Tds M a 79 B57 1915A_ ASIA Jtti!atrtWim;!y!=; OLIfvJ ts > C'/iC CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924064186533 Production Note Cornell University Library pro- duced this volume to replace the irreparably deteriorated original. It was scanned using Xerox soft- ware and equipment at 600 dots per inch resolution and com- pressed prior to storage using CCITT Group 4 compression. The digital data were used to create Cornell's replacement volume on paper that meets the ANSI Stand- ard Z39. 48-1984. The production of this volume was supported in part by the Commission on Pres- ervation and Access and the Xerox Corporation. Digital file copy- right by Cornell University Library 1991. INDIAN NATIONALISM MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited LONDON . BOMBAY , CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO DALLAS . SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO INDIAN NATIONALISM An Independent Estimate EDWYN BEVAN AUTHOR OF "the HOUSE OF SELEUCUS," "JERUSALEM UNDER THE HIGH PRIESTS," " STOICS AND SCEPTICS" MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1913 COPYRIGHT RioHABD Clay and Sons, Limited, BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E., AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK. '• There was once a, fairy who was so clever that she found out how to make butterflies. I don't mean sham ones, no ; but real live ones, which would fly, and eat, and lay eggs, and do everything that they ought ; and she was so proud of her skill that she went flying straight off to the North Pole, to boast to Mother Carey how she could make butterflies. But Mother Carey laughed. "'Know, silly child,' she said, 'that anyone can make things, if they will take time and trouble enough ; but it is not every one who, like me, can make things make themselves.' " — The Water Babies. CONTENTS PAQK INTKODTJCTORY EXPLANATION 1 CHAPTER I MIGHT AND RIfiHT .... CHAPTEK II THE CASE FOK THE E.MHRE 32 CHAPTER III THE SEAMY SIDE . . 52 CHAPTER IV MODERATES AND EXTREMISTS 95 CHAPTER V THE OUTLOOK . 121 INDIAN NATIONALISM INTRODUCTORY EXPLANATION. It will be apparent to anyone who turns over the pages of this little book, that it does not set out to champion the views of any particular camp. None of the parties, which the question of Indian Nationalism has thrown into antagonistic groups, will be pleased with it, and, if they do not think it too insignificant to rouse so serious an emotion, may even be angry with it. It merely gives the impressions of a de- tached onlooker, who approached the present Indian Question by a path which might, I suppose, be called academic. That is in some ways an advantage ; on the other hand, I present the word to any hostile critic who wants a stone near at 2 INDIAN NATIONALISM hand to throw at me. I came to think about India, my mind already filled with an earlier phase of the interaction between the Rationalist culture of Europe and Asiatic traditions — the phase when Hellenism invaded Asia under Alexander, and continued its process of penetration under Rome. The coming together of different traditions, different forms of mentality — their meeting, their antagon- ism at one point, their coalescence at another, the new things that come out of the contact — has always had for me a peculiar fascination. And I saw what happened then and what is happening to-day as parts of one movement. I saw the Rational civilisation of Europe, the new thing which appeared in the world in the little Greek republics two millen- niums and a-half ago, go forth to conquer under Alexander ; I saw it establish itself — though at a moment when its quality was already beginning to deteriorate — in Nearer Asia ; then both in Europe and Asia it formed a coalescence with something of a INTRODUCTORY 3 wholly different order, with the movement, the Life, whose origin was in the hills of Galilee, with the result that the dSbns of Hellenic thought took new concrete shape as an intellectual shell for that Life, a shell which in one way straitened and neutralised it, and in another way pre- served and conveyed it : then this Chris- tianised Hellenism was submerged both in Europe and Asia by the barbarian deluge which brought on the Middle Ages ; and both in Europe and Asia the Hellenism gradually began to work through the barbarism which had been heaped upon it — Asia leading at first with the Moham- medan, largely Hellenistic, culture of the Middle Ages ; then after the Mongol invasions, Asia drops back, and from the fourteenth century the Christian-Hellenistic tradition of Europe expands into the vigorous, complex. Rationalistic civilisation of modern times. And once more in this far richer phase of its existence, the Rational civilisation which arose among the Greek republics goes forth conquer- B 2 4 INDIAN NATIONALISM iug into Asia. The last province, towards the North-West, of British India was the last province, towards the South-East, of Alexander's Empire. We do not know yet — only historians centuries hence will know — what is going to come this time of the meeting, the antagonism, the coalescence. But it is explicable, perhaps, that anyone who has tried to look through the mists of time at that earlier phase, should look with immense interest at what is going forward under our eyes. In studying antiquity, one feels at every turn the sparseness of the material — the little collection of books and fragments of books, the broken inscribed stones, out of which one has to reconstruct the vast pulsating life of a whole world. We scrutinise our documents more and more minutely and try to wrest more meaning out of them by reading between the lines. But they remain written words, and many of our questions encounter inexorable silence. If only for one half-hour we could talk to someone who had trodden the streets of INTRODUCTORY 5 Antioch or Bactra, what stretches of new knowledge would be suddenly thrown open to us ! If only we could study that process in living men instead of in dead writing on paper or stone ! With this sense of restriction become almost habitual, the historian turns to the interaction of England and India and finds now that the embarrassment is not the scarcity, but the vast volume, of the material. And the men in whom the process is going on, are not men who speak to him from far away through written words ; he stands in the midst of the process himself; it is going on in him; and these other men, Indians, English, whom he may know as a man knows his friend, it is going on in them. Surely if ever there were a case when intellectual curiosity might draw anyone, it is here. But I don't suppose that anyone can enter into reaUy human relations with his fellow- men, and intellectual curiosity not be merged in feelings of another kind. There has been a vein of egoism in all 6 INDIAN NATIONALISM this, but I feel that the book is going to be so much the utterance of my own personal reaction to the fact of India, so little a scientific treatise, that I may as well strike the personal note at once. It is not a treatise at all. It is an attempt to say things that I have come to feel strongly and should like to say as best I can. The reaction of India to the great body of traditions, institutions, ideas, thrown in these latter days upon her — all that is shortly termed " the West " — takes in part the form of Nationalism. The word brings us to the heart of the crisis ; and a crisis it is in the literal sense, a time of judging for acceptance or rejection, and men come to the new things with old canons of judgment established in their minds, old desires, habits, affections, which, in the very attempt to judge new things by them, men bring into judgment themselves. Through the various difficulties, tensions, doubts, travailings, combinations, which result, life becomes deeper and richer. Different ideas form centres round which these canons, INTRODUCTORY 7 habits and affections group themselves, and among such central ideas that of the Nation is pre-eminent. Nationalism in India has many aspects beside the political. Over the whole field in which interaction between the native tradition and the new things is going on — religion, art, social life, individual ethics — Nationalism is an organising principle of conservation and resistance. But to say that political Nationalism is not the only form of Nationalism is to say too little. I agree fully with those who maintain that it is not even the most important form, that the political question has drawn to itself in the past a disproportionate amount of attention, eclipsing other questions which affect the future of India far more deeply and vitally. It may therefore seem to require some explanation why, holding this view, I write a book dealing almost ex- clusively with political Nationalism. It is, I may say, largely the desire to get rid of the political question, so far as I am concerned ; to make articulate what I feel 8 INDIAN NATIONALISM about it, and theu turn to the other, more vital things. I find that the political question, unless one grasps it and drags it forward into the light of day, is likely always to loom in a troublesome way in the back- ground. Especially an Englishman, it seems to me, who allows his attitude re- garding that to remain obscure, either to himself or to others, will seem to shirk the issues, just when it is difficult to be honest, and a suggestion of hedging may there- fore infect his treatment of the other, greater problems. Some day it may be granted to me to enter upon that larger field. And meantime I am trying to state what I have been able to understand of the political problem, as a kind of katharsis. CHAPTER I MIGHT AND RIGHT Indian Nationalism, in its political aspect, means the view that the government of the country by British officials is something to be negated, to be got rid of. And first one notices that on the fundamental principle, not only are all young Indians Nationalists, but that the view which seems to prevail in the highest circles of Government agrees with them. We have had authoritative statements that the ultimate object of the British rulers is to train India for self- government. In so far, the British Govern- ment is itself working, in the best way it knows, for its own negation. The difference of opinion that matters does not concern the goal : it concerns the method of reach- 10 INDIAN NATIONALISM ing it, the speed with which it can be reached. No intelligent member of the governing class, I imagine, however stiff in his official prepossessions, supposes that three hundred years hence young English- men will be going out year by year, as they are going to-day, to man the higher ranks of the Civil Service in India ; no Nationalist, however vehement, but would wish the Bri- tish officials if they were willing to quit the country to-morrow, to give at least a month's notice. Between one month and three hundred years there are an indefinite number of stopping places, and opinion may fix the readiness of India for self-govern- ment at any one of them. Two considerations, I think, should govern all discussion of the problem from the outset. One is that we must acknow- ledge accomplished fact. It is no good arguing in the abstract, as if the British rule in India were a mere possibility and we had to consider whether it would be good to impose it upon an India chaotic or independent. That might have been MIGHT AND RIGHT 11 possible before Clive took the momentous step of assuming the government of Bengal : we see now that the British Empire in India grew up from that decision by a kind of logical inevitability in which the English never looked more than a step ahead. But whether right or wrong, there is no undoing what is done. For the present state of things no living men who stand on the earth are responsible ; we, English and Indians, have to deal with a situation created by our fathers. We have got to see how the relation into which we were born can be best turned to our common good and the good of those who come after us. Personally, I think it will in the long run prove to have been fortunate for India that at that moment of her history the English power entered in ; but if you take the opposite view, if you think it an unfor- tunate entanglement, we have all been born to find the cords of that entanglement already around us, and it belongs to us, as reasonable beings, to ease or undo the knots with a little patient intelligence and 12 INDIAN NATIONALISM goodwill, uot to plunge wildly like beasts in a net and tear ourselves by stupid violence. The second consideration is one often forgotten, I think, both by English and Indians. All of us, who discuss the subject, have a certain modicum of education, and we approach it with some notion of great events in the past of mankind ; echoes and memories haunt us of other men's conflicts and agonies and triumphs, and, consciously or sub-consciously, affect our view of the present. The European literature with which young Indians are made familiar by their modern education, presents them with glowing pictures of people winning their independence from alien domination by peril of the sword, and it is no wonder that the name of Mazzini sounds to them like a trumpet-call. It is idle to lay the blame for this upon the prescribed educa- tional curriculum, as if they could be taught English at all and not find out that these things are written in our books ! The trouble is that we Englishmen have put it MIGHT AND RIGHT 13 on record that we admire these things, and that record we cannot shuffle away or efface. Or again, the English official can hardly help being haunted by the great memories of Rome, by what he was taught perhaps long ago at school, of that vast imperial system, based indeed upon force, and yet a force which educated and shaped the rude nations of Europe for great destinies. Or he may think rather of the old Hellenistic and Roman rule in Asia, which writers like Mr. Meredith Townsend tell him (falsely) left no impress upon the provincials, and then he will be apt to feel that he too is merely repeating an experiment already proved to be futile. Now it is right that analogies of the past should help us in dealing with the things of the present : to some extent the experience of the race is bound to take the form of generalisations. But what I think is often forgotten is how widely such historical generalisations differ from the generalisations of physical science. In history every personality and every situation is really unique ; there may be 14 INDIAN NATIONALISM resemblance in certain points between different personalities and diflPerent situa- tions, but the resemblance is never more than partial. We can get no series of exactly parallel cases upon which to base a strict induction. Historical generalisa- tions are, therefore, apt to break down continually when applied to new concrete cases. They may be useful in giving us suggestions, but the individual character of the concrete case has always to be studied if our action is to be well-directed. The Indian situation is not really like that of Italy under the Austrians or of the Syrian provincials under Rome. There never was a situation before in the history of mankind like that of India to-day. In the past history through which the two peoples have come to the present juncture there are factors which make their association in this manner something unprecedented. And more than this : not only does history never, strictly speaking, repeat itself, but the history of mankind as a whole, shows us a succession of epochs marked by a MIGHT AND RIGHT 15 progressive enlargement of the means of communication — speech, writing, printing, and now in these latter days the triad, steam, electricity, and petrol — in each of which epochs things become possible that were impossible before. In each epoch, larger associations of men for common purposes — ^the tribe, the city, the modern national state — have been brought about. The last few generations have seen an enlargement of the means of communica- tion, which would have been incredible to our fathers. Already the whole world has been drawn together as never before. But we are only at the beginning of the new era. It will be unlike anything that the world has yet known. That is why popular generalisations about East and West, or Europe and Asia, drawn from the past, even if they are true of the past (which they usually are not) are especially foolish as applied to the new time before us. No doubt, as has just been said, it is according to the English tradition to sym- pathise with nations who rise to throw off" 16 INDIAN NATIONALISM foreign rule. There is something in us which makes us feel that for one set of men to impose their will by force upon any other set of men is, one cannot say always a wrong, but something which needs to be justified by very special considerations. And yet we do not usually regard the great conquests of the past with abhorrence. Our histories are not written in a way to make us feel the conquests of Alexander or the growth of the Roman power as crime on a gigantic scale. There is still for us a kind of glory attached to conquest and empire. This valuation is determined, I think, psychologically, by a variety of considerations. It is in part due to the pagan classical tradition, which glorified