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Morleyism Analysed
THE
fuller reports of Mr. Morley's speech to hand by mail do not in any essential
point alter the impression that was produced by Reuter’s summary. The
whole of the speech turns upon a single sentence as its pivot — the statement
that British rule will continue, ought to continue and must continue. Mr. Morley
does not say forever, but that is understood. It follows that if the continuance
of British rule on any terms is the fundamental necessity, any and every means
used for its preservation is legitimate. Compared with that supreme necessity
justice does not matter, humanity does not matter, truth does not matter,
morality may be trampled on, the laws of God may be defied. The principles of
Liberalism, though they may have been
professed a thousand times over, must be discarded by the English rulers of
India as inapplicable to a country of “300 millions of people, composite,
heterogeneous, of different races with different histories and different
faiths". All these things weigh as dust in the balance against the one
supreme necessity. If the continuance of British rule seems to be threatened by
any popular activity, however legitimate, resort must be had to any weapon, no
matter of what nature, in order to put down that activity. Reasons of State,
"the tyrant's plea, necessity", must be held to be of supreme
authority and to override all other considerations. Mr. Morley admits that the
plea is a dangerous one, but sedition is still more dangerous. The danger of the
reason of State is that it can cover and will inevitably be stretched to cover
the repetition of "dangers, mischiefs and iniquities in our olden history
and, perhaps, in our present history", in other words Mr. Morley's
reasoning in favour of the present "iniquities" in India, can equally
well be used to justify every utmost atrocity, cruelty, vileness with which
tyrants ancient or modern have attempted to put down opposition to their
sovereign will. Wholesale deportation, arbitrary imprisonment, massacre,
outrage, police anarchy, torture of
Page-447
prisoners,
every familiar feature of Russian repression, can be brought under the head of
weapons necessary to combat sedition and can be justified by the plea of State
necessity. This is the danger of reason of State, a danger that recent events in
India and especially current events in the Punjab show to be by no means so
remote as we might have some months ago imagined. But the danger of sedition is
the cessation of British rule. And in the opinion of Mr. Morley, supported by an
almost unanimous concensus of British opinion, the re-enactment by a British
government of the iniquities and atrocities of ancient and modern tyranny are
preferable to the cessation of British rule; it is better to take the risk of
these than to take the risk of losing the absolute control of Britain over
India. This is Mr. Morley's argument, approved by Conservative and Radical alike....
No,
we are not distorting or exaggerating. There it is, plump and plain, in the
speech of the great British Radical, the Liberal philosopher, the panegyrist of
Burke and Gladstone. It is the last word of England to India on the great issue
of Indian self-government.
What does Mr. Morley mean by British rule? Not the British connexion, not
the continuance of India as a self-governing unit in a federation of free
peoples which shall be called the British Empire. No, Mr. Morley is quite as
hostile to the Moderate ideal of self-government on colonial lines, modified
Swaraj, as to the Nationalist ideal of Swaraj, pure and simple. The educated
minority in India have the presumption to think themselves capable of working
the government of the country as smoothly as the heaven-born Briton himself, but
Mr. Morley is persuaded that they would not work it for a week. This is final.
If after a hundred years of English education and no inconsiderable training in
the subordinate conduct of the bureaucratic machinery of government, the
educated class are not fit to be entrusted even by gradual stages with the
supreme government of Indian affairs, then they will never be fit. And we must
remember that the policy of the rulers henceforth will be to control and
restrict and not to encourage or promote the spread of education of the higher
sort. From our own point of view, we may put it more strongly and say that if a
hundred years of dependence and foreign control have so immensely impaired that
governing capa-
Page-448
city
of the Indian races which they showed with such splendid
results for the
last three thousand years, then another century will
absolutely and for ever destroy it. Mr. Morley is therefore
logically
justified in reiterating his conviction that personal and absolute
foreign control must be the leading feature of Indian administration to the very
end of time. This is what Mr. Morley means by the continuance of British rule,
he means the continuance of a personal and absolute British control pervading
the administration of affairs in every department, in other words, a
bureaucratic despotism strongly flavoured by the independent personal
omnipotence of local governors and local officials. The problem which former
British statesmen professed to have before them was the problem of gradually
training and associating the Indians in an European system of government until
they were fit to take over absolute control of affairs and allow their patrons
and protectors to withdraw. This problem does not any longer trouble the peace
of British statesmen; on the contrary, it is definitely and forever disclaimed
and put aside as a chimera —
or a pretence.
