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Appendixes
These appendixes comprise materials written by Sri Aurobindo, mostly by hand, between 1906 and 1908. The first one contains incomplete drafts of three articles, two of which were later published in the Bande Mataram . The second one contains writings and jottings related to the organisation and running of the newspaper, the third, organisational material for a proposed independent Nationalist Party, and the fourth, an interview of 1908.
APPENDIX ONE
Incomplete Drafts of Three Articles
Draft of the Conclusion of “Nagpur and Loyalist Methods” (see pages 742 43)
[.....] whether they will or will not recognize this unconstitutional decision to transfer the place of session arrived at on an unofficial representation and while there were still citizens of Nagpur[,] members of the Reception Committee willing & able to carry out the resolution of the Calcutta Congress to hold the next session at Nagpur. If we do not, we have two courses open to us, either to separate from the dictator-ridden Congress altogether and hold a Nationalist Conference at Nagpur or to leave the Loyalists to a purely Moderate Congress at Surat and according as they act, decide our future course. In any case we think there should be a council of leading men of our party at Nagpur in December to confer on our future action, for in view of the bureaucratic campaign & the danger of a retrograde step on the part of the Congress the times are critical for the Nationalist movement and concerted action is imperative.
Draft of the Opening of “In Praise of Honest John” (see pages 751 54)
The onslaught of the bureaucracy on the Nationalists of Bengal has to a certain extent found the
There is no more common question on men’s lips nowadays than
the question which is naturally suggested by our apparent inability to answer the attacks of a bureaucracy armed with all the
weapons of the law and not overscrupulous as to their use, the question “What shall we do?” The bureaucracy is determined
Page – 1125 to crush the movement. It has no qualms, no scruples; for has not Mr. Morley, the great Radical philosopher, justified anything . and everything they may do by the immortal dictum that the eternal principles which apply to Britain or Ireland or Canada are not eternal & need not exist in India? The analogy of the fur coat need not stop with political conduct, it may be extended to moral conduct. For
Mr. John Morley is a very great man, a very remarkable and
. exceptional man. I have been reading his Arbroath speech again
and my admiration for him has risen to boiling point, so that I am at last obliged to let it bubble over into the columns of the Bande
Mataram. Mr. Morley differs from ordinary mortals in three .
very important respects; first, he is a literary man; secondly, he is a philosopher, thirdly he is a politician. This would not matter
much if he kept his literature, philosophy & politics apart; but he doesn’t. He is a literary philosopher or a philosophic litterateur;
better than this he is a literary philosopher-politician. This is a superlative combination; God cannot better it & the devil does
not want to. For if an ordinary man steals, he steals and no more bones are made about it; he gets caught and is sent to prison,
or he is not and goes on his way rejoicing; in either case the matter is a simple one without any artistic possibilities; but if a
literary philosopher steals, he steals on the basis of the great & eternal verities and in the choicest and most poetical English. An
ordinary man may be illogical and silly and everybody realizes that he is illogical and silly. But the philosopher is logically
illogical and talks nonsense according to the strictest rules of philosophical reasoning, and the literary man will be brilliantly
foolish and illogically convincing. An ordinary man may turn his back on his principles and he will be called a turncoat, or
break all the commandments and be punished by the law & society, unless, of course, he is a millionaire or a member of the
ruling race in India— but the literary philosopher will reconcile his principles and his conduct by an appeal to a fur-coat or a
syllogism from a pair of Northampton boots. He will abrogate all the ten commandments on the strength of a solar topi.
Page – 1126 A politician again will lie and people will perceive it and take it as a matter of course; but a literary philosopher politician will easily prove to you that when he is most a liar, then he is most truthful and when he is juggling most cynically with truth & principle, then he most deserves the name of Honest John; and he will do it in such well turned periods that one must have a very bad ear for the rhythm of sentences to quarrel with his logic. Oh yes, a literary philosopher politician is the choicest work of Heaven, when he is not the most splendid instrument in the hands of the Prince of Darkness. For the Prince of Darkness is not only a gentlemen, as Shakespeare discovered, but a gentlemen of artistic perceptions who knows a fine and carefully-worked tool when he sees it and loves to handle it with the best dexterity and grace of which he is capable.