success in war for its own sake, an inherited hardness in our common standards, which Christianity has not yet done away. But it is not only that. It is partly the per- ception that other powers were implied in conquest than mere brute force, nobler powers of mind, resolution, daring, practical intelligence, method, power of organisation. MIGHT AND RIGHT 17 that it was tlie finer type of man in some respects which prevailed. Then the result of the conquest, bringing together into one system people of many nations, seems, when we look back, to have furthered the progress of mankind. It seems plain that the same things could never have been achieved, had mankind remained a multitude of small separate communities, strange or hostile to each other, and it was the building up of empires by conquest which bound them together. When we think of the " Roman Peace" extended over a congeries of diverse races and states for centuries, of wild fighting peoples taught the majesty of one reasonable Law, of the strong straight roads going out to all quarters, of the similar milestones, measuring the distance from one centre, found in Scotland and in Syria, of how the consciousness of belonging to a splendid world-state dignified the lives of all those — Celtic, German, Greek, African, Asiatic as they might be in blood — ^who could say "I am a Roman citizen," we feel that this construction was a great achievement c 18 INDIAN NATIONALISM of the human spirit, something we could not wish not done. Or perhaps to the modern mind, all moral valuation applied to the great processes of history appears absurd. The Darwinian doctrine is often understood to mean that in conquest the fittest comes to the top, that everything that happens is determined by laws fixed from the beginning, and that to condemn any historical development is to quarrel with the design of Nature, working her deep purpose ruthlessly and mightily, too great and elemental to care for the little fretful moralities of men. All these things surely have determined the way in which men ordinarily regard conquest, and help to take away any feeling of moral discomfort the present generation of Englishmen might have in finding themselves born to a position of command over three hundred millions of their fellow men. And yet perhaps we feel to-day, as the ruling race in the great Empires of the past never felt, that there is a question to be answered : What right here gives its MIGHT AND RIGHT 19 sanction to might ? It may be regarded as a degenerate sensibility showing us less worthy of empire than the old Eomans with their robust unquestioning brutality. We cannot imagine them anxious about their right " To govern the peoples by their empery, Spare the bent neck, and battle down the proud." Or it may be that the spiritual in Christendom is slowly asserting itself against the mass of inherited paganism. Any way, it is a novel peculiarity of the British Empire in India that the ruling race this time feels the necessity of justifying its position by other sanctions than the right of conquest. The very frequency and earnestness with which the moral justification of our rule is set forth bewrays a sense that there is a question pressing upon us. For the theory that the unbridled struggle for prevalence among human societies necessarily produces the type of greatest spiritual worth, or that everything in history is to be immune from censure because it is the result of natural laws greater than our moral standards, is a c2 20 INDIAN NATIONALISM very crude reading of Darwinism, after all, common perhaps among people who pride themselves on catching up some of the fashionable phrases of the day, but long since exposed by serious thinkers. I believe myself that the maintenance of the British supremacy in India for the present is the least ol)jectionable of all possible courses, not onl)^ from the English, but from the Indian, point of view, but I cannot imagine a man who believes in moral values not having his uncomfortable moments, never having felt that there is a question to be answered. It is a dreadful thing to have the destiny of three hundred millions on one's shoulders ! It would be dreadful if they had been thrust upon us, it is still more so if we have taken them on ourselves by force. So far as I can see, there are three grounds on which we find the forcible co- ercion of one community of men by another justified by current opinion. Of course, if you hold the view connected with the early Quakers and Tolstoi that the employment MIGHT AND RIGHT 21 of force is always wrong, all such coercion is condemned straightaway and there is no defence possible. But these views have not so far commended themselves to the general conscience of Christendom, which holds that there is a legitimate use of force, and that by allowing it in within these limits the general good of mankind is furthered. Accepting this view for the time being (and it is the one which seems to be the sanest) three grounds of justification may be alleged for the forcible coercion of some com- munities of men. Firstly, it sometimes appears that the safety of a large political system demands the inclusion in it of some community numerically small as compared with the numbers whose well-being is bound up with the maintenance of the system as a whole. In that case it might be maintained that the governing power in the system has a right to compel the smaller community to belong to the system, whether it wants to or not. An extreme imaginary case would be supposing Portsmouth wished to separate from England and attach 22 INDIAN NATIONALISM itself to France or Germany : it would be difficult to condemn the rest of Great Britain if it prevented the men of Portsmouth by force from carrying out their design. I take an extreme imaginary case, because in the actual cases in which this motive of self- defence determines action, the abstract question of the rightness of the principle is mixed up with the question how far the principle is applicable to those particular circumstances, and I wanted the principle to be considered in its abstract purity. No doubt in many cases in which a demand for national independence is resisted by the imperial power, it is the belief that the coherence of the empire as a whole would be imperilled by granting it, which is the inhibiting motive. If Ireland were far away in the Atlantic, if Egypt did not command the main line of communication between England and India — an easy prey, if left to itself, to any foreign Power — the demands of the Nationalists in both cases would probably have been satisfied long ago, so far as the British Government was MIGHT AND RIGHT 23 concerned. As it is, it is felt that the desires of some few millions must yield to the good of a much larger number of millions. Secondly, coercion is held to be legiti- mate, where tracts of the earth's surface had been occupied by primitive races, unable to turn them to account, and civilised peoples have entered in by force to take them in possession. Whatever frightful tale of wrong done by civilised man to primitive man can be proved against us, it would hardly be possible to maintain that great continents, capable of producing food for the world, ought to have been abandoned for all time by the rest of mankind to the backward tribes who first wandered into them, or to judge such tribes' right of possession as equivalent to a legal title in an ordered community. But since tribes on that low level form only a subordinate part of the population of India, its conquest presents no parallel to the European con- quest, say of South Africa or Australia. The third ground on which the rule of 24 INDIAN NATIONALISM one people over another is defended is that it makes for the good of the ruled. It is this ground which is put forward in the case of India. It is maintained that the British rule secures a tranquillity and order for the whole peninsula, a higher level of justice and administrative efficiency, and consequently greater happiness for the people as a whole, than would be possible if the country were left to itself. It is therefore said to be, not only legitimate for England to maintain its supremacy for its own advantage, but an absolute duty which it could not abandon without betraying a people committed to its charge. This ground — the good of the ruled — we may observe, is not usually alleged as a reason for making fresh conquests. Not even England claims that she has a general man- date from the Almighty for going into other people's houses and putting them in order. A statesman would hardly feel he had a right to launch his people upon an adven- ture which was not for his people's own profit. The fact indeed that a nation's MIGHT AND RIGHT 25 public action is determined, not directly by the nation, but by representatives and trustees, makes it far harder for a nation to engage in an altruistic undertaking than it is for an individual. However deplorable the interior condition of a foreign country might be, an English statesman would not be likely to propose to his people to annex it out of pure philanthropy. No, it is when the conquest has been made for other reasons that the good of the ruled is alleged as a reason for maintaining it. It is ad- duced, for example, as a supplementary justification, where the conquest was ori- ginally prompted by a motive of self- defence, as in the case of the British occu- pation of Egypt. We went into the country to prevent its falling into the hands of a Power hostile to the British Empire, but we feel that in order to have a good conscience about it we are bound to make our rule there as profitable and pleasant for the Egyptians themselves as is consistent with our keeping a strong hand upon the su- preme control. We believe, in fact, that 26 INDIAN NATIONALISM what would follow an evacuation of the country would be something much worse for Egypt than any grievance that our presence there entails, and that meanwhile the material condition of the country is im- proving under British stimulus and direc- tion by leaps and bounds. The fact, however, that the other motive, the self-regarding one, was the determining one in the first instance, and remains there always alongside of the altruistic motive, in the case both of India and Egypt, makes some people impatient with all this talk of the good of the ruled. It savours to them of cant and insincerity, an attempt to give a fair moral colour to what is essentially sel- fish. It is not only enemies of the British rule, not only men who want to sneer at its apologists, there are Englishmen, all in favour of the position being strongly held, who yet would prefer that all pretence of finding moral reasons for it should be given up and that we should say bluntly : " We won the position by the sword, and we mean to hold it by the sword." It would be better MIGHT AND RIGHT 27 for all concerned in the long run, they say, to be honest about it ; it only leads to con- tinued misunderstandings and disappoint- ments if we try to cover up facts with com- fortable illusions. This view is, of course, a cynical one, and the cynic always claims superior honesty. The cynic, as a rule, has facts on his side — some part of the facts, that is, often a part of which the too easy optimist may profit- ably be reminded. But it does not follow that cynicism is true to the facts taken as a whole. In the case of India, it is quite true that the driving motive in the advance of the British rule was not concern for the happiness of the Indian peoples. It was the commonplace desire, in the first instance, on the part of a commercial people to secure a safe market, and then the desire to safe- guard what was won. It is quite true that if there were no prospect of holding India except at a continuous loss to the British people with no compensating advantage, we should have statesmen in England counsel- ling us to get out of it as expeditiously as 28 INDIAN NATIONALISM we could, and leave the Indian peoples to take their chance with nothing but our pious wishes to speed them. So far the facts are with the cynic. But we must re- member on the other side that this extreme simplification of the business, this reduction of the motives in play to a single self- regarding one, would be improbable even in the case of an individual, and is altogether incredible in the case of a nation. For, speaking as we do of the nation meta- phorically as if it were a single personality, we are apt to forget that it is in fact a com- plex of millions of individual characters and purposes largely contradictory. It may be true that the individuals who first built up the British rule in India were actuated, and that many of the individuals who work to maintain it are now actuated, exclusively or predominantly, by regard for the advan- tage of their own nation, or of some section of their own nation, or possibly even their own personal profit ; it is none the less true that regard for the good of India is also a motive really operative in a large numl)er MIGHT AND RIGHT 29 of Englishmen. There has always been a section of the English people who care for justice and loving-kindness more than for mastery, for honour more than for material gain. The cynic may say it is a minority. Well, whatever it may be numerically, I believe the influence of this section has been of enormous importance. It has been always there, the conscience of the people. Its judgment often takes long to tell. Baser motives may hurry the nation over and over again into courses which that section will not approve, for its operation is too slow to keep pace with the speed of public action, and gives therefore no guarantee against the people plunging into crime ; indeed, it may often appear impotent ; and yet I believe that in the end its protest prevails ; no wrong can withstand for always its steady pressure, no crime can be persisted in, against which it sets its face. The importation of opium into China was a typical case. We see there the rash public action, the protest main- tained year after year, and then public 30 INDIAN NATIONALISM opinion slowly brought round to the higher view. If this section, which cares supremely for loving-kindness and justice and honour, had believed that the British rule in India was inconsistent with those things, that rule could not have gone on till now. Because this section has remained unconvinced that the demand for autonomy coincides with India's real good, and believes that England has a work of service to do for India, which it would be a baseness to abandon, — because of this British rule has continued. It could not continue if it were maintained only by the lower selfish vainglorious passions of the community ; but the fact cannot be denied ; the best part, the conscience, of the nation sanctions it. In this sense it is not cant, it is plain truth, to say that the pillar upon which the British rule in India rests is the belief that it secures the maximum of good, certain unalterable things being what they are, for the Indian people, that, however our fathers came by the power, we hold it now as a trust. MIGHT AND RIGHT 31 This belief on the part of the best section of the English people is a fact. We may think that thev are wrong, but it cannot be denied that they really do hold the belief. What are the considerations which confirm them in it ? Well, the case for British rule in India has been put so often, that one feels it is going over old, old ground to attempt to summarise it. Every statement we have heard repeated so many times ! And yet one must try the patience of readers by glancing at the familiar argu- ments once again. CHAPTER II THE CASE FOR THE EMPIRE A MAN, knowing little of the real India, and coming into contact with Indians of the educated class, who expound to him, perhaps with singular eloquence and force, the national demand for self-government, is apt, we are told, to get the values of things in utterly false proportion. He does not realise that these political aspirations are confined to a section of the community numerically insignificant, to the few who have received a modern, that is to say a more or less Western, literary education. If he visits India he is likely to be sur- rounded by a group of them from his first landing, who shepherd him carefully and prevent his seeing anything except through THE CASE FOR THE EMPIRE 33 their spectacles. But these clever young men are not the people of India. The millions of India are outspread, tranquil and laborious, in thousands and thousands of sun-baked villages over infinite dusty plains, among the rich greenness of moun- tain sides, or beside the stream of sacred rivers, far outside the narrow zone of political agitation. They follow from birth to death the routine marked out by im- memorial custom, and ask nothing of their rulers but protection from disturbance. It is this simple agricultural people, an enor- mous majority of the population of India, for whom the British Government cares, for whom it works, and spends and plans. Its representatives, the district officers, live amongst them, year in, year out, in daily contact with the interests, the troubles, the pleasures of their primitive lives,^ and come ' This was truer, probably, of the older generation than of the present one, not so much through any fault of the latter, as because communications with headquarters take up so much of the time, and take away so much of the initiative, of the modem district officer, that he has nut the same opportunity, as the old one had, for cultivating human relations. 