dation
of anything like future progress. If any of you hear unfavourable
language applied to me as your representative, do me the justice to
remember considerations of that kind. To nobody in this world, by
habit, by education, by experience, by views expressed in political
affairs for a great many years past, to nobody is exceptional
repression, more distasteful than it is to me. After all, gentlemen,
you would not have me see men try to set the prairie on fire without
arresting the hand. You would not blame me when I saw men smoking
their pipes near powder magazines, you would not blame me, you would
not call me an arch coercionist, if I said, "Away with the men and
away with the pipes." We have not allowed ourselves--I speak of the
Indian Government--to be hurried into the policy of repression. I
say this to what I would call the idealist party. Then I would say
something to those who talk nonsense about apathy and supineness. We
will not be hurried into repression, any more than we will be hurried
into the other direction. This party, which is very vocal in this
country, say:--Oh! we are astonished, and India is astonished, and
amazed at the licence that you extend to newspapers and to speakers;
why don't you stop it? Orientals, they say, do not understand it.
Yes, but just let us look at that. We are not Orientals; that is the
root of the matter. We are in India. We English, Scotch, and Irish,
are in India because we are not Orientals. We are representatives, not
of Oriental civilisation, but of Western civilisation, of its methods,
its principles, its practices; and I for one will not be hurried into
an excessive haste for repression, by the argument that Orientals do
not understand patience or toleration.

You will want to know how the situation is viewed at this moment in
India itself, by those who are responsible for the Government of
India. This view is not a new view at all. It is that the situation is
not gravely dangerous, but it requires serious and urgent attention.
That seems for the moment to be the verdict. Extremists are few, but
they are active; their field is wide, their nets are far spread.
Anybody who has read history knows that the Extremist often beats the
Moderate by his fire, his heated energy, his concentration, by his
very narrowness. So be it; we remember it; we watch it all, with that
lesson of historic experience full in our minds. Yet we still hold
that it would be the height of politic