Prospects of a united Congress

THERE is no newspaper in the country which ever since the secession of the Liberal Party from the Congress more than seven years ago has pleaded more consistently, more energetically or more wholeheartedly for the restoration of the unity of the Congress than The Tribune. In spite of the deepening of national consciousness and the undoubted extension of the area of the national movement, the division among national workers is even wider today than it was in 1918 or 1919. To us, therefore, the attempts that are being made in certain influential and authoritative quarters to make the Congress once more a united body are naturally a source of intense gratification. Unhappily, we do not see in these attempts either a sufficiently deep and penetrating analysis of the cause or causes of the present indication of that readiness to subordinate non-essential differences to essential unity among the parties in the country on which alone successful efforts for uniting them on one political platform can be based. You can no more bring about unity merely by talking of unity than you can bring about peace merely by crying peace where there is no peace. Of most of those who have for sometime been speaking and writing with impassioned vigour about the necessity of a united Congress, it can be safely said that they want unity only on their own terms, that they are prepared to make no sacrifice of any kind for the realisation of the object they profess so loudly and so eloquently to have at heart. Some of them, indeed, go even farther and frankly assume the role of the infallible. “We have always been right,” they say in effect to their opponents.