery of Bengal politics, a brilliant, cultured amateur, who catches up certain thoughts or tendencies that are in the air and gives them a more or less striking expression, but he has not the qualities of a politician—robustness, backbone, the ability to will a certain course of action and the courage to carry it out. He has intellectual sensitiveness, but not intellectual consistency. Suave, affable, pliable, essentially an amiable and cultured gentleman, he is unfit for the rough and tumble of political life, especially in a revolutionary period; no man who shrinks from struggle or is appalled by the thought of aggression can hope to seize and lead the wild forces that are rising to the surface in twentieth-century India. But this very knack of catching up however partially the moods of the moment gives a certain interest to Mr. Chaudhuri's pronouncements which make them worth examining.

When Mr. Chaudhuri at Burdwan pronounced against the mendicant policy he was voicing two distinct and various currents of political tendency. The opprobrious term of mendicancy was applied to the old Congress school of politics not because remonstrance and protest are in themselves wrong and degrading, but because in the circumstances of modern India a policy of prayer, petition and protest without the sanction of a great irresistible national force at its back was bound to pauperise the energy of the nation and to accustom it to a degrading

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dependence. It was not only a waste of energy but a sapping of energy, and it was ruinous to manhood and self-respect. But the recognition of this fact only led to another problem. If we did not sue to others for help, we must help ourselves; if we did not depend on the alien's mercies, we must depend on our own strength. But how was that strength to be educated? Again, when we had decided that a subject nation has no politics, what then? Were we to renounce the birthrights inherent in our manhood and leave the field to the bureaucratic despotism or were we to resolve to cease to be a subject nation so that we might recover the right and possibility of political life and activity? There were two currents of political thought growing up in the country. One, thoughtful, philosophic, idealistic, dreamed of ignoring the terrible burden that was crushing us to death, of turning away from politics and educating our strength in the village and township, developing our resources, our social, economic, religious life regardless of the intrusive alien; it thought of inaugurating a new revolution such as the world had never yet seen, a moral, peaceful revolution, actively developing ourselves but only passively resisting the adversary. But there was another current submerged as yet, but actively working underneath, which tended in another direction,—a sprinkling of men in whom one fiery conviction replaced the cultured broodings of philosophy and one grim resolve took the place of political reasoning. The conviction was that subjection was the one curse which withered and blighted all our national activities, that so long as that curse was not removed it was a vain dream to expect our national activities to develop themselves successfully and that only by struggle could our strength be educated to action and victory. The resolve was to rise and fight and fall and again rise and fight and fall waging the battle for ever until this once great and free nation should again be great and free. It was this last current which boiled up to the surface in the first vehemence of the anti-Partition agitation, flung out the challenge of boycott and plunged the Bengali nation into a struggle with the bureaucracy which must now be fought out till the end.

All were carried away in the tide of that great upheaval;

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but it is needless to say that this was not what the advocates of self-help pure and simple had contemplated, Mr. Chaudhuri least of all. He very early identified himself with the small knot of older leaders who from time to time struggled with the tide and tried to turn it back; but until now the tide was too strong for them. For a moment, however, the rush has been checked by superhuman efforts of repression on the part of the panic-stricken bureaucracy and it is natural that those who were not with their whole heart and conviction for the struggle for Swaraj, should begin to revert to their old ideas, to long to give up the struggle, to retreat into the fancied security of their fortress of unpolitical Swadeshism and a policy of self-help which seeks to ignore the unignorable. The tendency is to cry, "The old policy is a failure, the Briton has revealed his true nature; the new policy is a failure, we have not strength to meet the giant power of the bureaucracy; let them have the field, let us quietly pursue our own salvation in the peaceful Ashrams of Swadeshism and self-help." Mr. Ashutosh Chaudhuri with his keen intellectual sensitiveness has felt this tendency in the air and given it expression. It is a beautiful and pathetic dream. We will develop our manufacture, boycott foreign goods, of course in a quite friendly and non-political spirit, and England will look quietly on while its trade is being ruined! We will ignore the Government and build up our own centres of strength in spite of it, a Government the whole principle and condition of whose existence is that there shall be no centre of strength in the country except itself! Mr. Chaudhuri's policy would be an excellent one if he could only remove two factors from the political problem, first, Indian Nationalism, secondly, the British Government. And how does he propose to remove them? By shutting his eyes to their existence. Ignore the Government, dissociate yourselves from the men of violence—and the thing is done. Such is the political wisdom of Mr. Ashutosh Chaudhuri.

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A Current Dodge

22-June-1907

Referring to the transfer to other places of Mr. Barneville and Maulavi Faizuddin Hossein who tried cases of looting in Jamalpur and recorded as their opinion that the riots were not provoked by Hindu boycotters and National volunteers, even the Hindu Patriot which has never been friendly to the Nationalist movement writes—

"Transferring judges and magistrates whose decisions differ from the settled policy or preconceived views of the Executive officials, is a current dodge whereby the ends of justice are sought to be subordinated to political or other considerations. And this is but another very forcible illustration of the evils of the combination of Judicial and Executive functions, and it also explains the reason why there is so much opposition to the separation of the duties. All the same however, we may frankly observe here that any attempt to destroy the integrity of the law-courts will deepen the anxiety which is being manifested on all sides. It is the proverbial impartiality of British justice which is prized more than anything else."

But this current dodge is played not by the local executive officials but by the higher bureaucracy and need not be an argument in favour of the separation of Judicial and Executive functions. Our contemporary's attempt to smother facts in a profusion of side-issues cannot deceive those who can read between the lines. We must congratulate him all the same on this sudden flash of intelligent outspokenness. But our contemporary need not feel anxious about "the proverbial impartiality of British justice". The proverb is badly in need of a change. And as we said yesterday when referring to many cherished shibboleths of the people departing into the limbo of forgotten follies, the greatest fall has been the fall of the belief in the imperturbable impartiality of British justice. The transfer of Mr. Barneville and the Maulavi is only another count in the indictment.

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More about British Justice

24-June-1907

We commented the other day on the policy of refusing bail which has recently been adopted by the bureaucracy in a spirit of petty vindictiveness and the scandalous manner in which men accused of political offences are being punished before conviction. Of course it is all under the law, but that only proves the contention we have always advanced that the criminal law in this country on which our rulers pride themselves, is barbarous, oppressive and semi-mediaeval in its spirit and that its provisions are governed far more by the principle of repressing the spirit of the people than by the principle of protecting the citizen. Moreover, in all judicial administration there are two elements, the letter of the law on one side, a humane and equitable practice on the other. To suspend the latter in favour of the former shows an oppressive and tyrannical spirit. The letter of the law enables the Government to appeal against any and every acquittal in a criminal case; equitable practice forbids it to take advantage of this barbarous provision except in important cases where it is convinced there has been a serious miscarriage of justice. But the first principle of bureaucratic rule in India is repression, to crush the spirit of the people and keep them down with the strong hand. Every acquittal is therefore considered by the executive a defeat to Government prestige and resented. Unless therefore there is a strong and independent High Court, the habit of appealing against acquittals is bound to become a standing feature of British justice. But the idea of a strong and independent High Court is becoming more and more a legend of the past. Future generations will be as sceptical of the possibility of its ever having existed as the modern world is of the existence of gnomes and fairies.

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There is another equitable practice which has been violated with the most cynical openness in the Rawalpindi trial. It is a sound principle of legal procedure that the accused should not be hampered in his defence but on the contrary should receive every legitimate facility. The unjust judge who denies proper facilities of defence to a man whose life or liberty, honour or reputation is imperilled by an accusation which may be false or mistaken, the hanging judge whose diseased brain and morbid temperament are consumed with the desire to have the accused convicted, are survivals of mediaeval barbarity. Such men are the lineal descendants of Jeffreys and Torquemada. In England such men are rarities upon the Bench; in India especially among Civilian Magistrates and Judges, they are not uncommon. In England the prosecuting Counsel will seldom throw unnecessary difficulties in the way of the defence, in India it is too common for the prosecuting Counsel to regard the defence as an enemy to be beaten down and out-manoeuvred by any means which the technicalities of the law leave open to him. For the atmosphere is different. The spirit of bureaucracy in all countries tends to be narrow, hard and domineering, but in a country where a small alien element subsists in a huge native mass partly by the maintenance of a hypnotic illusion, partly by a cold legal repressive severity, ubiquitous and watchful to crush down every least unit of strength in the indigenous population, this temper is immensely heightened and exaggerated. Everybody knows that in the local administration of the law in this country conviction, not impartial justice, is the object. A Subordinate Magistrate is rated not by the soundness of his judgments but by the percentage of convictions to the total number of cases he has tried, and it is by this test that he is promoted. In that single fact we find the true and fundamental tendency of British justice in India.

When such is the spirit even in the ordinary administration of the law, it can easily be imagined to what lengths this spirit of semi-mediaeval barbarity is likely to be carried when political considerations are imported. To get justice in a Swadeshi case is nowadays almost impossible; even in the High Court only one or two judges have managed to keep a judicial frame of

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mind in relation to political cases. This is of course natural and inevitable. A struggle is going on between the ruling bureaucracy and the people of the country, and every judge or magistrate is a servant of the bureaucracy, generally a member of it and very often himself one of the caste and race whose monopoly of power is threatened. In his eyes the accused in a political case is not an ordinary accused but a rebel prisoner of war; he may not be guilty of the offence with which he is charged, but he is guilty of Swadeshism, he is guilty of being an opponent of the Government established by law. His punishment is therefore desirable in the interests of the ruling class and in the judge's own interests as a servant and member of that class. The judge is really a party to the case. It is not to be expected that in such circumstances any facilities will be allowed to the defence beyond what the letter of the law and bare decency require. A few magistrates may rise superior to these considerations, but the majority cannot be reasonably asked to do so. They are after all human beings—and Englishmen.

Still there is a limit, there is something due to decency, and at Rawalpindi it seems to us that the limit has been overpassed and the dues have been denied. We have nothing to say as to the guilt or the innocence of the men under trial. We will assume that they are guilty, we will assume that their conviction is a thing settled. But still until the trial is over, they are in law regarded as men who are possibly innocent and should be allowed ordinary facilities to prove their innocence. One of the principal safeguards of accused innocents in India is the necessity of identification under stringent rules which prevent collusion between the police and the witnesses. In the Rawalpindi trial it has been repeatedly stated that the identification has been a scandalous farce; the prisoners have been under police custody all the time and have been repeatedly shown to the witnesses in the jail, and as if this were not enough, the police in Court are allowed to make signs to the witnesses so that they may be sure to identify the right persons. These statements have not been denied. They may be true or they may be false; but when such statements are advanced by the defence, it is the duty of an impartial judge to

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inquire into them and take every precaution against the barest possibility of such practices. Piteous complaints have been made by several of the accused of police violence and cruelty in hajat. Into this also no inquiry has been made and the only answer the unfortunate men have received is a rough and uncivil command to keep silence.

If this were all, it would be scandalous enough, but the recent developments have been still more staggering. A hooligan crusade has been started against the pleaders for the defence, so shamelessly persistent and open as to drive them to throw up their briefs. Sirdar Beant Singh's house has been invaded, himself and his brother brutally assaulted, his ladies' apartments entered and an ornament snatched from the person of his wife. While these brutal outrages were being committed, the police remained quiet in their thana which is in the same compound as the Sirdar's house and made no attempt to give assistance, nor do we hear of any attempt to trace and punish the miscreants. The houses of other defence pleaders have been exposed to a campaign of theft and pilfering and none of them is safe against a repetition of the kind of intimidation which has been used against Beant Singh. All India has drawn its own conclusions from these singular occurrences, for indeed, the conclusions are not difficult to draw.

But the crowning scandal of all was the treatment of the witness Abdullah. It is possible that seditious speeches were delivered by the accused, but it is certain that the amazing literal unanimity of the witnesses has created, rightly or wrongly, an impression that their evidence was given according to police dictation. When, therefore, a Mahomedan witness actually declared in the witness box that his first evidence has been given under fear of the police, it was obvious that the whole foundation of the prosecution case was threatened; for the example of recantation might easily be followed. Then ensued a scene which we hope, for the credit of humanity at large, has never had a parallel in recent judicial history. Immediately the prosecuting counsel leaps up and demands that this inconvenient witness be at once prosecuted for perjury and handed over to the tender mercies

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of the police against whom he has given evidence; immediately the judge complies with this amazing demand; immediately the unfortunate witness is hustled out of court into the grip of the police. It is not surprising that the miserable Abdullah should recant his recantation and balance his charge against the police by a charge against the leading pleader for the defence. And this too is British law and British justice. Nay, it is the climax, the apex, the acme, the culminating point which British justice has reached in this too fortunate country. After all, the British Empire must be saved at any cost.

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Morleyism Analysed

25-June-1907

The fuller reports of Mr. Morley's speech to hand by mail do not in any essential point alter the impression that was produced by Reuter's summary. The whole of the speech turns upon a single sentence as its pivot—the statement that British rule will continue, ought to continue and must continue. Mr. Morley does not say for ever, but that is understood. It follows that if the continuance of British rule on any terms is the fundamental necessity, any and every means used for its preservation is legitimate. Compared with that supreme necessity justice does not matter, humanity does not matter, truth does not matter, morality may be trampled on, the laws of God may be defied. The principles of Liberalism, though they may have been professed a thousand times over, must be discarded by the English rulers of India as inapplicable to a country of "300 millions of people, composite, heterogeneous, of different races with different histories and different faiths". All these things weigh as dust in the balance against the one supreme necessity. If the continuance of British rule seems to be threatened by any popular activity however legitimate, resort must be had to any weapon, no matter of what nature, in order to put down that activity. Reasons of State, "the tyrant's plea, necessity", must be held to be of supreme authority and to override all other considerations. Mr. Morley admits that the plea is a dangerous one, but sedition is still more dangerous. The danger of the reason of State is that it can cover and will inevitably be stretched to cover the repetition of "dangers, mischiefs and iniquities in our olden history and, perhaps, in our present history"; in other words Mr. Morley's reasoning in favour of the present "iniquities" in India

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can equally well be used to justify every utmost atrocity, cruelty, vileness with which tyrants ancient or modern have attempted to put down opposition to their sovereign will. Wholesale deportation, arbitrary imprisonment, massacre, outrage, police anarchy, torture of prisoners, every familiar feature of Russian repression, can be brought under the head of weapons necessary to combat sedition and can be justified by the plea of State necessity. This is the danger of reason of State, a danger that recent events in India and especially current events in the Punjab show to be by no means so remote as we might have some months ago imagined. But the danger of sedition is the cessation of British rule. And in the opinion of Mr. Morley, supported by an almost unanimous consensus of British opinion, the re-enactment by a British government of the iniquities and atrocities of ancient and modern tyranny are preferable to the cessation of British rule; it is better to take the risk of these than to take the risk of losing the absolute control of Britain over India. This is Mr. Morley's argument, approved by Conservative and Radical alike. No, we are not distorting or exaggerating. There it is, plump and plain, in the speech of the great British Radical, the Liberal philosopher, the panegyrist of Burke and Gladstone. It is the last word of England to India on the great issue of Indian self-government.

What does Mr. Morley mean by British rule? Not the British connexion, not the continuance of India as a self-governing unit in a federation of free peoples which shall be called the British Empire. No, Mr. Morley is quite as hostile to the Moderate ideal of self-government on colonial lines, modified Swaraj, as to the Nationalist ideal of Swaraj pure and simple. The educated minority in India have the presumption to think themselves capable of working the government of the country as smoothly as the heaven-born Briton himself, but Mr. Morley is persuaded that they would not work it for a week. This is final. If after a hundred years of English education and no inconsiderable training in the subordinate conduct of the bureaucratic machinery of government, the educated class are not fit to be entrusted even by gradual stages with the supreme government of Indian affairs, then they will never be fit. And we must remember that the policy

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of the rulers henceforth will be to control and restrict and not to encourage or promote the spread of education of the higher sort. From our own point of view, we may put it more strongly and say that if a hundred years of dependence and foreign control have so immensely impaired that governing capacity of the Indian races which they showed with such splendid results for the last three thousand years, then another century will absolutely and for ever destroy it. Mr. Morley is therefore logically justified in reiterating his conviction that personal and absolute foreign control must be the leading feature of Indian administration to the very end of time. This is what Mr. Morley means by the continuance of British rule, he means the continuance of a personal and absolute British control pervading the administration of affairs in every department, in other words, a bureaucratic despotism strongly flavoured by the independent personal omnipotence of local governors and local officials. The problem which former British statesmen professed to have before them was the problem of gradually training and associating the Indians in an European system of government until they were fit to take over absolute control of affairs and allow their patrons and protectors to withdraw. This problem does not any longer trouble the peace of British statesmen; on the contrary it is definitely and for ever disclaimed and put aside as a chimera—or a pretence. British rule in India will continue, ought to continue and must continue. What then is the problem which is troubling Mr. Morley? The problem is "the difficulty of combining personal government in our dependency with the rights of free speech and free meeting". Personal government, absolute government, despotism, that is the supreme necessity which must be continued for ever even at the sacrifice of morality, justice and every other consideration. Subject to that necessity Mr. Morley proposes to allow a certain amount of free speech if that be possible. Free speech was harmless so long as the Indian people had not set their heart on self-government; but now that they are resolved to have nothing short of self-government, free speech means seditious speech, and sedition is not consistent with the continuance of the absolute and personal British control. How then can free speech

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and British despotism be combined? How can fire and water occupy the same space? That is the problem, which Mr. Morley refuses to believe insoluble, and he solves it by proclaiming the areas where free speech has been chiefly employed,—and by establishing an Advisory Council of Notables.

It may be asked, if the continuance of absolute government is the whole policy of British statesmanship, why does Mr. Morley trouble himself about free speech at all or propose any reforms? That question can be easily answered by a consideration of the suggested reforms. The first of these reforms is a Council of Notables. Mr. Morley has told us what is the object of this body; it is to be a sort of medium of communication between the Government and the people. Of course Mr. Morley is quite mistaken in supposing that such a body can really serve the object he has in view, but we are concerned for the present not with the sufficiency of the means he is devising for his object, but with the object itself. The second reform is an expansion of the Legislative Councils and greater facilities to the elected members for the expression of their views; in other words the object of the expanded Legislative Councils is to keep the Government in India in touch with the views of the educated class. The third reform is the admission of Indian members to the India Council, and it is obvious that here again the object is that these Indian members should keep the Government in England in touch with the opinions of educated India, just as the elected members of the Legislative Councils are to keep the Government in India in touch with the same opinion. The fourth reform is the decentralisation of the administration so that each local official may become an independent local despot. The object is clearly defined; first, to give him greater opportunities of being in touch with the people, secondly, to give him a greater power of personal despotic control within his own jurisdiction unhampered by the interference of higher authorities. All the reforms have one single object, one governing idea,—an absolute personal despotic British control in touch with the people. That is Mr. Morley's policy.

The object of keeping in touch with the people and knowing

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their opinions is not to redress their grievances, still less to allow their opinions any control over the administration. The object is quite different. A despotism out of touch with the people is a despotism continually in danger; ignorant of the currents of opinion, ignorant of the half-visible activities among its subjects, ignorant of the perils gathering in the vast obscurity, it must one day be suddenly surprised and perhaps overthrown by the unforeseen outburst of activities and dangers it had not anticipated. It is in order to avoid these dangers that Mr. Morley wishes to employ various means of keeping in touch with public opinion and its manifestations. He talks in his speech of the necessity of the rulers putting themselves in the skins of the ruled, in other words, of thoroughly understanding their thoughts, feelings and point of view. This does not mean that they shall rule India according to the sentiments, views and wishes of the Indian people. The whole conduct of Mr. Morley and the whole trend of his utterances show that he means the opinions of the Government to prevail without regard to Indian opinions and sentiments. The rulers are to understand the ruled so that they may know how their measures are likely to affect the minds of the latter, how opposition can best be persuaded or samjaoed into quiescence and how, if persuasion is useless, it can most swiftly and successfully be crushed. Through the Council of Notables, the Legislative Councils and the Indian members of the India Council, the Government will come to know the ideas, views and feelings of the people; through the two former bodies they will try to present unpopular measures in such a way as to coax, cajole, delude or intimidate public opinion into a quiet acceptance. If they cannot do this, then through the decentralised local officers they can keep in touch with the popular temper, learn its manifestations and activities and successfully and promptly put down opposition by local measures, if possible, otherwise by imperial rescripts, laws and ordinances and every possible weapon of despotic repression.

We have analysed Mr. Morley's speech at length, because people in India have not the habit of following the turns of British parliamentary eloquence or reading between the lines of

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the speech of a Cabinet Minister. They are therefore likely to miss its true bearings and fail to understand the policy it enunciates. Read by an eye accustomed to the reservations and implications by which a British Minister makes himself intelligible without committing himself unnecessarily, Mr. Morley's speech is an admirably clear, connected, logical and, let us add, unusually and amazingly frank expression of a very straightforward and coherent policy. To maintain in India an absolute rule as rigid as any Czar's, to keep that rule in close touch with the currents of Indian sentiment, opinion and activity and to crush any active opposition by an immediate resort to the ordinary weapons of despotism, ordinances, deportations, prosecutions and a swift and ruthless terrorism, this is Morleyism as explained by its author.

Political or Non-Political

25-June-1907

We are glad to see that both at Jessore and Pabna the foolish idea of excluding politics from a political conference has been entirely abandoned. The attempt to parcel off our national progress into water-tight compartments, the attempts especially to put off political activity and political development to a far-distant area is, when not dictated by weakness or cowardice, a narrow, one-sided and short-sighted attempt. In one sense everything that concerns the welfare of the polis, the state or community, is political. Education, social reconstruction, sanitation, industrial expansion, all these are a necessary part of politics; but the most important part of all is that to which the term politics is especially applied, the organisation of the state and its independence; for on these all the others depend. Just as an organism must first live and then attend to other wants and must therefore give the highest importance to the preservation of life, so also a state or nation must first win or maintain an organised independence, otherwise it will find itself baffled in all its attempts to satisfy its other wants. Swadeshi, Boycott, Arbitration, National Education, are all doomed to failure if

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pursued separately and for their own sake; but as part of a single co-ordinated attempt to attain an organised independence they are the necessity of the present time. They are merely component parts of Swaraj, which is made of all of them put together and harmonised into a single whole. It is mere ostrich politics to pretend to give up Swaraj, and confine oneself to its parts for their own sake. By such an attempt we may succeed in deceiving ourselves; we shall certainly not deceive anybody else.

Hare Street Logic

25-June-1907

The Englishman has found out a new reason for refusing self-government to Indians on the plea of unfitness. Their unfitness for self-government is shown by their unanimity in demanding self-government. Our contemporary arrives at this conclusion in a way peculiar to himself. Mr. S. M. Mitra, that great and solitary admirer of Anglo-India and all its works, has recently discovered that Mr. R. C. Dutt in his green and callow days held views diametrically opposed to those of his ripe and reflective manhood—views entirely in agreement with official opinion. Now that officials should be unanimous and Mr. Dutt along with them, the Englishman thinks quite right and proper; but that Indian politicians should be unanimous and Mr. Dutt along with them is disgraceful and reprehensible. How is it, asks the Hare Street Sir Oracle, that Indians are all agreed about Permanent Settlement and other political questions. It shows they do not think independently about politics and people who do not think independently about politics cannot be fit for self-government. We will ask the Englishman one question. If the Englishman, the Daily News and the Statesman were all laid flat on their backs and subjected to the torture called peine forte et dure, if, for instance, the Nawab of Dacca were dumped down on the Englishman's chest and Mr. Curshetji upon his master and the Nawab's Maulavi, one after the other added to the heap, and if Mr. N. N. Ghose were similarly seated on the editor of the Statesman and Mr. Narendranath Sen on Mr. N. N.

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Ghose and Pandit Kaliprasanna Kabyabisharad were piled upon Mr. Sen like Pelion upon Ossa, and the editor of the Daily News were similarly treated; then if under this pressure these three jarring powers were to become suddenly unanimous and struck out an appeal to have this loving burden or some of it taken off their chests,—would that prove their inability to think independently? India is suffering economically and politically from the peine forte et dure and it is only to be expected that we should be unanimous in requesting that it should be stopped or reduced. But then the Englishman is so hard to please. If we differ among ourselves, he cries, "Look, look, you cannot agree among yourselves, and yet you ask for self-government." When we do agree among ourselves he shouts, "Look, look, you cannot disagree among yourselves, and yet you ask for self-government." It is a case of heads I win, tails you lose.

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The Tanjore Students' Resolution

26-June-1907

At a meeting of the Tanjore students a resolution was passed exhorting the students and guardians at Rajamundry "to lose no time in starting a National College free from the shackles of the Government". Thus we find Madras students realising the situation better than the students in Bengal who played so prominent a part in the agitation that followed the Partition of Bengal. We have all realised that the education the Government prescribes for our young men is not calculated to help in developing the manhood of the nation. The system of education that prevailed before the passing of the Universities Act was bad enough. But this education as deformed by the provisions of the Act was a direct attempt to stem the tide of political progress in India and produce men minus a backbone. Now that we have realised that to help the growing race consciousness in India we must have a system of education consistent with the traditions of the people and calculated to foster that spirit of Nationalism which alone can make a nation great, it is the duty of every Indian to help the inauguration of such a system of education and place it on a firm footing. The duty becomes all the more sacred in the face of the powerful opposition that such a system of education is sure to encounter at the hands of the bureaucracy whose interests are likely to be injured by it. It is only the unanimous support of the country that can make such an opposition fruitless. And it is a significant sign of the times that students all over the country are realising it. We are sure it will not be long before the whole country is on fire with a desire to strengthen the national system of education that has been inaugurated and the impending struggle against the Risley

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Circular will be the precursor of even a greater movement which will make National Education in India an accomplished success.