34 INDIAN NATIONALISM in this way to know them far better than the lawyers and journalists of the great towns do, the men of talk who claim to speak in the name of India. It is not part of the business of the English district officer to talk about India, but it is part of his business to think day and night how this village is to be fed in seasons of famine, and that village kept free from plague, how the petty quarrels which threaten to impede harmonious co-operation in that narrow world may he lubricated or adjusted, how water may be brought to the dry land, meaning more fruitful work for the industri- ous hands and more bread for the hungry ; it is his business, if need be, to stay at his post through the summer heats, saving others but not himself, to die for India, if need be, with shut lips, and expect neither notice nor reward. In one way indeed this people is already self-governing, in so far as some of their immediate simple needs are provided for by the operation of old custom apart from Government interference ; but it isobvious that the tranquillity andsufficiency THE CASE FOR THE EMPIRE 35 of the village life as a whole depends on its being enclosed in an imperial system which keeps off the armed aggressor and carries through great works of irrigation and sanita- tion and road-making ; and self-government, in the sense of taking part in the control of this imperial system, is something which it is ludicrous to think of such a people possess- ing, utterly strange and unintelligible as all this machine of government would be to their unsophisticated minds. A paternal despotism is the only possible form which the ruling power can take, as things are. And to hand over these passive millions to the rule of those who would not care for them, as they are cared for now, would not be a laudable renunciation ; it would be the betrayal of a trust. But why assume, it may here be asked, that if they were handed over to their own fellow-countrymen, some of whom are demanding it as their right, they would be worse cared for than now ? Surely their natural kinsmen would care for them as well as foreigners do ? It would be a D 2 36 INDIAN NATIONALISM mistake, we are told in answer, to suppose so. The fact of belonging to one race does not override human selfishness, and, outside the educated circle, an Indian is little moved by the racial or national idea. We have but to look at the conduct of the Indian money-lender or corn-merchant towards his poorer brethren, the way the Indian mill-owner enriches himself by the labour of little children, to fore- cast what it would mean for these millions to be given over to the tender mercies of the professional and commercial classes in their own country. Sir Valentine Chirol in his book on Indian Unrest has maintained that even the educated men, to whom the Nationalist agitation is due, are largely members of the Brahman caste, and that their governing desire is to regain for their caste the political power which it had in old India. Evidence from other quarters seems to show that Sir Valentine went too far in generalis- ing from facts gathered in one part of the Indian field — the Mahratta country — but if THE CASE FOR THE EMPIRE 37 the special form under which the disunion of India appears in that part is jealous antagonism on the part of the Brahmans to the inferior castes, it is true over the whole field, we are told, that men are guided far more by the interests of the smaller groups to which they may belong — the caste, sub- caste, professional set, commercial com- munity or social class — ^than by concern for the toiling multitude. It would be vain to hope that any sense of solidarity would act as an eflfective check, in the case of the majority, to prevent their regarding power committed to them as an opportunity for enriching or aggrandising themselves or their group at the expense of the people. The British Government only reaches the level it does of purity and efficiency because among Englishmen generally a higher standard of honesty prevails than prevails generally among the upper class in India. There are, of course, on both sides individual exceptions, venal Englishmen and incorruptible Indians, but it is the general standard which we have here to 38 INDIAN NATIONALISM take account of, and the judicial upright- ness which characterises the British administration would instantly disappear if the English on a large scale gave place to Indians. The common people themselves are quite aware of it — the common people who would rather bring their suits before an English magistrate than before one of their own race. And in claiming this higher standard of judicial and administrative honesty for Englishmen, we are not, it is said, claiming something incredible. The two standards are, after all, only the natural outcome of the past history of England and the past history of India. The free constitutional government under which the English race has lived for many generations has naturally produced qualities which are not produced under the despotisms of the East. Other virtues may have been evolved under other conditions, but it is reasonable to suppose that the particular virtues which are required for healthy public life should have been evolved where comparatively healthy public life has THE CASE FOR THE EMPIRE 39 existed. It would, indeed, be absurd to expect that the same sort of man should be produced by two wholly diflFerent systems ; and equally absurd to suppose that a race can change its character, the biological result of hundreds of years, in a moment, by the stroke of a constitution-making pen. Personally, I do not quite trust the latter kind of reasoning. We are very fond of biological arguments now-a-days, and they sound scientific and all that, but they are extraordinarily slippery things in the sphere of morals . No doubt, the inherited tempera- ment of different individuals supplies very different material for the will to deal with, a different body of capacities, sensibilities, appetites, desires. But the direction of the will to good or evil seems to me a matter of individual choice, with which biology has little to do. And honesty is a matter of the direction of the will. The choice in moral matters, it would follow, is influenced not biologically, but spiritually, by the influence of other persons. A bad tradition. 40 INDIAN NATIONALISM acting in this way as a spiritual influence, may, of course, depress the general moral standard in a community, and it is intelligi- ble that a corrupt tradition in public life may have led to a low standard prevailing to-day in the East. But supposing the personal influences brought to bear upon the individual changed, there seems no biological reason why the young Indian should grow up any less honest than the young Englishman. As a matter of fact, the young Indians coming from educational establishments where there is a healthy tradition — such institutions as the great Christian College at Madras or the Moham- medan College of Aligarh, to name two eminent examples among many — will be likely to show no less honesty than Englishmen in positions of public trust. " Ah, yes," it will be answered, " but honesty, after all, is only part of the matter. The qualities which make the average Englishman reach the efficiency which he does in the work of administration consist in something deeper than a direc- THE CASE FOR THE EMPIRE 41 tion of the will. They inhere in that temperament, that special body of capacities and sensibilities, which you admit is a matter of biological inheritance. Without them, a man may be as honest as you like in intention, and yet ineffectual in practical affairs. What those qualities are can be better felt than described. One might perhaps analyse them as a kind of energy of initiative, steadiness and resource in emergencies, precision and thoroughness necessary for co-ordination and organisation, a practical common-sense which sees the way by a kind of instinct rather than by any articulate process of reasoning. That kind of robustness and reliability may be possessed by individual Indians, but it is difficult to devise any test — paper exam- inations certainly are none — by which those who possess the qualities can be sorted out from the mass. In the case of Englishmen paper examinations are appropriate, because some measure of those other qualities may usually be taken for granted." If we imagine the Englishmen who to-day 42 INDIAN NATIONALISM direct the government of India standing at the bar of history, examined by those who centuries hence will pass judgment on the work England did in the world just as we pass judgment now on Rome, examined as touching their unwillingness at this moment of time to relinquish the power of which they stand possessed, we must, I think, see it would not be fair to treat that unwilling- ness as a mere egoistic clinging to power for its own sake. Future times will surely recognise that for men who had built such a machine of government, and had seen it function to such beneficent purpose, who had come to regard it, as makers regard their own work, with affection and pride, it was hard to give it up into hands which they were sure were too feeble to grasp it, in which the whole machine would fall into ruin and disarray. And then the crowning consideration of all ! The catastrophe these men foresaw, on such a supposition, was not limited to the ruin and disarray of the administrative machine. That ruin meant a setting free of THE CASE FOR THE EMPIRE 43 all the brute force, within and round about the frontiers of India, which their rule had kept under. Instantly the discordant elements which the strong band of a foreign rule had held together in temporary unity would fly asunder. The most barbarous elements — half-wild fighting peoples from the North-West and the hills, all the rascality within the land which was ready to live by the sword — would submerge the rest. In such a time of horror, the first to suffer, it was foreseen, would be the educated class which had carried on the agitation. Parliamentary eloquence, journalistic smartness, enlightened ideas, would count for little then. Savagery and chaos would triumphantly overflow all the dykes which had kept secure for some generations a space wherein civilised life could thrive. The strong band of a foreign rule — yes, that figure points to the aspect, under which the situation often presents itself to me. If it is true in any sense to speak of the population of India as one people — and it is true that there is some community of 44 INDIAN NATIONALISM culture and tradition and way of looking at life all over India — we must regard the Indian people as split up and divided more than any other people in the world. The cleavages between race and race, between creed and creed, between men of one language and men of another, between caste and caste, each an exclusive com- munity with separate interests — all these profound divisions make India a parallel, not to any single European country, but to Europe as a whole. Europe, too, shows a certain community of culture and tradition and sentiment extended over a variety of nations and languages. But even Europe is less divided than India, for though we may discern the principle of the Indian caste-system in our different social strata, in the opposition of capital and labour, and so on, the principle is nowhere elaborated and stereotyped as it is in India. And now all this mass of diversity has been pressed together, has been compelled to exist peaceably side by side, has been brought under the operation of one law, by THE CASE FOR THE EMPIRE 45 a strong external band. No former Indian kings had ever succeeded (though some, like Asoka, almost succeeded for a moment), in making the whole of India a political unity. A normal human body- is held together by internal coherence, by the bones, bands, and fibres of the organ- ism, but when bones are dislocated or connecting fibres torn asunder, surgeons, I believe, sometimes case the body in a hard frame of plaster of Paris or steel to hold it together till the gradual process of internal growth has joined the dislocated bones and knit up the torn fibres. It is not the normal thing for a man to wear a steel frame ; it is not beautiful ; it is not comfortable, calculated rather to cause considerable cutaneous irritation ; it ham- pers movement ; and if the frame is a well- made one, it is likely to be expensive ; but in spite of all these drawbacks, an abnormal dislocation of the body within is held to demand an abnormal constraint without. What if, after all, it should have been a kind Providence which picked up India, 46 INDIAN NATIONALISM while she floundered miserably in all the weakness and anguish and shame of her internal disintegration, and fastened round her for a time a strong, compelling, external band ? It is a mistake then for her to point to the freely-moving countries of Europe, or to a compact and disciplined state like Japan, and ask, " Why should not I act as those ? " — as much a mistake as it would be for the dislocated man to point to people running and walking and cry, "Take off this horrible frame, doctor: those people get on well enough without one : take off this frame, I say : how can I move about in it ? Besides it makes one ache abominably to be strapped up like this." A steel frame, in contrast with the natural freedom of the body, is always an evil ; but in contrast with the condition of the broken or dislocated body without it, it may be a necessary evil. And if the need for the external band be once admitted, the financial grievance, which has played a part in the Nationalist agitation, ceases to be reasonable. For in THE CASE FOR THE EMPIRE 47 attempting to prove what is called " the drain," all the old Nationalist argument does is to prove by marshalled arrays of statistics the perfectly obvious fact that a steel frame costs more than an ordinary belt. Leaving out of account the interest paid on money borrowed for works of public utility, which every country, free or not, pays to its foreign creditors, it can be shown that a certain amount of money goes regularly out of the country in the form of pensions to ex-officials or re- mittances for officials' families in England. But it is obvious that, if you have a service of foreign officials at all, you must offer, in order to get good ones, higher remunera- tion than would suffice for people of the country. If a man needing a steel frame will not pay enough for one of good work- manship, he will only get an inferior article which will be less effectual and probably be much more uncomfortable. The financial grievance is really a confusion of the issues. The real question is simply, " Is the frame needed or not ? " If it is 48 INDIAN NATIONALISM needed, then it is absurd to haggle about the price : if it is not needed, then, even on the cheapest terms, it is a nuisance. We have glanced at the body of facts which have up till now convinced the best- disposed section of the British people that the frame is needed. Nothing probably in my statement of the case will come as new either to the defenders or to the opponents of British rule. To the defenders it is all truism, and to the opponents it is — well, what is it ? Untrue ? Can they really dispute that these things are facts ? We are all so apt to simplify the problems of life falsely, by refusing to look at the facts which do not square with our particular desires. And yet it is certain that it never pays in the long run not to give their full value to all the facts of the case, even those urged by an enemy, even those most disagreeable and awkward for ourselves. And such a statement as the one just given seems to express the real belief of men who have been in close contact with the facts, men who deal with life THE CASE FOR THE EMPIRE 49 seriously and would certainly not be consciously dishonest. To me personally the statement seems defective, not by stating things which are untrue, but by what it leaves out. The most questionable assertion in it, the assertion of so decided an inferiority in practical grip on the part of the generality of Indians, is one obviously incapable of exact proof. Practical ability is not a thing you can lay hold of and measure. The assertion can only be given as a personal impression, formed instinctively from the experience of a number of concrete cases. It may seem an inconsistency in me to state that in this matter I cannot help my belief being influenced by the Anglo-Indian evidence, whereas I shall presently express the opinion that the average Anglo-Indian knows very little of the educated Indian. I do think that the inner life of the educated Indian is to the average Anglo- Indian — I will not say a sealed book, but rather a book he has never tried to read. But here we are not concerned with what 50 INDIAN NATIONALISM the educated Indian thinks or desires or feels, but with his practical efficiency ; and of that the Anglo-Indian might take some measure by a merely external observation of results. I expect that many statements made by