The Bagbazar Meeting

                      WE DO not clearly understand what has been gained by the Bagbazar meeting held on Sunday under the auspices of the leading lights of Bengal. There were one or two speeches made which said certain obvious things and there were certain resolutions passed in which we condoled, sympathised, demanded and protested. But when the meeting dispersed, we were not one whit more forward than we had been a few hours before. What we want to know, what the country wants to know, is not what we think, - there is no doubt or difference of opinion about that, everybody is thinking the same thing, - but what are we going to do? The right of public meeting is to be allowed to us in future only on sufferance; students of schools are not to be permitted to think about politics; students of colleges, schoolmasters, professors are to be suffered to take interest in politics only so long as they do not do or say anything unpleasant or objectionable to the authorities; nationalist agitation has been practically forbidden on penalty of arrest, deportation or exposure to police or Mahomedan goondaism. What the Government means to do is plain enough. It intends to put down nationalism with the high hand and crush every attempt of the nation to raise its head, every aspiration to breathe, to grow and to live. The question now is, what do we mean to do in reply?

                There were four subjects before the meeting on Sunday. The deportation of Lajpatrai came first in importance, because it shows to what extremes the bureaucracy is prepared to go in order to crush nationalism. Merely. to express indignation and sympathy in answer to such a step is absurd; it has all the  bathos and futility of a foreseen commonplace. Of course we are indignant, of course we sympathise, but what afterwards? Have we no duty to perform except the expression of these very natural, unavoidable and entirely useless emotions? Yes, we demand that the charges against Lajpatrai should be formulated

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and proved. From whom do we make this demand? In the case of the Natu brothers it was just possible that pressure in Parliament might induce the Government in England to undo what the Government in Bombay had done in a moment of panic. Here there is no such possibility. Mr. Morley has publicly identified himself with this act of arbitrary oppression and his mind is too stiff and rigid with age to change. The deportation of Lajpatrai is therefore an action for which the Liberal Government has be- come responsible and, as such, is bound to have the support of almost the whole Liberal Party, while it will certainly have the support of the whole Conservative Party. Who then is likely to listen to this empty "demand"? We could have understood it, if the demand had been coupled with a resolution that the campaign of Boycott, Swadeshi and Swaraj should be pursued with tenfold vigour, that Srijut Bepin Chandra Pal should be asked to return to Madras and complete his programme with additions, and Srijut Surendranath Banerji should proceed at once to the North for the same purpose and should take in Gujarat and the Central Provinces in his return journey, and that meanwhile every nerve should be strained to promote and organise the movement in Bengal. The resolution would then have had a meaning and the nation would have been inspirited to draw fresh resolve and energy from what would otherwise be a national calamity. As it stands, this "demand" rings hollow and savours of empty braggadocio.
            The second question before the meeting was the state of things in Eastern Bengal, and here again the meeting dispersed after passing an utterly empty and unpractical resolution. There are various ways in which the situation might be met. It might have been resolved to arrange a meeting with the leading Mahomedans of Bengal and call upon them to dissociate themselves publicly from Nawab Salimullah and take active steps in order to put a stop to anti-Hindu ferment which its misbegetters are now attempting to spread westward. Or, we might have decided in consultation with the Hindu Zemindars in the East to arrange adequate self-defence at every defensible point of the affected areas and withdraw the Hindu element from villages where they were too few to render a good account of themselves. This would

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