The Statesman on Mr. Chaudhuri

26-June-1907

The Statesman is naturally delighted with Mr. A. Chaudhuri's declaration in favour of leaving politics out of our programme. Here at least, cries the Friend of India, is a leader after our own heart. No doubt it would be extremely convenient for the Friend of India and its countrymen if Indians did give up their political aspirations and leave Anglo-India in undisputed possession of the field, but we do not think the friendly yearnings of the Statesman are likely to be gratified. Mr. Chaudhuri's message fell flat even in his own Pabna. At the same time our contemporary seems hardly to have taken the trouble to understand the speech of his new protégé. He fastens on the powerful indictment of the present system of education which is the most striking portion of Mr. Chaudhuri's address, and warmly approves of it. But he mildly rebukes the speaker for pinning his hopes on the new system of National Education which is gradually spreading throughout Bengal and advises him to transfer his affections to the old University. National Education will be a failure, says the Chowringhee prophet; Indians are too selfish and unpatriotic to make it a success. What then is to be done? Why, give up agitating for political reform since our agitation is so obviously a failure and begin agitating for educational reform. It is a luminous idea. After having wasted a century begging the British Government to reform their administration, we are to waste another century begging them to reform their educational system,—with equal futility. The Government cannot give us a reformed and modern system of education for obvious reasons. It would mean the growth of highly trained specialists who would immediately demand to be employed in preference to aliens, and either the bread of so many Europeans would be taken out of their mouths or there would be a fresh cause of discontent. It would equip Indians to oust the white man from his

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lucrative monopoly of commerce and trade and kill British trade in India by the development of indigenous industries. It would mean the transformation of our people into a highly-trained and well-equipped nation who would certainly not submit to Mr. Morley's personal and absolute British control. Anything short of this would not meet Mr. Chaudhuri's ideal; but anything like this the bureaucracy could not give us without committing suicide. The Statesman has not, as we said, cared to understand Mr. Chaudhuri. He is for dropping politics but he is also for self-help and denounces mendicancy. We fear the Statesman will have to look farther for its ideal Bengali leader. Why not try Sankaritola?

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"Legitimate Patriotism"

27-June-1907

Lord Minto has given us the historic expression "honest Swadeshi", and it was reserved for an Anglo-Indian publicist to startle the English-knowing world by an equally significant expression, "legitimate patriotism". Honesty, legitimacy and other kindred words of the English vocabulary are being newly interpreted by the Anglo-Indian bureaucrats and publicists. The natural sentiments and aspirations of men are to be regulated according to their convenience and notions.

If you give preference to the indigenous products of the country and ask your friends, relatives and countrymen to do the same, you are dishonest. This is stretching the meaning of honesty to suit the moral sense of our alien and benevolent despots. Today we hear from another Anglo-Indian Sir Oracle, the Daily News of Calcutta, that there is such a thing as legitimate patriotism. We have looked up the dictionaries to profit by the enlightenment so kindly vouchsafed to us, but we have failed in our efforts. According to Webster, patriotism covers all activities to zealously guard the authority and interests of one's country and we are at a loss to understand how what the Indians have hitherto done or proposed to do to ensure the authority and interests of their country can be stigmatised as illegitimate. We on the contrary believe, and that according to the best authority, that the patriotism which has hitherto wrested from Mr. Morley only an expanded Council with an official majority and a comic advisory Board of Notables, falls far short of the standard of lexicographers. Patriotism will never rest satisfied till it has recovered the authority of the country, however much the Anglo-Indians try to twist its meaning and implication.

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If it is patriotic for an Englishman to say, as their greatest poet has said, that this England never did nor shall lie at the proud feet of a conqueror, why should it be unpatriotic and seditious for an Indian to give expression to a similar sentiment? If it is highly patriotic for a Roman "to die in defence of his father's ashes and the temples of his gods", why should it be madness and senseless folly for an Indian to be stirred by a similar impulse? If "self-defence is the bulwark of all rights", as Lord Byron has said, why should an Indian journalist be charged with an attempt to incite to violence when he asks his countrymen of East Bengal to defend the honour of their women at any cost? If Campbell is right in saying that virtue is the spouse of liberty, why should an Indian be exposed to the menace of siege-guns when entering on a legitimate and lawful struggle for the recovery of his lost freedom? If each noble aim repressed by long control expires at last or feebly mans the soul, why should not our countrymen benefit by the advice of Goldsmith and begin to chafe at the attempt to prolong this alien control? If Tennyson is justified in taking a pride in his country which freemen till, which sober-suited Freedom chose, where girt with friends or foes a man may speak the thing he will, where freedom slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent, why should it be criminal on the part of an Indian to imagine a similar future for the land of his birth? It will not do to fling in our face the mockery of glittering generalities or blazing ubiquities of natural right with which they ridiculed the Declaration of Independence by the American colonists in 1776. Man cannot escape the influence of these glittering generalities and blazing ubiquities; the literatures of peoples who struggled for independence in former ages have always abounded with them and the awakened East must also talk in the same language. When some mighty sentiments dominate the human breast, they give rise to language which runs the risk of being scouted as mere platitude, they give rise to activities and demonstrations which are in danger of being traced to illegitimate sources. The students of Rajamundry wore "Bande Mataram" badges, shouted "Bande Mataram" in the streets, gave a grand reception to a Nationalist speaker, formed

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themselves into a Balabharat Samiti and the Daily News thinks all these to be the outcome of a patriotism hardly legitimate. What is then legitimate patriotism, pray? Our contemporary has given us no light on the point. We suppose it means a blind loyalty to the alien government, a helpless acquiescence in its most despotic measures, bowing our knee to every Anglo-Indian, especially to the dicta of the Editor of the Indian Daily News and the Englishman. If we do not accept the ethics of the British and Anglo-Indian press which calls the present patriotic movement immoral and ascribes it to the want of moral training in our schools and colleges, we may be guilty according to Anglo-Indian jurisprudence but the higher tribunal to whom alone all oppressed peoples look up, knows their hearts and shapes their destinies accordingly.

Khulna Oppressions

27-June-1907

What is the reason of the extraordinary activity of Government oppression in the Khulna District. At the present rate Khulna promises to be the Barisal of West Bengal. A District Conference forbidden and held, a prosecution for sedition against a leading pleader and influential citizen of the chief town of the District, a prosecution of a local Nationalist paper, a summons to all the leading men of a Sub-divisional town to show cause why they should not be bound down because they intend to hold a Conference, this is no bad record in the course of a few weeks. Of course the reason for this official jehad against Swadeshi in Khulna is precisely the same as the reason for the jehad in Barisal. Barisal has been selected for the most wanton and disgraceful series of oppressions solely because it is the district in East Bengal which is best organized for the work of Swadeshi and self-help. It is to break down the organization of Nationalism that the bureaucracy is now struggling with all the resources that a system of arbitrary, absolute, personal rule places at their disposal. Khulna is the first district in West Bengal which has set itself heart and soul to the work of organizing Swadeshi and

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Swaraj and Khulna suffers accordingly. This is the real reason of the attempts made by the Khulna officials to stop or punish the holding of Conferences. These District and Sub-divisional Conferences are especially dreaded by the bureaucracy because they know them to be the first step towards organization. We welcome the oppressions in Khulna because they mean the beginning of a true awakening in West Bengal. After its splendidly successful Conference Jessore ought to organize itself as Khulna has been doing. The Twenty-four Parganas and Midnapore will soon follow and as the organization spreads, the oppression will go with it and with the oppression will come the awakening.

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The Secret Springs of Morleyism

28-June-1907

The apostasy of John Morley has come as a surprise and a scandal to that numerous class of believers in British professions who looked upon him as an avatar of the spirit of philosophic Liberalism. To those who had studied the man at closer quarters there was no disappointment and no surprise. As the Kesari pointed out in the early days of his administration, the new Secretary of State might be a philosopher and defend human liberties in his books, but in the India Office he was bound to be a British statesman first of all and defend the continuance of British supremacy in India. But apart from this the whole temper of Mr. Morley's mind and the cast of his opinions made it quite certain that he would never be able to sympathise with the aspirations of our people and their claims to self-government and autonomy. It is true that Mr. Morley talks about the necessity of sympathy as the mainspring of Indian administration, but what is the nature of this sympathy? What Mr. Morley calls sympathy is not really sympathy but the patronising benevolence of the master possessed of absolute powers of life and death who is generous enough to give his bondslave as much education as is good for him: in the process of that education he tries to be as indulgent as possible while reserving his right to scourge him occasionally for his own good and of course to appropriate all the profits of his labour for the master's own purse. The object of the education given to the slave is not to fit him for freedom but to make him a more useful servant and one whose appearance and manners shall reflect credit on the master. Needless to say, this is not sympathy but a very undesirable form of arrogance and selfishness masquerading as benevolence. True sympathy means

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"putting oneself in another's skin", understanding and appreciating his view of things, his feelings, hopes and aspirations and feeling his struggles and sufferings as one's own. This is the true liberal sentiment, the true liberal enthusiasm which men like Mr. Hyndman feel but which is extremely rare in the so-called Liberal party. Mr. Morley never had this sentiment and enthusiasm, he had only a cold philosophic conviction of the truth of the Liberal view of politics. This conviction depended on a keen intellectual appreciation of the materialistic, agnostic, scientific enlightenment of modern Europe and the governing ideas of the nineteenth century. But the very keenness of this appreciation makes it utterly impossible for Mr. Morley and men like him to understand and sympathise with Asiatics. To them Asia is a home of monstrous religions, barbarous despotisms, grotesque superstitions and a primitive morality. That this half-civilised continent contains peoples as capable of self-government as any European race is a thing which they cannot persuade themselves to believe, Japan notwithstanding. Japan has shown that Asiatic civilisation is equal and in some important respects superior to European, needing only to be modernised and equipped with the mental and material processes invented by European science. She has proved that the capacity Asiatics have shown in organising society and politics under old conditions can be diverted with admirable results to the reorganisation of society and politics under modern conditions. But to minds of the Morley type Japan only presents itself as a freak or an inexplicable exception. The world of Liberalism and enlightenment to which alone liberal philosophy is applicable and in which alone liberal institutions can flourish, is the world of Europe and America which has inherited the legacy of Rome and Greece, of Christianity and rationalistic thought and science. Asia stands outside that charmed enclosure.

That this is the mental attitude of Mr. John Morley is shown by the use which he has made of a certain passage from Mill: "Government by a dominant country is as legitimate as any other if it is one which in the existing state of the civilisation of the subject people most facilitates their transition to our state

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of civilisation." Now, it is obvious that the case which Mill had in mind was that of a civilisation so inferior that the people possessing it had no capacity to raise themselves or to assimilate for themselves the essentials of a new organization and must be gradually trained up by foreigners; his dictum can have no reference to a great and living civilization like the civilizations of China, Japan and India which have understood and practised organization and self-adaptation to surrounding circumstances for thousands of years and have developed a highly intellectual and ingenious people quick to understand, to imitate and to improve. Japan has reorganized herself without the blessings of foreign rule, China is doing the same, and there is no reason to suppose that there is any constitutional defect in the Indian people which would prevent them from following the example if the alien incubus were removed. In none of these cases would foreign rule facilitate the transition to a modern organization of politics and society; in India it has distinctly retarded it. But the very fact that Mr. Morley applies Mill's dictum to India shows his inability to appreciate Asiatic civilization, character and capacity. He cannot and will not believe that Asiatics can ever be on a level with Europeans or capable of equalling and surpassing them in their own arts and sciences. His view of them is the view of Rudyard Kipling; they are the white man's burden, the lower races, half devil and half child. This attitude of Mr. Morley's is the ingrained, unalterable European sentiment. The rise of Japan is to the European a thing monstrous, incredible, unrealisable; he makes friends with the monster because he has seen its strength, but in his secret heart he chafes and rages against it as a thing intolerable and out of nature. He is prepared to use any and every means to crush Asiatic aspirations. Morality and humanity are meant to be employed in dealing with Asiatics just as much but no more than in dealing with the animal creation. There can be no European respect for Asiatics, no sympathy between them except the "sympathy" of the master for the slave, no peace except that which is won and maintained by the Asiatic sword. East is East and West is West and divided they shall remain; their temporary contact is decreed from time

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to time so that each may take from the other's civilisation, but the interchange does not bring them nearer to each other. Those who like Mr. Krishnaswamy Aiyar think that because Europe will take much of India's religion and philosophy, therefore she will learn to love and respect the Indian people, forget that Europe adopted a modified Judaism as her religion, yet hated, despised and horribly persecuted the Jews. European prejudice will always refuse to regard Asiatics as anything but an inferior race and European selfishness will always deny their fitness to enjoy the rights of men until the inevitable happens and Asia once more spews Europe out of her mouth.

A Danger to the State

28-June-1907

Mr. Morley has declared from his high archangel's seat that Lajpat Rai was a danger to the State. We wonder what Mr. Morley means by the State. The biographer of Burke must certainly know enough of political science to be aware that a temporary and forcible subjugation of three hundred millions of people by a handful of alien bureaucrats does not constitute an organized state. It is an unnatural condition which can only last so long as the diseases of the body politic engendered by it do not become critical. The people of India, thrilled with new ideas and aspirations, reawakened to self-knowledge and bent on ensuring the continuity in development of their ancient civilization, cannot see their way to assimilate themselves to the alien handful. They demand that the system of government shall be so rearranged that an organized State may again be constituted in India. The leaders in that attempt are the hope of the future State and a danger only to the morbid and unnatural bureaucratic cancer which prevents its growth. Lajpat Rai, says Mr. Morley, may have devoted his time and means to religious and social reforms, but he could not therefore expect immunity for the actions which render him a danger to the State. Now, Lajpat Rai devoted himself to politics in the very same spirit as he devoted himself to religious and social reform. His

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whole aim was to assist the healthy and free development of this ancient nation and its distinctive civilization. If he subordinated his social and religious activity for the time being to the political, it was from the conviction that the causes of his country's sufferings are political. If he erred, he has erred in company with Mr. Morley. It was the present hope of Anglo-India who tried to refute Professor Seeley and show that the striking amount of happiness which America began to enjoy after her secession from the British Empire was the consequence of that secession. Independence, Mr. Morley argued, not only put the Americans on their mettle, but it left them with fresh views, with a temper of unbounded adaptability, with an infinite readiness to try experiments and free room to indulge it as largely as ever they pleased. Independence alone, he held, and Mr. Chaudhuri and others of his way of thinking should take note of it, can give a stimulus to all the nonpolitical forces which make for the happiness of man. Australia and Canada cannot approach the United States in vigour, originality and spirit, because their national life is circumscribed and provincial. If, therefore, Lajpat Rai devoted himself to the political regeneration of his country and the attainment of autonomy, he was merely carrying out in practice Mr. Morley's political teachings. Why, then, does the teacher turn round and deport his pupil?

The New Thought

28-June-1907

Mr. John Morley is reported to have delivered himself of the following fatuity: "One of the most difficult experiments ever tried in human history was whether we could carry on personal government along with free speech and free right of public meeting", and he was cheered by the House. He might as well have said, "We are carrying on in India the most difficult experiment of hunting with the hounds and running with the hare", and no

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doubt he would have been applauded with the same enthusiasm. The average member of Parliament is gifted with no remarkable powers of understanding, and such intelligence as they possess is never drawn upon in elucidation of matters Indian; and as there is a well-understood agreement between the two front benches that no real measure of liberty is to be given to India, the Secretary of State has a most enviable opportunity of saying anything he may please within the strict limits of such agreement about freedom of speech and similar topics, without the least fear of provoking any serious hostile criticism, and Mr. Morley has certainly taken his occasion by both hands.

Any power or privilege in order to deserve the title "free" must be based on the authority of an independent people possessing the supreme and ultimate power of control over its own government. It is this fundamental fact of self-government that must be their origin and sanction, and it is only in this sense that terms like "freedom of conscience" or "freedom of speech" are understood in the countries that actually enjoy them. Their "freedoms" are the concrete expressions, the sacred symbols of the popular will that has realised its sovereignty, and constitute the inviolable limitations under which the executive must work. They stand inaccessibly superior to the needs or wishes of those who actually carry on the government of the country, whose tenure of power primarily rests on their unquestioned submission to the sovereign will and freedom of the people as whose servants they administer. Take the situation in England during the late Boer War as an instance. Throughout that war the Pro-Boers carried on their propaganda all over the country without the least let or hindrance from the Cabinet or the administrative authorities, however much they might have desired to coerce them into silence. John Morley himself was the most outspoken exponent of those who sympathised with the Boers and denounced the war, but no ukase could reach him nor any Emergency Act hurry him out of England.

But when the right of spontaneous articulation comes as a gift from a foreign despotism with no limits on the power of its Executive, instead of proceeding from the consent and

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conviction of the people governed, it becomes then a mere licence strictly similar in kind to any other of the species, for example, a licence issued by the Excise Department. It is held during pleasure, the giving and the taking of it having not the least reference to the people's wishes. In fact the word "right" has no meaning in a subject country. A right can only be where the people are free, and signifies some inalienable incident of citizenship, the recognition of which is an absolute obligation on the Government. The things that masquerade in a country like India under the name of rights, are only concessions of might qualified by prudence and what is conceded in the prudential exercise of despotic power will be withdrawn out of the same consideration, the people remaining equally helpless before and after. The proclamation that is now brooding in a death-like hush over the Punjab and East Bengal is the amplest confirmation of the foregoing lines and disposes finally of the sickening cant of John Morley about the coexistence of free speech and personal rule. The freedom of a subject race is only the freedom to starve and die, all the rest of its existence being on sufferance from those who govern.

The pseudosophies of the Radical philosopher who now rules our destinies, bear however some ugly results. They give in the first place a splendid opportunity to unblushing journals like the Times for insolent dissertations on the enlightened and democratic character of the Government that England has founded in the Orient and for illusory comparisons between the Indian Government and any other Government that might have possibly been established in this country if England had not come to bless her with her beneficent rule, the result of which is to place India in an entirely false light before the civilised world. They also fill the Briton, endowed by Nature with more than the ordinary mortal's share of pride, with an intoxicating sense of exultation as he thinks of the noble work his countrymen are carrying on in India. But far worse than all this is the poison they instil into the minds of those immoderate lovers of England in general, and John Morley in particular, who are known as Moderates amongst us, hereby constantly

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borrowing from the language of English constitutionalism in order to designate the gewgaws given them by the Government. They have gradually deluded themselves into the belief that Indians possess like Englishmen the real incidents of citizenship and such belief hardens into a dogma when Mr. Morley lends it his sanction. The Queen's Proclamation becomes in the borrowed phraseology of the Moderate the Magna Charta of India; the indulgence granted to a subject people to ventilate their grievances is transmuted by the same jugglery of language into freedom of speech and writing; his membership of a helpless Dependency he must persist in describing as the citizenship of the Empire. No matter that the whole world laughs at him in utter contempt and calls him a fool. There are two things that his English education and his reading of Morley have not given him—the sense of history and the sense of humour. And when a proclamation descends like thunder and shatters all his pretentious nonsense to slivers, he clings nevertheless to his illusion and blames the Extremist for having brought on the catastrophe by his foolhardiness. He weeps and wails because he has lost his primary right of citizenship, without a moment's thought on the fact that he has neither rights nor citizenship, and that such things cannot be taken away by a Government. He has read in the history of free countries, but read in vain, that right and citizenship have behind them a sacred tradition of sacrifice, even to the shedding of blood, on a loyal adequate recognition of which their Government is founded. The Moderate does not see that what has been withdrawn from him by the proclamation is no such right as he pretends to have had, but the mere opportunity conceded by the master to the helot to pour forth his unavailing complaint. He confuses sufferance with freedom, the favour of a foreign despotism with the right of citizenship, and his ambition is to win liberty by a whimper. Unless he relearns History and undeceives himself, he will always remain unfit for freedom, a hindrance to his country, a mere dupe of Morleyism, the subject of utter scorn for the nations that are free. What he adores as liberty is a sorry, sordid, delusive mask, not the high-throned, stern, exacting Goddess whose one

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incessant, unambiguous demand resounds through History and ever pierces across the night of time to the heart of the Indian who would worship her—"Main bhukha hun, main bhukha hun."

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The Secret of the Swaraj Movement

29-June-1907

The paragraphist of Capital in the course of a denunciation full of venom and adorned with one or two choice bits of Billingsgate, describes Swaraj as a far-off divine event to be made possible by our being gradually educated to it under the guidance of the beneficent aliens. We need not trouble about the choleric effusions with a daily output of which Anglo-Indian writers nowadays provide their readers. But apart from the natural unhinging of the reason for which the prospect of loss of power and prestige or of trade is responsible, there is a plentiful lack of appreciation of the nature of the movement, its causes and probable effects not only on the part of the ruling class but of the majority of our educated people. We can understand the ruling class doing their very best to crush the movement out of self-interest. But it is none the less our duty to return good for evil and try our best to enlighten their intellectual haziness. It is from the want of a true perception of the nature of the movement that much of the misunderstanding and irritation has proceeded. And in trying to present it in its true bearing we have not been guided by any individual notions of our own but the decisions and findings of master-minds on the success of all spiritual movements. Why do men at all turn their backs on old ideas and betake themselves to revolutionary ones? How come these ideas to rise up and fill the whole air?

Why do they command acceptance notwithstanding much that seems unseemly, alarming and often even preposterous about them? The answer is that in spite of any defects there may be, even if they are marred by self-contradiction, shallowness or elements of real danger, such

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ideas fit the crisis. They are seized on by virtue of an instinct of national self-preservation. The evil elements in them, if any, work themselves out in infinite mischief. The true elements in them save a country by firing men with social hope and patriotic faith, and the good done is well worth having even at the price of much harm and ruin. M. Taine gives the same explanation of the success of Rousseau and Voltaire in influencing the minds of the French people, though there were Montesquieu with a sort of historic method, Turgot and the school of the economists and, what is more, seventy thousand of the secular clergy and sixty thousand of the regular clergy, ever proclaiming by life or exhortation ideas of peace, submission and a kingdom not of this world.

At certain critical moments in history men come out from the narrow and confined track of their daily life and comprehend in one wide vision the whole situation; the august face of their destiny is suddenly unveiled to their eyes: in the sublimity of their emotion they seem to have a foretaste of their future and at least discern some of its features. Naturally these features are precisely those which their age and their race happen to be in a condition to understand. The point of view put forward is the only one under which the multitude can place themselves. There is pronounced the unique word, heroic or tender, enthusiastic or tranquillising: the only word that the heart and the intelligence of the time would consent to hearken to; the only one adapted to the deep-growing wants, the long-gathered aspirations, the hereditary faculties.

It might seem strange if it were not so consonant with past examples, that a man like Mr. Morley who has so heartily admired the discernment of Taine about the secret of the great movements of human history and explained and elaborated it as clearly as possible, should look upon the present happenings in India as mere effervescence due to accidental causes that will instantaneously subside at the mere frown of a mortal man however powerful. We have explained how this has happened in the particular case of Mr. Morley. A mind clouded by national self-interest and perverted by European prejudices and contempt for

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Asiatics forbids him to use his reasoning powers on India as he would have used them in the case of an European country similarly circumstanced. Otherwise he would have perhaps understood that the same laws govern and explain all human movements whether among Europeans or Asiatics. The working of the human mind, the correlation of causes and effects, the ups and downs in the life of a nation are never isolated phenomena defying the scientist's attempt to systematise, co-ordinate and generalise. The movement in India, like all other movements in history, has life and vitality in it and its root deep in the very nature of things and events. It is not artificially got up, no movement of the kind can be; it has not been engineered by a Lajpat Rai or an Ajit Singh: it does not proceed from mere discontent or "disloyalty": it is no aberration or monstrosity. It has the uniformity, the identity of manifestations in widely-separated regions, the similarity of thought, motive and expression which belong to great, sudden, spontaneous movements, to divine events.

India was a centre of human prosperity and a fountain of light when there was still darkness and savagery on the face of the major portion of the earth and she has not gone into an eternal eclipse. The over-shadowing influence cannot last for ever, it is a temporary obscuration from which the sun of her destiny is soon to emerge. This is the law of Nature and divine dispensation, and, amidst the noise and dust and smoke of that confused struggle of myriad opinions and misunderstandings which mark a revolution, the one thing essential which should never be forgotten by those who have once had the strength and clarity of vision to perceive through the clamour and confusion this guiding star of hope and truth.

Passive Resistance in France

29-June-1907

The curious struggle in the South of France which is being waged between the vine-growing population of the South and the Government in Paris, has not yet come to a conclusion. The leaders have surrendered, but their following seems to be still defiant.