Anglo-Indians on the subject require considerable qualification, and I hope I have still an open mind. But I am not able to get rid of the impression that the statement is true, not, of course, of all Indians, but of the average over the whole field. I can say this with the better grace before my Indian friends, in that I make for myself no pretence to the superior efficiency supposed to characterise my race. I cannot imagine that any Indian who did his best would be more unsatisfactory as an administrator than I should be. The swift decision in a practical emergency is something altogether beyond me. And I have often been struck with the evident superiority to me in these respects of quite common-place examples of my countrymen — men who had apparently few ideas, or childish ones, and no conversation to speak THE CASE FOR THE EMPIRE 51 of. I know that they would naturally take command of me in a tight place. Sometimes, I tell myself that it is actually a kind of stupidity which helps them in practical business, since it shuts out disturbing considerations and concentrates attention on the road ahead. And consolation of this kind may be suggested to others like myself. But I am not sure whether that is not really an attempt to salve one's self-conceit by a fiction. E 2 CHAPTER III THE SEAMY SIDE 1 HAVE good hope that my people will come off not without honour at the bar of history. Their case, as I have tried to reproduce it, seems a substantial one. And yet I must confess that I sometimes hear it stated in a spirit or tone which stirs something in me to profound dislike — a stolid and comfortable consciousness of virtue, a triple integument, as it were, of self-righteousness, or an ecstasy of self-applause. No possible de- traction can be made from the completeness and efficiency with which our task has been carried through. It is not Civil Servants themselves, as a rule, who talk like that. They are usually men too closely at grips with reality, too cognisant of the risks and 52 THE SEAMY SIDE 53 responsibilities, too serious and unassuming. I often think that many ardent Indian Nationalists would be surprised at the amount of sympathy with their cause which I have heard expressed quietly in con- versation by some members of the British Civil Service. The people who talk like that are generally members of the British public who sit at home and look on. For them the British rule in India is a kind of drama tending to the glorification of British character. They see it through the medium of popular writers and journalists who min- ister to the national pride. It makes them angry that any suggestion of deficiency should disturb their enjoyment of the spectacle of their own virtue. Our task, I am afraid, is far from being carried through ; we are only approaching its most critical phase. If the British case, as I have stated it, following its recognised exponents, seems to have facts behind it, there are other facts which it leaves out. There is one fact, to start with, which hardly ever seems to me sufficiently 54 INDIAN NATIONALISM appreciated by exponents of the Anglo- Indian view — the fact of Time. They forget that the world in which we live is involved in a process of continuous change. They make a section, as it were, in the process at the present moment and give us an analysis of the factors which it reveals. Now the analysis may be true of the present moment, but it may soon become untrue. This is a natural limitation of view in men whose attention is focussed by their duties upon the needs and problems of immediate urgency : their apprehension of the longer reaches of the process is in many cases quite vague. It is often not only vague, but positively misleading, owing to their giving too ready acceptance (as is quite excusable in men absorbed in practical activities) to current popular falsifications of history — such a falsification, for instance, as is involved in the phrase " the unchange- able East." For not only is it generally true that the world changes, and that the East has changed as well as the West, but change takes place more rapidly to-day, all THE SEAMY SIDE 55 the world over, than at any previous epoch. We seem, as I said before, to be entering upon an era in the history of mankind unlike anything that has gone before, one characteristic of which will be a drawing to- gether of the whole of the earth in a new way. The race will get, as it were, a single nervous system, that network of electric lines, by which the agitations of one part will be transmitted to another part with unprecedented swiftness. It will be im- possible any longer to fence off a sphere of stationary quiet — not even the village world of India. I don't know whether the new world will not be in some ways a less pleasant place to live in than the old one. But we must be prepared for it. And this fact of change bears especially upon a principal part of the Anglo-Indian argument — -its estimate of the relative importance of the educated fraction of the Indian community. In that fraction, it was admitted, there was political unrest, but we need not pay too much attention to it, it w^as said, because the fraction was relatively 56 INDIAN NATIONALISM a small one. This may be a true analysis of the present moment, but the importance of the educated class in India consists not in what it is now, but in what it stands for in the future. With the advance of general education in India, which even in the near future apparently is destined to be immense, not only will the educated class itself increase in numbers, but its influence upon the community as a whole will increase. The idea that we could go on permanently directing the life of the agricultural part of the community with a despotic, if beneficent, authority, whilst the growing educated class stood apart in passive hostility, is one which has little probability to recommend it. In the end, surely, there can be only two issues to the present order of things — co- operation or war. The former issue is the only one worthy of reasonable beings : it is the one to which, I believe, the better part of the British people, the more far-seeing and sympathetic members of the official service in India, look forward. But co-operation implies THE SEAMY SIDE 57 mutual knowledge, mutual respect — that is the difficulty. We saw, in reviewing the Anglo-Indian case, that it was not only the numerical insignificance of the educated class which was insisted upon. For some reason or other — biological, social — the quality of the educated class was held to be such that the machine of government would inevitably break down, if that class were given an extended power of control. The machine of government, we may observe, is to a very large extent at present in the hands of educated Indians ; practically all the subordinate posts in the Service are held by Indians, and a certain proportion of relatively high posts. This is a fact of which both the Anglo-Indian and the Nationalist may sometimes be reminded. In answer, I suppose, the Anglo-Indian might say that he never meant to allege a total inability in the educated class of Indians to conduct a government ; it was only a relatively inferior capacity, which made it desirable that the posts of greater responsibility should be kept in British 58 INDIAN NATIONALISM hands ; and the Nationalist might say that he was naturally not satisfied with only the lower posts in his own country. Now argument as to the relative amount of capacity or incapacity in a whole people seems to me extraordinarily profitless to embark upon. There can, as I said, be nothing in the nature of proof, but only varying personal impressions ; and while it is impossible for the argument to be brought to any conclusion, it is bound to excite bitter feeling on both sides, as the Commis- sion on Public Services has recently shown. Any impartial person, I think, must see that so long as the governing body in India holds the opinion it does in this matter — and there can be no real question that it holds it perfectly honestly and sincerely — there is an extremely difficult factor in the situation. You can't expect to make them think otherwise by scolding them. And supposing any of them came forward and said to us frankly : " We have every desire to co-operate, so far as it is possible ; but this, you see, is our con- THE SEAMY SIDE 59 viction, and we can't change it by wanting to : so what do you suggest that we should do ? " Should we find ourselves at an im- passe f AVould there be no answer we could make to them ? I think, for one thing, we might again remind them of the fact of Time. Granted that this belief of theirs was built on facts which had come within their experience, the belief concerned some- thing which was always undergoing modifi- cation, a changing society, constantly replenished by fresh generations of young men, subjected to new impulses from within, to new influences from without, making a difference in interests, in standards, in habits. A belief about it might have been true ten years ago and not to-day, or be true to-day and not true ten years hence. Convictions ought not in such a case to be stereotyped as something final and above revision, but held continually open and readjusted byfresh reference to the changing reality. For instance, the spread of Western education in India has naturally produced all sorts of mixtures of Indian and 60 INDIAN NATIONALISM Western elements, many of them grotesque and crude. It was inevitable that Western ideas and Western phraseology should in a large number of instances be caught up in the most superficial way, that there should be quite hideous attempts to reproduce the externals of Western culture. " Babu English," apart from actual confusions of idiom, is often fulsome and bombastic in a way which either amuses or wearies a people rather suspicious of eloquence at its best. Out of all these things the typical incon- gruous figure of an educated Indian may be constructed, drawn in all its elements from life, and yet utterly untrue in reference to the growing body of educated men who show no inferiority to educated Europeans in their appreciation of literary and intel- lectual values, in their reasonableness and humour, in the simplicity and straight- forwardness of their language. These men are a small minority as yet, it is true. But it is these, whom we English must get to work with us, these with whom we have to establish relations of mutual confidence, if THE SEAMY SIDE 61 the problem of the future is to be solved in a manner happy for both peoples. I must, before going further, obviate a misunderstanding which might easily arise from the way in which I speak of modern education in India. I might be thought to mean that the old culture of the land was valueless, and that the class which received modern education, and in doing so became more or less " Westernised," was passing from childhood to maturity. Now I think that what the old culture of the land in its best form attained was something great — greater than anything realised, for instance, by an education which is what we call " a sound business education," and nothing more. But here we are speaking, not of the human spirit as a whole, but of certain special aptitudes — the aptitudes in virtue of which a people can conduct a modern State. The State means the organ- isation of force for material well-being with- in the national borders and for defence against enemies without. The old culture of the land has other ends, and it is no 62 INDIAN NATIONALISM disparagement of it to say that it is quite unadapted for securing such an organisation of force as is needed for the survival of a State in the modern world. It is in refer- ence to these aptitudes that I think of India as growing up by the fact of its receiving Western education. In the West itself there is much in the higher education that has no direct relation to practical efficiency. It will be remembered that Cecil Rhodes, in-his famous will, spoke of the Oxford dons as being " children in matters of business." It is only in such a sense as this that I speak of Indians of the old-world type as children in comparison with the future generation of educated men. Our task is now approaching a phase of greater delicacy than any former one. For the new phase demands qualifications in which, I am afraid, we do not, as a people, shine. It seems to me that in some capacities the British race really has deserved the ad- miration of the world. No race, I believe, has been more successful in dealing with rude and primitive peoples. In the back parts of THE SEAMY SIDE 63 the earth, among the fighting tribes of the hills, the wild men of jungle and forest, the simple folk of old-world villages, one may find the young Englishman dispensing a commonsense justice, winning the child-like confidence of child-like men, giving in re- turn something like affection to the people whose wants he understands, on occasions resolute and severe, high-handed often in visiting sloth and ill-doing, and yet free in his kindliness, human and elastic, resource- ful and strenuous in help. We have done well, I believe, in India in relation to the people of simple wants, the soldier and the peasant. I don't know whether anywhere else the relations between foreigner and home-born are so completely satisfactory as in the case of many British officers and their native regiments. The enthusiastic admiration with which it is common to hear these officers talk of their men is touching. And in meeting the wants of the village people for food, for sanitation, for common- sense justice, perhaps no government, Euro- pean or Asiatic, could have done better than 64 INDIAN NATIONALISM the British Government. But in all this part of our task there have been two things in our favour. One is that we have been in a position of unchallenged superiority. There could be no question of wild tribes- men or Indian peasants putting themselves on a level with the Englishman or thinking it anything abnormal that they should be ordered about at his will or the will of those above him. And such authority the Englishman has, on the whole, exercised with consideration, with good-will, with a sense of duty. The second thing in our favour has been that the wants we had to deal with were, as I have said, simple ones. The ordinary Englishman knows that people need food to eat and water for their fields. And he has spared himself no pains to satisfy these wants, which he understands. When India some day makes up the account of debt between the Englishman and herself, I don't think she will forget those men who gave their lives, silently, without ostenta- tion, staying all the summer, at seasons of distress, in the plains, to keep her help- THE SEAMY SIDE 65 less people alive. What those men gave India was much more than material help ; it was something to enrich her own rich spiritual heritage. We can think over our discharge of all this part of our task and have good hope as to the ultimate verdict. But it is a different matter when the Englishman is confronted, as he is con- fronted now and as he will be confronted more and more, in the future, with people who in culture and education are his equals or, it may be, his superiors. That is a position requiring a delicacy and tact, a fineness of manners, which some English- men certainly exhibit, but how many? And here we have to deal with the subtler wants of human nature, needs which it requires a gift of imagination to understand. And that sort of imagination has not been the Englishman's strong point. The pain of starvation, this he understands, and would labour to spare you, but the pain that comes from some sensibility wounded, from some ideal violated, that he finds it very hard to understand. I don't think it true to say he F 66 INDIAN NATIONALISM is merely material : he has his own ideals, the ideal, for instance, of professional duty, not an unworthy one ; but he finds it hard to believe that other people's sensibilities are real. I feel sure that the very same man who would give his life to keep people alive in famine, might behave to an educated Indian in a manner which could not fail to wound, and be unconscious of anything wrong. In human nature, it does not follow that, because a man is admirable in one way, he is not wanting in another, or because he is odious in one way, he is not magnificent in another. That is one of the things which makes moral valuation so difiicult. There are many Englishmen honestly unable to understand why an educated In- dian should regard the present state of his country with anything but extreme com- placency. If he is not happy, they can conceive no reason for it, but the rancour of a disappointed place-hunter or unreason- able malignity. They have not enough dramatic imagination to put themselves in THE SEAMY SIDE 67 the place of some one who sees foreigners in his country, exercising the office of rulers, and treating him and his people, the people of the land, as a subordinate race. Of course, India had had plenty of experience of that sort of thing long before the English came, and the old-fashioned Indians very likely had come to regard it as part of the normal constitution of the universe. But we must not suppose that young India can be touched by our education, by the thoughts and ideals