Facts and Opinions

Volume I - Sept. 11, 1909 - Number 12

Impatient Idealists

                    The President of the Hughly Conference, in reference to the formal statement by Sj. Aurobindo Ghose of the adherence of the Nationalist Party to the policy of self-help and passive resistance in spite of their concessions to the Moderate minority, advised the party of the future under the name of impatient idealists to wait. The reproach of idealism has always been brought against those who work with their eye on the future by the politicians wise in their own estimation who look only to the present. The reproach of impatience is levelled with equal ease and readiness against those who in great and critical times have the strength and skill to build with rapidity the foundations or the structure of the future. The advice to wait is valueless unless we know what it is that we have to wait for and why it is compulsory on us to put off the effort which might be made at the present. If we can progress quickly there must be adequate reasons given us for preferring to progress slowly or to stand still. We have not yet heard those adequate reasons. As far as we have gone, the only reason we have been able to find is that the fears and hesitations of our Moderate countrymen stand in our way. The whole Asiatic world is moving forward with enormous rapidity. In Persia, in Turkey, in Japan the impatient idealists have by means suited to the conditions of the country effected the freedom and are now busy building up the dignity and strength of their motherland. Constitutional Government has been everywhere established or is being prepared for consciously and with a steady eye to its establishment in the immediate future. Even in Russia a Duma has been established with however restricted an electorate. Of all the great nations of the world India alone is bidden to wait. It is bidden by Lord Morley and Anglo-India to wait for ever. It is bidden by its own leaders to wait till the rulers are induced by prayers and petitions to concede a

constitutional government and we have been told by those rulers when that will be — never. We have been told not by conservative statesmen but by the chief teacher of Radicalism and Democracy. Under the circumstances, which is the more unpractical and idealistic, the impatience of the Nationalist or the supine and trustful patience of the President of the Hughly Conference ?

The Question of Fitness

It is possible the President had his eye on the question of fitness or unfitness which is the stock sophistry of the opponents of progress. One of the delegates strangely enough selected the occasion of moving the colonial self-government resolution for airing this effete fallacy. The storm of disapprobation which his lapse evoked proves that in Bengal at least that superstition is dead in the minds of the people, and it is well, for no nation can live which at the bidding of foreigners consents to despise itself and distrust its capacities. We freely admit that no nation can be fit for liberty unless it is free, none can be wholly capable of self-government until it governs itself. We freely admit that if we were given self-government we should commit mistakes which we would have to rectify, as has been done even by nations which were old in the exercise of free and self-governing functions. We freely admit that the liberated nation would have to face many and most serious problems even as Turkey and Persia have to face such problems today, as Japan had to face them in the period of its own revolution. But to argue from these propositions to the refusal of self-government is to use a sophistry which can only impose on the minds of children. In the nineteenth century owing to a stupefying education we had contracted the trustfulness, naivety and incapacity to think for itself of the childish intellect and we swallowed whole the sophisms which were administered to us. But we have thrown off that spell and if the impatient idealists of the Nationalist party had done nothing else for their country this would be sufficient justification for their existence that they have made a clean sweep of all this garbage and purified the intellect and the morale of the nation. It is

enough if the capacity is there in the race and if we can show by our action that it is not dead. This we have shown by organised successful and national action under circumstances of unprecedented difficulty. If the success is now jeopardised, it is because of the temporary revival of the weaknesses of our nineteenth century politics and the desire to fall back into safe and easy methods in spite of their unfruitfulness. That is a weakness which is not shared by the whole nation, but is only temporarily suffered because a situation of unprecedented difficulty has been created in which it was not easy to see our way and in the silence that was unfortunately allowed to fall on the country and deepen the uncertainty, the forces of reaction found their opportunity. In times of difficulty to stop still for a long time is a cardinal error, the best way is to move slowly forward, warily watching each step but never faltering. Action solves the difficulties which action creates. Inaction can only paralyse and slay.

Public Disorder and Unfitness

A favourite device of the opponents of progress is to point to the frequent ebullitions of tumult and excitement which have recently found their way into our political life and argue from them to our unfitness.

In the mouths of our own countrymen the use of this argument arises partly from political prejudice but still more from inexperience of political life and the unexamined acceptance of Anglo-Indian sophistries. But in the mouths of Englishmen this kind of language cannot be free from the charge of hypocrisy. They know well of the much worse things that are done in political life in the west and accepted as an inevitable feature of party excitement. The rough horseplay of public meetings which is a familiar feature of excited times in England, would not be tolerated by the more self-disciplined Indian people. As for really serious disturbance the worst things of that kind which have happened in India occurred at Surat when Sj. Surendranath Banerji was refused a hearing and on the next day when Mr. Tilak was threatened on the platform by the sticks and chairs of

Surat loyalists and the Mahratta delegates charged and after a free fight cleared the platform. The refusal to hear a speaker by dint of continuous clamour, hisses and outcries is of such frequent occurrence in England that it would indeed be a strange argument which would infer from such occurrences the unfitness of the English race for self-government. We may instance the University meeting at which Mr. Balfour was once refused a hearing and at the end of an inaudible speech two undergraduates dressed as girls danced up to the platform and gracefully offered the Conservative statesman a garland of shoes which was smilingly accepted. As for the storming of platforms and turning out of the speakers and organisers, that also is a recognised and not altogether infrequent possibility of political life in England. A case remarkable for its sequel happened at Edinburgh when a faith-healer attempted to speak against Medicine and the undergraduates forced their way in, attacked and wounded the police, smashed all the chairs, hurled a ruined piano from the platform and hooted the discreetly absent orator in his hotel and challenged him to come out with his speech. On complaint the Chancellor of the University declared his approval of this riot and in a court of law the students were acquitted on the plea of justification. It may well be said that such a view of what is permissible in political life ought not to be introduced into India, but it is the worst hypocrisy for the citizens of a country where such things not only happen but are tolerated and sometimes approved by public opinion, to turn up the whites of their eyes at Indian disorderliness and argue from it to the unfitness of the race for democratic politics. And it must be remembered that worse things happen on the Continent, free fights occurring even in august legislatures, yet it has not been made an argument for the English people going over to the Continent to govern the  unfit and inferior European races.