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The cause of the pother seems to be hardly proportionate to the results. The wine-trade in the south of France is on the decline because the French people are taking to other and cheaper beverages, and the vine-growers demand State protection and encouragement for their industry, which the French Government has not denied but has been somewhat dilatory in arranging. The population of southern France are hot, excitable, unstable and, being all more or less affected—for the vine is the chief produce there—have been exasperated by the neglect into something like rebellion. This is all that from this distance one can understand. The interest of the outbreak for us lies in the fact that it began with a huge passive resistance movement very much on the lines we have advocated in India, the object being to paralyze the Government and the chief weapon the voluntary resignation of the Municipalities which are indispensable instruments of administration in France. Unfortunately a fair chance was not given to the experiment which should have been one of the most interesting in human history. With the arrival of the Military the movement passed into a queer amalgam of passive resistance, military mutiny and popular revolt; the leaders took fright, surrendered or bolted to Paris, wept at the feet of ministers and returned to advise their followers to weep and surrender along with them. The whole business is somewhat farcical and extremely French. At any rate the hot French nature, impatient and incapable of endurance, found it impossible to continue the experiment. Perhaps passive resistance is in itself too much not only for French nature but for human nature generally; perhaps it is always bound to pass into active resistance. But this cannot be decided until it is given a fair trial by a more politic, patient and enduring race than the Frenchmen of the south. Meanwhile we note that the French Government has hastily passed the more urgent clauses of the Bill for assisting the wine industry. So the demonstrators have got the immediate thing that they wanted—just as the Punjabi agriculturists did.

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By the Way

29-June-1907

The Newmaniac is abroad again. He has been to Chandpur, in the flesh or in spirit, and the result is a fresh attack of delirium newmans. He has discovered a Babu Kingdom in Barisal and a phantom army of secret National Volunteers. To the unsophisticated unaided eye there are no National Volunteers; the red shirt, the dreadful yellow turban, the awe-inspiring anti-regulation lathi all have disappeared, but the detective ability of the Newmaniac is not to be baffled or bamboozled. He can still discover the National Volunteer by the one thing left to him—the now world-renowned or at least Times-renowned "insolent stare". Wherever there is a National Volunteer there is an insolent stare, and wherever there is an insolent stare there is a National Volunteer. The Newmaniac is down on that stare like a flash of lightning; he has come out with a new description of it and its accompaniments, very picturesque and painful. "The man stands with his legs apart and his hands behind his back, and looks at you unblinking, the very picture of insolent defiance. Gradually the eyes become bloodshot, and the face puffs out a little, then the lips twitch and the teeth are bared, and as you pass, the man either spits on the ground, or laughs a kind of snarling laugh, a mixture of contempt and triumph." Isn't that a wonderful bit of delirium newmans, gorgeously and grotesquely horrible? We sympathise with the Newmaniac in his lament that he is gripped by the law he himself has made and held back from going for this apoplectic nightmare. We are glad to learn that the authorities are going to take an immediate action on the Newmaniac's complaint. We learn by telegram from Simla that the Legal Member has drawn up for the Viceroy's approval the following notes for a Draft Bill to amend the Indian Penal Code.

Note for additional sections (draft) to the Indian Penal Code.

1) Whoever, being a native-born subject of His Majesty the King-Emperor, shall be observed to separate or suspected of

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separating his nether limbs when he is in the presence or within the vision actual or potential of an European, shall be guilty of a seditious offence henceforth to be known as breach of the legs, and may be bound over in personal securities of not less than Rs. 10,000 to keep his legs together for six months or a year according to the discretion of the trying Magistrate.

EXPLANATIONS

a) The expression "in the presence or within the vision" shall be held to apply to any distance of not more than four hundred yards to the right, to the left, before or behind the accused.

b) The word "European" in this and the following sections shall be understood as including Australians and Americans as well as natives of India of a white complexion and European descent and Imperial Anglo-Indians, but it shall not be held to cover the Nawab of Dacca. Provided that nothing in this section shall debar the Governor-General in Council from extending the section to the Nawab of Dacca by a special ordinance for a given period in case of emergency.

c) It shall not be incumbent on the prosecution in cases under this or the following sections to prove that any European was actually on the scene of the separation; it will be enough to prove that an European might have been there or that the accused had reason to believe that an European was or might, could, should or would be within 400 yards of him.

d) It shall be a sufficient defence to prove that the legs in question were already separated, with or without any necessity, before it was possible for the accused to know or believe that an European was, might, could, should or would be within the legal distance, and that the error was rectified within three seconds of his becoming aware of the presence.

e) If it be proved that the crural separation was directed against or in view of the presence of the European, no motive or necessity or plea of urgency shall be admitted in justification or mitigation of the offence.

2) Whoever, being a native-born subject etc., puts his hands behind his back, or joins them over his stomach, or pats his stomach, or twirls his moustache, or touches his nose, or twiddles

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his thumbs, or uses any other gesture which is or may or can be or might, could, should or would be considered offensive, seditious, libellous, mutinous or rebellious, in the presence etc. of an European, shall be guilty of a seditious publication and liable to prosecution and punishment under section 124a.

3) Whoever, being a native-born etc., is observed to look or suspected of looking with unblinking eyes at an European shall be guilty of breach of the peace and liable to rigorous imprisonment for six months, with or without fine.

EXPLANATIONS

a) It shall not be an offence under this section to look with unblinking eyes at the back of an European or at his legs or at his stomach or at any other portion of his anatomy except his face.

b) It shall not be a sufficient defence under this section to prove that the accused blinked once, twice or thrice during the commission of the offence. The blinking must be continuous, as when one is looking at the sun.

4) Whoever, being a native-born etc., is observed to suffer or suspected of suffering from epilepsy or apoplexy at the sight of an European, shall be guilty of seditious apoplexy and liable to seven years' rigorous imprisonment which shall include two years' solitary confinement.

EXPLANATIONS

a) The following symptoms shall be held when found together, to constitute the offence of seditious apoplexy, viz. eyes bloodshot, face puffed out, lips twitching and teeth bared.

b) It shall be a sufficient defence under this section to show that the accused was suffering from eye-disease or a cold in the head, or that his teeth naturally and unavoidably project, or that he suffers from a nervous labial disorder, or that he was frightened out of his wits, or that he mistook the European for a lunatic or a special correspondent of the Englishman.

5) Whoever, being a native-born etc., by accident or intention forgets to retain his saliva in the presence etc. of an European, shall be guilty of seditious spitting and liable to two years' rigorous imprisonment or in the alternative, to transportation for life.

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6) Whoever, being a native-born etc., is observed to laugh or is suspected of laughing a kind of snarling laugh or snarling a kind of laughing snarl in the presence etc. of an European shall be guilty of seditious cachinnation and liable to be bound over to keep the peace (which shall include abstention from inaudible as well as audible laughing or snarling) for six months or a year according to the discretion of the trying Magistrate.

EXPLANATIONS

a) An ordinary or average or pure, simple, uncomplicated domestic laugh shall not count as an offence under this section.

b) A pure, peaceable or innocent snarl directed at the weather or any other inanimate and non-European object and guiltless of either contempt or triumph except for or over the said inanimate object, shall not be an offence under this section.

c) As it is impossible for the offence to be precisely defined, the complainant shall be asked to reproduce in the witness-box the said snarl or laugh as he saw or imagined it and the nearest available canine being shall be held up by his side and induced to snarl and if there is any resemblance between the two performances, the offence shall be considered proved.

N.B. With this exception no corroborative evidence will be required in cases under these sections; the unsupported testimony of the complainant or the belief of the trying Magistrate shall be considered sufficient.

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Stand Fast

01-July-1907

A temporary lull in the policy of repression adopted by the bureaucracy in dealing with Bengal has ceased and the surging waves are once again threatening to engulf the province. At Bagerhat the Sub-divisional Conference will not be allowed to meet. At Barisal the worst scenes enacted during the early days of Fullerism are being repeated. Honour is not safe in East Bengal, nor is the person. And a fresh outburst of repressive measures is likely to take place in West Bengal as the result of Sir Andrew Fraser's visit to Simla. And Mr. Newman of the Englishman is persistently pressing the Government "to arrest and report (deport?) certain persons and shut up certain printing presses in Calcutta". The reason is not far to seek. Now is the time to book orders for the Puja season. Swadeshi must be crushed now or the British capitalists' opportunity to reap a golden harvest will be lost,—for full one year at least. Last year we said the same thing, and this year we can easily see through the trick. Let us then be prepared for a fresh outburst of Fullerism in United Bengal and organize our resources to withstand it. Let us stand fast as the rock which resists the billow and the sky, determined to do our duty according to the lights granted us,—to live for the regeneration of the country and die, if need be, for the cause. Repressive measures will only add to our endeavours to serve the cause unmindful of consequences—trials and tortures will only make us firm in our determination. It is always darkest before dawn. And if we only persist, and now is the time for us to do so, the darkness that envelops the country now will in no time disappear before the dawning day that will illumine not only India but the entire East.

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The Acclamation of the House

02-July-1907

A great deal is being made in the Anglo-Indian press of the unanimous appreciation with which the House of Commons received Mr. Morley's speech on the Budget. The discovery that superior culture has not destroyed the primitive savage in the Anglo-Saxon, has been welcomed with fierce gratification. One English paper writes:—"It was a healthy sign to which the attention of native sedition-mongers may be usefully directed that the House of Commons which gave an appreciative reception to the speech of the Secretary of State showed impatience at the captious and mischievous vapourings of Mr. C. J. O'Donnell." Well, but why draw attention to it? We have been arguing the same thing from the very beginning of our propaganda. We were among the first to point out to a too credulous nation that the friends of India in Parliament represented nobody but themselves. It was one of the principal items on the destructive side of the Nationalist programme, to prove the delusiveness of the prevalent faith in the ultimate sense of justice of the British people. If the House of Commons saves us the trouble of farther argument and itself conclusively proves the soundness of our reasoning, we accept its assistance with gratitude but without surprise. We may draw the attention of our monitor in return to an equally healthy sign in India. Nobody now, at least in Bengal, ventures in public to advocate an appeal to the bureaucracy or to the people in England for the redress of our grievances. There may not be agreement as to the best means of gathering strength by self-help but the hope of gaining rights and privileges by what is known as constitutional agitation has been given up by one and all. It is a faded superstition which has no longer any hold on

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the Indian mind. To warn us that the highly illiberal speech of Mr. Morley struck a responsive chord in every bosom in the House, is therefore labour wasted. As nobody now looks with wistful eyes to that quarter, it is immaterial what they think or do. They may go into ecstasies over the speech of Morley, or they may gnash their teeth at the vapourings of O'Donnell; we in India are no longer affected by their frown or by their smile. The sympathy of people beyond the seas is no longer our guiding star and what happens at Westminster is no concern of ours. We have to improvise our own means of meeting the Regulation lathi and other bureaucratic means of repression and we neither hope for nor desire its mitigation.

If it were possible for anyone to re-evoke that dead phantom of a phantom, British sympathy, we should not be grateful to him for constraining our unbound spirit into bonds again. The legend of British sympathy misled us for a century and now that the phantasm has of itself ceased to haunt us, let no one try to juggle and deceive us again with the mantras of that modern black art. Both Mr. Morley's speech and its effect on the British people are, we repeat, matters of supreme indifference to us, and the British and Anglo-Indian journals who want to frighten us into our old mendicant attitude by trumpeting the "sensible and resolute speech" of Mr. Morley and the appreciation it received in the House, merely show that they have no true conception of the Nationalist movement. The mind of our people has at last attained a certain amount of freedom. Faith in unrealities no longer clogs its progress. The Budget speech admirably exposed the true relation between England and India and betrayed the hollowness of the so-called liberal professions which have so long exerted their poisonous influence on the unsophisticated Indian mind, displaced as it was from its own orbit by an unnational education. Mr. Morley's outspokenness was welcome to the House? Well, it was tenfold more welcome to his "enemies" in India. Mr. Lalmohan Ghose in one of his more recent speeches, has said: "Dazzled by the meretricious glitter of a tawdry imperialism, conspicuous members of Parliament are now trying to sponge from their slate the teachings of men

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like Gladstone and Bright." It was reserved for Mr. Morley to tell all India what some of us had perceived long ago, that those teachings were never meant to be carried out in practice.

Whoever is a scourge of India must naturally be a demigod to the British people. The political instinct of a free people long accustomed to the international struggle for life, shrewd, commercial, practical, is not likely to be misled by humanitarian generalities as the politically inexperienced middle class in India have been misled; they have always felt that the man who trod down India under a mailed heel and crushed Indian manhood and aspiration was serving their own interests.

The sequel to the trial of Warren Hastings is an excellent example of this dominant instinct. Twenty-seven years after the impeachment, sixteen years after the death of Burke had left his orations as a classic to English literature,—a scene was enacted in the House of Commons similar in spirit to the unanimous acclamation of Mr. Morley's speech. Warren Hastings—an old man of eighty—appeared at the bar to give evidence in connection with the renewal of the East India charter. He was received with acclamations, a chair was ordered for him, and when he retired the members rose and uncovered. The political instinct of the people perceived that this man, ruthless and monstrous tyrant though he had been, had consolidated for them a political empire and a basis of commercial supremacy, and the means by which this great work had been accomplished, were sanctified by the result. The scourge of India, a recital of whose misdeeds had 27 years before made some of Burke's listeners swoon with horror, was honoured as a hero and god, and biographies and histories have been written by the score to justify his action and exalt him to the skies. When therefore Mr. Morley declared his intention of preserving the Empire Hastings had consolidated, by any means however unjust or tyrannical, is it any wonder that an English House of Commons should recognise in him a worthy successor of Hastings and accord to him an unanimous applause?

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Perishing Prestige

02-July-1907

Some time back a retired Anglo-Indian wrote a letter on the unrest in the Punjab in the Times. He said: "Many English officials live for weeks and months absolutely alone among Indians, far from others of their race, and their comfort and their safety are dependent on the prestige of the English name and on the good will of the cultivators for their English rulers." Mr. Newman the travelling editor of the Englishman has taken the cue from this gentleman and improved upon him. Writing on Mr. Crabbe's murder he comments: "It may be said that the solitary murder of a European committed evidently by a desperate man who would have killed anybody who interfered with him, has no bearing at all on the general political situation in this province. In one way of course it has not, but the non-official view is that the crime would not have occurred but for the fact that the European has entirely lost his prestige here." It is to maintain this lost prestige that Regulation lathis and bayonets have been sent to Eastern Bengal. But this prestige must be weak indeed to require more support. Threats cannot keep prestige intact when it has not the power to maintain itself nor can oppression ensure its safety. The origin of their prestige is not likely to touch the popular imagination and it cannot hope to hold its own when the people realise their own position in the land that is theirs. No amount of brandishing of the rusty sword will be able to take India back to the days gone by. The tide of progress cannot be turned back and the race-consciousness once awakened cannot be suppressed. The old superstitions must fall away and disappear and the English in India can no longer hope to effect a return to the old ways. It is the old vain attempt to turn back the wheel of Time and bring back the "good" old past that has gone for ever.

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A Congress Committee Mystery

02-July-1907

When the All-India Congress Committee was appointed last December, we had no great hopes of its being of much utility either as a political instrument or an ornament, and when names were being juggled within the Pandal, we did not consider the matter of supreme interest. Nevertheless, the names of a few men of advanced opinions did find their way into the Bengal list. Men like Srijuts Motilal Ghose, Bipin Chandra Pal, Aswini Kumar Dutta and A. Rasul sitting side by side with Messrs. Tilak and Khaparde would form a leaven which, however small, might easily season the mass of the Committee and would at any rate prevent it from being a mere phonograph to repeat the decisions of the Dictator of Bombay. Recently there has been much talk of a meeting of the All India Committee. Mr. Gokhale took an active interest in the idea and a sitting was actually arranged for June 30 to consider the crisis in India. There was nothing to object to in that; it seemed right and reasonable that the Committee should at least appear to justify its existence. But then comes in the peculiar feature of this Committee which turns it from a straightforward body, of politicians elected by the people and observing the ordinary rules of business, into a Tibetan mystery. Certain gentlemen in Calcutta of more or less moderate views and irreproachable political respectability received notice of the meeting but other less favoured members of the Committee were utterly unaware that the meeting was to be held at all. A few days before the date fixed they were astonished to receive private letters from Bombay side assuming that they knew of it and would not fail to be present on the occasion. Neither Mr. Rasul nor Moti Babu nor Bipin Babu had received any notice from the proper quarters. Since then the meeting has been postponed and for the present all's well that ends well. But we should like to ask one or two questions. Is it possible that the conveners in Bombay did not know the addresses of the Nationalist members?—did not know for instance, that Mr. Rasul was a Barrister-at-law, or Sj. Motilal Ghose edited a not altogether unknown journal called the Amrita Bazar Patrika or Srijut Bipin Chandra was

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connected with a weekly called New India of which also even Bombay worthies must at least have heard. Or was it merely an amiable bit of "diplomatic tactics" such as it has been our privilege to witness on occasions? We heard that Mr. Gokhale had given up the idea because he could not get the Bengal leaders to agree—though we are not aware that he made any very strenuous efforts to bring about an agreement. Is it possible that it was only intended to call those of them this time who could agree? On the whole we are inclined to be charitable; no doubt the conveners thought that the Nationalist members would be likely to acquaint each other and the Committee might economise the public money in stamps; or else they may have published the date of meeting in some Bombay paper and left it to these gentlemen to take note—if they had the good luck to read it; or perhaps they knew all along that the sitting would not come off and did not like to trouble them. In any case we hope that this time they will be more formal and less kind. The members in question are none of them millionaires and cannot afford, on the strength of a newspaper notice, to take a trip to Bombay—and find the meeting postponed.

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Europe and Asia

03-July-1907

The London correspondent of a contemporary quotes, with the apposite change of a word, some verses from a poem by Wilfrid Blunt which so admirably express the basic motive of the Nationalist movement in India that we reproduce it here. It is often represented by our opponents that the cry for Swaraj is a mere senseless cry for freedom without any recognition of the responsibilities of freedom. This is not so. Those who have followed the exposition of the Nationalist ideal in Bande Mataram know well that we advocate the struggle for Swaraj, first, because Liberty is in itself a necessity of national life and therefore worth striving for for its own sake; secondly, because Liberty is the first indispensable condition of national development intellectual, moral, industrial, political (we do not say it is the only condition) and therefore worth striving for for India's sake; thirdly, because in the next great stage of human progress it is not a material but a spiritual, moral and psychical advance that has to be made and for this a free Asia and in Asia a free India must take the lead, and Liberty is therefore worth striving for for the world's sake. India must have Swaraj in order to live; she must have Swaraj in order to live well and happily; she must have Swaraj in order to live for the world, not as a slave for the material and political benefit of a single purse-proud and selfish nation, but as a free people for the spiritual and intellectual benefit of the human race.

The verses quoted are from a poem called "The Wind and the Whirlwind", addressed to England. England, by her oppression of the Asiatic peoples under her sway, by her selfish and ruthless exploitation of their wealth, by her refusal to allow them the chance of national life and free development, is sowing

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the wind, and she will reap the whirlwind in the loss of her Empire, perhaps in national decay and death.

"Truth yet shall triumph in a world of justice;
This is of faith. I swear it. East and West
The law of Man's progression shall accomplish
Even this last great marvel with the rest.

"Thou wouldst not further it. Thou canst not hinder.
If thou shalt learn in time, thou yet shalt live.
But God shall ease thy hand of thy dominion
And give to these the rights thou wouldst not give.

"The nations of the East have left their childhood.
Thou art grown old. Their manhood is to come;
And they shall carry on Earth's high tradition
Through the long ages when thy lips are dumb,

"Till all shall be wrought out. O lands of weeping,
Lands watered by the rivers of old Time,
Ganges and Indus and the streams of Eden,
Yours is the future of the world's sublime.

"Yours was the fount of man's first inspiration,
The well of wisdom whence he earliest drew.
And yours shall be the flood-time of his reason,
The means of strength which shall his strength renew.

"The wisdom of the West is but a madness,
The fret of shallow waters in their bed.
Yours is the flow, the fullness of man's patience,
The ocean of God's rest inherited.

"And thou, too, India, mourner of the nations,
Though thou hast died today in all men's sight,
And though upon thy cross with thieves thou hangest,
Yet shall thy wrong be justified in right."

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The view of the East as just emerging from its childhood and the West as old and senile, is contrary to received ideas, but there is a deep truth underlying it. The East is more ancient by many thousands of years than the West, but a greater length of years does not necessarily imply a more advanced age. The years which would mean only childhood to a long-lived species would bring old age and death to more ephemeral stocks. Asia is long-lived, Europe brief and ephemeral. Asia is in everything hugely-mapped, immense and grandiose in its motions, and its life-periods are measured accordingly. Europe lives by centuries, Asia by millenniums. Europe is parcelled out in nations, Asia in civilisations. The whole of Europe forms only one civilisation with a common, derived and largely second-hand culture; Asia supports three civilisations, each of them original and of the soil. Everything in Europe is small, rapid and short-lived; she has not the secret of immortality. Greece, the chief source of her civilisation, matured in two or three centuries, flourished for another two, and two more were sufficient for her decline and death. How few in years are the modern European nations, yet Spain is already dead, Austria death-stricken and suffering from gangrene and disintegration, France overtaken by a mortal and incurable malady, England already affected by the initial processes of decay. Germany and America alone show any signs of a healthy and developing manhood. In the place which is left vacant by the decline of the European nations Asia young, strong and vigorous, dowered with the gift of immortality and the secret of self-transmutation, is preparing to step forward and possess the future. She alone can teach the world the secret of immortality which she possesses and in order that she may do so, she must reign.

Asia has been described by the Europeans as decrepit; they will find to their amazement and dismay that she is rather emerging into her age of robust and perfect manhood. It is true that she reached ages ago heights of science, philosophy, civilisation which Europe is now toilfully trying to reach and that afterwards there was a slackening down, loss and disturbance from which she is only now recovering, but there was no decay or

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decline. It was rather the disturbance, the temporary arrest, disorganization and derangement which marks the transition from boyhood to manhood. Her mighty civilizations, her great philosophies, her acute scientific observations and intuitions were the toys and games of her yet immature and imperfect powers, the light and easy play of a child-giant, and form merely a slight index of the far greater things she will accomplish in the coming days of her ripe strength and maturity. What she did, she did by the activity of intuition and imagination, the first free penetrating sympathy of a mind fresh from the divine source of life. She will now learn the scientific method of the adult and senescent West and apply it with a far greater force and ability to lines of development in which Europe is a bungler and novice.

The wisdom of the West is but a madness,
The fret of shallow waters in their bed.

This shallowness proceeds from the fact that the West has developed materially and on the surface, but has not sought for strength and permanence in the deeper roots of life of which our outer activity is only a partial manifestation. The fundamental difference between East and West has been exemplified more than once in recent times. What European nation could have changed its whole political, social and economic machinery in a few years like Japan, with so little trouble, with such thoroughness and science, with the minimum of disturbance to its national economy? The phenomenon is so alien to European nature and European experience that even to this day Western observers have been unable to understand it. Japan is a "weird" nation, that is all the conclusion they can come to on the subject. What European nation again would deal so swiftly, directly and earnestly with its own national vices as the Chinese are dealing with the opium vice in China? The very idea that China really meant it, was incredible to English observers. And well it might be, for one can imagine what would be the fate of any such attempt to deal with the national vice of drunkenness in England. If India is unable to show such signal triumphs, it is because she has been disorganized by the merciless pressure of the alien rule

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and all her centres of strength and action destroyed or disabled. Yet even so, she has shown and is still showing signs of a prolonged and unconquerable vitality such as no nation subject for an equally long time has evinced since history began. It is this moral strength, this ability to go to the roots, this gift of diving down into the depths of self and drawing out the miraculous powers of the Will, this command over one's own soul which is the secret of Asia. And he who is in possession of his soul, the Scripture assures us, shall become the master of the world.

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Press Prosecutions

04-July-1907

The Bureaucracy has at last commenced its attack on the so-called freedom of the Press in Bengal. Intolerance of free speech and writings is the sure index not only of unenlightened mediaevalism in the existing Government, but of its rottenness and instability. Our old Hindu regime allowed the utmost freedom of speech and Manu lays it down that when in a time of stress and trouble people take to speaking unpleasant things about the sovereign, it is the height of folly on his part to stop their mouths by punishing the free expression of their feelings. Our ancient law-giver has not thought it necessary to support his dictum by reasons because its wisdom is obvious to the most ordinary common sense. The tendency towards repression in a government proceeds from a consciousness of instability or unsoundness in the foundation of its authority. If on the contrary the ruler is sure that his authority is based on a just title and exercised in the interests of the people, he will never be anxious to live in an air-tight compartment secure from the influence of any disturbing element. No just Government, no beneficent Empire can be overthrown by a campaign of misrepresentation, however extensive and well-organized. The logic of facts is always superior to any other logic. If the people have enough to eat, if they can clothe themselves decently, if they can walk in their own country with heads erect, if they are not frequent victims to the highhandedness of the ruling class, if their comfort, convenience and self-respect are not interfered with in their homes and in their journeyings, if honest efforts are made by the rulers to prevent plague and famine or to bring about those conditions of general well-being which arm all well-administered countries

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against such visitations, no eloquence or rhetoric can alienate the popular affection from such a beneficent administration. If the British people and their representatives, both in England and India, are so confident that their administration is the very best that can be given to India under the present circumstances, it is surprising that they should apprehend mischief from "enemies" against whom they are so well secured by the intrinsic merit of their rule.

