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Bande Mataram { CALCUTTA, June 28th, 1907 }
The Secret Springs of Morleyism
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
Page – 548 “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
Page – 549 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
Page – 550 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
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
Page – 551 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
Personal Rule and Freedom of Speech and Writing
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
Page – 552 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
Page – 553 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
Page – 554 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
Page – 555 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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