|
The Strength of the Idea
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 Aurangzebe, 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, 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
Page-411
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 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,
Page-412
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 world-wide 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 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
Page-413
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.
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 and the Maharaja of
Darbhanga, the Maharajas of Coochbehar and Cashmere, 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
nonofficial Europeans, the knight of the umbrella from Bombay, etc. etc. with
Mr. 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 the 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 is 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
Page-414
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 of check on
the management of their own affairs. We had gilted 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 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.
Mr.
G. C. Bose, principal and proprietor of the Bangabasi Col-
Page-415
lege,
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
un-turned 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 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.
Bande
Mataram,
June 8, 1907
Page-416 |