Of course when Manu wrote he had in view the natural princes and rulers of the people whose authority was rooted in the soil and their existence a benefit and not a scourge to the country. But the British claim that their rule is superior to any the country has ever known since the dawn of time, a natural substitute for the normal condition of liberty and a condition of things which is destined to perpetuate itself in nature. Such a rule can surely not be so loosely rooted that the "vapouring" of agitators can blow it out of the soil or the helplessness of an unarmed people endanger its security.

The natural and legitimate method by which a modern government meets sedition, is to present the strong defence of an impeccable administration to its attacks. If there are weak points, they must be so few or of such minor importance that even to the most ignorant eye or the most ill-informed understanding they will appear insignificant compared with the benevolent policy and beneficent working in the large, of the system assailed. If there is misrepresentation, the administration has its own organs or its own supporters who can meet the assailants with their own weapons in the Press and on the platform. The agitator's eye may in a fine frenzy roll from earth to heaven, but it cannot discover anything there which does not exist; or if it does, he can easily be convicted of falsehood or perversion of truth. Writing and speech are not the monopoly of agitators. If Surendranath and Bipin Chandra can stump the mofussil, have not the Government their heaven-born and earth-born agents who can put their measures in the most attractive light and inculcate loyalty by their admonitions—if they cannot do it by their actions? If the Bande Mataram, Patrika or Bengalee vex

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the soul of benevolent despotism by their writings, have not the bureaucracy such authoritative, able and reliable supporters as the Pioneer, the Englishman or the Times of India in English and the organs of their ally Salimullah in the vernacular to undo the mischief?

To meet the peaceful instruments of Press and platform with imprisonment and persecution or with swords and guns, is a confession not merely of despotism but of weakness. It is a confession of guilt. To dethrone reason, wisdom, truth and justice and substitute brute force in their place is to appeal from the twentieth century to the Middle Ages, to confess oneself a stumbling-block in the way of human progress and an enemy of Heaven, and to array all the silent forces of civilisation, enlightenment and progress, the justice of Heaven and the sure working of irresistible nature in one formidable league to bring about one's ultimate downfall. When the ruler, beaten in the fair fight of argument, eloquence and reason, throws his sword into one scale, it will not be long before God throws His into the other. The purpose of the ages is not going to be frustrated by section 108A or the destinies of the nations stopped in their inevitable march because Manchester cotton-spinners want a market for their wares. Prosecute free speech, deny the heart of a nation its utterance; but will you stop the fire of a volcano by covering over its crater? The fire is elemental and comes up from an inexhaustible reservoir of flame in the depths. The battle of freedom begins with the pen and the tongue, but its instruments do not end with these two; and when has the coercing of pen and tongue ever put an end to the battle? Men can be depressed or subdued, but ideas cannot. The enemy of the despot is not a man, but the patriotic sentiment in men which is immortal and which can neither be hanged nor deported. The doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, their inalienable rights, their claim that the Government should exist for them and by them, will always find an unfailing succession of exponents. Rulers have always forgotten this lesson of history in the intoxication of power but it is always they who have suffered for it. Men are born with the instinct of freedom and they can never acquiesce for ever in the

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loss of freedom, even if necessity has compelled them to forgo it for a while or guile or violence deprived them of it. No amount of coercion or repression will make them renounce the memory or avert their eyes from the vision. Rather coercion is the surest way to make them feel its loss and desire it with passion and with resolution.

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Try Again

05-July-1907

The announcement "authoritatively" made by the Hindu Patriot that the Ranchi College modified scheme has been finally sanctioned by the Government of India, reminds us of how the example of a spider succeeding on the seventh attempt to fix its web in the proper place resuscitated the drooping ambition of Robert the Bruce. In the present case too the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal has, through sheer perseverance, succeeded in making the Government of India accept his proposal and thus relieve the revenues of Bengal of an unnecessary superfluity. The policy of the Government seems to have undergone a sea-change. Even Sir Alexander Mackenzie protested against the Government of India appropriating the surpluses. Referring to the Quinquennial Contract he said, "The provincial sheep is thrown on its back and shorn of its wool, and then left to shiver in the cold till its fleece grows again." And here the triumph of tenacity indicates the adoption of a policy which advocates spending—profitably or unprofitably—of surpluses, so as to give the Government renewed opportunities to tax the people and thus cripple their resources further. We ourselves have no interest in these things; and if we cannot feel "glad" like the Hindu Patriot, we cannot also feel indignant like the Bengalee or sorry like the Patrika. The education that the Government imparts is bad in quality and worse in spirit; it is ruinous to the intellect, the physique and the morale of the race and the money spent on it is worse than wasted. But then over such misuse of their money the people have no control, and till they secure such control, it is useless to protest from the Press or the platform. The root of the evil lies deeper and to remove it we must go to the root. Mere lopping of branches will not do.

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A Curious Procedure

09-July-1907

That the bureaucracy and its instruments should look with disfavour on the Bande Mataram and dread the increase of its circulation, is only to be expected; but the means by which they combat its diffusion are sometimes of a peculiar, if characteristic kind. An up-country agent writes to us: "The police and the Government officials are obstructing us much. They are threatening the servants with punishment and imprisonment, if they sell the Bande Mataram paper, because the paper writes against Government. So the poor illiterate people of this place are afraid of selling them." We are often advised to keep our agitation within the limits of law; we would suggest that the bureaucrats might show us the example. If in order to prevent the growth of an infant Nationalism and its new-born exponent, an all-powerful bureaucracy is compelled to stoop to such petty persecution and intimidate people from a peaceful avocation by the illegal menaces of their underlings, the as yet weak and disorganized people of this country may surely be excused if they are sometimes carried beyond the precise limits of moral suasion in struggling against the most powerfully organized commerce in the world backed by the whole administrative strength, the police, magistracy and troops of the British Indian Empire. As to the paltry meanness of such obstructions, we say nothing; "melancholy meanness" and bureaucracy have always gone hand in hand in all climes and ages.

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Association and Dissociation

09-July-1907

The Maharaja of Darbhanga has dissociated himself from the "extremists" and Hare Street is wild with delight. But really, what else did the Englishman expect? A great landholder of the Maharaja's position is hardly more of a free agent than the ruler of a "protected" State. He is so exposed to official pressure and has so much to lose that it would indeed be miraculous if he did not insist in season and out of season on his loyalty. If the Maharaja had been a declared Nationalist and suddenly recanted, we could have understood the joy of Anglo-India over the sheep that was lost and again is found. But he has on the contrary been always avowedly loyal, moderate and platonically patriotic. In fact we believe the speech of Darbhanga marks rather a setback to Anglo-Indian hopes than an incident over which there need be any exultation. Recently there was a secret conclave of high dignitaries in the Maharaja's house, at which there were some strange planetary conjunctions, Sirish Sarvadhicari of the Hindu Patriot sitting cheek by jowl with Srijut Surendranath Banerji to consult on the situation. At this meeting of opposites it was proposed, we believe, to issue a loyal manifesto after the fashion set by the Punjab. But owing to the opposition of the popular leaders who would not hear of such a betrayal and self-degradation the proposal fell through. We do not know how far the report is true, but if the proposal was made and failed, a personal declaration must obviously have been resorted to by the Maharaja when the hope of finding companions in sin had to be renounced. The Maharaja is to be pitied for having to dissociate himself from his countrymen in this crisis of their destinies.

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English Obduracy and Its Reason

11-July-1907

We seriously invite our Moderate friends to ask themselves for a reason as to why Englishmen should invariably meet all their demands for political reforms with the one unalterable answer that they are not fit to receive them. Why should John Morley whose writings and sayings are so instinct with an ardent love of liberty, so lightly flout their prayer for some concessions of a democratic nature? He not only denies the Indians the least measure of liberty, but shuts the door of any possible hope abruptly in their face by telling them that as long as his imagination can travel into futurity so long must India remain under personal rule. In his last Budget speech also he took the opportunity to reiterate his faith in the efficacy of personal rule for India and even went a step further and indulged in the paternal prophecy that if the English left India today, she would plunge back into rapine, bloodshed and chaos within a week. Naturally a Secretary of State who entertains such a low opinion of the Indian character would consider it the maximum of human folly to give Indians any control over the government of their country. And the opinion of Mr. Morley only too truly represents that of the general body of the Europeans who have ever come into contact with India or thought about the problem she presents before humanity. The question is why should they all have arrived at this poor estimate of the Indian's political capability? The answer, however, is not far to seek; we have only ourselves to thank for this cosmopolitan contempt into which we have brought our country. The European remains today essentially as he was in the time of Aristotle, "a political animal". His nature has retained throughout history its ingrained and inalienable

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political bent; polity has played the greatest part in the moulding of his life and destiny; the ideas that have irresistibly moved him to heroic strivings, passionate hopes or death-defying sufferings have been mainly those of independence, freedom, liberty; the greatest names in his history are those of political heroes or governors; the one call that has ever sung truly in his ears and commanded his unquestioning obedience is the call to the service of his country; the courting of death for the fulfilment or the upholding of the above ideas has been as natural to him as breathing; the history of his country is the history of the increasing consummation of those ideas, in which faith and intellect have filled a subsidiary place. Such is the European by constitution. To him India is an insoluble riddle. How a country of three hundred million men can consent to be governed by a handful of foreigners he simply cannot understand. He thinks of the Indian as a member of a sub-human race, outside the pale of his privileges, his code of morality, his civilisation. And that new-fangled specimen of the Indian race, the educated Indian, only intensifies his contempt. That a man who has been nurtured on the literature of England, and has read the history of Europe, can still have failed to be touched by the European ideal, to be visited by an insatiable longing for liberty, and can continue, on the other hand, in a life of contented acquiescence in foreign rule, and feel happy and proud merely to serve under it and ensure its continuation, strikes the native of Europe as a most monstrous mockery, as some unimaginable and unaccountable perversion of human nature. He gradually gets to believe that whatever may be the excellence of his domestic life or the greatness of his philosophy, the Indian is by birth fit only to be a slave, and education succeeds in perfecting him only in the art of slavery. And as slavery means to the European the permanent extinction of all the nobler possibilities that lie before man, servile India ceases altogether to engage his least consideration or enlist his sympathy; let her alone with her slave's philosophy and art, thinks he, she can be of no service to the future of the human race.

And the politics and politicians of India heighten further

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his convictions about the lowering nature and effect of slavery, and the impossibility of India ever lifting herself to the level of civilised humanity. Her politics are the slave's politics whose method is prayer and petition and whose resentment or disapproval can find expression only in weeping and sobbing. And rebuff merely urges the Indian politician to greater efforts of supplication and to higher feats of wailing. And by such persistent mendicancy alone he aspires to win his country's liberty—liberty to which Europe has wilfully waded her way through a welter of blood after her struggles of centuries. No, cries the irritated European, India can never be fit to govern herself. This is the secret of John Morley's point-blank refusal to satisfy Moderate aspirations; he has thrown to them a plaything or two, for they deserve nothing better. And because Mr. Morley loves and prizes liberty more highly than the average man, therefore has he been the more intolerant of the Moderate's pretensions, the more merciless in felling to the ground all his cherished delusions based on his inverted conception of liberty. The Partition of Bengal Mr. Morley admits to be a wrong, but he will not undo it because it is a settled fact; in other words, in dealing with dependent India he refuses to observe the rules of political morality which he has himself so clearly enunciated; in enunciating them, he would say, he had in contemplation only the rights and obligations that arise between one free people and another, and not the relationship between a ruling race and their abjectly servile subjects. All his other pronouncements point to the same moral. And have we not heard of the common English labourer who on being harangued eloquently by a Moderate missionary about Indian grievances asked him bluntly if he was really relating the true state of affairs, and on being answered in the affirmative told the missionary without much ceremony that a people who could submit to such wrongs and could think of nothing better than the sending of representatives to England to plead for their removal, fully deserved to be ruled by an arbitrary despotism? Unknowingly perhaps he was summarising the verdict of the civilised world on Indian politics. The moneymaking middle class in England say the same thing, and further

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strengthen their argument with the interesting inquiry, "What is to become of our boys if we leave the management of India in your hands?" The man from the Continent or America asks plainly, "How can the whole three hundred million of you be kept under by 70,000 tommies?"

Ought not all this to give our Moderate friends furiously to think? We can appreciate the humanity of their desire to emancipate the country without dragging her through the red horror of a revolution. But let them reconsider how best to achieve this end. Surely their failure to obtain anything worth having after thirty years of patient supplication culminating in the supreme tragedy of the refusal of John Morley, the one man of whom they had expected more than of any other—even to listen to their prayers with any seriousness, ought to impel them to some introspective inquiry regarding the soundness of their political faith. We also invite their thoughts to the changing attitude of England and of the whole world towards India since the declaration of the Boycott and the rise of the new party. We conjure the Moderate to spend his best and sincerest thoughts on these two most vital topics; and once he has begun to think, we know the days of his creed are numbered, and there can be but one party in India, the Nationalists.

Industrial India

11-July-1907

The Englishman has the following—"Unfortunately for the Eastern artisan the present age is one devoted to mechanical contrivance. The handloom has given place to the power loom, the worker in metal has been displaced by the huge factories which deal in a very wholesale way with tons of metal and most complicated machinery. The consequence has been that Indian industry has been crushed by the superior strength of its European competitors, and the country has now practically no resource save agriculture. This is regrettable for at least two reasons. Agriculture depending on the seasons, does not afford a stable basis for national prosperity. The absence of native

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manufacturing enterprise tends to dull the minds of the whole people. Hence we miss here the keenness to take advantage of opportunity, the readiness of industrial resource, which are characteristic of other countries." So far we agree with the Englishman. But the Englishman is discreetly silent about the causes of this regrettable state of affairs. The reader of Indian history cannot be ignorant of the fact that England's policy has been to crush Indian industries and thus convert her to the position of a producer of raw materials to be worked up beyond the seas. And a "defective education" alone is not responsible for the shyness of Indian capital. However, we too admit that the system of education, stamped with official approval, is responsible for much of our woe as it engenders a spirit of helpless dependence and sense of inferiority and discourages in Indians the confidence in one's own ability which is essential to enterprise. It is exactly for this reason that India has realised the necessity of a system of national education which will have the same effects in India that such a system had in Germany. And we are sure the awakened spirit of nationalism, when it receives the powerful stimulus of a system of national education, will make the people self-reliant and able to bring about India's industrial regeneration without the hollow sympathy and deceptive help of aliens.

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From Phantom to Reality

13-July-1907

The action of the omnipotent and irresponsible executive in obstructing District Conferences alike in the proclaimed and un-proclaimed areas of Bengal ought to carry home to every mind, however persistent in self-deception, the absurdity of vaunting the rights and privileges of a subject people. There is a taunt writ large over these ukases and it is this: "Fools and self-deceivers who think that rights can be held as the gift of a superior! Nothing is a right till it has been purchased by sacrifices as great as the aspiration is high. You were allowed to speak and pass resolutions so long as speeches and resolutions were all; but now that you are breaking the tacit contract by turning your movement into a serious thing, we order you to be silent and disperse." Maya dies hard. Illusion is the chief obstacle to salvation, man clings to illusions by a natural impulse; but to rid oneself of them is the beginning of wisdom. Illusions have long stood in the way of our political salvation and the lingering faith of our prominent men in persistent constitutional agitation even when the alien bureaucracy stands completely unmasked before our eyes, is an illustration of the obstinate cherishing of illusions. The Magistrate prohibits the holding of the District Conference at Khulna. The High Court is moved and the illegal ukase is precipitately withdrawn: but the withdrawal was merely a change of tactics. A bureaucracy never lacks pretexts to harass the undesirables. The promoters of the Conference are now on their trial for making seditious speeches in the Conference.

At Faridpur a local leader whose faith in the ultimate good sense of the autocratic rulers has outlived even the recent violent strain, arranged for a District Conference on a grand scale

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notwithstanding the protests of a section of the public against holding meetings with permission from the Police. As the recent District Conferences, though compromising our self-respect to a certain extent, have at last been justified by their results, we have preferred not to press the point of honour. We have submitted to the Ordinance by not holding meetings; Faridpur and Pabna carry their weakness a little further, that is all. And on the whole it was well that the attempt to hold the Conference was made. For the Faridpur leaders adopted to a certain extent the Nationalist programme and have, as a consequence, come in conflict with the bureaucracy. The prohibitory ukase of the Magistrate of Faridpur leaves no doubt as to the attitude of the bureaucracy towards opposition in any form. They demand a tame acquiescence in their arbitrary regulations and are determined to put down any expression of adverse opinion under the pretext of preventing the spread of disaffection and the disturbance of public tranquillity. Is further explicitness wanted? Cultivate the art of "wooing", hold meetings to issue loyalist manifestos or celebrate the Empire Day, but if you are audacious enough to express your discontent, the British truncheon is ready for you. This is the whole meaning of these ukases; this is the moral repeatedly inculcated through the various prohibitory circulars. As the old superstitions have still their hold on some minds, we welcome the repetition of such browbeating. But in the meantime we must not fail to turn them to account. If we are not capable of offering any active opposition to the encroachment on our natural rights, the intensified sense of wrong should at least give a healthy direction to the patriotic efforts of all. From such continued rebuffs we should draw the energy and inspiration to work out our national well-being on independent lines. Every fresh blow should impart a greater impetus to the Boycott, to National Education, to the organisation of discontent, with a view to leaving the aliens severely alone. But hitherto our Moderate friends have rather been anxious to ram their heads more vigorously against the stone wall of bureaucracy than to learn by their failure the necessity of taking our own road. They still persist in trying to resurrect the dead phantom of British

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sympathy and good will. Henceforth they should seek rather the resurrection of our own national strength and greatness. When Lord Curzon aimed his first blow at self-government by giving his seal of approval to the Calcutta Municipal Bill, the Pratibasi published a cartoon exposing the unsubstantial nature of our rights and privileges. The Calcutta Municipality was represented as a shrouded corpse surrounded by weeping relatives to whom a padre with the physiognomy of Sir John Woodburn soothingly remarked, "The Lord hath given, the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord." It drew forth from the Pioneer the following retort: "The quaint conceit might have been rounded off by some hope of future resurrection." This false hope which the bureaucracy till now sedulously fostered, has been a curse to the country. Privileges granted as favours have no true life in them; they are mere illusions and what is the use of striving for the fitful return of ghosts who are again bound to disappear? Let maya pass out of us, let the illusions die; let us turn with clear eyes and sane minds from these pale and alien phantoms to the true reality of our Mother as she rises from the living death of a century, and in her seek our only strength and our sufficient inspiration.

Audi Alteram Partem

13-July-1907

Our Nagpur correspondent has taken us sharply to task for allowing ourselves to believe that the publication of the pamphlet Audi Alteram Partem indicated a desire on the part of the Loyalists to leave backstairs tactics for the open field of fair and honest controversy. We drew our first information from the Mahratta and naturally inferred that the pamphlet was intended for public circulation, nor is there anything in the printed copy which has come into our hands to show the contrary. We presume, however, that our correspondent is well informed and that we were mistaken. By the invitation to hear the other side is evidently meant that only one side should be heard and that

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too in camera. We shall take an early opportunity of answering this secret manifesto of Nagpur Loyalism.

Swadeshi in Education

13-July-1907

There is an interesting article in the Modern Review on Swadeshi in Education, interesting not only because of the subject and its importance, or of the undoubted thought and ability which have been devoted to the subject, but also and still more because of the limitations of the present education to which it bears striking evidence. The mind trained by the present system of education, even when it is somewhat above the average, is almost invariably deficient in practicality and the robustness to shake off cherished superstitions and face and recognise facts. The attempt at Swadeshi Education under the official Universities has been made both in Calcutta and under peculiarly favourable circumstances at Poona. At Poona an immense amount of self-sacrifice went to the making of the New English School and the Ferguson College, and some of the best intellects and noblest hearts in the Deccan devoted themselves to the work. Yet the end was failure. The Ferguson College is in no way superior to any other institution in the Bombay University, although also in no way inferior. Its education is the same vicious and defective education—utterly unsuited to modern needs, academic, scrappy, unscientific, unpractical, unideal. It takes aid from the officials, submits to their dictation and excludes politics at their bidding. Yet the proposal of the Modern Review writer is merely to concentrate the best intellects of the country in the Poona Institution in order to make it "an Indian College superior to any existing College", and he summarily dismisses the idea of a National University merely on the score of expense. We fail to see how this will meet the problem or how such an institution can really deserve the name of Swadeshi in Education. Swadeshi in Education does not mean teaching by Indian professors only or even management by Indians only. It means an education suited to the temperament and needs of the people, fitted to build up a nation equipped

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for life under modern conditions, and absolutely controlled by Indians. The proposed Model College might avail itself of the services of Drs. Bose and Ray and Ziauddin, but they would after all have to teach on the lines and up to the standard of the Bombay University and submit entirely to the rules and orders of the Bombay Government as conveyed through an officialised Senate and Syndicate. We should still be confined within the vicious circle of which the writer complains. We should be no nearer "taking the higher education of this country into our own hands and ceasing to look to Englishmen for help" than we were thirty years ago. Independence is the first condition and any scheme which disregards it is doomed to failure.

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Boycott and After

15-July-1907

The twentieth century dawned on a rising flood of renascent humanity surging over Asia's easternmost borders. The first report of it reached the astonished world in the victorious thunder of Japan. And it spread onward, this resurgent wave of human spirit, swiftly, irresistibly, overflooding in a sweeping embrace China, India, Persia and the farther West. India received the ablution of the holy waters singing her sacred hymn Bande Mataram that filled the spaces of heaven with joyous echoes heard of the Gods as of old, and the nations of the earth listened to the song of unfree India and knew what it was—a voice in the chorus of Asiatic liberty. The unpremeditated and spontaneous declaration of the Boycott was the declaration of the country's recovery to life from its death-swoon of centuries, of her determination to live her own life—not for a master, but for herself and for the world. All was changed. Patriotism, the half-understood catchword of platform oratory, passed out of its confinement into the heart of the people—the priest and the prince and the peasant alike—giving to each that power of sacrifice which has now translated itself according to the confessions of the Times into the concrete fact of 42 million yards less of English cotton goods. And the demonstration of the sixteenth of October joined in by the Hindu and the Mahomedan, the Buddhist, the Jain and the Sikh, the police and the people, through the mystic compulsion of an instinctive fraternity, was the enchanting prevision of the India to be.

Such a vision is vouchsafed only to the man or the nation that stands on the threshold of emancipation; it came to the Rishi filling him with the immortal longing to be one with the

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Divine, to the mediaeval monk penetrating him with the lifelong love of Christ, and it has ever come at the mature moment to the down-trodden peoples of the earth revealing to them in a flash the mission and the destination of their life. It remains but a moment, but those that have seen it can never forget or rest; they pursue the glory, even while it seems to recede into the distance, over the even and uneven walks of life, past the smiles of the tempter, through the prison-gate and exit, on through the jaws of death. Its effect on the individual is immediate, on a whole nation necessarily spread over a longer time during which the seer of it bears its message to him who has not seen. But the progress of the pursuit none can arrest till the vision is reached, realised and reinstalled in all the beauty of its first appearance. Ever since the Partition day, India has pressed on this path; the boycott of foreign goods, the return of the weaver to his loom, the dissociation of the people from the Government, the strikes, the deluge of meetings all over the land, the insulting of the National leaders, the breaking up of the Barisal Conference, the dismissal of Fuller, the appointment of Hare, the persecution of boys, the dismissal of the school-masters who loved liberty more than money, the foundation of the National Council of Education, of National schools, the institution of technical education, the insolvency of dealers in Bideshi goods, the social excommunication of anti-boycotters, the unbidden repetitions of the Rakhi-day fast, the passing of the Swadeshi resolution by the Congress, the prosecution of the Punjabis, the Rawalpindi riot, the Mahomedan rowdyism in East Bengal, the loan to Salimullah, Newmania, the changed and respectful attitude of Anglo-Indians towards Indians, the deportation of Lajpat and Ajit Singh, the proclamation, the unmasking of English liberalism, the awakening of Madras, the prosecutions at Rajamundry and Coconada, the continuing prosecutions in the Punjab and Bengal, the admission by the Times of the success of the Boycott, the throwing of 150,000 English labourers out of employment and the necessity of easing overstocked markets, are some of the landmarks of the country's progress. Before her now lies the valley of the shadow of death full of trials and

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unknown perils and temptations, but the light that leads her cannot fail; the inspiration of the Power that gives her strength is irresistible, superior to death; she will go on till the fulfilment of the vision of the 16th of October. There is a Divinity that has been shaping her ends—no mere might of man, for nothing but the renovating touch of Divinity can account for the difference between now and then, between the days before and after the Boycott.

