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Facts and Opinions Volume I - July 31, 1909 - Number 6 The Spirit in Asia
A spirit moves abroad in the world today upsetting kingdoms and raising up new principalities and powers the workings of which are marked by a swiftness and ubiquity new in history. In place of the slow developments and uncertain results of the past we have a quickness and thoroughness which destroy in an hour and remould in a decade. It is noteworthy that these rapid motions are mostly discernible in Asiatic peoples.
The Persian Revolution has settled, with a swiftness and decisiveness second only to the movement of Turkey, the constitutional struggle in Iran between a reactionary Shah and a rejuvenated, eager and ardent nation. The weak and unstable promise-breaker at Teheran has fallen, mourned by a sympathetic Anglo-India but by no one else in the world. Since the late Shah under the pressure of passive resistance yielded a constitution to his people, the young Nationalism of Persia has been attempting to force or persuade his son to keep the oaths with which he started his reign. Some deeds of blood on both sides, some sharp encounters have attended the process but the price paid has been comparatively small. Like other Asiatic States in a similar process of transformation Persia has rejected the theoretic charms of a republic; she has set up a prince who is young enough to be trained to the habits of a constitutional monarch before he takes up the authority of kingship. In this we see the political wisdom, self-restraint and instinct for the right thing to be done which is natural to ancient nations who, though they have grown young again, are not raw and violent people new to political thought and experiment.
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A great and difficult task lies before the newly-risen nation. No other people is so difficultly circumstanced as the Persians. Weak in herself, long a stranger to good government, military strength and discipline, financial soundness and internal efficiency, Persia has to evolve all these under the instant menace from north and south of two of the greatest European empires. The threat of Russia to act herself if the new government does not instantly guarantee security on its borders, a threat made on the morrow of a violent coup d'état and before there has been time for the Regency to cope with any of the immediate difficulties surrounding it, is typical of the kind of peril which this proximity is likely to produce. Self-restraint and patience towards these doubtful friends and unbounded energy and decision within are the only qualities by which the statesmen of Persia can surmount the difficulties in their path and satisfy the claims posterity makes upon them. The internal reorganisation of Persia and the swift development of military strength are the first needs. Till then Persia must bear and forbear.
It is worthy of notice that Sipahidar and Sardar Assad, the Bakhtyari leader, who have effected this revolution, are men who in their youth have studied in Europe. They should know the springs of European politics and thoroughly understand the way in which European Powers have to be dealt with as well as the necessities and conditions of internal reorganisation. The problem for all Asiatic peoples is the preservation of their national individuality and existence while equipping themselves with the weapons of the modern struggle for survival. A deep study of European politics, a strong feeling for Asiatic institutions and ideals, a selfless patriotism and immense faith, courage and self-restraint are the qualities essential to their leaders in these critical times. It is reassuring to find Persians high in praise of the self-denying and lofty character of the new Regent. In the absence of
Page – 118 a patriotic King like the Mikado such a man alone can form the centre of national reconstruction.
Madanlal Dhingra pays the inevitable and foreseen penalty of his crime. We have no wish whatever to load the memory of this unfortunate young man with curses and denunciations. Rather we hope that in his last moments he will be able to look back in a calm spirit on his act and with a mind enlightened by the near approach of death prepare his soul for the great transit. No man but he can say what were the real motives for his deed. If personal resentment and exaggerated emotions were the cause of his crime, a realisation of the true nature of the offence may yet help the soul in its future career. If on the other hand a random patriotism was at its back, we have little hope that reflection will induce him to change his views. Minds imbued with these ideas are the despair of the statesman and the political thinker. They follow their bent with a remorseless firmness which defies alike the arrows of the reasoner and the terrors of a violent death. He must in that case go forth to reap the fruits in other bodies and new circumstances. Here his country remains behind to bear the consequences of his act.
It is at least gratifying to find that the theory of conspiracy is exploded except in the minds of Anglo-Indian papers and perhaps of a few Anglo-Indian statesmen and officials. Not a single circumstance has justified the wild suspicions and wilder inventions which journals like the Daily Mail and Daily Express poured thick upon the world in the first few days that followed the occurrence. These strange fictions are still travelling to us by mail. The most extraordinary of them is perhaps that launched, by a certain gentleman who is bold enough to give his name, upon the World. It seems that long ago the redoubtable Krishnavarma
Page – 119 in a moment of benign and expansive frankness selected this gentleman and revealed to him the details of a gigantic plot he has been elaborating for the last eight years with a view to the murder wholesale and retail of Anglo-Indian officials. If the story were true, Krishnavarma's confidant ought certainly to have been put in the dock as an accessory before the crime on the ground of criminal concealment. These romances sound ridiculous enough now that we read them three weeks afterwards when the excitement of the hour has passed, but the harm this kind of journalism can do was sufficiently proved at the time of the Chinese disturbances and the trouble which preceded the Boer War. That these daily voidings of impudent falsehood and fabrication should be eagerly swallowed by thousands shows the rapid deterioration of British dignity and sobriety.