that we bring, and all those sensibilities not be revived. We are so satisfied with our demonstration that the steel frame is a necessity, and we forget that there is such a thing as a necessary evil ! And until we can feel with the young Indians that the frame is an evil and realise that it hurts, it will be hard to get them to listen to us when we try to show that it is necessary. We imagined the dislocated man just now pointing to other people and asking the surgeon to take oif his steel frame, and it was obvious that a wise sur- geon would not do so till the inner lesions r2 68 INDIAN NATIONALISM were healed. But would a wise surgeon attempt to minimise the pathos of the man's condition ? Would he win his patient's confidence, if he began by exclaiming : " Uncomfortable ! my dear sir, a complete mistake, you were never more comfortable in your life ; besides, the frame looks ex- ceedingly well on you, and as for wishing yourself like those other people walking about there, or like me, I must say I take it ill that you should harbour a thought of that kind, considering the frame is one whose manufacture I supervised myself ! " And does it make it hurt less, if our demon- stration is true ? Think what line that demonstration took. The frame was ne- cessary, because of a special impotence in the Indian people, as things now are, to manage their affairs. Supposing a young Indian convinced by our demonstration, he will, no doubt, if he is reasonable, cease to go on asking for the frame to be taken off prematurely. But will the pain not be all the greater ? For the sight of the foreign official will now be for him a continual re- THE SEAMY SIDE 69 minder of his own people's inner weakness, and the thought of other nations working out their destiny will have a more poignant sting than before. Supposing we on our side could meet the young Indian so far as to admit that the evil which he felt to be implied in our rule was a real evil, that his pain was honourable, I do not say it would go far towards finding a practical solution of our problems, but it would be the first step to a mutual understanding without which we cannot even discuss our problems together. That the political dissatisfaction is the consequence of the modern education is, of course, recognised by everybody. The great bulk of the people up till now, not having tasted the dangerous wine of European culture, has remained passively acquiescent in the present order of things. One may even say that the figure of the great Queen — especially her abstinence during so long a widowhood from con- tracting a second marriage — impressed the popular imagination in India powerfully, and stirred feelings which may be called 70 INDIAN NATIONALISM emotional loyalty, while the visit of the present King and Queen, whose personal affection for India is well known, touched, by all accounts, both the imagination and heart of millions. The rulers recognise that education means a troubling of this simple- hearted content, the emergence in con- sciousness of many intractable questions. And yet they know that education must go forward, that they must themselves labour to extend its sphere. In this dilemma they are inclined to find a way out by laying blame on the kind of education which has hitherto been given under government auspices. It erred, we hear commonly to- day, by being purely secular, with the result that the old useful restraints were done away, or by being over literary, so that the heads of the young became filled with a multitude of exciting phrases and dazzling abstract ideas which had little relation to real life. Now I find no difficulty in believing that our system of education has been extraordinarily unintelligent, but it seems to me false to suppose that you can THE SEAMY SIDE 71 have education at all without creating political unrest. It is especially naive, I think, to suppose that by encouraging an infusion of traditional Hinduism and Mohammedanism into the schools, one will maintain in the younger ' generation the political outlook of the old-fashioned Hindu and Mohammedan. It is true that the older generation often combined a devout worship of Krishna or fidelity to Islam with a passive political fatalism, whilst the younger generation studies Herbert Spencer (I think that in India they do still read Herbert Spencer) instead of the Bhag- avadgita or the Koran, and has Nationalist aspirations. But the passivity of the old generation was not the consequence of its fidelity to religious tradition : both were parallel consequences of its intellectual slumber never having been disturbed by troublesome questions, and you cannot restore the old dignified acceptance of things-as-they-are by a forlorn attempt, under Government auspices, to make the younger generation go on believing in its 72 INDIAN NATIONALISM ancestral religion. If that religion can be interpreted in such a way as to be com- patible with the new ideas brought by education, it can no less be interpreted in such a way as to be compatible with, yes to sanction and consecrate, the Nationalist movement. I believe myself that a purely secular education has unhappy consequences in the moral sphere, but as far as political unrest goes, I very much doubt whether there would have been any less of it to-day had the government education in India during the last half-century included a religious element. On the part of too large a section of the Anglo-Indian community there is no desire even to treat the feelings of educated Indians as serious at all. On such a small point, for instance, as the use of the term " natives," that section does not consider it worth while to avoid a perfectly gratuitous occasion of offence. Whether the objection to the term which Indians feel is reasonable or not — in the strict meaning of the term it is innocent enough, merely signifying that THE SEAMY SIDE 73 they belong to the country in contrast to us, who don't — the objection is well known to be universally felt, and that should be a perfectly sufficient reason for people of good manners to avoid it. No doubt those Anglo-Indians who have natural courtesy do avoid it, and it has recently been banned in Government publications, but it will take some time for the ordinary Anglo-Indian language to be affected. The last to abandon it will probably be those people whose European blood is mixed in greater or less measure with Indian. That one of the gravest factors in the situation is the frequent rudeness with which educated Indians are treated by Englishmen and Englishwomen in India seems to me certain. It is a very ugly fact, and shows an ugly side of our national character. Therefore we do not like to look at it or admit it : we are impatient and angry when anybody calls attention to it. We deny it, or minimise it, or excuse it. I had, some pages back, occasion to suggest that Indian Nationalists might be apt to 74 INDIAN NATIONALISM blink facts which did not square with their desires, and I shall venture, before I have done, to indicate some facts which I think they generally overlook. But the failing is not confined to Indian Nationalists : it is as broad as humanity. Here is a fact dis- creditable to us, and we won't face it steadily. Of course, various things can be said in qualification. It may be said that English- men are rude by nature and that no special offence need be taken by Indians. Our natural want of grace has, of course, to be taken into account : but it is an especially unfortunate characteristic at the present phase of our task in India, especially unfortunate where we have to do with a people whose natural grace and courtesy even their detractors allow\ It may be said that in many cases there has been fault on the Indian side — an obsequious impor- tunity, which deserved a rebuff, an inten- tional provocativeness which it would have been softness to overlook. This also may have its truth : there are among Indians, THE SEAMY SIDE 75 as among every other people in the world, a large number of undesirable individuals. But when all is said and done, that there is a great mass of gratuitous rudeness, or, at any rate, hard unfriendliness on the Anglo-Indian side, is, I believe, the plain fact. The assertion is incapable of proof: no statistics can measure the shades of social behaviour. It is incapable of proof, just as the statement of Anglo-Indians as to the practical incapacity of Indians is incapable of proof. In either case, belief is founded on a personal impression which cannot be represented in the form of a mathematical demonstration. We may adduce a limited number of cases, but where the assertion covers so wide a field, it may always be questioned whether the cases are typical. In all matters of this kind men in real life, I think, if they have no personal experience of their own to go upon, go upon the testimony of those who have. Their discretion is shown in recognising which witnesses are trustworthy, which have had opportunities for observation. 76 INDIAN NATIONALISM I may remark then that I do not make the assertion I have done on the testimony of Indians alone, or of Europeans who made a cold weather excursion to India like Pagett, M.P. My belief in what is told me is determined, of course, by my estimate of the character of my informants. No doubt, Anglo-Indian society consists in part of people incapable of knowing good manners from bad, when they see them. I should not attach great value to the evidence of such people in a matter of this kind. I do not propose to repeat the uncompromising terms which people of another sort — people whose judgment I trust from personal acquaintance and whose knowledge of India has been gathered in long residence — have used to me to describe what they have seen of the social conduct of many English people towards educated Indians. Hard words only stir up bitter passions, and one wants to say no more than is necessary to make the reality and seriousness of the evil thoroughly under- stood. THE SEAMY SIDE 77 That the rudeness occurs cannot be denied even by the most wholesale admirers of Anglo-Indians. They only deny that it occurs often. The impression left in my mind by all that has reached me is that the majority of Anglo- Indians of the upper and middle class — ^the ones with whom educated Indians would mainly come in contact — do abstain from breaches of formal civility. The stories, for instance, about Indians of high social position being pushed out of railway carriages only represent the actions of a few exceptionally ill-bred individuals. Some, but I am afraid very few — mainly civilians of finer in- tellectual interests — seek to establish relations of mutual frankness and con- fidence with educated Indians. The great majority maintain an attitude of severe aloofness, due, in many cases, not so much to haughtiness as to an English- man's instinctive shrinking from the un- familiar. Most Englishmen, no doubt, like to have everything about them — their furniture, their friends, their food — just of 78 INDIAN NATIONALISM the conventional type they are used to, and feel uncomfortable in close relations with an unknown mentality. Unfor- tunately this anxiety to shun in the case of coarser natures shows itself as a hard assumption of superiority, which is certainly not what we call pleasant manners in Europe, and not seldom wounds as deeply as positive insult. And as to positive insult, although out of every hundred Englishmen with whom an educated Indian may have in various ways to do, the great majority — say ninety odd — abstain from such acts, most educated Indians can look back to some incidents in their own experience, whose bitterness it requires all their magnanimity and all their non-Christian charity to do away with. "It largely depends upon the rank of the Englishman," a distinguished Indian once said to my friend. Professor Gilbert Murray, " the higher you go in the service, the surer you are of meeting with politeness. If I go to see the Governor, nothing could exceed the courtesy with which I am received ; but if I go to THE SEAMY SIDE 79 see a young soldier on the lowest rung of the official ladder, I am likely to be kept wait- ing for an hour in the sun without being offered a seat." Many Anglo-Indians will pooh-pooh the attempt to give the social grievance such importance. I am convinced that there is no factor in the situation which more gravely compromises the whole future. There it is, this growing society of educated men, which we ourselves are helping to extend, and which the majority of our officials do not even make an attempt to understand. For they cannot be under- stood by any method of crisp interrogation, by any organised official enquiries — surveyed, examined, reported on. No official will ever see more than the out- side of them, unless he is able to meet them, not as an official, but as a man. If such relations with them are ever to be established, as will make co-operation for the great political problems of India possible, the sphere in which such rela- tions are knit up cannot be the office or 80 INDIAN NATIONALISM the law-court ; it can only be the sphere of a common social life. Supposing the Indian educated community were averse from forming any friendly relations with the European, it would require a much cleverer people than we are to win them over. But, by what is a singular piece of good fortune, if we avail ourselves of it, this part of our task has been facilitated by the fact that the Indian educated com- munity, as a whole, is even to-day wonder- fully ready to respond to any advances which it recognises as genuinely frank and friendly. I do not mean anything so silly as that we could induce the Indians to give up their political desires by asking them to dine with us : the hard problems of the future are not likely to be solved quite as simply as that : but I am convinced that the political grievances would never have been what they have been, had the social grievance not imported into them a peculiar bitterness and resentment. I was once present at a meeting, presided over by Lord Cromer, for the discussion of Ancient THE SEAMY SIDE 81 Imperialism, upon which he had just written a notable little book. One of the speakers put forward in passing the opinion that the trouble in the East to-day was much more due to social than to political causes, and Lord Cromer, in his summing- up, went out of his way to give the opinion his emphatic endorsement. The authority of Lord Cromer on such a matter is not to be despised. Of course, people can always find reasons for not doing what they do not wish to do ; any course of action involves getting over some obstacles which disinclination can represent as insuperable. It is easy, for instance, in this case, to lay stress on the difficulties which caste exclusiveness on the Indian side makes to social intercourse. The difficulty is no doubt a real one. But there are many considerations which are often left out of account by those who make much of it. Even if men of the higher castes strictly observe their rule, that does not prevent friendly intercourse, so long as food is not eaten together, but, G 82 INDIAN NATIONALISM as a matter of fact, in the matter of eating together, the rule is not strictly observed by a large number of individuals, even of those who do not openly break with the caste system ; no notice is often taken of such transgressions if the occasion be not a public one. But among the class who have received a modern education — the class, that is to say, which is especially under consideration here — quite a number do break with the caste system altogether. The fact that they usually find themselves kept at arm's length by the Anglo-Indian community just as much as the others, shows the insincerity of the objection. Obviously, were the Anglo- Indian community prepared to admit to terms of social equality Indians qualified by character and education, who on their side were prepared to discard caste restrictions, the number of educated Indians doing so would be likely to increase more rapidly. A Brahman from Mysore assured me once that it had seemed quite possible at one moment in the past that the whole of the high-caste society in his part would throw THE SEAMY SIDE 83 over the traditional taboos and take to free- dom of intercourse with Europeans : it was the discovery that the Europeans on their side were unwilling to relax the exclusive- ness of their society, which convinced his own people that they would gain nothing by giving up their old ways. Another objection one hears ad nauseam is that it is impossible to have social inter- course with educated Indians because of " their ideas of women." It is not sug- gested that anything improper in their behaviour need be anticipated, but apparently Anglo-Indian society claims in this matter an occult power of thought- reading and is dissatisfied with what it finds. Now it is true that many educated Indians have defective views of women ; so have all those Englishmen who are incontinent. The best Indians on the other hand have a much stricter view of chastity than most Europeans. For people who would receive a European into their society, without troubling themselves about his private morals, to raise this objection against an g2 84 INDIAN NATIONALISM Indian is pure hypocrisy and nothing more. As a matter of fact, most