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In Honour of Hyde and Humphreys

16-July-1907

In contrast with the extraordinary row that is being made by the Anglo-Indian Press over the police libel case it is instructive to set the judgment in the Delhi sweeper's case. In one case a Calcutta journal makes imputations which it could not prove against the immaculate Police and damages whatever reputation had already remained undamaged by their own efficiency, integrity and self-denying devotion to duty; and it is mulcted in a few thousands for the offence. In the other an Englishman carries his conception of the white man's burden and his benevolent sympathy for the race in whose interests he is unselfishly toiling under the Indian sun, so far as to kick an Indian to death. For this reassertion of British prestige he is fined Rs. 50 by a fellow white, who is equally conscious of the burden and equally flowing over with the milk of Morleyesque sympathy, but who has also to consider the health of Delhi which was threatened by the sweepers' strike. We do not know who killed Ganga Uriya; we do know who killed the Delhi sweeper. The Indian murderer, if he had been caught, would have been hanged; the English man-slaughterer has to pay Rs. 50 to the Government treasury, which may be regarded either as the price which the bureaucracy puts on Indian life or a sort of tax on the luxurious amusement of rupturing Indian spleens. We are surprised by the way that the Anglo-Indian Defence Association has not as yet moved in the matter or made any protest against making a poor man pay so heavily for his amusements. For our part, we would not for a moment be thought to suggest that Hyde ought to have been punished for his crime; that would be a monstrous and seditious proposal, and if we made it, we have no doubt we would be

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immediately run in for causing enmity between the races. No, our object in writing is to suggest that now the Clive memorial idea has been dropped, statues may be raised instead to Hyde and Humphreys in a conspicuous part of the Maidan: for if Clive was the founder of the Empire, Hyde and Humphreys are among its defenders. For Indians the moral of such incidents is the old one, "To be weak is miserable."

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Angelic Murmurs

18-July-1907

There could hardly be a more moving instance of self-denying benevolence than the occasional anxiety of Anglo-Indian journals to point out the defects of Congress methods and teach us how to make our propaganda a success. The success of the Congress movement would mean the loss of all political and commercial preponderance to these grave mentors, but that is nothing to them. They will be benevolent. Buddha and Christ were not in it with these saintly Britishers. The Pioneer is the most persistent of these paper angels. It has recently been discoursing on Indian members of Parliament and Friends of India in Parliament. The enthusiastic anticipations of a millennium which the election of Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji to Parliament excited in the Congress bosom have yielded to sad disillusionment, and the Pioneer regrets it, for the presence of Indian members in the House would do no harm to the bureaucracy and it might help to prolong Indian delusions. Apparently it was all Mr. Naoroji's fault that no more Indian members are elected. He would keep harping on Indian grievances, a thing no British constituency could be expected to stand. The Pioneer then points out that the Congress has been particularly unfortunate in attracting eccentrics and faddists to its side, while it has repelled great and rising statesmen like Mr. Rees. Omitting the Pioneer's little joke about Mr. Rees who would be more in place in a broad farce or musical comedy at the Gaiety than in the House, there is truth in the Pioneer's remarks. The Friends of India are men without weight or influence in English political life; for no man of importance would risk his career by going against the prominent British interests which would be offended by a support of

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India's claims to self-government. Finally our benevolent mentor warns us against any alliance with the Irish Nationalists, for that would bring the hostility of Britain upon us. Henceforth, therefore, the Congress has no excuse for not succeeding in its campaign in England. It has only to avoid bringing up Indian grievances in the House, to enlist the co-operation of those who are thorough-going champions of bureaucratic absolutism and to shun the assistance of the only party which has some community of interest with India, and we shall romp in winners next morning. The Angel of the Pioneer office has spoken.

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A Plague o' Both Your Houses

19-July-1907

The mellay between the Anglo-Indian Press and the Bengal Government over the dead body of Ganga Uriya shows no sign of diminishing in intensity. The indignation meeting which was foreshadowed by the Daily News is, we are told, to come off in the Town Hall. We can have no possible objection so long as our only share in this civil strife is to look on as interested spectators and shout "Charge, Fraser, charge! On, Digby, on!" according as our sympathies are enlisted on one side or the other by the merits of the case or our personal predilections or the gallant bearing of the high and mighty combatants. But it becomes a serious matter when we are asked to join in as allies of Anglo-India and ourselves take a share in the chances of battle. Some of our public men are deceiving themselves into the notion that we ought to make common cause with our natural enemies in this struggle. We should have thought that the reasons against this suicidal course were too plain to even need formulating; but then many of our countrymen allow the over-subtlety of their brains acting in a complete void of political experience to cheat them into strangely foolish courses.

The claim for Indian support to the Anglo-Indians in the Police libel case rests on the assumption that both communities are alike citizens of the same state with the same rights and disabilities on the whole and therefore equally interested in preserving those rights or removing those disabilities. If this were true, we should freely admit the desirability of supporting our fellow citizens against bureaucratic injustice. We do not indeed consider that the Daily News has been unjustly mulcted, if justice and law be identical and convertible terms. The judgment of Justice

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Chitty seems to us to be a fair and judicial application of the law on the subject to the particular case. But then a large part of the law in India is unjust, repressive and even monstrously severe, and it is to the interest of the people, if they cannot get these laws altered, at least to insist on seeing that they are administered not in the letter but under the modifying influence of the spirit of equity. The Anglo-Indians are therefore justified in challenging the action of the Government and the spirit in which the case has been engineered and decided. But unfortunately, this which would be the whole matter in a free country, is a very small part of it in India. What is it that Anglo-India is fighting for? What is it that we shall be helping to establish if we support her? It is not the independence of the Press, it is not the common rights of the citizen. Anglo-India is a determined enemy of the freedom of the Indian Press, she is always howling for the repression of free speech in matters political and for savage punishments to be meted out to Indian speakers and journalists; and even in non-political matters, if it were only Indian journals that were being prosecuted, she would not care a button or stir a finger to help them. Anglo-India is equally a determined opponent of the rights of citizens being extended to Indians, a consistent supporter of despotic and personal rule. And she is so because she has felt confident that the Press repression and administrative coercion she advocated would not be applied against her, rather she would herself be the power behind the throne. This confidence has received a rude and startling shock. Hence her rage and outcry, hence this howling of wolves for the blood of Sir Andrew Fraser. What Anglo-India is fighting for is the independence of the Anglo-Indian Press, and that only as part of the Anglo-Indian supremacy. She is fighting for her exemption from the laws and the administrative severity which she desires to see savagely applied to us. She is fighting against her being put on the same level as her Indian fellow-subjects. Is this an object in which we can support her? She wishes us to support her in vindicating her independence and supremacy which she will use in binding the chains tighter on ourselves. Are we going to be such idiots as to help her in her game?

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The spirit in which Anglo-India is fighting has hardly been concealed. The Daily News has frankly said that despotism is necessary as against the people of India, but that it is limited as against men of English birth by the ultimate supremacy of the English people of whom, it is hinted, the Anglo-Indians are a part. The question is not so easy as all that. The supreme power, the sovereignty, maker of the laws and above the laws, in India is the conjoint power of the British Parliament and the Anglo-Indian bureaucracy, the latter receiving its authority from the former, but in practice exercising the whole sovereignty. Every sovereign, however, rests his sovereignty on some support in the country or outside it, and our sovereign the bureaucracy rests on the support, for extraordinary occasions, of the people of England and for ordinary purposes on that of the Indian police and army and the Anglo-Indian community. If the Indian police and military revolt or are unable to maintain the sovereign, a life and death crisis supervenes and the British army has to be called in to restore the balance. But ordinarily the Indian police and military and especially the former are of supreme importance, much more so than the unofficial Anglo-Indians who can only give a valuable but not indispensable moral support. In order therefore to secure and make the most of its chief support, the sovereign bureaucracy must itself support the police even against Anglo-India. But Anglo-India is not satisfied with this position; she puts a high value on her support and desires to share the sovereignty informally, through the Press and the Chambers of Commerce. This is a natural desire, but why should we help her to attain it? If the bureaucracy is supreme, we suffer, but if the weight of a triumphant and dominant Anglo-India is added to the weight of the bureaucracy we shall be oppressed indeed. Our business is to develop our own strength so that we may get the sovereignty for ourselves and not help either of our enemies to our own hurt. A plague o' both our houses is the only sensible attitude for us in the question between the Government and the Anglo-Indian community which the Police Libel Case has raised.

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The Khulna Comedy

20-July-1907

The result of a political case is always a foregone conclusion in this country in the present era of anti-Swadeshi repression, for the object of the proceedings is not to detect and punish crime but to put down Swadeshi under the forms of law. Whether the accused is innocent or guilty of the particular charge it has been thought convenient to formulate against him, is a matter of very trifling importance. Neither the people nor the bureaucracy really accept a conviction as proof of any offence against the law. Indeed it is more or less a matter of caprice or convenience whether one offence or another is selected. When the crime is not chosen with a view to the punishment it is desired to inflict, or the greater ease of securing evidence, or the necessity of convicting when there is no evidence, the problem is probably determined by the sense of humour of the prosecuting Magistrate or by an aesthetic perception of the fitness of things. Generally the Swadeshi worker is charged with sedition or assault or breach of the peace or wishing to break the peace or thinking of doing something which somebody in authority pretends to believe likely to break the peace but he might just as well be charged with burglary or abduction or with contempt of the Magistrate's khansamah or with the Bengal stare or the Coconada grimace. The main object is to send him to prison or bind him over not to do any work for Swadeshi for six months or a year, and the pretext is a mere bagatelle. The real point is not whether the accused is innocent or guilty of the particular offence but whether he is innocent or guilty of Swadeshi, whether he is innocent or guilty of patriotism, whether he is innocent or guilty of Nationalism. For this reason no disgrace attaches to conviction,

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rather it is the passport to fame, honour and public esteem. The prosecution is a farce, the defence is a farce, and the judgment is the most exquisite farce of all. The bureaucracy go through the farce because they cling to the shadow of moral prestige even when the substance of it is gone: they like to adopt Russian methods, but they do not like them to be called Russian and still hug the delusion that by going through the legal forms of which Justice makes use they can cover the nakedness of their tyranny with the rags of law. The accused go through the farce with the sole object of so managing the defence as to dispel even the last shadow of the old moral prestige and to expose the nakedness of bureaucratic oppression more and more. It is a political fight with the law-courts for its scene.

In no recent political case except Rawalpindi has the veil of law been so ridiculously thin as in the Khulna case. Partly, no doubt, this is due to the personal gifts of the prosecuting Magistrate who decided the case. Mr. Asanuddin Ahmed is a very distinguished man. The greatest and most successful achievement of his life was to be a fellow-collegian of Lord Curzon. But he has other sufficiently respectable if less gorgeous claims to distinction. Arithmetic, logic, English and Law are his chief fortes. His mastery over figures is so great that arithmetic is his slave and not his master; it is even said that he can assess a man at Rs. 90 one day and bring him down 200 per cent in estimation the other. It is whispered that it was not only for a masterly general incompetence but also for this special gift that he was transferred to Khulna. His triumphant dealings with logic were admirably exampled by the original syllogism which he presented to the startled organisers of the District Conference. "I, Asanuddin, am the District Magistrate; the District Magistrate is the representative of the district; ergo, I, Asanuddin, am the one and only representative of the district. Now only a representative of the district has a right to hold a District Conference or to do anything in the name of the district, or to use any expression in which the word district occurs; I, Asanuddin, am the sole and only representative of the district; ergo, I, Asanuddin, have the sole and only right to call a District Conference." Mr. Ahmed's

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English is the delight of the judges of the High Court, who are believed to spend sleepless nights in trying to make out the meaning of his judgments. In one case at least, it is said, a distinguished judge had to confess with sorrow and humiliation that he could make nothing of the English of the learned Magistrate and after reading the judgment in the present case we can well believe the story. As for his knowledge of law, the best praise we can give it is that it is on a level with his knowledge of, say, English. Such was the brilliant creature who appointed himself prosecutor, jury and judge in the Khulna sedition case.

Under such auspices the conduct of the case was sure to be distinguished by a peculiarly effulgent brilliancy. In order to prove that Venibhushan Rai talked sedition it was thought necessary to prove how many volunteers were present at the Conference. This is a fair example of the kind of evidence on which the case was decided and which the great Asanuddin declared to be particularly relevant. Beyond evidence of this stamp there was no proof against the accused except the evidence of police officers unsupported by any verbatim report, while on the other side were the statements of the respectable pleaders, the verbatim copy of the speech and a whole mass of unshaken testimony. But our one and only Asanuddin declared that the evidence of respectable men was not to be believed because they were respectable and graduates of the Calcutta University and partakers in the Conference; the police apparently were the only disinterested and truthful people in Khulna. But the most remarkable dictum of this remarkable man was that when one is charged with sedition it is not necessary to prove the use of any particular seditious utterances; it is quite enough for the Magistrate to come to the conclusion that something untoward might, could or should have happened as the result of the accused having made a speech. In fact, it is hardly necessary under the section as interpreted by Daniels of this kind, to prove anything against the accused; the only thing necessary is that the Magistrate should think it better for convenience official or unofficial that he should be bound over. The section answers the same purpose in minor cases which the regulation of 1818

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answers in the case of more powerful opponents of irresponsible despotism.

The Khulna case has been from the point of view of Justice an undress rehearsal of the usual bureaucratic comedy; from the point of view of Mr. Asanuddin Ahmed it has been a brilliant exhibition of his superhuman power of acting folly and talking nonsense; from the point of view of Srijut Venibhushan Rai it has been a triumph greater than any legal victory, a public certificate of patriotism, courage and sincerity, an accolade of knighthood and nobility in the service of the motherland.

A Noble Example

20-July-1907

The proprietors of the Ahmedabad Fine Mills have been doing substantial work not only for the industrial progress of the country but for Indian unity. At the First Industrial Conference held at Benares in December, 1905, Dewan Bahadur Ambalal Sakerlal Desai promised on behalf of this firm that they would undertake to train Indian students in the art of weaving free of charge in their mill. Since then no less than thirty students have started for Ahmedabad and are there receiving instruction, some in weaving and some in spinning and Mechanical Engineering. Another leading mill in the country offered to teach weaving through a six months' course for a fee of no less than one thousand rupees; the Ahmedabad Mill has undertaken it as a labour of love. The students will be taken through a three years' course, and if any of them wants to be specially trained as an expert he will have to stay on for a longer period. The proprietors are willing to take a fresh batch of students, but as they want to make sure that the students trained by them should not suffer from lack of employment and as no fresh mills are being started in Bengal, they have for the present stopped taking in fresh students. The capitalists of Bengal should take note of this and now that there will be no lack of trained experts should see that their expert knowledge is not wasted simply because there are no enterprising capitalists to utilise them. The whole country, and

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specially Bengal, owes a deep debt of gratitude to the authorities of the Ahmedabad Fine Mills, and most of all to the weaving master, Mr. Keshub Lall Mansukram Mehta, not only for their generous and patriotic work, but also for the almost paternal care they are bestowing on the young men placed under their charge.

We remember in this connection that Mr. Giridhari Lal, Government Pleader, Delhi, also promised at the same Conference that he would undertake to make provision for teaching the art of spinning free of charge to Indian students in a certain cotton mill. We have not heard if this offer also has been taken advantage of, like the above, by intending students, and should be glad to have further information on the subject.

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The Korean Crisis

22-July-1907

The chorus of jubilation with which the English Press receives news of any danger to the last shred of independence of any ancient people is characteristic. The Koreans cannot see their way to acquiesce in Japanese rule, ergo, they are arch-intriguers. Europe in her present temper seems to be the most uncompromising enemy of the liberty of all peoples except her own. The disturbances that have followed the deputation to the Hague, the meeting of the Korean troops, and the active participation of the populace in the same, seem to have filled Europe with a grim gratification at the prospect of Korea being placed permanently under the heel of Japan. Europe is a worshipper of success, and we need not wonder if she is glad to see an Eastern power taking a leaf out of her book, in threatening the liberty of nations.

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One More for the Altar

25-July-1907

Srijut Bhupendranath Dutt has been sentenced to one year's rigorous imprisonment for telling the truth with too much emphasis. As to that we have nothing to say, for it is a necessary part of the struggle between Anglo-Indian bureaucracy and Indian democracy. The bureaucracy has all the material power in its hands and it must necessarily struggle to preserve its unjust and immoral monopoly of power by the means which material strength places in its hands, by the infliction of suffering on the bodies of its opponents and on their minds, so far as they allow the suffering of the body to affect the mind, by forcible interference with the outward expression of their feelings, by intimidation and a show of brute power and force. But if the bureaucracy has all the material power in its hands, the democracy has all the spiritual power, the power and force of martyrdom, of unflinching courage, of self-immolation for an idea. Spiritual power in the present creates material power in the future and for this reason we always find that if it is material force which dominates the present, it is spiritual which moulds and takes possession of the future. The despot in all ages can lay bonds and stripes and death on our body; his power is only limited by his will, for law is an instrument forged by himself and which he can turn to his own uses and morality is a thing which he regards not at all, or if he affects to regard it, he is cunning enough to throw a veil of words over his actions and mislead the distant and ill-informed opinion which is all he cares for. But if the despot can lay on the body the utmost ills of the scourge and the rack and the sword, if he can directly or indirectly plunder the goods of those who resist him and seek to crush them by wounding them in

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their dearest point of honour, the enthusiast for liberty can also turn suffering into strength, bonds into a glorious emancipation and death into the seed of a splendid and beneficent life. He can refuse to allow the tortures of the body to affect the calm and illumined strength of his soul where it sits, a Divine Being in the white radiance of its own self-existent bliss, rejoicing in all the glorious manifestations of its Will, rejoicing in its pleasures, rejoicing in its anguish, rejoicing in victory, rejoicing in defeat, rejoicing in life, rejoicing in death. For we in India who are enthusiasts for liberty, fight for no selfish lure, for no mere material freedom, for no mere economic predominance, but for our national right to that large freedom and noble life without which no spiritual emancipation is possible; for it is not among an enslaved, degraded and perishing people that the Rishis and great spirits can long continue to be born. And since the spiritual life of India is the first necessity of the world's future, we fight not only for our own political and spiritual freedom but for the spiritual emancipation of the human race. With such a glorious cause to battle for, there ought to be no craven weakness among us, no flinching, no cowardly evasion of the consequences of our action. It is a mistake to whine when we are smitten, as if we had hoped to achieve liberty without suffering. To meet persecution with indifference, to take punishment quietly as a matter of course, with erect head and undimmed eyes, this is the spirit in which we must conquer.

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Srijut Bhupendranath

26-July-1907

At the meeting held day before yesterday in the College Square to express sympathy with the editor of the Yugantar and congratulate him on his good fortune in being so signally chosen out to suffer for the Motherland, it was pointed out that Srijut Bhupendranath had initiated a new departure in the struggle with the bureaucracy. He is the first who standing in the dock, called to account by the alien under alien-made law for preaching the gospel of Indian freedom to his countrymen, has refused to acknowledge any responsibility to the alien bureaucracy. It is extremely important that the real meaning of the attitude of the accused should not be mistaken, for it has undoubtedly been obscured by the shape into which it was put under the influence of others more accustomed to legal notions and legal phraseology than to the plain utterance of the heart. The accused was strongly represented, Srijuts Ashutosh Chaudhuri, Aswini Banerji, Chittaranjan Das and A. K. Ghose appearing for him in the case, and had he chosen, as he did not choose, to make a sensational trial of the Yugantar case and win for himself popular notoriety, he could easily have done so. We think, however, it might have been better if Srijut Bhupendranath had rejected even this brilliant legal assistance and relied on the frank and straightforward utterance which wells up from the depths of a strong and abiding feeling and profound intellectual conviction. The over-careful language of legality, guiding its feet with delicate scrupulousness among a million traps and pitfalls and intent only upon avoiding a stumble, that is one thing; the clear bold speech of the patriot speaking straight to his countrymen's hearts, enamoured of martyrdom, exalted with

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the passionate realisation of sacred liberty, that is quite another. Bhupendranath's statement was a political declaration, not a legal formula, and it should so have been expressed. Unfortunately it was toned down into legal form and lost half its force. In the original statement drawn up under the instructions of the accused he had declared sans phrase, "I have done what I considered my duty to my country" and ended by saying, "I do not wish to make any farther statement or to take any part in the case." This was clear enough; the editor of Yugantar, consistent with the views he had publicly professed, refused to do anything which would seem to be an acknowledgement of responsibility to the codified caprice or selfishness of the small handful of alien officials who call themselves the Government established by law. He had written with his eye not on the limitations imposed by the Penal Code, but on the needs of his country. This responsibility was to his countrymen, not to a group of English officials. To plead before a Court constituted by the bureaucracy, was to admit his responsibility to aliens and deny his responsibility to his countrymen.

Unfortunately the edge of the utterance was blunted by the verbal alterations made by the pleader, who looked on the statement with the eyes of the lawyer, not of the politician. The calm and dignified appeal to the duty his country demanded of him was marred by the legal plea of good faith; the patriot's refusal to take part in a trial before the very authority it was his whole mission to displace, was modified into a legal abstention from any further "action" in an ordinary undefended trial. Later in the day a worse thing happened. Srijut Ashutosh Chaudhuri has been severely criticised for the remarks with which he accompanied his refusal to give any address. It is fair to state that he does not seem to have been accurately reported. We are informed that he prefaced his remarks by saying that as his client had refused to plead, he had no locus standi in the case; whatever he said, was therefore not spoken in the name of Srijut Bhupendranath, but merely expressed his own opinion. We are also informed that he did not say that the accused had placed himself in the Magistrate's hands, but simply that the case was now in the

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Magistrate's hands and Counsel had no farther concern in the matter. Nevertheless, Mr. Chaudhuri's intervention was unfortunate, as it has led to the obscuring of the true spirit of the statement, so much so that Srijut Bhupendranath was considering whether he should not make an additional statement in order to make clear his position but was advised that the opportunity had passed. The proposed statement was to the following effect, "I do not wish any address to be delivered by Counsel on my behalf. I have refused to plead not because I wish to withdraw a single word of what I have written or acknowledge the justice of any sentence that may be passed on me, but for an opposite reason. I have written what everyone knows to be true and what is in the minds of all my countrymen, but I was aware that in doing so I would have no chance of justice in the British Courts. I do not think it consistent with the views I have always preached to plead before them."

The justice of which there was no chance, was of course, not justice according to the letter of the alien law, but moral justice. When Mr. Aswini Banerji declared that the accused neither pleaded guilty nor not guilty, but simply declared that he had done no wrong, the Magistrate asked whether he meant legal wrong or moral wrong and certain empty-headed people in the audience laughed. But it is no laughing matter to a rule which has no roots in the soil, when there comes to be a recognized opposition, recognized equally by rulers and ruled, between the laws it enforces and the obligations of morality, when an action savagely punished by authority is recognized as morally inoffensive or praiseworthy. It means that the whole basis of the rule has become rotten, that it has neither a material nor a moral foundation.

Srijut Bhupendranath's attitude was dignified and consistent. His duty to his country, the interests of her future, of her very life, demanded that he should preach the gospel of independence. But the duty to our country, the interests of our country can be no justification before the law of the alien. Rather the interests of the rulers being diametrically opposed to the interests of the ruled, those who try to promote the latter are

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natural enemies of the former and punishable by the alien law. To hope for justice therefore in political cases where one of the parties is the judge, is irrational and to plead justification to those against whom one's action was directed, an inconsistency and a degradation. It was open to the accused to plead not in order to defend himself, but to make his position clear to the world at large. But not even to this would Bhupendranath condescend. He refused to do anything which could be construed into an acknowledgement of responsibility for his political actions to an established authority ruling and resolved to continue ruling without the consent of the Indian people.

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The Issue

29-July-1907

The bureaucracy as usual has overreached itself in instituting a case under the sedition clause against the editor of the Yugantar. The Punjabee prosecution did untold harm to their prestige and helped to shatter the not overabundant remnants of their moral ascendancy; its work was negative and destructive. But the Yugantar prosecution has been a positive gain to the national cause; it has begun the positive work of building up the moral ascendancy of the people which is to replace that of the alien and nullify his mere material superiority. This momentous result the editor of Yugantar has brought about by his masterly inactivity. His refusal to plead has been worth many sensational trials. It has produced an enormous effect on the public mind all over India, not only as an individual instance of moral courage and readiness to suffer quietly and simply, without ostentation and self-advertisement, as a matter of course and one's plain duty to the country, but as the first practical application in the face of persecution of the sheer uncompromising spirit of Swarajism. For the first time a man has been found who can say to the power of alien Imperialism, "With all thy pomp of empire and splendour and dominion, with all thy boast of invincibility and mastery irresistible, with all thy wealth of men and money and guns and cannon, with all thy strength of the law and strength of the sword, with all thy power to confine, to torture or to slay the body, yet for me, for the spirit, the real man in me, thou art not. Thou art only a phase, a phenomenon, a passing illusion, and the only lasting realities are my Mother and my freedom."