There are other reasons for which I admire Mr. John Morley.
. I admire him for what he has done not only for the way in
which he has done it. It is true he is not so great a man as his master Gladstone, who was the biggest opportunist and most
adroit political gambler democracy has till now engendered and yet persuaded the world that he was an enthusiast and a man
of high religious feeling and principle. But Gladstone was a genius and his old henchman is only a man of talent. Still Mr.
. Morley has done the best of which he is capable and that is by
no means a poor best. He has served the devil in the name of God with signal success on two occasions. The first was when
he championed the cause of the financiers in Egypt, the men who gamble with the destinies of nations, who make money
out of the groans of the people and coin into gold the blood of patriots and the tears of widows & when, abusing his position
as an influential journalist, he lied to the British public about Arabi and urged on Gladstone to crush the movement of democratic and humanitarian Nationalism in Egypt, that movement in which all that is noble, humane and gracious in Islam sought
to find fulfilment and a small field on earth for the fine flowering of a new Mahomedan civilisation. The second is now when he
is trying in the sordid interests of British capital to crush the
Page – 1127 resurgent life of India and baffle the attempt of the children of Vedanta to recover their own country for the development of a revivified Indian civilisation. The two foulest crimes against the future of humanity which any statesman in recent times could possibly have committed have been engineered under the name and by the advocacy of Mr. John Morley. Truly, Satan knows his . own and sees to it that they do not their great work negligently.
Mr. Morley is a great bookman, a great democrat, a great exponent of principles. No man better fitted than he to prove
that when great human movements are being suppressed by the sword and the prison, it is done in the interests of humanity; that
when a people struggling to live is trampled down by repression, pushed back by the use of the Goorkha and the hooligan, the
warder’s lash & the whipping post into the hell of misery & famine & starvation, of insult & ignominy & bondage from
which it dared to hope for an escape, the motive of the oppressor finds its root in a very agony of conscientiousness, and it is with a
sobbing & bleeding heart that he presses his heel on the people’s throat for their own good; that the ruthless exploitation and
starvation of a country by foreign leeches is one of the best services that can be done to mankind; the international crimes
of the great captains of finance a work of civilisation and the brutal & selfish immolation of nations to Mammon an acceptable offering on the altar of the indwelling God in humanity. But these things have been said & done before; they are the
usual & blasphemous cant of nineteenth-century devil-worship formulated when Commerce began to take the place once nominally allowed to Christ and the ledger became Europe’s Bible. Mr. Morley does it with more authority than others, but his
. own particular original faculty lies in the direction we indicated
when we drew the distinction between the ordinary man & the extraordinary Morley. What he has done has been, after all,
largely on the initiative of others; what he has said about it, is his own, and nothing more his own than the admirably brilliant
& inconsequential phrases in which he has justified wickedness to an admiring nation.
Page – 1128
Incomplete Draft of an Unpublished Article
It is always useful to inquire into the inner psychology of common & vulgar types. Their very crudeness and coarseness is an
advantage, because we see in them in the rough and laid bare to a surface analysis the secret motives which in the higher evolutions
of the type are too self-conscious & self-concealing to be easily detected. It is not easy to detect at first the common Britishness,
if we may be allowed the word, of two men so different, at such opposite poles of human evolution as Mr. John Morley, the
. litterateur, politician, philosopher & fine perfection of the most
serious & sober British culture, and the vulgar Newmaniac, the loud, ranting, blustering, impudently lying Yahoo of Hare Street.
And yet it is by understanding the Newmaniac that we shall best understand not only John Morley but his whole race and
understand too that the policy which Morley accepted from the first to the wonder & dismay of his Indian worshippers, was the
only policy he or any other Englishman could have accepted. It is the common Briton in each which forms the bond of sympathy
between the Newmaniac & Mr. John Morley and makes them .
think so wonderfully alike. That is the only answer which we can give to the question why Englishmen professing to be just,
beneficent & all that is noble & unique, have so readily accepted a mingled policy of brutal repression and false conciliation in
India— because it is the nature of the beast. The Britisher may wish to be or at least to seem just, noble, generous, humane,
beneficent; but what is the use? “To their nature all things at the last return, and what shall coercing it avail?”
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