Anglo-Indians know no more about the ideas of educated Indians than they do about the ideas of the inhabitants of Mars. They only repeat the phrase, like parrots, because they have heard other people say it, and it gives them the excuse they want. It was claimed, I noted some time back, for the British district officer that he knew the Indian villagers better than the educated Indian generally does. If there is some truth in this, one may say on the other hand that when Anglo- Indians talk about educated Indians, they are not necessarily an authority on the sub- ject because they have lived long in India, for here they are speaking about a class of people with whom, by their own admission, their dealings have been as scanty as they could make them. They probably have not known in a real sense one single educated Indian. What they report is based on stale hearsay or the most superficial acquaintance. How difficult it is even for men of goodwill, as things are now in India, to keep their THE SEAMY SIDE 85 knowledge of the educated community up- to-date was brought home to me not long ago when at a gathering in London, where some fifty or so young Indian Mohammedan students were present, I met an Englishman who had a high place in the administration in India. " I have been thirty years in India," he told me, " and this type of young man is something quite new to me ; I have never met it till to-night." And he went on to say how blind the majority of English people appeared to him to the great changes taking place in Asia. He is not among those Anglo-Indians who have tried to keep apart from Indian society ; on the other hand he is a man of the largest sympathies and has many personal friends among the older generation of Indians. But the new type of young man growing up in the country had been outside his horizon till that night. ^ ' I do not quite like using the word " type " in this connection, because it is exactly one of the popular errors to be corrected that the young Indians who come in hundreds to England and America conform to any one type. I think I may speak of this part of the field with 86 INDIAN NATIONALISM Another consideration, expressed or inarticulate, which hinders social inter- course between the two peoples is the idea connected with the word "prestige." It would be unwise to admit to too close familiarity people whom we intend, when all is said and done, to govern autocratically. We have to keep up a kind of superiority in our carriage or run the risk of com- promising our authority. The word "prestige," and the ideas connected with it, seem to me to owe their force and their vogue to a real psychological truth behind them, and, like many other ideas with a truth behind them, to lend themselves to the meanest passions of human nature. It is true, no doubt, that men are governed largely through imagination and suggestion some first-hand knowledge, and I may say that "the Indian student" is an abstraction which has ceased to have any reality for me. The only generalisations, so far as I can see, which would be true of the whole number would also be true of an equal number of educated young Englishmen or Frenchmen. In India perhaps the Europeans whose knowledge of young Indians is the most real and intimate are the best educational missionaries. It is significant how high an opinion of the young Indians these men often express. THE SEAMY SIDE 87 and can often be daunted by bluff. And in governing children or child-like peoples I suppose this kind of suggestion can be use- fully employed. But as the reason in the child becomes mature, as he begins to see things in their real proportions, the wise parent admittedly treats with him as an independent rational being and seeks intelli- gent agreement instead of blind submission. Even in the case of children, we now gene- rally consider that the principle of authority was enormously overdone by earlier genera- tions. The impeccable Papas of old- fashioned children's books are an almost vanished type, and we now think that the respect of children is not forfeited by a frank admission on our part that our wisdom has limits and that we sometimes do wrong. Yet even now, we know how often the relations of father and grown-up son suffer just because the father cannot realise the fact of the son's maturity or reconcile himself to that wise renunciation which the growth of the new personality requires. He thinks it necessary to go on " asserting 88 INDIAN NATIONALISM his authority " in the old way. It is exactly the same failing of human nature which leads to these family tragedies and which on a larger field seems to me to be shown, when we suppose that the educated Indian community can be imposed upon for ever by a lofty manner. What may impress a child, to a grown man may seem simply ridiculous. And it is not generally the really strong who take such thought for their authority being unimpaired. In the old heroic days, the days of the Elphinstones and Nicholsons, they could have frank friendships with those they found worthy among the people of the land and not be afraid. And to-day it is only the least admirable members of the Anglo-Indian community who try to maintain by strut- ting a position which was won by very different means. Courage and determination, it is true, were among those means, but is it realised how much was also due to gentleness and self-restraint ? A Sindi friend of mine has often heard his grandmother describe, as she THE SEAMY SIDE 89 remembered it, the lirst coming of the English to Hyderabad. They were going to enter the city as conquerors, and what that meant according to the tradition of the old violent world everybody in Hyderabad comprehended. The men stood at their house-doors, sword in hand, between their women and the English soldiery, resolved not to behold alive the thing which they dreaded. And the English marched all through the city, in sober order, and at the end of the day there had been no act of violence done ! The impression made was profound. It remained in the mind of the people, subduing it more eiFectually to the English rule than any display of brute force could have done. The older generation in my friend's family reverenced the English as almost more than human. And j ust as to-day we are convinced, in contrast to the attitude of the old- fashioned Papas in the story-books, that our children really respect us more, if we admit our failings, so I believe that the hold of the British Government upon the reverence of the Indian people has been sensibly 90 INDIAN NATIONALISM increased, and not diminished, by the stern public visitation of wrongs committed by Europeans against Indians. It is generally known how immensely the prestige of Lord Curzon, in the honourable sense of that word, was raised among the population of India during his first term of office by the vigour with which he drove home upon a British regiment its accountability for a wrong done by a soldier to a woman of the people.^ But however desirable it might be that the English community in India and the educated Indian community should draw together, is it possible that it should come about, some one may say, except by 1 In his second term of office, after the unfortunate misunderstandings had occurred, which embittered Indian feeling, there was a curious echo of his first popularity. At the Delhi Durbar of 1903, the passage of the offending regiment gave an opportunity to a block of Anglo-Indians present to make a demonstration in its honour — hardly an edifying exhibition : in answer to this the Indian multitude felt it had no alternative but to receive Lord Curzon, when he appeared, with a counter-demonstration of applause, although Indian feeling was at the moment running high against him, and to applaud him was the very opposite of what they wished to do. It was i. situation which had the elements both of tragedy and comedy. THE SEAMY SIDE 91 spontaneous movement ? If Englishmen, who had no personal interest in the Indians they met, began to make awkward advances as a matter of policy, would not the effect be merely absurd ? I feel the force of the objection, and I fully believe that friendships cannot be made by Government order. To make the friendship demands a certain goodwill and intelligence, and when these are wanting, no deliberate arrangements can supply their place or affect anything. Where this goodwill and intelligence are wanting, I admit, the case is hopeless : but I believe that there is a mass of goodwill and intelligence in the Anglo-Indian community, which, as things are, is rendered frustrate. All that any change of practice can do is to set it free to act. Many young men coming out to India quite prepared to meet Indians on friendly terms find the bad tradition of their society too strong for them. Many worthy men who if they once came to know educated Indians would discover common interests, never get the opportunityofformiug any real acquaintance. 92 INDIAN NATIONALISM AH that can be done by public action is rigidly to suppress all positive rudeness (and probably more could be done in this matter by an enlightened public opinion than by administrative measures) and to remove the barriers of convention which hinder the meeting of the two peoples. The rest must be left to individual inclination and tact.^ It is one encouraging feature in the situation that there has been a marked improvement in the social relations of English and Indians during the last few years. There is immense lee-way to be made up, and possibly the change is so far more felt in the larger centres than in the smaller stations, but a turn for the better there has been. Indians seem generally to attribute it to the personal influence of Lord Hardinge and Lord Carmichael, but I 1 There are local varieties of practice. In Hyderabad, I am told by a friend, who has just been reorganising education in the Nizam's dominions, there is complete freedom of intercourse between the English colony and the upper-class families. Apparently what one part of the Anglo-Indian world stoutly affirms to be impossible, another part has been quietly doing all the time. THE SEAMY SIDE 93 have been assured by an Anglo-Indian friend that the improvement began to be sensible under Lord Minto. That the influence of Lord Hardinge has nevertheless counted for much in the extension of the movement may be believed. In one of the speeches he delivered just before leaving England he made an earnest appeal to English society to show more friendliness to the young Indians who come to this country for study. Social goodrfellowship would not, I have admitted, solve political problems : it would only change the atmosphere in which they were discussed. It would give some chance for mutual sympathy, not in the sense of a merely vague and sentimental benevolence, but of a definite realisation of each other's feelings and desires and convictions. The dominant body of opinion in Government circles, as I have said, already recognises that the fundamental principle, expressed in Nationalism, is reasonable ; it recognises that when the man says he would like the steel frame taken off, the desire is not in 94 INDIAN NATIONALISM itself foolish or wicked. When we come to the application of the fundamental principle to existing circumstances, to practical programmes, disagreement begins, not only between views held by Englishmen and views held by Indians, but between the Indian Nationalists themselves. CHAPTER IV. MODERATES AND EXTREMISTS. Indian Nationalists are commonly divided into Moderates and Extremists. The Moderates continue the tradition of the last century embodied in the Congress Movement — the Movement which centred in the Indian National Congress. This is the form of Indian Nationalism best known to the British public ; it has been championed by a group of Eadical members of Parliament — Sir W. Wedderburn, Sir H. Cotton, and others — the group denoted " Friends of India " ; it has been ridiculed by Rudyard Kipling, and other Anglo- Indian writers. It is represented in Eng- land by the weekly periodical India, edited by Mr. H. E. A. Cotton (Sir Henry's son), 95 96 INDIAN NATIONALISM which maintains a critical, not to say per- sistently fault-finding, attitude towards the Government of India, but would, of course, be opposed to any violent rupture. The party got its initial inspiration from English Liberalism : Burke and Morley have been its scriptures : it believes in the formulae of Liberalism as in the Gospel. Rationalism, Enlightenment, Progress are what it stands for. It sees the salvation of India in the immediate, or almost immediate, establishment there of free representative institutions, popularly elected Parliaments, Municipalities, and so on. Its attitude to the old Indian world, the old religions, beliefs, ways of living, is generally depreciatory. The worship of Krishna, one of its prominent members declared at a meeting which was called to consider a new Government educational programme, was the poison which had destroyed India's manhood ; and he opposed the use in the schools of any text-book of moral instruc- tion into which Krishna was introduced. The method of procedure adopted by the MODERATES— EXTREMISTS 97 Moderate party, in order to secure its ends, is to be peaceful, constitutional agitation — for it has a horror at the thought of any violence — campaigns in the Press, public meetings passing resolutions, always avoid- ing anything like an incitement to a breach of the peace. It is sincerely anxious to maintain relations with the British Govern- ment and makes its goal, not severance from the British Crown, but the status of a self-governing Colony. The standing of the Moderate party with the Anglo-Indian world has risen notably since the days when Rudyard Kipling treated it as un- worthy of consideration, and the Indian National Congress is now regarded by the Government with a kind of distant be- nignity. This is in part due, no doubt, to the abilities, patriotism, and manly straightforwardness of the most outstanding personality of the party, the Mahratta Brahman, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, now a member of the Viceroy's Legislative Council ; but the Government, in its change of attitude, can hardly have been unin- II 98 INDIAN NATIONALISM flueneed by the appearance of what I think the most interesting phenomenon in Indian politics, the Extremist Movement. This inevitably tended to drive the Moder- ates and the Government together. Of the Extremist Movement most Eng- lishmen know nothing. They know, of course, that there is a set of Indians who devise in secret acts of violence against the Government : who assassinate with revolver and bomb, and wreck trains. If they connect anything with the term "Extremists" it is probably these men. Now these men are certainly one sort of Extremists, but if they were the only sort, the relation of the Government towards all Extremists could be nothing but war ; for these men have virtually declared war on the Government, and the Government is merely acting in accordance with the exigencies of war, if it tracks out, arrests, deports, exterminates them by all means in its power. The truth is that the name " Extremist " does not denote any coherent party, with a programme and common MODERATES— EXTREMISTS 99 methods of action. It connotes the accept- ance of certain ideas from which men of one kind may draw the practical conclusion of anarchy and assassination, but men of another kind may draw quite different practical conclusions. Why the Extremist Movement seems to me significant, is, firstly, because these ideas have value, showing the movement to have the drive of a really spiritual element in it ; and secondly, because it is apparently depleting the Moderate party by drawing away the finest in character and understanding among the younger men. The two ideas which give the Extremist Movement its significance are, firstly, the desire to get from shams to realities ; and secondly, the necessity of suffering and self-sacrifice for the achievement of national salvation. Into both ideas there enters a strong antipathy to the Moderate party. Let us consider the Moderate party in relation to the first of these ideas. The type of Nationalism represented by the Moderate party, has already had plentiful H 2 100 INDIAN NATIONALISM criticism levelled against it by the school of which Rudyard Kipling is the most popular exponent. And that criticism, which has now become a commonplace of English journalism, makes its chief point that the forms of constitutional govern- ment, to which the Nationalists attach so much value, are totally unsuited for India. Transplanted into this utterly alien world they can be nothing more than empty forms. India, Kipling said, would never learn to vote. It may please Radical opinion at home to have an elaborate system of municipal government, on ortho- dox elective principles, set up in an Indian city, and the Government of India, knowing that Radical opinion must be humoured, will do its best to stage the little play ; but the old Anglo-Indian magistrate, doing the real work of government, watches the solemn farce with a grim smile. All the second-hand Liberalism, we are told, dis- charged in such volumes of oratory by Nationalist speakers, consists in academic platitudes, remote from