It is well that we should understand the real issue which is not primarily one of law or of political forms and institutions,

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but a spiritual issue on which all others depend and from which they arise. The question is not whether one Bhupendranath Dutt published matter which he knew to be likely to bring the Government established by law, to wit certain mediocrities in Belvedere, Darjeeling, Shillong or Simla who collectively call themselves the Government of Bengal or of India, into contempt or hatred, or to encourage a desire to resist or subvert their lawful authority. If that were all, we might argue the question whether what he did was wise or what he wrote was true or mistaken, legal or illegal. As it is, these things do not matter even to the value of a broken cowrie. The real issue for us Nationalists is something quite different and infinitely more vital. It is this, "Is India free?"—not even "Shall India be free?" but, is India free and am I as an Indian free or a serf bound to the service, the behest or the forced guidance of something outside and alien to myself and mine, something which is anatman, not myself? Am I, are my people part of humanity, the select and chosen temple of the Brahman, and entitled therefore to grow straight in the strength of our own spirit, free and with head erect before mankind, or are we a herd of cattle to live and work for others? Are we to live our own life or only a life prescribed and circumscribed for us by something outside ourselves? Are we to guide our own destinies or are we to have no destiny at all except nullity, except death? For it is nonsense to talk of other people guiding our destinies, that is only an euphemism for killing our destinies altogether; it is nonsense to talk of others giving us enlightenment, civilisation, political training, for the enlightenment that is given and not acquired brings not light but confusion, the civilisation that is imposed from outside kills a nation instead of invigorating it, and the training which is not acquired by our own experience and effort incapacitates and does not make efficient. The issue of freedom is therefore the only issue. All other issues are merely delusion and Maya, all other talk is the talk of men that sleep or are in intellectual and moral bondage.

We Nationalists declare that man is for ever and inalienably free and that we too are, both individually as Indian men and collectively as an Indian nation, for ever and inalienably

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free. As freemen we will speak the thing that seems right to us without caring what others may do to our bodies to punish us for being freemen, as freemen we will do what we think good for our country, as freemen we will educate ourselves in our own schools, settle our differences by our own arbitrators, sell and buy our own goods, build up our own character, our own civilisation, our own national destinies. Your schools, your administration, your Law Courts, your manufactured articles, your Legislative Councils, your Ordinances and sedition laws are to us things alien and unreal, and we eschew them as Maya, as anatman. If men and nations are for ever and inalienably free, then bondage is an illusion, the rule of one nation over another is against natural law and therefore a falsehood, and falsehoods can only endure so long as the Truth refuses to recognise itself. The princes of Bengal at the time of Plassey did not realise that we could save ourselves, they thought that something outside would save us. We were not enslaved by Clive, for not even a thousand Clives could have had strength enough to enslave us, we were enslaved by our own delusions, by the false conviction of weakness. And the moment we get the full conviction of our strength, the conviction that we are for ever and inalienably free, and that nobody but ourselves can either take or keep from us that inalienable and priceless possession, from that moment freedom is assured. So long as we go on crying, "We are unfit, we are unfit", or even doubt our fitness, so long we shall make and keep ourselves unfit. It is only the conviction of fitness for freedom and the practice of freedom that makes and keeps men fit for freedom. To create that conviction, to encourage and make habitual that practice is the whole aim of the new movement. Nationalism is the gospel of inalienable freedom, Boycott is the practice of freedom. To break the Boycott and to stop the preaching of Nationalism is the whole object of the bureaucracy. The Times saw this when it singled out the writings of Bande Mataram and Yugantar, the speeches of Bipin Chandra Pal and his like and, above all, the Boycott as the root of all evil. Behind all technicalities this is the true and only issue in these sedition cases. The Nationalists declare that Indians are

Page 618

for ever and inalienably freemen and vindicate their right to preach this gospel; Mr. Morley and the bureaucrats tell us we are for ever and inalienably the property of England and would pursue our preaching as a crime. Who or what shall reconcile this fundamental and irreconcilable opposition?

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District Conference at Hughly

30-July-1907

We are glad to hear that arrangements have been made for holding a District Conference at Hughly, some time in September next. Hughly, as some earnest workers of the District complain, has not been much stirred by the new impulses. A District Conference, whether held or prohibited, has everywhere been instrumental in giving an impetus to the Swadeshi cause. We are thoroughly confident that Hughly, which claims now the best intellects of Bengal, will rise equal to the occasion and recover the lost ground by imparting a swifter pace to their patriotic activities.

Bureaucratic Alarms

30-July-1907

We would call the especial attention of our readers to the interesting communication from a Bhagalpur correspondent in another column. The exaggerated praise which was showered by the Bhagalpur vendors of loyalty on officials who had little or nothing to do with the actual fight with the plague, is an example of the value of these addresses. It is of course impossible for the address-mongers not to have known the real facts, but truth is not a commodity which one can profitably offer to the official dispensers of posts and titles. There are three kinds of composition which are exempted from the moral obligation of truthfulness, an epitaph, a loyalist address and an official statement. The description given of the work of the Ramakrishna Mission is admirable and touching, but such deeds we take as a matter of course and the least we can expect from those whose

Page 620

lives have been shaped by Ramakrishna and Vivekananda; it would be surprising if those who have touched the hem of the garments of divinity should not themselves have something in them of the divine. But the most significant part of the communication is the remarkable statement about the alarm of the police at the work of the Mission. That alarm is a pregnant comment on the nature of the bureaucratic domination in India. We have more than once pointed out that an alien rule without roots in the soil cannot possibly tolerate the growth of any strength or manliness or nobility in the subject people, and must inevitably try to crush, curb or render ineffective any actual or possible centre of strength around which it is remotely possible for the national self-consciousness to crystallize. Hence the alarm and suspicion which a movement like the Ramakrishna Mission, utterly divorced from politics as it is, awakes in the rulers. "Here are men, here are people who can feel work and dare for their suffering countrymen. If this manhood should prove catching? if it should even grow common and turn into channels directly dangerous to me? if these men should win a commanding influence by their good works and use it against me?" Such are the guilty suspicions which the bureaucrat is tortured with, and no movement however innocent can escape them. So he first bids his police spy out and give him full reports of these dangerous characters, dangerous because of their very nobility, and by police oppression, surveillance and harassment he will, when he thinks necessary, try to grind down, wear away and gradually efface the thing he fears. In the beginning of the Yugantar case one young man who was questioned by the police wished to take upon himself the responsibility for the incriminating articles, but the inquiring officer told him, "Whatever you may say, you will not save Bhupen Dutt; the mere fact that he is Swami Vivekananda's brother will be enough to send him to prison."

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The 7th of August

06-August-1907

The approaching celebration of the 7th of August has a double importance this year, for it has not only its general and permanent importance as the commemoration of our declaration of independence, but an occasional though none the less urgent importance as an opportunity of reaffirming our separate national existence against the arbitrary and futile attempt of the bureaucracy to reaffirm and perpetuate a vanishing despotism. The 7th of August will be recognised in the future as a far more important date to the building up of the nation than the 16th October. On the 16th October the threatened unity of Bengal was asserted against the disingenuous and dangerous attack engineered by Lord Curzon; and since it is on the solidarity of its regional and race units that the greater Pan-Indian unity can alone be firmly founded, the 16th October must always be a holy day in the Indian calendar. But on the 7th of August Bengal discovered for India the idea of Indian independence as a living reality and not a distant Utopia, on the 7th of August she consecrated herself to the realisation of that supreme ideal by the declaration of the Boycott. The time has not come yet when the full meaning of that declaration can be understood; even the whole of Bengal has not yet understood, much less the whole of India. But the light is coming; partly by the efforts of the preachers of the light, still more by the efforts of the enemies of the light, it is coming: and in the dim wide glimmer of the mighty dawn we can see the vast slow surge of Indian life quickening under the breath of a stupendous wind, we can discern the angry fringes of the tide casting themselves far beyond the old low level, we can almost hear the roar of the surf

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hurling itself on the flimsy barriers it had once accepted as an iron and eternal boundary. The waters are at last alive with the breath of God, the flood which is to overwhelm the world has begun.

The 7th of August was India's Independence Day. A big word, it may be said, far too grandiose for the little that was accomplished. To those who judge only by the gross material event it may seem so, but to those who look beneath and watch the course of events as they shape themselves in the soul of a nation, the phrase will not seem one whit too excessive. It is the soul within us that decides, that makes our history, that determines Fate, and the material nature, material events only shape themselves under the limitations of Space and Time to give an outward body and realisation to the decisions of the soul. The day of a nation's independence is not the day when the administrative changes are made which complete the outward realisation of its independence but the day when it realises in its soul that it is free and must be free. For it is the self-sufficing separateness of a nation that is its independence, and when that separateness is realised and recorded as a determined thing in ourselves, the outward realisation is only a question of time. The seventh of August was the birthday of Indian Nationalism, and Indian Nationalism, as we pointed out the other day, means two things, the self-consecration to the gospel of national freedom and the practice of independence. Boycott is the practice of independence. When therefore we declared the Boycott on the seventh of August, it was no mere economical revolt we were instituting, but the practice of national independence; for the attempt to be separate and self-sufficient economically must bring with it the attempt to be free in every other function of a nation's life; for these functions are all mutually interdependent. August 7th is therefore the day when Indian Nationalism was born, when India discovered to her soul her own freedom, when we set our feet irrevocably on the only path to unity, the only path to self-realisation. On that day the foundation-stone of the new Indian nationality was laid.

Let us then celebrate the day in a spirit and after a fashion

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suitable to its great and glorious meaning. Let it be a reconsecration of the whole of Bengal to the new spirit and the new life, a purification of heart and mind to make it the undivided possession and the consecrated temple and habitation of the Mother. And secondly let it be a calm, brave and masculine reaffirmation of our independent existence. The bureaucracy has flung itself with savage fury on the new activities of our national life; it has attempted to trample on and break to pieces under its armed heel our economical boycott; it has made the service of the motherland penal in her young men; it has visited with the prison and deportation the preaching of Nationalism by the elder men. The 7th of August must be an emphatic answer to these persecutions and prohibitions. The Boycott must be reaffirmed and this time in its purity and simplicity as the national policy to which all are committed. The Risley Circular must be definitely and unmistakably challenged and negatived in action. Let there be a procession of students led by those venerable leaders of Bengal who are also professors of the Government University. And let us see afterwards what the bureaucracy can do and what it dare do to the men who refuse to give up their lifelong and sacred occupation at an alien bidding and to the youths who refuse to abstain from initiation in the same sacred service out of sordid hopes and fears.

But most of all the day should be a day of rejoicing and a day of consecration. The whole Indian part of the town should be illumined in honour of the divine birth which saw the light two years ago. And along with the outer illumination it should be a day of the illumination of hearts. It is the sacrament of our religion that can alone give the perfect and effective blessing to our movement, and the celebration of this great day will not be complete until every Indian makes it a sacred observance, worshipping God in his own way, the Hindu in his temple, the Brahmo in his mandir, the Mahomedan in his mosque, to consecrate himself anew on that day to the service of that single and omnipresent Deity through the task He has set to the whole nation, the upbuilding of Indian nationality by self-sacrifice for the motherland.

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The Indian Patriot on Ourselves

06-August-1907

We gave in full yesterday the article of the Indian Patriot in which our contemporary criticised the action of the Bengal Government in searching the Bande Mataram office as a preliminary, it is presumed, to a prosecution under the sedition clause. We thank our contemporary for his sympathy, but we are bound to say that he does not seem to have entirely grasped the political gospel preached by Bande Mataram. The Patriot seems to be under the impression that it is a gospel of violent despair. Because England has refused to hear our prayers and melt at our tears, therefore we advocate an appeal to force. But this is not and has never been our attitude. Those who are at present responsible for the policy of this paper were never believers in the old gospel of mendicancy and at no time in their lives were associated with Congress politics; they publicly opposed the Congress propaganda as futile and doomed to failure at a time when the country at large was full of a touching but ignorant faith in prayers and resolutions and British justice. Despair and disappointment therefore could not possibly be the root of their policy. It is rather a settled, reasoned and calm conviction we have always held, but for which the country was not ripe until it had gone through a wholesome experience of disillusionment. Neither is our teaching a mere gospel of brute force. We preach on the contrary a great idea in the strength of which we are confident of victory. All that we contend is that we must reach the realisation of that idea in the same way as other nations by utter self-devotion, by self-immolation, by bitter struggle and terrible sacrifices, and that we cannot hope and ought not to wish to have liberty given us at less than its eternal and inevitable price.

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Our Rulers and Boycott

07-August-1907

It is often paradoxically urged that every step or policy which does not conduce to good feeling between the rulers and the ruled, the exploiters and the exploited, should be eschewed as both immoral and impolitical. And because Boycott certainly is not intended as a soothing potion for the rulers, there are some men of an unctuous humanity who look on it with alarm and distrust. We should love our country, they say, but should not allow that love to generate hatred against other nationalities; we should prefer our own manufactures and try to improve and extend them, but to eschew foreign goods is damnable. No nation, so runs the cant, can thrive on hatred and ill will,—though from the facts of History one might much more cogently argue that no nation has ever yet in its international relations thriven on love and philosophy and cosmopolitanism. These copybook maxims are, of course, meant for the especial benefit of the under-dog in the struggle. They are sometimes trotted out for the benefit of the rulers, but that is merely as a literary exercise or to fill up the orthodox amount of space required for the leading articles. Nobody seriously expects the English in India to forego any of the manifold and material advantages that are bound up with their despotic possession of the country, merely out of a philanthropic tenderness for the feelings, affections or interests of the ruled. Nobody really expects them to help the development of indigenous industry at the expense of British commerce merely because the millions of India are starving and ground down with poverty and miserable and discontented. Nobody sincerely thinks that they are going to part with an atom of their arbitrary and absolute power merely because our

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abject and servile condition awakes in our people anger and a settled bitterness and ill-feeling. No, it is only the down-trodden and suffering people of India who are expected to refrain from following the straight line of their national interest and welfare out of a noble and sensitive unwillingness to excite hatred and strife.

We have repeatedly said that Boycott is not a gospel of hatred. It is simply an assertion of our independence, our national separateness. But neither do we pretend that we can ask the rulers to overflow with feelings of benevolence for the Boycott or to regard it with kindly neutrality. Boycott has come among us not to bring peace but a sword. And this was inevitable. Until now the discontent, the ill-will, the suffering were all on one side. When one side is depressed, miserable, suffering, while the other thrives and prospers by means of that misery and suffering, when one side is denied the use of its capacities and the satisfaction of its aspirations, and the other grows great and glorious and robust by the exercise of the usurped opportunities it has taken from its neighbour, there must be resentment, there must be antagonism and therefore strife and ill-will and anger. No amount of pious and ethical exhortation will prevent it. When a just equality is denied, when the possibility of equal opportunities and equal accomplishment is rigidly excluded, there can be no real love and good feeling except such as exists between man and some of the lower animals. If there is insensibility on one side and indulgent masterfulness on the other, there can be an insulting patronage and a degrading loyalty, but these are animal emotions rather than the higher ethical feelings. It is only where liberty and a just equality are established that true good feeling can reign. Those who deny liberty have no right to appeal to the higher feelings or to morality at all, for they are trying to perpetuate for their own selfish ends an essentially immoral condition of things. So long as liberty is denied, there must be the hatred which the slave always cherishes for his master, and when the attempt to throw off the yoke comes, there must be the yet bitterer hatred which the master feels for his revolted slave. The denial of liberty is therefore doubly and trebly immoral and

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restoration of liberty the first condition of peace and good-will. There has been good feeling between Austria and a free Italy, but between Austria dominant and Italy enslaved it was impossible.

The English have long been boycotting us in our own country. They boycotted our industries out of existence, they boycotted our noblest capacities into atrophy by denying us any share in the higher activities of national life, they boycotted us in the management of our affairs, in the defence of our country, in the making of its laws. And India impoverished, degraded, demoralized, did not look with love upon the spoiler. Now the Boycott has commenced upon the other side, but it is not an act of retaliation merely; it is much more an unravelling of the English web, a retracing of the steps towards perdition which we were forced or induced to take. Shall we continue our course to perdition, shall we refuse to retrace our steps because it cannot be done without strife and ill-feeling, because it must temporarily result in a growth of enmity between class and class? Shall we consent to lie for ever stifled in the fatal web because the unweaving of it must enrage the master of the web? No, the curse of alien domination must be worked out, the doom which compels it to create hatred in its making and hatred in its unmaking. When natural relations have been restored, England and India may stand side by side as equals, comrades and allies in the world's work, but until that is done, it is hypocrisy or folly to suppose that we can escape God's law which makes strife the straight rough way to peace and enmity the father of union. Every redeemer or redeeming force has always been compelled to say in the first stages of his mission, "I come to bring among you not peace but a sword."

Tonight's Illumination

07-August-1907

We have been asked to intimate to the public that illuminations will be a part of the celebration today. We hope that every householder will illuminate his house as a sign of rejoicing on the birthday of Nationalism.

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Our First Anniversary

07-August-1907

The Bande Mataram has completed the first year of its existence. It was started on the 6th of August last year and its anniversary falls strictly on that date. But it is only in the fitness of things that the organ of Indian Nationalism should choose the birthday of Nationalism in the country for the purpose of observing its anniversary. The 7th of August, therefore, has another importance to the Nationalists of Bengal who brought into existence their accredited journal just in time to hail that historic date. We shall only be telling the truth if we notice here that the birth of our paper took place under the most favourable auspices. It came into being in answer to an imperative public need and not to satisfy any private ambition or personal whim; it was born in a great and critical hour for the whole nation and has a message to deliver which nothing on earth can prevent it from delivering. The Bande Mataram has been before the public for a year and it has, we believe, rendered a tolerably fair account of itself. It claims that it has given expression to the will of the people and sketched their ideals and aspirations with the greatest amount of fidelity. It is for this reason that it has received a splendid reception in almost all the provinces of India. The amount of support it has got in the first year of its existence surpasses all previous records in Indian journalism. The political ideal of the people has changed, the desire for freedom is a force to be reckoned with and if anybody has any doubt on the point, success of the Bande Mataram should set it at rest. Our constituents are aware of the difficulties in our way and we hope they will stand by us till we shall have fulfilled our mission.

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To Organise

10-August-1907

Srijut Surendranath Banerji in his remarkable speech in College Square, the other day, observed that what the country now needed was not oratory but statesmanship, for the only effective answer to bureaucratic repression is the organisation of the whole strength of the country to carry out its national ideal in spite of all repression. We think the veteran leader has gauged the situation very accurately, but we confess we do not see at present where the statesmanship is to come from which is to carry out the difficult, arduous and delicate task before us. What we have done hitherto we have done without leadership, almost without clear purpose, under an inspiring and impelling force which we must necessarily think divine. Where that force has visibly guided us, we have done astonishing things: but at the same time there has been much confusion, one-sidedness and incoherence in our work. And now that a powerful and organised Government has set itself in grim earnest to destroy our movement, it is imperative that we too should organise and make our whole potential strength effective for self-defence. The divine guidance will only be continued to us if we show ourselves in our strength and wisdom worthy of it. But it cannot be denied that the first effect of the repression has been to disorganise our work. Since it began, there has been no concerted and coherent action, every man has done what seemed good in his own eyes or else remained inactive. The result has been much weakness, supineness and ineffectiveness. Barisal fights for its own hand to maintain the boycott. The Yugantar attacked carries on a heroic struggle with the bureaucracy with what stray assistance, individual generosity or patriotism may offer it. But organised

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resistance, organised persistence even there is none.

This unsatisfactory condition of things is traceable to one main cause. All Bengal is heartily agreed in Swadeshi and professedly all are agreed on the necessity of industrial boycott. But a majority of the older leaders, trained in another school of politics, cannot adapt themselves to the new state of things, they cannot even throw themselves heartily into the only measures which can make the industrial boycott crushingly effective, and they are out of sympathy with the wider developments of boycott which are becoming indispensable if we are to meet the bureaucratic attack with full success. They object personally to the new men and decline to work in co-operation with them. The new men, on the other hand, who have immensely increased their following and influence in the country, are not in possession of the machinery of Congress and Conference, are in fact zealously excluded from it by the present possessors and have but small following among the richer men who might provide the sinews of war. They are moreover prevented, by a natural unwillingness to hopelessly divide the nation, from organising a machinery of their own. Yet to talk of organising the nation while excluding the new men is absurd. If the older party have the greater solidity and resources, the younger men have the lion's share of the energy and driving force, they divide the great middle class and are no longer there in a hopeless minority, but are gathering adherents all over the country (even in Madras they commanded one third of the votes at the last Conference) and they exercise an overwhelming empire over the minds of the rising generation. To organise the nation means to make all its elements of strength efficient for a single clear and well-understood work under the leadership of a recognised central force. To exclude such important forces as these we have described, means simply to leave the nation unorganised.

The country is in need of a statesman, yes: but what kind of statesman? He must be a man thoroughly steeped in the gospel of Nationalism, with a clear and fearless recognition of the goal to which we are moving, with a dauntless courage to aim consciously, steadily, indomitably towards it, with a consummate

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skill to mask his movements and aims when necessary and to move boldly and openly when necessary, and, last but not least, with an overmastering magnetic power and tact to lead and use and combine men of all kinds and opinions. Such a leader might organise the nation to some purpose, but those who shrink from following where their hearts and intellects lead them or who from party feelings or personal dislike or jealousy try to exclude powerful forces from the common national work cannot claim the name of statesman. It is an encouraging sign of the times that Surendranath is coming more and more into sympathy with thorough-going Nationalism, but will he have the courage and magnanimity to hold out his hand to the new men, and if he does will he be able to retain the loyalty of his principal followers? If not, he will never be able to carry out the task he has declared to be the one and supreme need of the nation.

Statutory Distinction

10-August-1907

Mr. Morley is opposed to ensuring by a statute the presence of at least two Indians on the India Council. The very idea that there should be any "statutory distinction" between class and class is repulsive to his fine sense of political equality. Of course, it is only Statutory distinctions that he objects to: to real and practical distinctions there is no objection whatever. Mr. Morley is a philosopher, and so long as there is no philosophical and theoretic distinction, it does not matter a bit if there is no practical equality: for principles are universal, but their application is to be confined to Europe. Such is Morleyesque liberalism, that queer combination of autocracy, selfishness, repression and "sympathy". Mr. Morley also negatived the proposal to limit the number of retired civilians on the India Council; for, he said, that would defeat the very object of the Council. Of course, for the whole object of the Council is to prime the Secretary of State with the narrow and reactionary views of hide-bound officialism, and to have other elements largely represented would defeat that object. Right, very Liberal Mr. Morley!

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Marionettes and Others

12-August-1907

The Englishman is naturally making the most of the Loyal Manifesto, but that most is miserably little. The unspontaneous character of the effusion has been emphasized by the difficulties and vicissitudes which it had to go through before it saw the light. Conceived in the Black and White Club, begotten, it is said, by Sir Andrew Fraser on the brain of Mr. Blair, the first attempt at delivery with Sjt. Pradyot Kumar Tagore as midwife ended in an abortion. Even the second time with an older and more experienced hand at work the pains of parturition were excessive. Not a single leader of the people or prominent political man signed the absurdity, even the most moderate declaring that no man with any sense of self-respect could sign such a document. Of the few Zamindars who have a real political sense and some position in politics, only one has signed and he, we believe, under the mistaken impression that the objectionable portions had been omitted. There are only two or three solid signatures, if we measure solidity by brains or public influence and not by wealth. Some of the signatories have obviously signed from fear of the consequences of refusal, others belong to that type of people found in every country who consider it their duty to bow their knees before the powers that be whenever required. Their loyalty is uncaused and unconditioned. It knows no ebb and flow, it is a constant quantity and can be manifested at the bidding of a superior person. These people are so well drilled and disciplined in loyalty that the master has simply to look at and down hangs the head, the hands automatically join and every limb falls into its fitting posture of humility. This dancing to the pipe is a natural phenomenon without any particular meaning.

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So this loyal manifesto of the Bengal landholders has excited less interest than even a bear-dance or the performance of a clown. There are professional and mechanical genuflexions with less significance than the automatic movements of marionettes. They think that the bureaucracy has made them and can unmake them at any moment, and the very instinct of self-preservation forces them to their knees. The surprising thing is that so able a political race as the English should think they can make anything substantial out of an advantage so unreal.

A Compliment and Some Misconceptions

12-August-1907

We extract in another column the opinions and interpretations of the London Times anent the Bande Mataram. It is gratifying to find the Thunderer so deeply impressed with the ability with which this journal is written and edited, even though the object of this generous appreciation be to point us out as the tallest oak of all on which the lightning may most fitly descend. But we feel bound to correct certain misapprehensions into which the Times has too readily fallen. It suits the Times to pretend that the Nationalist movement in India is a pure outcome of racial hatred and that the creation and fomentation of that hatred is the sole method of Indian agitators and the one object of their speeches and writings. But Nationalism is no more a mere ebullition of race hatred in India than it was in Italy in the last century. Our motives and our objects are at least as lofty and noble as those of Mazzini or of Garibaldi whose centenary the Times was hymning with such fervour a few days ago. The restoration of our country to her separate existence as a nation among the nations, her exaltation to a greatness, splendour, strength, magnificence equalling and surpassing her ancient glories is the goal of our endeavours: and we have undertaken this arduous task in which we as individuals risk everything, ease, wealth, liberty, life itself it may be, not out of hatred and hostility to other nations but in the firm conviction that we are working as much in the interests of all humanity including England herself

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as in those of our own posterity and nation. That the struggle to realise our ideal must bring with it temporary strife, misunderstanding, hostility, disturbance, that in short, it is bound to be a struggle and not the billing and cooing of political doves, we have never attempted to deny. We believe that the rule of three hundred millions of Indians by an alien bureaucracy not responsible to the nation is a system unnatural, intrinsically bad and inevitably oppressive, and we do not pretend that we can convince our people of its undesirability without irritating the bureaucracy on one side and generating a strong dislike of the existing system on the other. But our object is constructive and not destructive, to build up our own nation and not to destroy another. If England chooses to feel aggrieved by our nation-building, and obstruct it by unjust, violent or despotic means, it is she who is the aggressor and guilty of exciting hatred and ill-feeling. Her action may be natural, may be inevitable, but the responsibility rests on her, not on Indian Nationalism.