British rule in India will continue, ought to continue
and must continue. What then is the problem which is troubling Mr. Morley? The
problem is "the difficulty of combining personal government in our
dependency with the rights of free speech and free meeting". Personal
government, absolute government, despotism, that is the supreme necessity which
must be continued for ever even at the sacrifice of morality, justice and every
other consideration. Subject to that necessity Mr. Morley proposes to allow a
certain amount of free speech if that be possible. Free speech was harmless as
long as the Indian people had not set their heart on self-government; but now
that they have resolved to have nothing short of self-government, free speech
means seditious speech, and sedition is not consistent with the continuance of
the absolute and personal British control. How then can free speech and British
despotism be combined? How then can fire and water occupy the same space? That
is the problem, which Mr. Morley refuses to believe insoluble, and he solves it
by proclaiming the areas where free speech has been chiefly employed, — and by
establishing an Advisory Council of Notables.
It may be asked, if the
continuance of absolute government
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is
the whole policy of British statesmanship, why does Mr. Morley trouble himself
about free speech at all or propose any reforms? That question can be easily
answered by a consideration of the suggested reforms.
The first of these reforms
is a Council of Notables. Mr. Morley has told us what is the object of this
body; it is to be a sort of medium of communication between the government and
the people. Of course Mr. Morley is quite mistaken in supposing that such a body
can really serve the object he has in view, but we are concerned for the present
not with the sufficiency of the means he is devising for his object, but with
the object itself. The second reform is an expansion of the Legislative Councils
and greater facilities to the elected members for the expression of their views;
in other words the object of the expanded Legislative Councils is to keep the
Government in India in touch with the views of the educated class. The third
reform is the admission of Indian members to the India Council, and it is
obvious that here again the object is that these Indian members should keep the
Government in England in touch with the opinions of educated India, just as the
elected members of the Legislative Council are to keep the Government in India
in touch with the same opinion. The fourth reform is the decentralisation of the
administration so that each local official may become an independent local
despot. The object is clearly defined; first, to give him greater opportunities
of being in touch with the people, secondly, to give him a greater power of
personal despotic control within his own jurisdiction unhampered by the
interference of higher authorities. All the reforms have one single object, one
governing idea, — an absolute personal despotic British control in touch with
the people. That is Mr. Morley's policy.
The object of keeping in touch with the people and knowing their opinions is not
to redress their grievances, still less to allow their opinions any control over
the administration. The object is quite different. A despotism out of touch with
the people is a despotism continually in danger, ignorant of the currents of
opinion, ignorant of the half-visible activities among its subjects, ignorant of
the perils gathering in the vast obscurity, it must one day be suddenly
surprised and perhaps overthrown by the un-
Page-450
foreseen
outburst of activities and dangers it had not anticipated. It is in order to
avoid these dangers that Mr. Morley wishes to employ various means of keeping in
touch with public opinion and its manifestations. He talks in his speech of the
necessity of the rulers putting themselves in the skins of the ruled, in other
words, of thoroughly understanding their thoughts, feelings and point of view.
This does not mean that they shall rule India according to the sentiments, views
and wishes of the Indian people. The whole conduct of Mr. Morley and the whole
trend of his utterances shows that he means the opinions of the Government to
prevail without regard to Indian opinions and sentiments. The rulers are to
understand the ruled so that they may know how their measures are likely to
affect the minds of the latter, how opposition can best be persuaded or Samjaoed
into quiescence and how, if persuasion is useless, it can most swiftly and
successfully be crushed. Through the Council of Notables, the Legislative
Councils and the Indian members of the India Council, the Government will come
to know the ideas, views, and feelings of the people; through the two former
bodies they will try to present unpopular measures in such a way as to coax,
cajole, delude or intimidate public opinion into a quiet acceptance. If they
cannot do this, then through the decentralised local officers they can keep in
touch with the popular temper, learn its manifestations and activities and
successfully and promptly put down opposition by local measures, if possible,
otherwise by imperial rescripts, laws and ordinances and every possible weapon
of despotic repression.
