Patriots, Poets and Prisoners: Selections from Ramananda Chatterjee's The Modern Review, 1907-1947

PATRIOTS, POETS AND PRISONERS

SELECTIONS FROM RAMANANDA CHATTERJEE’S

The Modern Review, 1907–1947

Edited by

Anikendra Sen

Devangshu Datta

Nilanjana S. Roy

With an introduction by Ramachandra Guha

HarperCollins Publishers India

To Independent India and to liberal values, two things

that Ramananda Chatterjee fought for

Contents

Introduction: Ramachandra Guha

Foreword: A Note from the Editors

PATRIOTS AND PRISONERS

Towards Home Rule

Ramananda Chatterjee

India and Democracy

Sister Nivedita

The National Outlook

Lala Lajpat Rai

On Ahimsa: A Reply to Lala Lajpat Rai

M.K. Gandhi

Notes, July 1917

The Nation

Rabindranath Tagore

The Cult of the Charkha

Rabindranath Tagore

Striving for Swaraj

Rabindranath Tagore

The Mind of a Judge

Jawaharlal Nehru

We Want No Caesars

Chanakya

My Strange Illness

Subhas Chandra Bose

How a Harijan Candidate was Defeated

R.S. Pandit

The Making of an Indian MP

Sant Nihal Singh

The Responsibility of Women As Citizens in the India of Today

Rajkumari Amrit Kaur

Sj. Subhas C. Bose – Under Regulation III OP 1818

Satyendra Chandra Mitra

Japan’s Role in the Far East

Subhas Chandra Bose

Back Home

Jawaharlal Nehru

Selections from Notes over the Years

Fifty Years of the Indian National Congress

Is Inter-Caste Marriage Un-Hindu?

WRITERS AND POETS

Letters from Abroad

Rabindranath Tagore to C.F. Andrews

Krishnakanta’s Will

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee

Three Poems

Verrier Elwin

The Hindi Poets of the Middle Ages

C.F. Andrews

The Actress

Premchand

The Waters of Destiny

Sita Devi

Uncle Bhondool’s House

Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay

INTERVIEWS

On the Nature of Reality

Albert Einstein in Conversation with Rabindranath Tagore

What Romain Rolland Thinks

Interview by Subhas Chandra Bose

An Interview with Mahatma Gandhi

Nirmal Kumar Bose

TRIBUTES

Ramananda Chatterjee: India’s Ambassador to the Nations

Sir Jadunath Sarkar

Ramananda Chatterjee: Personal Reminiscences and Tribute

Atul Home

1947: DAWN OF A NEW AGE

1947: Dawn of a New Age

About the Book

About the Editors

Copyright

Introduction

Ramachandra Guha

J

ournals of opinion have had a disproportionate impact in shaping the public discourse of the modern world. Think, for example, of Les Temps Moderne in France, National Interest and The Nation in the United States, the New Statesman and The Spectator in the United Kingdom. These magazines sold far fewer copies than daily newspapers, yet had a far greater influence on politicians, civil servants, social activists and scholars.

The first Indian equivalent of Les Temps Moderne, the New Statesman, etc., was The Modern Review. Founded in 1907 by Ramananda Chatterjee, The Modern Review quickly emerged as a vital forum for the nationalist intelligentsia. It carried essays on politics, economics and society, but also, being run by a Bengali, poems, stories, travelogues and sketches.

Modern Review was the stable-mate of Prabasi, which was published in Bengali and catered exclusively to one linguistic group. As a vehicle for bilinguals from all parts of the subcontinent, the monthly Modern Review appeared, naturally, in English. While being broadly nationalistic it did not hold a brief for any particular political party. The first feature meant that it could act as a genuinely all-India forum; the second that it stood apart from party journals concurrently run by the Congress, the Muslim League, the Hindu Mahasabha, the Communists, and the Scheduled Castes Federation.

In a fine scholarly essay on the history of The Modern Review, the literary historian, Margery Sabin, explores the questions that most preoccupied the journal’s editor. Ramananda Chatterjee, she writes, ‘sustained in his own voice and sponsored in the voices of his contributors fundamental and continuing questions about India’s past, present, and future: What constitutes the authentic Indian past? What foreign influences in the present should India welcome or shun? What directions for the future would allow India to become modern without betraying its own identity?’