the real life of the MODERATES— EXTREMISTS 101 country, the staple of lawyers and jour- nalists and abstract idealists, which have no application to living practical problems. It is an exotic in India, and will not take root. Now the striking thing is that all this criticism the Extremists have come to feel in an obscure way is true ; they may not yet have formulated the feeling in words, and may even retain with unconscious in- consistency some part of the old Moderate tradition. But their real belief in the Moderate doctrine is gone. It is a strange case of extremes meeting. Rudyard Kipling and some exponents of the Extremist Move- ment would be in almost complete agree- ment in their estimate of transplanted Liberalism. These Western things do not belong here ; this whole body of things is play-acting, words, a sham. National emancipation cannot be achieved by India being untrue to herself. To many Extre- mists Englishmen of the old John Nicholson type appeal more powerfully, represent something much more real, than Sir Henry 102 INDIAN NATIONALISM Cotton and Sir William Wedderburn. So far the Anglo-Indian and the Extremists agree : the difference is that it remains for the Extremist an intolerable thing that the rulers in his country should be foreigners. The second leading idea in the Extremist Movement is the necessity for suffering and self-sacrifice, and here the Moderate party repels many young men by its facile optimism, its apparent unwillingness to face hard issues, its dread of any disturbance of comfortable regular life. Of course, all sober Extremists recognise the utter futility of such acts as bomb-throwing ; they may even have great personal regard for the Englishmen who conduct the government, and are far less likely, I think, to follow their acts with continual, captious, nagging criticism than the Eadical " Friends of India." The Moderates and their friends in Parliament are always restlessly trying to make the acts of a Government, essen- tially autocratic, fit in with the theory that it is a democratic government ; it is not so much the fact that the rulers are foreigners MODERATES— EXTREMISTS 103 which they object to ; it is the principles of autocracy. An Extremist on the other hand has, as such, no quarrel with the prin- ciples of autocracy ; he may be individually in favour of constitutional government as the ideal, or even a republic, but it is not the forms of government which interest him ; he might even hold that the Govern- ment from its own standpoint could not act otherwise than it did ; it is the fact that a foreign government is there at all to which he cannot reconcile himself. While there- fore the Moderates, who are always quarrel- ling with the acts of the Government, are horrified at the idea of any violent rupture, the Extremists, even if they find the acts of the Government justified, have generally made up their minds that sooner or later it must come to war. The horror and anguish of such a convulsion, the sacrifice of all the amenities and comforts of life, the sacrifice of possessions, or home, or life itself, which it may entail, all that, they say, they realise as much as the Moderates do ; but at no lesser price can so great a thing as 104 INDIAN NATIONALISM freedom be won. The Moderates want to purchase for India on cheap and easy terms what all nations who were worthy of it bought with agony and blood and tears. We must suffer, we must suffer, to attain anything worth attaining — that is always ringing in the ears of the young men ; and there is something in the call to sacrifice and suffer, which make all the counter inducements held out by prudent middle- aged people seem ignoble. We cannot help it ; young men are made that way. " The realities of life, when you get down below these smooth conventions and formalities," they say, " are hard and violent ; the Anglo- Indians were right ; we wanted to be a nation, when we had not the manhood ; perhaps some day we shall have it, and then in the old way peoples have shaken off the foreigner, India too will shake herself free." ^ It is curious how one is still keep- ' In the Society of the "Servants of India," founded by Mr. Gokhalc, a movement has taken place on the Moderate side which holds out an ascetic ideal of self- sacrifice. But Mr. Gokhale, though recognised as a leader by the Moderates, and holding to the Moderate MODERATES— EXTREMISTS 105 ing in touch with Anglo-Indian opinion. In a book I read the other day, by some Anglo-Indian official, I imagine, who has studied the underground revolutionary movement in India with close, if hardly sympathetic, interest — Siri Ram, Revolu- tionist — the following words are put into the mouth of an English member of the Indian Educational Service. They seem to represent the author's view : "I don't like talking about the fitness or unfitness of Indians for self-government. It sounds too much like cant. The country is ours after all, and we won it as fairly as countries ever have been won. There is no question of handing it over. When the Indians are strong enough to govern it, they .will be strong enough to take it, and they won't ask us." The same man is represented as saying to the boys in his school : " India, as you know, is not one people any more than Europe is one people. If ever she does become one, with a genuine sense of nationality, and the courage and unselfishness to defend it without any thought of indi- vidual interest or class privilege, she will be strong enough to take the reins, and no shame to us to drop them, seeing that it is we who have taught her to drive." tradition to a large extent in his views Cfor instance, in his coldness towards the popular religion) is in spirit allied to the Extremists. 106 INDIAN NATIONALISM There you have an estimate of the situa- tion with marked points of resemblance to the Extremist one. Only the Extremists are inclined to think that the strength to govern might be attained after, and not before, the departure of the English. All that the Anglo-Indians have said, as to the chaos which would follow the de- parture of the English — the setting loose of the forces of disorder, the Afghans ravish- ing the virgins of Bengal — all that. Ex- tremists say, may be true. But only by finding her own salvation out of such a time of horror, finding it herself and not another for her, can India follow her own natural evolution, learn to stand for herself among the peoples. Out of the chaos the really strong men would emerge, and bring back order — not necessarily rulers after the pattern approved by the Moderates and Sir Henry Cotton and the little weekly pe- riodical India, rulers perhaps much more like the great strong-handed Englishmen of the past, but Indians this time, kings and generals and councillors, not by right MODERATES— EXTREMISTS 107 of ballot-papers and constitutional shams, but by right of their own God-given force, and genius and will. Perhaps the relative positions of Anglo- Indians, Moderates, and Extremists may be put most shortly in a figure. Imagine a man unable to swim upheld and grasped in deep water by a strong swimmer. The swimmer says, " If I let you go, you will only sink." The man, if he is a Moderate, replies, " Yes, I want you to go on holding me, but I don't want you to hold me so tight," whereas the Extremist says, " I know I shall go under and have a horrible time of choking and distress, but that is the only way in which I can learn to swim." It will be seen how these ideas may produce a totally different practice, a dif- ferent emotional reaction, according to the disposition, intelligence, and temperament of the individuals upon whom they take hold. The plotter of violence may, no doubt, tell himself that, if war is ultimately the real test, he had better come to realities at once, and the danger to which he exposes 108 INDIAN NATIONALISM himself gives him the sense of personal sac- rifice. But the great mass of those who call themselves Extremists see the futility of that sort of thing and, because of its futility, its useless cruelty. Extremist, one might say, is really a negative term : it involves, of course, a great positive desire, the desire that India should be ruled by Indians, but its essential meaning is that, for the attainment of that end, the policy of the Moderates is no good. It does not mean that you necessarily have any alterna- tive policy which would be some good. Many Extremists do not see any hopeful line of action : and yet it remains there all the same, the great insistent desire. In the case of such men Extremist ideas can pro- duce nothing but a blank paralysing pessimism, and pessimism, I believe, is much more rife among the present generation of young Indians than among the older gene- ration which quite thought that Liberalism and Science had solved everything. Other young men may be attracted to Extremism simply by indolence, since it is much easier MODERATES— EXTREMISTS 109 to say that something is wrong than to say what would be right, and it is easy to say that nothing can be done, till people gene- rally are prepared to make great sacrifices , which at present there is no prospect of their making. I have said that Extremism seemed to me to be drawing into its current the first characters and understandings among the younger men, and that, I think, is true ; but I may add that I think it is also drawing the most worthless and thoughtless, the rotter and the poser, the criminal and the cranky. It is steady-going men in the middle, or able men of naturally cautious temperament, to whom the Moderate faith still makes especial appeal. Antagonism to the Moderates for good or bad reasons is almost all that the heterogeneous multi- tude, who wear the Extremist label, have in common. How real this cleavage in the Nationalist party is I hope will now be apparent. I don't think it is realised by most English people, who looking at all Indians in the mass imagine amongst them a solidarity 110 INDIAN NATIONALISM which does not exist. An amusing instance of this came under my notice the other day in a review in the Spectator written, I take it, by somebody reasonably well-in- formed about Indian affairs. It suggested that a short and simple way of stopping violent political outrages would be to put the screw upon the Moderate party ! All forms of popular election to Legislative Councils, Municipalities, and so on, were to be suspended after every outrage, till a definite period clear of political crime had elapsed. That would bring the miscreants to reason ! The writer did not realise that the Moderates are in no more favourable a position for discovering and checking the criminals than Anglo-Indians are,^ and that the people who commit outrages are quite indifferent to the constitutional forms upon which the Moderates put so high a value. ' At Cambridge three years ago, when the young Indian community was on fever with the suspicion ol espionage, an Indian of unknown antecedents coming to Cambridge had to overcome a greater barrier of suspicion than an Englishman — especially, for some reason unknown to me, if he was a Parsee. MODERATES— EXTREMISTS 111 It is very much as if you should suppose that because Dr. Clifford is an Englishman, you could frighten him by a threat to confis- cate the revenues of the Church of England ! The reversal of the Partition of Bengal was largely condemned by Anglo-Indian speakers and writers on the ground that it was a concession to Nationalist agitation and would therefore encourage agitation in the future. (This stock argument was usually coupled with the other argument, apparently without any sense of inconsis- tency, that the agitation had long ceased, and that there was therefore no popular demand : but that is by the way.) Yes, it was an encouragement to agitation, but what is not generally realised is that the party to whom it gave a great victory was the Moderates. It enabled them to turn round triumphantly upon the Extremists, and say, " You see that constitutional agita- tion can secure something after all ! " Many Extremists, to whom this cheap satisfaction, as they think it, in obtaining some readjust- ment of the machine is exactly what ob- 112 INDIAN NATIONALISM scures the great purpose of getting rid of the existing machine altogether, are inclined to feel that, even if the reversal of the Partition was a good thing in itself, it was changed into an evil by the occasion of glorying which it gave the Moderates. One great truth, I think, the Extremists have got splendidly — that emancipation means something much wider and deeper than politics, that it is a matter of building up a national character, of renewing all departments of life. Thinking as they do that it must ultimately come to a violent trial of strength between the two peoples, they realise — or aU the ones worth taking account of realise — that such a trial, as the Indian people now is, would have no faint- est chance of success. Its preliminary must be to make a new Indian people. That is why the job seems to them so immensely vaster than it does to the Moderates ; why many Extremists are Pessimists, and despair. They do not all despair. There is one section especially which believes that for such a national regeneration, such a renewing of MODERATES— EXTREMISTS 113 the inmost springs of human nature, of the deep sources of personality and character, the powers of a transcendent world may be drawn upon. Just as the Extremists turn away from the Western Liberalism of the Moderates to the ideal of personal govern- ment indigenous to the East, so this section of Extremists turns away from the Rational- ism and Secularism of the Moderates to the old religious tradition. A revival of Hindu- ism, the delivery of India, not only from the persons of the foreigners, but from the corroding infidelity which the foreigners brought with them, is for these an essential part of national restoration. India would gain little, if she only shook off the alien government and did not get back her soul. And just as the Extremist Movement on its political side drew in good and bad, so nobler and baser elements mingle in that group which seeks to give the movement this religious consecration. There is on the one side a genuine spiritual craving for something larger and richer than the narrow Rationalism or bald Theism which 114 INDIAN NATIONALISM characterised the old generation : on the other hand, some men find pleasure in a conscious, jesthetic, only half-serious, archaism. This phase of the Extremist Movement seems to me in many ways extraordinarily like the Romantic Move- ment which marked the early part of the nineteenth century in Europe. There, too, in a recoil from eighteenth century Eational- ism and Enlightenment, men turned with a somewhat uncritical admiration to the Middle Ages and all medieval survivals ; there was the same exaltation of sentiment and imagination over intellect, of what was suggestive and vague in outline over what was narrow and clear, of mysterious and sacred tradition over self-sufficient common- sense, the same clinging to everything that was archaic and quaint in symbol and ritual and belief. The Romantic Movement was in part the outbreak of the human spirit from an imprisonment which had cut it off from wide-stretching fields of its inheritance ; in part it was a pose. I think the same may be said of the Hindu revival. MODERATES— EXTREMISTS 115 I have now tried to state, so far as I can understand them, the significance of the three groups upon whose action politics in India turn — the Englishmen, the Moder- ate Nationalists, the Extremists. In what follows I am conscious of signal imper- tinence, for I shall venture to make reflec- tions upon the situation from the point of view of a mere onlooker. Only occasionally the observations of someone looking on from a little distance may be worth something, even to those who are in the thick of the action. Of course, I am not dispassionate in the sense that I look on, emptied of desires. I should like my countrymen to come out of it with credit, and I should like the end to be that India stood up strong and free among the nations : I don't think any consummation could be more honourable to my countrymen than that. If that could be brought about to-morrow by the sacrifice of a white goat to Kali, I, for one, should think it an object worth dying for ; if such a result could really be secured by such means, and I were put i2 116 INDIAN NATIONALISM to the test, I hope I should not refuse my neck : I don't think I should. Why, many of my countrymen die for lesser thiags than that — to keep some hundreds of Indians alive through plague or famine, and hardly a man of them but would risk his life to save an Indian whom he saw drowning. With all the three groups I have sympathies — even with the old Moderates and their English supporters. Say what we may of the clouded intelli- gence, the limited vision and tiresome self-conceit of Pagett, M.P., in the group which he was intended to represent there has been a real warmth of heart towards India, and that is worth not a little in this world of ours. For all his vapouring and absurdity, I should be happier with Pagett, M.P., than with Sir. J. D. Rees. India may not ultimately accept the specifics which her Radical "Friends" pressed upon her so earnestly, but she will be ungrateful, if