We have analysed Mr. Morley's speech at length, because people in India
have not the habit of following the turns of British parliamentary eloquence or
reading between the lines of the speech of a Cabinet Minister. They are
therefore likely to miss its true bearings and fail to understand the policy it
enunciates. Read by an eye accustomed to the reservations and implications by
which a British Minister makes himself intelligible without committing himself
unnecessarily, Mr. Morley's speech is an admirably clear, connected, logical
and, let us add, unusually and amazingly frank expression of a very straightforward and coherent policy. To maintain in India an absolute
Page-451
rule
as rigid as any Czar's, to keep that rule in close touch with the currents of
Indian sentiment, opinion and activity and to crush any active opposition by an
immediate resort to the ordinary weapons of despotism, ordinances, deportations,
prosecutions and a swift and ruthless terrorism, this is Morleyism as explained
by its author.
Political
or Non-political
We are glad to see that both at Jessore and Pabna the foolish idea of
excluding politics from a political conference has been entirely abandoned. The
attempt to parcel off our national progress into water-tight compartments, the
attempts especially to put off political activity and political development to a
far-distant area is, when not dictated by weakness or cowardice, a narrow,
one-sided and short-sighted attempt. In one sense everything that concerns the
welfare of the polis, the state or community is political. Education,
social reconstruction, sanitation, industrial expansion, all these are a
necessary part of politics; but the most important part of all is that to which
the term politics is especially applied, the organisation of the state and its
independence; for on these all the others depend. Just as an organism must first
live and then attend to other wants and must therefore give the highest
importance to the preservation of life, so also a state or nation must first win
or maintain an organised independence, otherwise it will find itself baffled in
all its attempts to satisfy its other wants. Swadeshi, Boycott, Arbitration,
National Education are all doomed to failure if pursued separately and for their
own sake; but as part of a single co-ordinated attempt to attain an organised
independence, they are the necessity of the present time. They are merely
component parts of Swaraj, which is made of all of them put together and
harmonised into a single whole. It is mere ostrich politics to pretend to give
up Swaraj, and confine oneself to its parts for their own sake. By such an
attempt we may succeed in deceiving ourselves, we shall certainly not deceive
anybody else.
Bande Mataram,
June 25, 1907
Page-452
The
Statesman is naturally delighted with Mr. A. Chowdhuri's declaration in
favour of leaving politics out of our programme. Here at least, cries the Friend
of India, is a leader after our own heart. No doubt it would be extremely
convenient for the Friend of India and its countrymen if Indians did give up
their political aspirations and leave Anglo-India in undisputed possession of
the field, but we do not think the friendly yearnings of the Statesman are
likely to be gratified. Mr. Chowdhuri's message fell flat even in his own Pabna.
At the same time our contemporary seems hardly to have taken the trouble to
understand the speech of his new protégé. He fastens on the powerful indictment
of the present system of education which is the most striking portion of Mr.
Chowdhuri's address, and warmly approves of it. But he mildly rebukes the
speaker for pinning his hopes on the new system of National Education which is
gradually spreading throughout Bengal and advises him to transfer his affections
to the old University. National Education will be a failure, says the
Chowringhee prophet; Indians are too selfish and unpatriotic to make it a
success. What then is to be done? Why, give up agitating for political reform
since our agitation is so obviously a failure and begin agitating for
educational reform. It is a luminous idea. After having wasted a century begging
the British government to reform their administration, we are to waste another
century begging them to
reform their educational system,
—
with equal futility. The Government cannot
give us a reformed and modern system of education for obvious reasons. It would
mean the growth of highly-trained specialists who would immediately demand to be
employed in preference to aliens, and either the bread of so many Europeans
would be taken out of their mouths or there would be a fresh cause of
discontent. It would equip Indians to oust the white man from his lucrative
monopoly of commerce and trade and kill British trade in India by the
development of indigenous industries. It would mean the transformation of our
people into a highly-trained and well-equipped nation who would certainly not
submit to Mr. Morley's personal and absolute
Page-453
British
control. Anything short of this would not meet Mr. Chowdhuri's ideal; but
anything like this the bureaucracy could not give us without committing suicide.
The Statesman has not, as we said, cared to understand Mr. Chowdhuri. He
is for dropping politics, but he is also for self-help and denounces mendicancy.
We fear the Statesman will have to look farther for its ideal Bengali
leader. Why not try Sankharitola?
Bande Mataram,
June 26, 1907
Page-454
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