Pal on the Brain

12-August-1907

We have commented on one misconception of the Times about ourselves which it perhaps could not help, so necessary was the error to justify its own position, but it has perpetrated another which seems wilful,—unless it is the result of monomania. The Thunderer seems to have Srijut Bipin Chandra on the brain; it sees him gigantically reflected in every manifestation of Nationalism and is rapidly constructing him into a sinister Antichrist of British rule. So it insists on identifying him with the Bande Mataram and will take no denial. Somebody has been pointing out to it that Bipin Babu severed his connection with the paper nine months ago, and this is how the Times disposes of the attempt to dissipate its cherished delusions: "Mr. Bipin Chandra Pal has nominally ceased to edit the paper, but there can be no question that he is the dominating force behind its policy and comments, which are stated with a literary ability rare in the Anglo-native Press." The Times is evidently not going to be

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deceived. The literary ability with which the Bande Mataram states its views is rare in the "Anglo-native" Press but it is known that Bipin Pal has a rare literary ability, therefore it is unquestionably Bipin Pal and no other who really edits and writes in the Bande Mataram. There seems to be a flaw somewhere in the Thunderer's logic, and we do not think the Bengal Government in its recent affectionate enquiries has come to the same conclusion. Bipin Babu has his own sufficient portion of anti-bureaucratic original sin without being burdened with ours. The Times should realise that almost the whole literary ability of Young Bengal is behind the movement of which we are the daily expression, so that the ability and literary excellence of our paper is not to be wondered at.

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Phrases by Fraser

13-August-1907

Sir Andrew Fraser has been receiving addresses from his loyal subjects of West Bengal and oratorising in answer. He has, among other things, discovered a surprising amity between the Hindus and Mahomedans in Burdwan and his prophetic eye foresees a splendid future for the capital city of the allied and friendly Principality of Maharaja Bijoy Chand on the basis of this amity. The object of giving this uncalled-for prominence to the old and natural relations between the two communities is of course to convey the idea that they are anomalous, surprising and quite different from the normal relations in the rest of Bengal. Before the Boycott movement this refrain was only occasionally employed by Anglo-India, but since, it has become the constant burden of their song. It is labour lost, however. After the Jamalpur exposure nobody except Mr. Morley can be got to believe really that the partial breach between the communities is the result of the Boycott. We all know how and by what agencies it was created and fostered. Sir Andrew however has made another and far more startling discovery,—he has discerned the quality of enlightened public spirit in the Maharaja of Burdwan. The natural wonder and excitement awakened by this remarkable find fades away when one realises that what Sir Andrew means by enlightenment is that luminous quality of spirit which enables a presumably respectable gentleman to sign without a qualm or twinge a manifesto accusing his own countrymen, ready-made for him by an English pen. Nevertheless it is comforting to find that the relations between the Principality of Burdwan and the British Empire are still amicable and untroubled as ever. While such compliments can be bandied about between these high and mighty powers, the peace of nations is assured.

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To Organise Boycott

17-August-1907

That boycott is the central question of Indian politics is now a generally recognised fact, recognised openly or tacitly by its supporters and its opponents alike. The Anglo-Indian papers are busy trying to make out that it is a chimera and a failure: the executive are straining every nerve to crush it by magisterial interference, by police zulum, by prosecution of newspapers and all the familiar machinery of repressive despotism: the friends of the alien among ourselves are reiterating that the movement is a foolish affair and that no nation ever was made by boycott. If boycott had really been an impossibility or a failure, it is obvious that all this elaborate machinery would not have been brought into play to crush it. On the contrary it has become a very substantial reality, a very palpable success, and now stands out, as we have said, as the central and all-important question of Indian politics. Those who say that no nation was ever made by boycott, do not know what they are talking about, do not understand what boycott is, do not know the teachings of history. Boycott is much more than a mere economical device, it is a rediscovery of national self-respect, a declaration of national separateness: it is the first practical assertion of independence and has therefore in most of the national uprisings of modern times been the forerunner of the struggle for independence. The American struggle with England began in an enthusiastic and determined boycott of British goods enforced by much the same methods as the Indian boycott but with a much more stringent

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and effective organisation. The Italian uprising of 1848 was heralded by the boycott of Austrian cigarettes and the tobacco riots in Milan. The boycott was the indispensable weapon of the Parnell movement in Ireland, and boycott and Swadeshi are the leading cries of Sinn Fein. The first practical effect of the resurgence of China was the boycott of American goods as an assertion of China's long down-trodden self-respect against the brutal and insolent dealings of the Americans towards Chinese immigrants. In India also boycott began as an assertion of national self-respect, and continued as a declared and practical enforcement of national separateness, liberty, independence and self-dependence. "We will no longer tamely bear injury and insult, we will no longer traffic and huckster with others for broken fragments of rights and privileges; we are free, we are separate, we are sufficient to ourselves for our own salvation," that was what boycott meant and what its enemies have understood it to mean: its economical aspect is only an aspect.

The economical boycott has been on the whole an immense success,—not indeed in every respect, for the crusade against foreign sugar has not diminished the import, though it may have checked to some extent the natural increase of the import, and the Tarpur sugar factory is, we understand, in danger of failing because people will not buy the dearer Swadeshi sugar,—an example of the futility of "honest" Swadeshi unsupported by a self-sacrificing boycott: but enormous reductions have been made in the import not only of cotton goods but of all kinds of wearing apparel, and salt has been appreciably affected. But now the whole weight of bureaucratic power is being brought to bear in order to shatter the boycott, and if we intend to save it we must oppose the organised force of the bureaucracy by the organised will of the people. What the unorganised will of the people could do, it has done: it has indeed effected miracles. But no statesman will rely on the perpetual continuation of a miracle, he will seek to counteract weaknesses, to take full advantage of every element of strength and to bring into action new elements of strength: he will in short utilize every available means towards the one great national end. Srijut Surendranath

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has said well that we must answer the campaign of repression by organising the country. And the readiest way to organise the country is to organise boycott.

The chief weakness of the movement has been the want of co-ordinated action. We have left everything to personal and local enthusiasm. The consequence is that while in East Bengal the boycott is a fact, in West Bengal it is an idea. There is some Swadeshi in West Bengal, there is no boycott. Moreover Bengal has not brought its united influence to bear upon the other provinces in order to make the boycott universal. The whole force of this vast country is a force which no government could permanently resist. But this force has not been brought to bear on the struggle, Bengal and Punjab have been left to fight out their battles unaided, without the active sympathy of the rest of India. This must be altered, the rest of India must be converted and we must not rest till we have secured a mandate from the Congress for an universal boycott of British goods. Meanwhile we must bring West Bengal into a line with East Bengal, and for that purpose we must have a stringent and effective organisation. We need not go far for the system which will be most effective. We have only to apply or adapt to the circumstances of the country the methods used by the American boycotters against England. How this can be done we propose to discuss in another article.

The Foundations of Nationality

17-August-1907

Mr. N. N. Ghose of the Indian Nation has some name in this country as an educated and even a learned man. He himself does not conceal his opinion that he is almost if not quite the only well-educated man in India and is perpetually asking the acknowledged exponents of public opinion on the Nationalist side what educational qualifications they possess which would justify them in advising or instructing their countrymen in politics. At one time it is the conductors of Bande Mataram who are put to the question; at another it is so able a political thinker

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and orator as Srijut Bipin Chandra Pal whose speeches and writings have extorted the reluctant admiration of our bitterest opponents in England; at another it is the editor of Yugantar who is apostrophied as an ill-educated adolescent—a paper every single issue of which evidences more knowledge, reading and power of thought and expression than the whole year's output of the Indian Nation. In the latest issue of his weekly Mr. Ghose has penned an article on the prospects of Nationality in India—which he thinks to be very bad indeed—and in trying to support his thesis by examples from history he has perpetrated such astonishing blunders, of so gross and elementary a character, that one wonders what ill-educated adolescent usurped the editorial chair usually occupied by the Principal of the Metropolitan College. We will give only a few samples of Mr. Ghose's historical knowledge. The unification of the Italian republics into a nation, he says, was not so much the effect as the cause of Italian independence. We leave for the moment the truth of the statement which is contrary to the facts of history; but we should like to know what on earth our universal critic means by his Italian republics? There were republics in mediaeval Italy, but we did not know that Naples and Sicily were republics under King Bomba, or Rome under the Popes, or Tuscany under the Grand Duke, or Lombardy under the Austrians, or Sardinia and Piedmont under the descendants of Victor Amadeus. Then again Mr. Ghose has "observed" that the different States of Greece developed a national unity as soon as they had a common enemy in the Persian. Really? We had always thought that the one outstanding fact of Greek history was the utter inability of these states to develop national unity at all, the sentiment of Pan-Hellenism never having a look-in against the separatist spirit of the city-states. And then he tells us that the provinces and states of ancient Italy (whatever that may mean) also readily united intto make one great nation.o a great national state in the presence of a foreign enemy. Yet those foolish historians tell us that Italy was united not at all willingly by the Roman sword and the Carthaginian invasion simply tested the solidity of the Roman structure; it certainly did not create it. But it would be a wearisome task to

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hunt down all the errors with which the article is packed. We think that after this Mr. N. N. Ghose had better stop questioning other people about their qualifications for instructing the people and examine his own.

But in spite of his historical blunders he has succeeded in giving expression to a very common error which troubles many patriotic people and unnerves their faith and weakens the quality of their patriotism: "Let it be distinctly remembered and never forgotten that the essential conditions of a nationality are unity of language, unity of religion and life, unity of race." And because there is diversity of race, religion and language in India he thinks that there is no possibility of creating a nationality in this country. This is a very common stumbling-block, but is there any reality in it? Rather we find that every nationality has been formed not because of, but in spite of, diversity of race or religion or language, and not unoften in spite of the co-existence of all these diversities. The Indian Nation has itself admitted that the English nation has been built out of various races, but he has not stated the full complexity of the British nation. He has not observed that to this day the races which came later into the British nationality keep their distinct individuality even now and that one of them clings to its language tenaciously. He has carefully omitted the striking example of Switzerland where distinct racial strains speaking three different languages and, later, professing different religions coalesced into and persisted as one nation without sacrificing a single one of these diversities. In France three different languages are spoken, in America the candidates for the White House address the nation in fourteen languages, Austria is a congeries of races and languages, the divisions in Russia are hardly less acute. That unity in race, religion or language is essential to nationality is an idea which will not bear examination. Such elements of unity are very helpful to the growth of a nationality, but they are not essential and will not even of themselves assure its growth. The Roman Empire though it created a common language, a common religion and life, and did its best to crush out racial diversities under the heavy weight of its uniform system failed to make one great nation.

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If these are not essential elements of nationality, what, it may be asked, are the essential elements? We answer that there are certain essential conditions, geographical unity, a common past, a powerful common interest impelling towards unity and certain favourable political conditions which enable the impulse to realise itself in an organised government expressing the nationality and perpetuating its single and united existence. This may be provided by a part of the nation, a race or community, uniting the others under its leadership or domination, or by an united resistance to a common pressure from outside or within. A common enthusiasm coalescing with a common interest is the most powerful fosterer of nationality. We believe that the necessary elements are present in India, we believe that the time has come and that by a common resistance to a common pressure in the shape of the boycott, inspired by a common enthusiasm and ideal, that united nationality for which the whole history of India has been a preparation, will be speedily and mightily accomplished.

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Barbarities at Rawalpindi

20-August-1907

The process of terrorism that is going on at Rawalpindi in the name of administering justice is too open and transparent to require any unravelling. Of course, everyone who takes politics seriously thought that the British law and administration would at once reveal their true nature if the people were to enter on a real struggle for self-improvement and the repression that is being resorted to in the Punjab under the pretext of trial has caused no surprise to those with whom the work for the nation's future is a duty demanding enormous self-sacrifice. But the series of episodes connected with the Rawalpindi trial in which humanity has been outraged and decency defied should nevertheless be taken to heart by the people. They demand an adequate response of stern and resolute work as an atonement and recompense for the sufferings of these martyrs. No patriot would shrink even from the agonies to which the accused are being subjected during the course of their trial at Rawalpindi if he could at least faintly hope from the attitude of his countrymen that they would carry on the patriotic work undaunted and with a greater amount of determination and energy. The man of faith no doubt is never depressed. His faith is always his stay and support. But the martyrdom becomes easier if there is the prospect of some immediate benefit to the country resulting from his sufferings.

From the very beginning of the Rawalpindi trial, the bureaucratic law seems to have been whetted against the alleged offenders. The refusal of bail to the accused amongst whom

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there are men of unquestioned respectability and integrity testifies to the petty vindictiveness of the judiciary which ostensibly exists to diminish crimes and not to exasperate people into their perpetration. The ill-treatment of the accused can without the least exaggeration be characterised as wanton cruelty. The accused after their experience of the British law courts will find it difficult to distinguish a judge from a mediaeval executioner. The Judge could not be moved to the most elementary feeling of humanity when the accused were overwhelmed by the most painful domestic calamities. One man was not allowed to see his dying son till he actually expired and was past all help or need of help. This ferocity on the part of a tribunal, whose special study should be to abstain from writing the least punishment on a man till his guilt has been fairly established is a violation of the first principle of justice and turns a court of law into a torture chamber. A judge should not lack firmness in repressing crime but to pursue an alleged offender with implacable wrath from the moment of his arrest is an exhibition of vindictiveness and not of due judicial austerity. The trial has now extended over nearly two months and the sickening details of inhumanity practised upon the accused continue to be as distressing as ever.

Lala Hansraj and two or three others of his position have been detained in the prison without any justification. They are not the men who can even think of shirking the consequences of their patriotic actions under an alien rule. But why antedate their punishment from the very time of their arrest. They are not men accustomed to privations and they have all been showing signs of failing health during this pretty long period of police custody. They have already served out a term of punishment disproportionate to the nature of their alleged offence. It is a brand new feature of British justice to go on with the trial of men stretched on their sick-bed in the court room. Our latest telegram from Rawalpindi says that on the 16th Lala Hansraj was shaking with fever and ague on a string cot borrowed from a constable. The internal pain was so intense that tears ran down his cheeks though he tried to be firm and cheerful and pretended that something had fallen into his eyes.

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We need not multiply the details of the prisoners' sufferings. We have already sampled the treatment which the Pindi martyrs are receiving at the hands of the judiciary. We expect no mitigation of their sufferings. The alleged offence of rousing people to a spirit of active resistance perhaps justifies these barbarities in the eyes of the ruling class. They are innocent of all compunction and are calmly watching the effect on the people. The Englishman once opined that even the suspected offence of inciting to a riot excuses the most monstrous treatment of the offenders. But we believe their lesson will not be lost on our own countrymen. The heavy price that these men are paying for merely inducing the spirit of self-assertion in us should nerve others to greater and greater sacrifices in the service of the motherland.

The High Court Miracles

20-August-1907

The situation in Bengal is one of a very peculiar kind and of extraordinary interest. There is a deep and widespread unrest in the country; a movement has commenced which the bureaucracy holds to be fraught with serious danger certainly to the British monopoly of commercial exploitation, possibly to the supremacy of British officialdom. In order to save these threatened citadels the bureaucrats in the Punjab and Eastern Bengal have embarked on a policy of thorough-going repression in which the practically unlimited and arbitrary power of an autocratic executive is backed up and confirmed by a zealous judiciary. The union of these two forces is essential to the success of the bureaucratic plan of campaign: for the strength of the bureaucratic position lies in the fact that all the powers of legislation and administration are centred unreservedly and without limitation in its hands. It controls the men by whom the law and the executive administration are carried out, for it not only exercises all the patronage of both services, but wields immense disciplinary powers. It can appoint and favour such men as are likely to do its will and it can punish with substantial marks of its displeasure those who disregard its interests or do

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not act according to its expectations. In an hour of crisis like the present when there is a powerful movement undisguisedly directed against the continued supremacy of the present ruling community in all its aspects, this concentration of all powers against the insurgence of the subject people is of the most vital importance. The executive must have a free hand to deal with the opposition of the demos without being hampered by inconvenient and trammelling considerations of legal procedure and the narrow limits of legality. But in a fight with an acute and intelligent people, a nation of born lawyers, this is only possible on condition that the judiciary are willing to support and confirm the actions of the executive unhesitatingly and without a qualm. These conditions have been secured in East Bengal and still more completely in the Punjab. But there is one weak point, the Achilles' heel in the otherwise invulnerable constitution of the bureaucracy, and that is the High Court of Bengal. The oldest and most venerable institution of British rule, with the most honourable traditions of integrity and independence maintained by a series of judges learned in the law, trained to the love of justice and equity and a calm judicial habit of mind, the High Court had become a thing cherished and valued, a refuge to the oppressed, a guarantee of eventual relief against executive vagaries. It had therefore attracted an almost superstitious reverence and was the chief moral asset of British rule. But the inevitable tendency of bureaucratic rule when threatened by the increasing self-assertion of the people, began eventually to affect the High Court. It is true that the High Court is independent of the executive authorities, but it is under the control of the Chief Justice, and by the simple device of securing a Chief Justice of weak personality and multiplying civilian judges of the right kind the institution can easily be converted into a source of strength to the bureaucracy instead of a source of weakness. Since the beginning of the reactionary policy which followed the Viceroyalty of Lord Ripon, this has been the increasing tendency of the High Court and the trust and reverence of the people has decreased proportionately, and the hold of British rule on their imaginations has decreased with it.

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We have always held that British justice as between Indians and Europeans or in cases in which the bureaucracy was judge, jury and accuser, must obviously and inevitably be a farce unless and until human nature ceases to have any resemblance to its present self. Neither had we any of that enthusiastic admiration for British law and its administration which was not so very long ago the fashion among Indians of the educated class. On the contrary we were compelled to regard its procedure as costly, dilatory and often calculated to defeat justice, its penal system repressive and its punishments savage and barbarous with the cold civilised brutality of a half-baked incomplete civilisation. Our respect for the High Court was tempered by a perception of the ease with which it could be captured by the bureaucracy for its own ends. We have therefore always decried the old moribund belief in the excellence of the British courts and the tendency to run to them for protection in all cases of oppression and injustice. Have the recent transactions in the High Court proved us wrong? They have certainly proved that there are still Judges Indian and English who can rise above the depressing atmosphere and lowered traditions of this once venerated institution and equal the distinguished record of those strong fearless Judges who have now become a memory, almost a legend of the past. There has been nothing like the series of important decisions given in a few days by Justices Mitter and Fletcher since the seven Bishops were acquitted. The bold opposition of the sense of justice and respect for law to the interests of an irritated and determined government in a time of great political unrest and disturbance, is an episode which history will love to record. But is it more than an episode? We apprehend it is the last flaring up of the old fire previous to extinction. The executive will surely take care not to repeat the error by which a fearless, just and religious Hindu lawyer has been placed on the Criminal Bench side by side with a young barrister Judge fresh from England and still full of the uncorrupted moral temper natural in a free country. The bureaucracy has blundered in its management of the High Court, but the power to utilize it is still in its hands and will no doubt be better handled in the near future than in the past. Let

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us not be unduly elated by the victory in the High Court: great as it has been, its causes are transient and its tenure insecure.

The Times Romancist

20-August-1907

The London Times has developed a new Newmaniac all to itself. The original Newmaniac of Calcutta had the National Volunteers for his special monomania: the Times specimen seems to have got the Arya Samaj on his brain. In a long and elaborate article he has traced the genesis of this dangerous group, its control over the bourgeoisie, its deadly seditious attempts to make use of the masses, and the final extinction of the rebellious movement by the strong and masterly policy of Sir Denzil Ibbetson. All this reads well as the romance of history, but when it is given us as a serious attempt to account for the situation in the Punjab, we begin to see what a plentiful lack of wisdom and knowledge governs us in India. For we may be sure that the diet of lies which the Times correspondent serves up as a dainty dish for the British public, is merely a daintily-seasoned version of the official view in the Punjab. It is not to be questioned that the present struggle is a contest between the intellectuals of India who are recruited mainly from the middle class, and the alien officials. In the struggle the former are attempting to range all classes under the common banner of liberty and Indian resurgence, just as the same class has done in Russia, and there is nothing in the aim or the movement which is illegitimate or immoral. If there is any immorality, it is surely on the side of the ruling class which is fighting for monopoly and privilege while the bourgeoisie are fighting for their own self-preservation and the life and expansion of their race and nation. The Times correspondent speaks acutely enough when he says that the middle class are trying to make their will the will of the nation and the object of the bureaucracy must be to prevent that consummation. But when the writer begins to trace all evil to the Arya Samaj, he at once passes into the regions of romance. No doubt the lion's share of the political spirit and

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genius in the Punjab belongs to the Aryas, but that is the result of the manliness of the creed preached by Dayananda and the admirable working power, self-sacrifice and gift of organisation which the Samaj has fostered among its members. But self-sacrifice, energy, organisation are precisely what most terrify the panic-stricken Anglo-Indian, and nothing will convince him that where these are, there is not a dangerous conspiracy against the British Raj. We may tell this new Newmaniac that if there were such a serious and skilfully engineered movement as the one he affects to describe,—well, the special correspondent of the Times would not be touring at his ease and writing nonsense at the present moment. Whatever has happened in India has been the result of great spontaneous forces without organisation or even conscious purpose: those who have seen where they were going, have been a small minority.

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A Malicious Persistence

21-August-1907

The persistence of the Englishman's attack on Justice Mitter in connection with the Bloomfield Murder Case is worthy of the traditions of Hare Street. The Englishman is perhaps the only Anglo-Indian paper in Calcutta which has a rigidly settled and consistent policy. Others allow themselves to be swayed sometimes by feeling and by calm dispassionate reason, and yield perhaps to some gust of generous feeling or suffer the sense of justice or fair play to overcome the dictates of class interest or policy, but Hare Street is above such weaknesses. Not much brains or political knowledge or discernment is needed to guide its policy, for it is simple and elementary in the extreme. A violent and venomous opposition to every Indian aspiration, to every claim to equality or even to ordinary justice, is the sole, simple and sufficient principle which guides it unerringly through the maze of politics. Legally the excited correspondents who pour out their fury and panic in its sympathetic pages, have not a leg to stand on. Some of them have made clumsy attempts to argue the point of agitation. The attempt is absurd. The position taken by the Judges is unassailable. Intention cannot be argued from the results of an action, but from the nature of the actions and utterances of the doer and from the probable consequences of his act as they may be reasonably supposed to have presented themselves to his mind. Now the actions of the assailants in this case were not such as to raise any certainty of their intention to kill. Men have been beaten by numbers and savagely beaten without being left dead, but have at most had to spend more or less time in hospital recovering from their injuries. The cessation of the beating as soon as the victim fell down, the words of the

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assailants as they ran away and several other circumstances seem to show that this was the result they aimed at, and the cumulative effect of these indications is very great. At any rate, in the face of such strong considerations in favour of the more lenient view, and in the absence of any positive evidence that the accused premeditated the assault, much less the manslaughter, any Judge knowing his business would feel himself bound to give them the benefit of the doubt so long as the principle of refusing to convict on a mere probability of guilt remains a fundamental principle of law. We can say without any fear of contradiction that the Englishman would not have a word to say against the Judgment if it had been any other than an European who had died: and if it had been an Indian done to death by an Englishman, Hare Street would have yelled itself hoarse over the brutal severity of the sentences. The position taken up is that because an Englishman was killed, somebody ought to have been hanged and all who were not hanged transported for life: otherwise the life of planters in the mofussil cannot be safe. Possibly, but the safety of European life in the mofussil is an extrajudicial consideration with which the Judges of the High Court, or any judges for the matter of that, are not concerned. Their sole business is to do justice, without any regard to the political consequences. The safety of European life is a question for the executive or for the political authorities. If the planters have made themselves so fiercely hated or the bureaucrats have by their policy rendered Europeans such an eyesore to the Indian masses that the latter are ready to murder them without serious provocation and can only be restrained by savage and iniquitous sentences in the law courts, it is for the planters and the bureaucrats to mend their ways and ease the tension: they cannot expect just and upright men to stain their consciences for their sake.