she forgets the spirit of stedfast devotion to her cause in which they were offered. And I do not think she will be ungrateful. MODERATES— EXTREMISTS 117 I am afraid all this sounds like the prelude to another plea for compromise and half- measures and moderation and making- things-snug-all-round and all that young India has come to abhor. I can only say I have tried not to let my desires play fast and loose with facts. Let us look once more at the dislocated man in the steel frame lying there, with the surgeon sitting beside him. The Extremist Movement in India we will represent by a mood of the injured man. A dreadful suspicion has laid hold of him — you can see it in his face — that the surgeon means never to let the frame be taken off, not though all the inner lesions be healed, the torn sinews be joined together, and the body regain its coherence and strength — even then the surgeon will refuse, he is sure, to let the steel frame be touched. And that means — we have to face facts — that means that sooner or later it must come to an actual tussle with the surgeon, if the man is to be free. What gives some ground to the suspicion is the boundless 118 INDIAN NATIONALISM satisfaction with whicli the surgeon con- templates the frame constructed under his supervision : he is always smiling to him- self magnificently, as his eye runs over it : he handles it with purring affection, and his face darkens at any murmur of complaint, any suggestion of discomfort, which may escape the impotent man. In these circumstances, the one thing which the man must desire is to attain inner coherence and unity as soon as possible. In any event that is the first thing necessary : necessary, if the surgeon is going to be honourable, because his jjrofessional duty forbids him to take the frame off till that inner restoration is accomplished ; and, no less necessary, if the surgeon means to keep the man strapped up for ever, because, till it is accomplished, a tussle with him would obviously have no chance. Such a tussle would put the newly established coherence of the organism, still tender and unpractised, to a severe test ; for although the surgeon is no longer a young man and a touch of obesity is beginning to threaten MODERATES— EXTREMISTS 119 the clean contours of his large frame, he has taken care by discreet gymnastic exercises to preserve a vigorous habit of body, firm muscles and a sound wind, and a good re- mainder of the strength which once gained him a place in his College Eight, still makes his movements buoyant and his step elastic. You can read too in his features, large, handsome, and clear-cut — a trifle Philistine, perhaps, and unsympathetic — the note of resource and will. As the injured man peruses the limbs, now carelessly disposed in their correct professional attire, on the seat beside him, he realises that when the moment comes for him to make a sudden and astonishing attempt to throw that stately figure, the next five minutes are likely to be horrid. Perhaps the thought will come to him then that the best course, for the present at all events, is to lie still. To wriggle about in the frame does not help matters — rather makes the soreness worse, and cer- tainly does nothing to heal the ruptures within. But to lie still seems like giving 120 INDIAN NATIONALISM up eflfort, resigning oneself tamely to an indefinite space of mere blank inaction. Ah ! if that time which seems so blank and profitless were really inactive, the man's case would be bad ! But work will be going on all the time, not his work, but Nature's, in ways too subtle and minute and gradual to follow binding up again the severed fibres, reconstituting the disordered parts, work inscrutable and noiseless and persistent, in which his conscious will has no part. It is not in anything that he can do himself at this moment that his de- liverance lies ; it is in giving Nature time. If his suspicion is true that the surgeon means never to let him go, then some day indeed action violent enough on his part will be required, but his best preparation for that day is not violent action, but patience in allowing certain processes within the organism to take place. CHAPTER V. THE OUTLOOK. Of course, the question is, whether the parable fits. It all depends, I suppose, on whether any gradual process is going for- ward, outside the political sphere, which will make hereafter all the diflFerence in politics. But first what exactly is the evil to be cured ? The disunion in India is partly provincial or racial, and partly social ; a disunion, that is to say, on the one hand between the people of different parts, be- tween Panjabis, for instance, as such, and Bengalis ; and a disunion on the other hand between diffierent sets of people in the same province ; and here, I am thinking not only of broad differences like that between Hindus and Mohammedans, but of all that 122 INDIAN NATIONALISM disintegration of India into little societies with few common interests. In the event of the constraining band being suddenly removed, it is the provincial and racial dis- union, I imagine, which would manifest itself the more prominently. The races with the greater fighting qualities would draw atten- tion to themselves in the general scramble. But it seems to me that in the long run the other sort of disunion is the more serious. I cannot see that it would matter so much for the strength and well-being of India as a whole, if the different provinces retained a strongly-marked separate character and existence — separate languages, traditions, points of pride — so long as they abstained from mutual aggression. It is the inner disintegration within each area which makes vigorous general action everywhere impos- sible. Two processes are going forward in India which must make a very great difference to the inner condition of the country. One is the spread of education. The effect of education in unifying Indian society may THE OUTLOOK 123 be expected to be immense. Education, on the one hand, will loosen the hold of tradi- tion, which largely maintains the barriers between the diflPerent communities, and will on the other hand provide a much wider field of common interests. A community of fair average education, like a European country, can, now that communications are facilitated and accelerated as never before in the world, share in common interests, in common knowledge of current events, in common judgments, as was impossible in ancient times outside the limits of a small city. India too will be transformed as edu- cation spreads. And in this connection I want to say a word for the old Moderates. I daresay the criticism is quite true that the constitutional forms, and so on, which they have succeeded in introducing into India are to-day largely shams. But I don't think the right explanation is generally given. People say it is because they are Western, and do not fit the East. That, I think, is wrong. They represent Eationalism in poli- tics, and though I do not believe that 124 INDIAN NATIONALISM Eationalism is as much of life as some people have believed, I think that Eationalism is the sound operation of the human Reason within a certain sphere, and Eeason does not belong to one part of the world, but to all. The real explanation of the absurdity of constitutional forms in present-day India is that they presuppose an effective public opinion, which in India does not exist, and which cannot exist till the general level of education is much higher. They are like flowers cut from their soil and expected to bloom in vacuo. When we see a class of men like the Englishmen who conduct the government of India keeping up, generation after generation, the standard they do of honesty and efficiency, the cause is not to be found in them alone. It is to be found in the great body of public opinion behind them, which shaped them when they were young and impressed its standards upon them, and watches and controls and stimulates them all the time they are at work. If you were to cut them ofl' from that public opinion — suppose, for instance, that India THE OUTLOOK 125 were separated from England, and the Anglo- Indian class stayed on in India and became a distinct ruling caste, I think they might perhaps keep up their standard of honesty and efficiency for two or three generations, but not more. The mistake of the Eadical M.P.'s was to suppose that when you had got in India a number of young men trained as administrators, when you had got a certain number of lawyers and professors and people who seemed capable of acting as municipal councillors, you had got all that was required in order to start Liberal insti- tutions straightaway. They did not realise that the task was a much vaster one than that. You had to make a whole people with an articulate effective public opinion before you could have Liberal institutions. And that is a work of time. But I see no reason to say with Rudyard Kipling that India will never vote. For I believe that the effect of education in unifying the community and creating a public opinion may be extra- ordinary. And I don't see how a large com- munity is to make its opinion articulate and 126 INDIAN NATIONALISM control public affairs, except by some sort of representative institutions. They seem to me the reasonable device under the circum- stances, and as such likely to be adopted by all reasonable beings. They have already been adopted by China and Japan. If they are ultimately adopted by a new India, the Moderates will have been more right after all than Anglo-Indians and Extremists allow. Their conception of the pattern to be kept in view will be proved to have been not so far out. They only erred in supposing you could realise it by one bound. Both Anglo- Indians and Nationalists of the old school, in fact, went wrong by ignoring the fact of Time. But they ignored it in opposite ways, the Anglo-Indians by supposing that things could not change at all, and the Nationalists by supposing that they could change all at once. There is one respect in which the parable of the dislocated man does not fit. The dislocated man can do nothing by any direction of his will to accelerate the internal process ; he can only lie quiet, and wait. But THE OUTLOOK 127 the speed with which education goes forward in India can be very much affected by the voluntary effort of the Indian community. Even if the Government does not move fast enough in the matter to satisfy the more ardentNationalists, it leaves open a large field for private enterprise. The Arya Somaj has already displayed signal activity in the educational field, and such an institution as Mr. Eabindranath Tagore's school at Bolpur shows what can be done in complete indepen- dence of government support and direction. Popular education in England was mainly initiated in former days by the public spirit and munificence of private citizens. There is enough money in the hands of Indians to plant a much greater number of educational establishments over the land, and, if they liked to go forward independently of government support, enough to maintain any type of education which any section of the Indian public might desire. There certainly appears something incongruous in the Nationalist demand for an immediate extension of the power of action in the 128 INDIAN NATIONALISM political field, when here a field of action is left open to the Indian community and its advance is so sporadic. Individuals have shown admirable self-sacrifice, teaching for small remuneration, or giving without public advertisement. But they are not typical of the richer classes as a whole. Perhaps the Nationalists might effect more by directing their energies upon their own fellow-countrymen than by directing them upon the Government. Not that there is much hope of bringing those who have grown old in egoism to another mind ; but there is always the younger generation. If the sons of the richer men, when they went through their University course, came into touch with a patriotic movement at once sane and strenuous, it might make all the difference to India in the near future. The other process which will, I think, have immense effect in transforming India will be industrial and commercial expansion. Where such development takes place, large new interests and organisations are created which draw to themselves much of the THE OUTLOOK 129 intelligence and energy in the community. They also act in the way of levelling barriers. But their most important elFect in India, I think, will be to develop qualities in which Indians at present are below the mark — thoroughness, punctuality, power to organise and combine. When Extremists talk of the struggle to come, I don't know how far they realise that, in a modern war, heroic bravery and self-devotion are little good, unless they are supplemented and directed by other much more prosaic apti- tudes. To conduct a modern war success- fully you want very much the same qualities as to run a big modern business. " I dare- say you have discovered that we are not a very punctual people," Indians have said to me, smiling, on occasions which obviously suggested the reflection ; and, of course, I smile too and feel it would be absurd to take the small things of life too heavily. And yet I have felt also that under the pleasantry there lay an immense tragedy. In a tussle with anyone like the surgeon, or an attempt to stand alone, an unpunctual K 130 INDIAN NATIONALISM people would have no chance at all. That is something which I don't think would be mended, if the whole of young India said in chorus to-morrow, " I will be punctual ; I will be businesslike." I imagine the quality of being businesslike can only be developed by doing business. As industrial expansion goes forward, more and more young Indians will be doing business ; more and more will be exercising different sorts of practical activity — building, engineering, planting — instead of theorising and discoursing, things which, I hope, are also good in their way, as I am doing both at the present moment. Thus it may be that a young mnn, pursuing success in business, would actually be doing more for political eman- cipation than somebody whose thoughts and activities were always directed towards it : the gradual processes in the organism do more for the dislocated man than a premature effort to get free. And then the Nationalist movement may get leaders of a very different kind than in the past. It is true, as Anglo-Indians say, that the leaders THE OUTLOOK 131 in the past have been men of books and theories and dreams. Books and theories and dreams may belong, I believe with all my heart, to a higher province of spirit than efficiency in business, but for bringing about changes in this material world you need the business efficiency too, and I think when Indian captains of industry, men who have successfully managed great business concerns, put themselves at the head of the Nationalist movement, it will be quite a new situation. My people will listen to them with more respect, for one thing : they are regrettably obtuse, I know, to the most lucid reasoning and the most powerful eloquence, while they are absurdly impressed by something actually achieved in the prac- tical field. Young India's diverting its energy from politics to business does not mean, as my parable has shown, that the political aim would be dropped. Sooner or later the time would come when success in other fields would produce signal political developments. The inner redintegration of the organism K 2 132 INDIAN NATIOxNALISM would mean in the end the taking off of the steel frame. And that end could be kept in sight always. From their childhood, boys who turned to any sort of work could have the vision of the future set before them. They could be taught that all work done honestly, thoroughly, exactly, was work done for the Mother. The healing of the dislocated organism means that an innumer- able number of molecules, too small even for the ken of the microscope, go on joining to make the new tissue, the contribution of each to the result infinitesimal, whilst yet it is just the sum of such infinitesimal pro- cesses which is the conspicuous result, when the man rises up healed. The insignificance of each man's work in the sum total of industry, apparently doing nothing by itself to bring the great day nearer, need not dis- concert his faith that his work too is service. I am conscious that this may seem a frightful descent from the poetry and. fire of the Extremist appeal. All the time then I was really the middle-aged man in disguise, trying to rob young men of their hope that THE OUTLOOK 133 life is splendid and passionate and intense, heroic agonies and dramatic triumphs, and lead them round in the end — they might have guessed it — to " Duty Smiles," and that sort of thing, as life's last word. It is not only that a prosperous commercial career lacks heroism ; my view comes to this, that the way to a great and glorious result is by money-making and the pursuit of material gain ; for that is what concentration upon business really comes to. And industrial expansion has rather an ill-omened sound to those who care for spiritual values. Surely this is dragging the whole thing down on to a lower plane. Yes, I think it is a lower plane. When I spoke of industrial expan- sion, and business aptitudes, and