"moderates" to break with their "advanced" friends by proclaiming, once
and for all, their own conviction that within no measurable time can
India in her own interests afford to forgo the guarantees of internal
peace and order and external security which the British _Raj_ alone can
afford. Hence the desire on both sides to find some common denominator
in a nebulous formula which each can interpret as to time and manner
according to its own desires and aims. That formula seems to have been
discovered in the term _Swaraj_, or self-rule, which, when
euphemistically translated into Colonial self-government for India,
offers the additional advantage of presenting the political aspirations
of Indian "Nationalism" in the form least likely to alarm Englishmen,
especially those who do not care or wish to look below the surface and
whose sympathies are readily won by any catchword that appeals to
sentimental Liberalism. Now if _Swaraj_, or Colonial self-government,
represents the _minimum_ that will satisfy Indian Nationalists, it is
important to know exactly what in their view it really means.
Fortunately on this point we have some _data_ of indisputable authority.
They are furnished in the speeches of an "advanced" leader, who does not
rank amongst the revolutionary extremists, though his refusal to give
evidence in the trial of a seditious newspaper with which he had been
connected brought him in 1907 within the scope of the Indian Criminal
Code. Mr. Bepin Chandra Pal, a high-caste Hindu and a man of great
intellectual force and high character, has not only received a Western
education, but has travelled a great deal in Europe and in America, and
is almost as much at home in London as in Calcutta. A little more than
three years ago he delivered in Madras a series of lectures on the "New
Spirit," which have been republished in many editions and may be
regarded as the most authoritative programme of "advanced" political
thought in India. What adds greatly to the significance of those
speeches is that Mr. Pal borrowed their keynote from the Presidential