not in its gift, they had to come and stand at the cottage door of the village of their birth. Acknowledgment as a high-souled member of the community by the meanest there, meant more than the highest Maharajaship conferred by the Sarkar. In those days they had learnt to value appreciation by the motherland in the very depths of their being, and the pomp of the metropolis, or the glories of the imperial audience chamber never succeeded in drawing their hearts away therefrom. Therefore, there was no water-scarcity then, and all the adjuncts of true human culture were to be found in the life of the village.
To-day it adds not to our happiness that our countrymen should hail us as blessed, and so does our endeavour fail to be directed towards our country. It has now become necessary for requests and reminders to come to us from the Sarkar. There is nothing within us to impel us to take the natural course ourselves, for have we not signed away our birthright to the white man,—are not our very tastes put up for sale in his shops?
I feel I may be misunderstood. I do not mean that each one of us should cling to the soil of his native village and that there is no need to stir outside it to gain knowledge or recognition. The Bengali cannot but be grateful to the forces of attraction which have drawn him out, roused his faculties, and broadened his mind by widening his sphere of activity. But the time has come to remind the sons of Bengal that they must not turn topsy-turvy the natural relations of within and without. Men go abroad to earn, and come home to spend. To make the best use of our powers in the outside world, we must keep our heart true within. But, as the last Provincial Conference showed only too clearly, we have now changed all that. We went to confer with our provincial brethren, but our language was foreign. We have learnt to look upon the English-educated man as our next-of-kin, and cannot realise that all our politics are futile if we cannot make one with us the whole community, from the highest to the lowest. We have become used to keeping the great mass of our countrymen outside our deliberations and so have set up an impassable barrier between them and ourselves. We have from the very first spared no effort or artifice to win the heart of England, but have clean forgotten that the heart of our own country is of greater value and requires at least as much of striving for its conquest.
The ultimate object of political work is to mould the mind of the people into one. It is only in our unfortunate country that the idea finds place of calling a series of operations designed to capture the mind of the foreigner by the name of political education. If we acknowledge the conquest of the country’s heart to be the supreme gain, we must cast aside the foreign methods which we have learnt to consider so necessary in business matters, and bring full into our view the avenues which have always been open, and still are available, as thoroughfares to the heart of the motherland.
Let us try and imagine what we should have done if we really had some message which we wanted to deliver to the country. Instead of getting up a meeting in the English style we should have organised a grand mela. There arrangements for play and song and festivity galore would bring crowds hurrying from the most distant places. There we could hold our markets and our exhibitions of home-made goods and agricultural produce. There we could award prizes to our bards and reciters and those who came to sing or play. There we could arrange lantern lectures on sanitation. There we could have heart to heart talks with each other, and bethink ourselves of ways and means, in regard to all matters of national interest,—and with gentle and rustic alike we could hold communion in our own language.
Our countrymen are mainly villagers. When the village desires to feel in its veins the throb of the greater life of the outside world, the mela has always been its way of achieving that object. The mela is the invitation of the village to the world into its cottage home. On such festive occasion the village forgets its narrowness in a