The exaggerated view of Mr. Shyamji Krishnavarma as an arch conspirator of malign subtlety and power who has long been inculcating terrorist opinions among young men and building up a secret society, is one which none can accept who has any knowledge of this gentleman's past career. Mr. Shyamji Krishnavarma is an earnest, vehement and outspoken idealist passionately attached to his own views and intolerant of all who oppose them. He first went to England to breathe the atmosphere of a free country where he could speak as well as think as he chose. He was then a strong constitutionalist and his chief intellectual preoccupations were Herbert Spencer, Home Rule and the position of the Native States. When the new movement flooded India it carried Mr. Krishnavarma forward with it. He became an ardent Nationalist, a confirmed passive resister with an idealistic aversion to violent methods and a strong conviction that, whatever might be the case with other countries, India would neither need nor resort to them. His conversion to Terrorism is quite recent and has astonished most those who knew him best. We know that Sj. Bepin Pal went to England with the confident expectation of finding full sympathy and co-operation from the
Page – 120 editor of the Indian Sociologist. The quarrel between the two resulting from the change in Mr. Krishnavarma's views is a matter of public knowledge. We refuse therefore to believe that Mr. Krishnavarma has been a plotter of assassination and secret disseminator of Terrorism or that the India House is a centre for the propagation and fulfilment of the ideas he has himself ventilated in the Times.
Time was when Srijut Surendranath Banerjee was held by nervous Anglo-India to be the crowned King of an insurgent Bengal, a very pestilent fellow flooding the country with sedition and rebellion. The whirligig of Time brings round with it strange revenges and at this moment Srijut Surendranath is returning to India acclaimed by English Conservatives as a pillar of the British Empire, India's representative with a mighty organisation behind him pledged to loyalty, co-operation and the support of Morleyan reform. After Surendranath, Srijut Bepin Chandra Pal, reputed editor of Bande Mataram and author of the great Madras speeches, loomed as the arch-plotter of revolution and the chief danger to the Empire. The same Bepin Chandra is now a peaceful and unsuspected journalist and lecturer in London acquitted, we hope, of all wish to be the Ravana destined to shake the British Kailas. But Anglo-India needs a bogeyman and by a few letters to the Times Mr. Krishnavarma has leaped into that eminent but unenviable position. Who knows ? In another year or two even he may be considered a harmless if inconvenient idealist. What is it, one wonders, that has turned the firm, phlegmatic Briton into a nervous quaking old woman in love with imaginative terrors ? Is it democracy ? Is it the new sensationalist Press run by Harmsworth and Company ? The phenomenon is inexplicable, but it is to be feared it is going to be permanent.
There is a general law that Karma rebounds upon the doer.
Page – 121 Associated in Hindu philosophy mainly with the individual and the theory of rebirth, this truth has also been recognised as equally applicable on other lines to the present life and to the destiny of nations. The Karma of the British people in India has been of a mixed quality. So far as it has opened the gates of Western knowledge to the people of this country it has been good and in return the thought and knowledge of India has poured back upon Europe to return the gift with overmeasure. Had they in addition consciously raised up and educated the whole people, all the fruits of that good Karma would have gone to England. But the education they have given is bad, meagre and restricted to the few, and their sympathy for the people has been formal and deficient. In consequence the main flood of the new thought and knowledge has been diverted to America, the giant of the future, which alone of the nations has shown an active and practical sympathy and understanding of our nation. British Karma in India has been bad in so far as it has destroyed our industries and arrested our national development. This Karma is also beginning to recoil, patently in Boycott and unrest, much more subtly in the growing demoralisation of British politics. Already the jealous love of liberty is beginning to wane in the upper classes in England, political thinkers are emerging who announce the failure of democracy, the doctrine of the rule of the strong man is gaining ground and the temptation to strengthen the executive at the expense of the liberty of the citizen is proving too powerful even for a Radical Government. It seems impossible that even a veiled despotism or a virtual oligarchy should ever again rule in England, yet stranger things have happened in history. The change may come by the growth of Socialism and the seizure of the doctrine of State despotism by masterful and ambitious minds to cloak an usurpation the ancient and known forms of which would not be tolerated, just as the Caesars, while avoiding the detested name and form of kingship, yet ruled Rome under the harmless titles of Princeps and Imperator, first man of the state and general, far more despotically than Tarquin could have done. Under whatever disguises the change may steal upon the people, one thing is certain that if Lord Morley and the Anglo-Indian proconsuls succeed in perpetuating absolutism in
Page – 122 India, it will recoil from India to reconquer England. The Nationalists of this country are fighting not only for the liberties of India but for the liberties of England.
It is an ancient and perpetually recurring choice which is now being offered to the British people, the choice between liberty and empire. The two are incompatible except by the substitution of a free federation for a dominion. Rome was offered the choice. She won an empire and lost her liberty. External expansion has always been accompanied by a concentration of internal power in King or oligarchy. Athens, the only people who attempted to be imperial and despotic abroad and democratic at home, broke down in the attempt. In English history also we find that the great expansion in the eighteenth century led to the reactionary rule of the third George and it was not till England after the severe lesson in America adopted her present colonial system that expansion and democracy went hand in hand. That system was not an imperial system but a loose collection of free states only nominally united by the British Crown. The Indian problem is the test of British Liberalism. The colonial system as it stands cannot obtain between two States which are not mother and daughter. The one would not tolerate it, the other would not be content with it. But if England can bring herself to extend in a different form the principle of a collection of free States to India, she may keep her position in the world and her liberty together. Despotic Empire and liberty she cannot keep; she must either yield up absolutism abroad or renounce liberty at home.
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