It is common to say of a dead politician that he was devoted heart and soul to the service of his country, and, happily, it is sometimes true, even though that devoted service has been crowned by honours, fame, and riches. But of Mr. Gokhale who is still alive, I would say that for every day of his manhood he has had no motive but his country’s service, from the day of his appointment on a salary of £60 a year as teacher of history and economics at the Fergusson College in Poona up to his retirement in 1902 on a pension of £20 a year, and onward through the last six years of labour, vilification, and heated controversy. Not a great speaker, and making no attempt at emotional eloquence at a time when oratory counted for much more in India than it does now—a man who has never even contemplated any popular arts except his own inevitable politeness, he has won his influence upon his country’s future simply by unreserved devotion and integrity of life. At a moment of intense excitement during the plague riots in Poona, when Mr. Rand and Lieut. Ayerst were shot by Damodar Chapekar and his brothers as they drove into the city from Government House (June 22, 1897), he, being then in England, published charges against the method of plague-observation by British soldiers, which on his return he discovered were not supported by the promised evidence, and he offered an open apology to Lord Sandhurst and the Army. Amidst an infuriated public opinion, which believed the charges to be not only true, but below the truth, few could have lived down such a retractation. But Mr. Gokhale lived it down.
When the National Congress met at Benares in December, 1905, just after the partition of Bengal, he was elected President as the safest guide in a crisis of extreme difficulty and increasing indignation. Mr. John Morley had just received his appointment to the India Office, and a few lines from Mr. Gokhale’s presidential address may be quoted to show the hopes and fears of the time:—
“Large numbers of educated men in this country feel towards Mr. Morley as towards a Master, and the heart hopes and yet trembles. He, the reverent student of Burke, the disciple of Mill, the friend and biographer of Gladstone, will he courageously apply their principles and his own to the government of this country, or will he too succumb to the influences of the India Office, and thus cast a blight on hopes which his own writings have done so much to foster? In any case his appointment indicates how favourable to our cause the attitude of the new Ministry is.”
For two or three years past Mr. Gokhale had represented the Presidency of Bombay as one of the elected Indians upon the Viceroy’s Legislative Council, and when I first met him at Poona, as I have described, he had just returned from the Council at Simla, in which the Seditious Meetings Bill was approved.[8] Before the Viceroy and the rest of the British majority, he had opposed the Bill with a restrained but overwhelming plea for the common rights of freedom, as English people understand them. In one significant passage, after referring to “the malignant activity of certain unscrupulous correspondents” who had recently been trying to lash the British public into a panic by false versions of events and private utterances, he added:—
“The saddest part of the whole thing is that the Secretary of State for India has fallen a victim to these grievous misrepresentations. Possessing no personal knowledge of the people of this country, and overwhelmed with a sense of the vast responsibilities of his office, he has allowed his vision to be obscured, and his sense of proportion to be warped. From time to time he has let fall ominous hints in the House of Commons, and more than once he has spoken as though some great trouble were brewing in India and the country were on the eve of a dark disaster. My Lord, in these circumstances the passing of a Bill like the present, and in such hot haste, is bound to have the effect of confirming the false impression which has been already created in England, and this cannot fail to intensify and deepen still further the sense of injustice and injury, and the silent resentment with which my countrymen have been watching the course of events during the last few months.”
Here, on the edge of the rocky country west of Poona, close beside the Fergusson College for Indians, with which he had been so long connected, he had laid the foundation of his “Servants of India Society” two years before, and in the two-roomed cells about a dozen Knights of the Order were already living. They were men prepared, in the language of the Society’s rules, “to devote their lives to the cause of the country in a religious spirit, and to promote, by all constitutional means, the national interests of the Indian people.” The object of the Society is to train the Servants as national missionaries, ready to visit any part of India at the order of the First Member and Council, in the hope of creating a deep and passionate love of the country, organizing political teaching, promoting goodwill among the different races, assisting education, especially of women, and raising the people who live below even the lowest caste.
Each Servant of India remains under close training for five years, but out of the five years he spends two in visiting various parts of India, so as to know the people’s needs at first hand. Even when his novitiate is complete, he is required to live two months every year in the Headquarters, and, like the Monastic Orders, all the members take vows—to give their best to the service of the country; to earn no money for themselves and seek no personal advantage; to regard all Indians as brothers, without distinction of caste or creed; to engage in no personal quarrel; and to lead a pure personal life. In this Order, as in other similar societies throughout India, there is a growing tendency to celibate consecration, like the Roman priesthood’s. But the last vow does not exclude marriage. In fact, there is a provision that every member under training shall have his personal expenses borne by the Society, but be granted £2 a month for his family, if he has one, and that after his novitiate the full member shall bear the expenses of himself and family out of a grant of £3 6s. 8d. (Rs. 50) a month, with an extra allowance for the insurance of each child as it comes.
The merely learned side of the Order is represented by a large library, already containing rows on rows of the many great books that Indians and Englishmen have written on India, together with a selection from the history of liberty in all countries. That is the library’s distinction. Beginning with England herself, and passing right down the glorious roll to the Russia of 1905, it has here collected the long record of man’s gradual and hard-won conquest of freedom.
Social reform is certainly one side of the Society’s work. To free the laborious peoples of India from the bondage they lay on themselves in harassing ritual, immature marriages, exclusion from life’s decencies of some fifty millions, who eat dead animals and think they commit mortal sin if their shadow touches a Brahman—to free the common people gradually from these obsolete ways, and to spread among them the first inkling of knowledge, for which the Government does not yet afford the money—these are objects common to most Indian reformers, and natural under the tradition of Ranade. Such purposes are missionary in the ordinary sense, like the efforts of our missionary societies or university settlements. Only those who are dubious about all missionary efforts could criticize them. I am dubious myself, only because no one has ever deliberately missionized me without driving me further into sin, if only as a relief from his presence. For I keep in my mind that saying of Thoreau’s:—
“If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life as from that dry and parching wind of the African deserts, called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear I should get some of his good done to me—some of its virus mingled with my blood.”