System Versus Individuals.

WE cannot accept Dr. Rabindranath’s view that “all British troubles in India are due to the lack of sympathy between the rulers and the people”, that all that the Government of India lacks is “personal human touch,” that no modification of the existing machinery would make the slightest difference without change of spirit and that the only hope is for a man with “real nobility of purpose and generous sympathy” to go to India as Viceroy. Not that we do not recognise the value of sympathy and personal human touch, or the need for a change of spirit. But clearly in his anxiety to emphasise one indispensable element, Dr. Rabindranath is greatly minimising another. The difference between a good and a bad ruler is unmistakable and will always remain, but even the best of rulers cannot do their work properly or give complete satisfaction with the aid of an evil system and a vicious method. Indeed, at the risk of repeating an unpleasant truism we must say that where a system is radically unsound, bad rulers sometimes actually serve a more useful purpose than good rulers. The latter, by glossing over the defects of the system, may induce the people to go to sleep over them and thus prolong its life, while the former, by revealing the defects of the system in their nakedness, may act as a much-needed spur, and unconsciously and unwittingly give an impetus to the forces of freedom and progress. And apart from this aspect of the matter, is not Dr. Tagore making an artificial division between sympathy and policy, between the machinery and the spirit of the Government? He is a thinker as well as a poet, and he surely knows as well as any of us that sympathy to be of any practical value must be embodied in policy and that the relation between the form and the spirit of a Government, as of all similar bodies, is organic, that neither is really independent of the other.

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