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In Melancholy Vein

23-August-1907

The Englishman is in melancholy mood. Swaraj and Justice Saroda Charan Mitter have been too much for our gentle contemporary's nerves, and he is full of sorrow and care-worn longings. He wants "to wipe out an unpleasant world and create a new and beautiful one to live in," where there is no Swaraj, and no High Courts, and no diminishing cotton imports, and no Anglo-Indian editors to telegraph home denying his blood-curdling visions, and the agitator is not abroad. He wants "like the Hindu ascetic considering all this as Maya to retire into existence of solid imagination". We shall find it hard to believe that there is any lack of imagination in Hare Street existence, but this new-born desire to turn the imagination from the gaseous into the solid state is a hopeful sign. Our contemporary anticipates all sorts of curious and pleasing results from his new departure, and even breaks out into irregular blank verse in his ecstasy. "Then comes again the care-free heart of youth, the lines of trouble fade from the face, the empty pocket, like that of Virgil's traveller, becomes a cause for song, or like that of the schoolboy, a hoarding place for curious and assorted treasure." We are sorry to hear that the Englishman's pocket is empty, but we think he goes too far in expecting people to write poetry about his diminishing sale and circulation. As for his alternative hope, the Englishman's pocket whether empty of cash or not, is full enough of Golden Bengal Mare's nests, Newmaniac effusions and other curious and assorted treasure. Finally our contemporary announces his intention of dismissing "mean-souled malice"—of the Statesman and Empire and others—with a "vacant stare"—which is evidently preferable to the Barisal stare. Our contemporary

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wishes to practise the art of detachment as a substitute for furlough and hypophosphites. We would suggest to him that it might be better to take the furlough and the hypophosphites—especially the furlough—to restore his scattered system, and try the detachment as an additional sedative. That, to adapt the language of the Abbotabad Magistrate, will be the best for the Englishman and will satisfy everybody else in India.

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Advice to National College Students: Speech

23-August-1907

I have been told that you wish me to speak a few words of advice to you. But in these days I feel that young men can very often give better advice than we older people can give. Nor must you ask me to express the feelings which your actions, the way in which you have shown your affection towards me, have given rise to in my breast. It is impossible to express them. You all know that I have resigned my post. In the meeting you held yesterday I see that you expressed sympathy with me in what you call my present troubles. I don't know whether I should call them troubles at all, for the experience that I am going to undergo was long foreseen as inevitable in the discharge of the mission that I have taken up from my childhood, and I am approaching it without regret. What I want to be assured of is not so much that you feel sympathy for me in my troubles, but that you have sympathy for the cause in serving which I have to undergo what you call my troubles. If I know that the rising generation have taken up this cause, that wherever I go, I go leaving behind others to carry on my work, I shall go without the least regret. I take it that whatever respect you have shown to me today was shown not to me, not merely even to the principal, but to your country, to the Mother in me, because what little I have done has been done for her, and the slight suffering that I am going to endure will be endured for her sake. Taking your sympathy in that light I can feel that if I am incapacitated from carrying on my work, there will be so many others left behind me. One other cause of rejoicing for me is to find that practically all my countrymen have the same fellow-feeling for me and for the same reason as yourselves. The unanimity with which all classes have expressed their sympathy for me and even offered help at

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the moment of my trial, is a cause for rejoicing, and for the same reason. For I am nothing, what I have done is nothing. I have earned this fellow-feeling because of serving the cause which all my countrymen have at heart.

The only piece of advice that I can give you now is—carry out the work, the mission, for which this college was created. I have no doubt that all of you have realised by this time what this mission means. When we established this college, and left other occupations, other chances of life, to devote our lives to this institution, we did so because we hoped to see in it the foundation, the nucleus, of a nation, of the new India which is to begin its career after this night of sorrow and trouble, on that day of glory and greatness when India will work for the world. What we want here is not merely to give you a little information, not merely to open to you careers for earning a livelihood, but to build up sons for the motherland to work and to suffer for her. That is why we started this college and that is the work to which I want you to devote yourselves in future. What has been insufficiently and imperfectly begun by us, it is for you to complete and lead to perfection. When I come back I wish to see some of you becoming rich, rich not for yourselves but that you may enrich the Mother with your riches. I wish to see some of you becoming great, great not for your own sakes, not that you may satisfy your own vanity, but great for her, to make India great, to enable her to stand up with head erect among the nations of the earth, as she did in days of yore when the world looked up to her for light. Even those who will remain poor and obscure, I want to see their very poverty and obscurity devoted to the motherland. There are times in a nation's history when Providence places before it one work, one aim, to which everything else, however high and noble in itself, has to be sacrificed. Such a time has now arrived for our motherland when nothing is dearer than her service, when everything else is to be directed to that end. If you will study, study for her sake; train yourselves body and mind and soul for her service. You will earn your living that you may live for her sake. You will go abroad to foreign lands that you may

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bring back knowledge with which you may do service to her. Work that she may prosper. Suffer that she may rejoice. All is contained in that one single advice. My last word to you is that if you have sympathy for me, I hope to see it not merely as a personal feeling, but as a sympathy with what I am working for. I want to see this sympathy translated into work so that when in future I shall look upon your career of glorious activity I may have the pride of remembering that I did something to prepare and begin it.

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Sankaritola's Apologia

24-August-1907

The omniscient editor of the Indian Nation exposed himself last week to a well-deserved castigation at our hands by trespassing into history, of which he evidently knows less than a fifth form school-boy in an English public school. We gave him his deserts, but were careful to couch our criticism, however deservedly severe, in perfectly courteous language. We find, however, that the courtesy was thrown away on the most hysterically foulmouthed publicist in the whole Indian Press. The late Shambhunath Mukherji ironically described Mr. N. N. Ghose as a thundering cataract of law: he might more aptly have described him as a thundering cataract of Billingsgate. He has attempted to answer our criticism in this week's Indian Nation, but the answer is so much befouled with an almost maniacal virulence of abuse that most of our friends have advised us to ignore his frenzies and never again give him the notoriety he desires by noticing him in our columns. It is true that the Indian Nation addresses itself to a microscopic audience and expresses the personal vanities, selfishness, jealousies of a single man, but so long as it enjoys a false reputation for learning and wisdom even with a limited circle or trades on that reputation to attack and discredit the national movement, it is our duty to expose its pretensions, and we shall not be deterred by any abuse, however foul.

Mr. N. N. Ghose's reply falls into three parts, of which one consists merely of rancorous vituperation, another of a feeble attempt to wriggle out of the uncomfortable position he has got into by his failure to consult a few historical primers before writing, and the third is a restatement of his opinions about nationality formulated this time in the shape of general ideas

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without any basis either of historical fact or of Metropolitan College fiction. As to the abuse we can only say that it might have been more skilfully done. At least it might have been more coherent. The aggrieved sage of Sankaritola picks out from all the Bande Mataram writers Srijut Aurobindo Ghose for the object of his wrath and among other elegant terms of abuse calls him a prig and a Graeculus esuriens. To those who may not be such accomplished Latin scholars as the Principal of the Metropolitan College, we may explain that the last expression means a starving and greedy scholar who is prepared to commit any vileness for the sake of earning a livelihood. We will not stop to ask whether this description applies to Srijut Aurobindo Ghose or to a Principal who daily exhorts his students to subordinate honour, high feeling and patriotism to the supreme consideration of bread and himself practises the lofty philosophy he preaches. We will only ask Mr. Ghose whether a man can be at once a prig and an esurient Greekling. Srijut Aurobindo Ghose may be one or the other or neither, but he can hardly be both. Either Mr. N. N. Ghose's knowledge of Latin is as distinguished and correct as his knowledge of history, or else he is so ignorant of English as to be even ignorant what the word prig means. We can understand his being in a rage at the merciless exposure of his pretended scholarship, but that does not excuse his incoherence: nor is it a sufficient reason for what was once a fair counterfeit of a gentleman and a scholar turning himself into the image of a spitting and swearing tom-cat. And with that we leave Mr. N. N. Ghose the fishwife and pass on to Mr. N. N. Ghose the historian.

He does not try to justify his blunders,—that would be hopeless—but he does try to excuse them. He practically admits that his Italian republics are a blunder and that he was thinking of the Middle Ages when he was writing of the nineteenth century. But he pleads that Burke uses the word commonwealth in the sense of state and therefore Mr. N. N. Ghose can use the word republic in the same sense. This is Metropolitan College logic and Metropolitan College knowledge of English. Does Mr. Ghose really think that republic and commonwealth mean the

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same thing precisely or that Burke would have talked of the Russian republic when he meant the Russian monarchy? But, says Mr. Ghose, it does not matter, as I was not talking about forms of government. But if Mr. Ghose in his class was to talk about adjectives when he meant nouns, would it be an excuse to say that he was not talking about the difference between various parts of speech? His defence of his other blunders is still more amusing.

Says the Oracle: "To combat our proposition about ancient Greece an academic commonplace is trotted out, namely, that the people of Greece never developed a Pan-Hellenic sentiment." Really this is enough to take one's breath away. Mr. Ghose told us last week that the Greeks became an united nation under the pressure of the Persian invasion: this week he coolly tells us that it is an academic commonplace that the Greeks never even developed a Pan-hellenic sentiment. We certainly never said anything of the sort. The Greeks, as any tyro in history knows, did develop a Pan-hellenic sentiment but it was never strong enough—and that was all we said—to unite them into a nation. But Mr. Ghose flounders still deeper into the mire in the next sentences. "What does it signify whether they did or not? The whole question is, could the Greek states have been set against one another? Athens and Sparta, for instance, against each other? And if not, why not?" Really, Mr. Ghose, really now! Is it possible you do not know that soon after the Persian invasion which you say made Greece an united nation, Athens and Sparta were at each other's throats and the whole of the Greek world by land and sea turned into one vast battlefield on which the Hellenic cities engaged in a murderous internecine strife? What would we think of a "scholar" who pretended to know Indian history and yet asserted that the Hindus became an united nation under the pressure of the Mahomedan invasion and that it was impossible to set the Hindu states against each other, Mewar and Amber for instance? Yet this is precisely the blunder Mr. Ghose has committed with respect to Greek history. But he pleads bitterly that his facts are no doubt all wrong, but the conclusions he bases on them are right. What do facts matter? It is only Mr. N. N. Ghose's opinions which matter.

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Mr. Ghose accuses us of incapacity to understand the substance of his article. We quite admit that it is difficult to understand the mystic wisdom of a sage who asserts that the soundness of his premises has nothing to do with the soundness of his conclusions. Mr. Ghose stated certain facts as supporting a conclusion otherwise unsupported. We have proved that his facts are all childish blunders. He must therefore accept one of the two horns of a dilemma; either his facts had nothing to do with his "truism" or his "truism" itself is an error. But we had another object in view in exposing the pretentious sciolism of this arrogant publicist. Our business with him is not so much to disprove his opinions as to convince the few who still believe in him of the hollowness of his pretensions. It was for this reason that we dwelt on his blunders last week and have done the same this week,—in order to show that this gentleman who claims a monopoly of culture and wisdom in India, is a half educated shallow man whose boasted mastery of the English language even is imperfect and who in other subjects, such as history and politics, is an ignoramus pretending to knowledge.

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Our False Friends

26-August-1907

The Englishman has been warning us against our false friends. We have been asked to avert our eyes from those Indian delegates who have asked the socialistic Conference at Stuttgart to liberate one-fifth of the human race from serfdom. The Englishman unblushingly calls these Indian delegates our enemies and perhaps points to himself as our only friend, guide and philosopher. With the Englishman for our friend, and the Civil and Military Gazette for our ally and the rest of the Anglo-Indian Press for our well-wishers it is no doubt sinful to long for a change for the paradise of universal brotherhood. India is the freest of lands, retorts the Hare Street journal to the misrepresentation of our false friends in the above socialistic Conference. Here under British rule the people enjoy religious freedom, they are allowed to stick to their absurd social customs, they are not denied food, clothing and luxuries. What is there wanting to their freedom the Englishman is at a loss to discover. Does our contemporary seriously desire enlightenment on the point? Or is he indulging in a bit of Hare Street humour at our expense? Is it owing to this freedom of which we are the enviable possessors that he himself as well as his prototype in Lahore enjoy the monopoly of pouring daily vile abuses on us with perfect safety and immunity? Is it due to this freedom that we are threatened with imprisonment for republishing the articles of the Yugantar and they are supported and patronised for the very same offence? Is it for this enviable freedom that some innocent men of Comilla were very near being hanged and transported without a shred of evidence against them? Is it in consequence of this freedom that a highly respectable accused at Rawalpindi is taking his trial on

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a sick-bed? Is it in the exercise of their rights as free citizens of the British Empire that Lala Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh have been deported without even the mention of the charge against them? This freedom is perhaps responsible for the banishment of an Arya Samajist from his country though the trying magistrate has declared him quite innocent of the charge brought against him. Is it a tangible demonstration of our freedom that we cannot keep our food grains for our own use even when there is a terrible famine in the land? Is it because we are free to think and act that the Partition of Bengal has been carried out in the teeth of an unanimous and protracted opposition? The disarming of a whole people is another incontrovertible evidence of their freedom. They are not allowed the use of arms because they are free. Their manhood is repressed because they are free. They are converted into so many harmless cattle because their Mother-country is the freest of all countries! If we had even a jot of freedom the Englishman could not have flung in our face such a mocking statement. The world has come to know of India's true condition, and these interested and shameless perversions of truth can deceive nobody.

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Repression and Unity

27-August-1907

One of the most encouraging signs of the present times is the effect of repression in bringing together men of all views who have the future welfare and greatness of their country at heart. At this time last year the great fight between the old and new parties was just beginning to pass from the stage of loose occasional skirmishes into a close and prolonged struggle. The emergence of Nationalism as a self-conscious force determined to take shape and fight for the domination of the national mind was indicated by the appearance of the Bande Mataram as the first out-and-out Nationalist daily in the English tongue published in India. For the first time a gospel of undiluted Nationalism without any mitigating admixture of prudent concealment or diplomatic reservation was poured daily into the ears of the educated class in India. At first the Bande Mataram and the cause it came to champion had to make a hard fight for existence and for a voice in the country, and in the struggle which culminated in the last session of the Congress, many hard words were used on both sides, strong animosities aroused and what seemed incurable misunderstandings engendered. Those times are now fading into a half-remembered past. The second year of the paper's existence has begun with a prosecution for sedition, but circumstances have so changed that in its hour of trial it has the sympathy of the whole of Bengal at its back. We note with satisfaction and gratitude that all classes of men, rich and poor, all shades of opinion, moderate or extremist, the purveyors of ready-made loyalty alone excepted, have given us a sympathy and support which is not merely emotional. This growing unity is mainly due to the action of the bureaucracy in attempting to put down

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by force a movement which has now taken possession of the nation's heart beyond the possibility of dislodgment. This is the last and crowning blessing of British rule.

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The Three Unities of Sankaritola

31-August-1907

Mr. N. N. Ghose has again attempted to answer us in his issue of the 26th August. As usual the bulk of his answer is composed of irrelevant abuse, but we are glad to note that except towards the end where his passion of spite and wounded vanity has broken out in a furious yell of hatred, he has tried to curb his natural inclination to couch the logic of Billingsgate in the language of the gutter. We pointed out that Mr. N. N. Ghose's "historical facts"—which he had brought forward to prove his theory that Nationality was possible everywhere except in India,—were all blunders of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed, and we drew the inevitable conclusion that the sage of Sankaritola was an ignoramus in history. That was exceedingly plain language, no doubt, but it was relevant to the issue. A man who knows nothing about history, has no business to argue from history and foist on the public conclusions drawn from his own imagination or from others and distorted in the borrowing under the disingenuous pretence that they are the "laws of national growth" as ascertained from an accurate study of the world's past experience. And what is Mr. N. N. Ghose's answer? His answer is that Srijut Aurobindo Ghose

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is a coward and had not courage to ride a horse and that he would never have been a patriot if he had not failed in the Indian Civil Service. Even if that be true,—and we can hardly blame the Principal of the Metropolitan College for judging others by his own standard of courage and patriotism—we do not see how it helps his case or goes to prove that his bad premises do not vitiate his conclusions or that Nationality is impossible in India. The question is not whether Srijut Aurobindo Ghose is a coward and a self-seeker but whether Mr. N. N. Ghose is wrong in his facts and in his conclusions. With regard to the facts he has practically admitted defeat. He admits that he is an ignoramus, he admits that the depths of his ignorance have been proved to be unfathomable. We can therefore leave him alone in the future and confine ourselves to his opinions. An ignoramus who pretends to a monopoly of knowledge and wisdom, and is always questioning other people about their educational qualifications, makes himself offensive and deserves to be exposed but an ignoramus who confesses that he is an ignoramus is harmless and even an object of kindly pity.

Mr. Ghose argues that though his facts were wrong, that does not prove that his conclusions were not right. Perhaps not, but it at least creates a presumption in that direction. We shall however leave his self-justification on this point for future treatment and deal with the more substantial issues he has raised in his defence.

Mr. N. N. Ghose's position—and we notice it only because it is the position of better men than he—is contained in the following luminous sentence: "The bookish politician is not able to cite a single instance where a nation was made by boycott or under any conditions other than the unities we have more than once referred to." Here there are two propositions, one, that boycott never made a nation, the other that in every case of the building up of a nationality there have been present as indispensable conditions and the only causes of the growth of nationality Mr. Ghose's three precious unities,—viz., a single language, a single race, a single religion. A more shallow, ignorant and unfounded brace of assertions it would be difficult to imagine. We pointed out in the first article in which we condescended to notice Mr. Ghose's flounderings, several instances of nations which have been welded into unity and maintained their unity without possessing a single one of these indispensable "unities". As for unity of race there is not a single one of the European nations which is not a compound of several races except, possibly, the Scandinavian peoples. In England up to the present day the Celtic races preserve their separateness and distinct individuality: in

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Austria there are a superfluity of different races and languages: Russia is a congeries of peoples: Italy was built up out of various races and even after the accomplishment of national unity the Gallo-Lombard of the North and the Latins, Oscans, Umbrians, Tuscans of the Centre find it difficult to understand and live with the Graeco-Italians of the South: in Germany the Prussian, the Slav, the Pole, and the South German are of different race types and temperaments: in Spain the Iberian, the Goth and the Moor have mingled their blood: in France there are the Breton, still a distinct race, the Provencal and the Frank as well as the Celts of the Centre and the Aquitanian, each with noticeable marks of their separate origin: in Switzerland there are three races speaking three different languages. Does Mr. N. N. Ghose want any more instances? We can give him plenty if he does. If he had even the most insignificant knowledge of common facts, he would not have needed our assistance to enlighten him on the subject. Everyone knows, except the Sankaritola sage, that race and nationality are two totally different things which have no necessary relation to each other, since one depends upon common descent while the other is a geographical and political unity. One might just as well say that different chemical elements cannot combine into a single substance as that different races cannot combine into a single nation. There is no such irreconcilable divergence between the races in India as to make their union an impossibility. If we turn to unity of language we find a respectable number of nations which do not speak a single language. Three languages are spoken in Switzerland, the same number in France, while Welsh holds its own in Great Britain. Unity of language, therefore, is not necessary to nationality, only the recognition of one prevalent language as the State language is required. If America, needing to be addressed in fourteen languages by her would-be Presidents is a nation, if the Swiss speaking three different languages on equal terms are a nation, what reason is there that the people of India should not federate into a single political unity? As for the religious difficulty, it is an old bogey. We do not deny the difficulty created by the divisions between the Mahomedans and Hindus, but it is idle to

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say that the difficulty is insuperable. If the spirit of nationalism conquered the much fiercer intolerance of the religious struggles in Europe after the reformation, it is not irrational to hope as much for India in the twentieth century. We have not seen in Mr. N. N. Ghose's polemics a single argument or favourable instance for his pretentious theory of the three unities of nationalism. We do not deny that it would be a great help to us if we had a single language or professed a single religion. But we do deny that these "unities", still less the unity of race, are indispensable. There is no warrant for such a view in history or in reason.

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Eastern Renascence

03-September-1907

When the mailed fist of young Japan was striking blow after blow at the huge Russian bear our benevolent rulers who were secretly dismayed and astonished tried to put on a smiling face as best they could and persuade us into the belief that Japan was only an exception which proved the rule of Eastern worthlessness. Somehow or other, however, inconvenient facts cropped up to challenge their favourite theory and Persia and even Afghanistan began to raise their heads. Even China threw away her phial of laudanum and opened her eyes to the rays of the rising sun. Our honest Anglo-Indian Press tried to ignore this ugly fact as long as it could; but now with a deep sigh it has to confess that the Eastern nations have secured a fresh lease of life and have begun in right earnest to set their houses in order. Here is an extract published by the Pioneer from a circular issued by the Chinese authorities:

"Those who are able to promote agricultural enterprises, mechanical arts and handicrafts, trade and mines or any other kind of business, or aid merchants to subscribe capital for industrial enterprises, and succeed in them—such officials or gentry who have worked to such an end, will be rewarded by the Throne to an extraordinary degree. Should anyone be able to show that he has succeeded in starting a manufactory or industrial work with a capital of over ten million taels, where the workmen number several thousand, such persons will be even more greatly rewarded—even to the extent of being raised to the peerage."

Japan joined in the race of commercial enterprise later than India and outstripped her in no time and now China, where there are no "honest Swadeshi" officials to let loose mercenary

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Gurkha bands to crush all spirit of enterprise, may very well be expected to do the same. Here in India we lag behind and lose the race not because the other Eastern nations are naturally more gifted than we are but because there is that benevolent despotism which like a leaden extinguisher puts out all the fire of our genius. There is scarcely a word of encouragement, and in fact there cannot be; but of repression and Swadeshi cases there are plenty.

But the Time-spirit is abroad, and out of the extinguisher leaps forth the tongues of fire that will at no distant date set all obstacles ablaze. The nations of the East will rear up their heads and India will be herself again. Repression will only enhance the glory of her victory and help in putting her in the vanguard of nations.

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The Martyrdom of Bipin Chandra

12-September-1907

We have felt considerable delicacy hitherto in writing on the prosecution of Srijut Bipin Chandra Pal for refusing to take the oath in the Bande Mataram case, as that prosecution has arisen directly out of our own. In fact all the more important events of recent occurrence in Calcutta have been so closely connected, directly or indirectly, with this case that we have been practically compelled to keep our lips closed on current public affairs. The imprisonment of the Nationalist orator and propagandist, the most prominent public figure of the New Party in Bengal, is nevertheless a matter of capital importance on which we cannot remain silent. Without touching on the relations of this affair with the Bande Mataram case we shall say what we have to say on the political aspect of the vindictive sentence passed by the third Presidency Magistrate, an obscure servant of the bureaucracy, on the man with a great and historic mission whom the strange incongruous humour of Fate brought before his petty judgment-seat.

Srijut Bipin Chandra Pal has been condemned to six months' simple imprisonment, the maximum penalty permitted by the law for the crime of possessing a conscience. Mr. Hume asked for a conviction on the ground that Bipin Babu had baulked the prosecution in the Bande Mataram case. Apart from the large assumption involved in the assertion that his evidence would have materially assisted the prosecution this appears to us a singular plea for a lawyer to put forward. It has not yet been made a crime punishable under the Penal Code to baulk a Government prosecution and if it was the intention to draw the Magistrate's attention to the political bearings of the case, it was at least

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maladroit to allow the suggestion to be palpable. We will take it, however, that the Magistrate sentenced Bipin Babu for a breach of the law which the defendant did not deny, not for an action of which there was no evidence and which is not an offence under the law. What then was Bipin Babu's offence? Certainly it was not that he carried the policy of Boycott beyond the limits of legality and preferred adhesion to his own political programme before the dictates of the alien's law. That would have been an action which, however pardonable or praiseworthy in the eyes of patriots engaged in a life and death struggle with the bureaucracy, must necessarily figure as a serious offence in the eyes of the bureaucracy itself and we could hardly quarrel with its servant for trying to serve the interests of his employers by the infliction of a severe punishment. But it was distinctly declared by Bipin Babu that it was not as a boycotter, not with the political intention of making the working of the bureaucratic law-courts impossible that he declined to give evidence or take the oath. The boycott in Bengal has not yet been extended in practice to the law courts, and even in theory it is proposed to extend it only to voluntary resort to the protection of the alien authorities and not to cases in which one is compelled to them by a warrant or a summons. A few men like Bhupendranath Dutt who have realised freedom in their souls and refuse to be bound by any limitations of an alien making, may decline to have anything to do with the law which the nation had no hand in framing and the courts over which the nation has no control, but this has not yet become the accepted policy of the New Party and there was no moral compulsion on its leader to make any such refusal. If it had been an ordinary case of crime, he would not have refused to give evidence. It was, in fact, as an individual case of conscience that he regarded the question. In his first statement Bipin Babu declared that it was the duty of a citizen to refuse to take any part in such cases which are manifestly unjust and injurious to society and the peace of the country. In his later statement the expression about the duty of the citizen was, wisely we think, dropped: for we in India are not citizens and having no rights of citizenship cannot be saddled with any duties of citizenship.

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The members of a subject nation absolutely destitute of any inalienable rights cannot have any moral obligations as citizens: they can only have moral obligations as patriots and subject to their patriotic obligations, as members of a social order. If therefore we recognise any obligation to respect and obey the law, it is not as citizens but as members of the social order who are interested in its maintenance and in the maintenance of peace and order so long as and no longer than that order and peace do not militate against the well-being of the society instead of promoting it. The moment obedience to the law involves a wound to society, the individual is brought face to face with a difficult case of conscience.