Sabin also analyses how Chatterjee skilfully negotiated his way through the mire of repressive colonial laws restricting press freedom. Since outright calls for Indian independence could attract prosecution on grounds of ‘sedition’, Chatterjee often quoted British statesmen in praise of liberty and national emancipation. Drawing on a well-stocked library and his own wide learning, ‘a plenitude of English voices from the past could be summoned to indict British rule without the editor risking a sentence of his own’.

Among the most famous articles published in The Modern Review was ‘The Call of Truth’, by Rabindranath Tagore, which appeared in the issue of October 1921. Tagore had recently returned from a long trip abroad, where he had gone to raise money for his new university in Santiniketan. While he was away, Mahatma Gandhi launched his Non-co-operation movement, urging Indians to boycott state-run schools, colleges, and law courts, organize bonfires of foreign cloth, and court arrest in doing so. Reading the news from India, Tagore was dismayed. As he wrote to C.F. Andrews from Chicago on 5 March 1921: ‘What irony of fate is this that I should be preaching co-operation of cultures between East and West on this side of the sea just at the moment when the doctrine of non-co-operation is preached on the other side?’

Later that year, Tagore returned to India, had long conversations with Gandhi in Calcutta, but remained unpersuaded about non-co-operation and its methods. When he decided to go public with his criticisms, he chose The Modern Review as his outlet. In his recent travels in the West, said Tagore, he had met many people who sought ‘to achieve the unity of man, by destroying the bondage of nationalism’. He had ‘watched the faces of European students all aglow with the hope of a united mankind…’. Then he returned home, to be confronted with a political movement suffused with negativity. Are ‘we alone to be content with telling the beads of negation’, asked Tagore, ‘harping on other’s faults and proceeding with the erection of Swaraj on a foundation of quarrelsomeness?’

Gandhi replied in equally spirited tones, albeit in his own journal, Young India. The Non-co-operation movement, he said, was a refusal to co-operate with the English administrators on their own terms. ‘We say to them, Come and co-operate with us on our terms, and it will be well for us, for you and the world. … A drowning man cannot save others. In order to be fit to save others, we must try to save ourselves. Indian nationalism is not exclusive, nor aggressive, nor destructive. It is health-giving, religious and therefore humanitarian. India must learn to live before she can aspire to die for humanity. The mice which helplessly find themselves between the cat’s teeth acquire no merit from their sacrifice’.

(Some years later, Tagore wrote another critique of Gandhi in The Modern Review, this time deploring the cult of the charkha. The debates between Tagore and Gandhi in their entirety have been published in The Mahatma and the Poet, edited by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, who has also provided a useful introduction. This is a book that every thinking Indian should possess. It is published by the National Book Trust, which means that every Indian can afford it, but few would know where to find it.)

Another celebrated essay published in Ramananda Chatterjee’s journal was an auto-critique. In its issue for November 1937, The Modern Review carried a profile of the Congress president, Jawaharlal Nehru. The profile was not wholly flattering; it spoke, for example, of Nehru’s ‘intolerance of others and a certain contempt for the weak and inefficient’. It noted that his conceit was ‘already formidable’, and worried that soon ‘Jawaharlal might fancy himself as a Caesar’.

The essay was written under the pen-name of ‘Chanakya’. There was much speculation as to who the author might have been. It appeared to be a critic of the Congress president, possibly a critic of the Congress party as well. Then it was revealed that the author was none other than Jawaharlal Nehru himself.

That Tagore would criticize Gandhi in its pages, or that Nehru would anonymously criticize himself here, were marks of how significant The Modern Review was to public discourse in late colonial India. The magazine was vital to intellectual debates as well. It was in The Modern Review that the sociologist, Radhakamal Mukerjee, published his early pioneering essays on environmental degradation in India; and it was to The Modern Review that the anthropologist Verrier Elwin sent his first reports from the Gond country. Among the magazine’s other contributors was the distinguished historian Jadunath Sarkar.

As a platform for debate and discussion among India’s finest minds and its most public figures, The Modern Review played a major part in the process of national awakening. Education, the rights of women, the relations between religions and castes, India’s place in the world – these extremely important subjects were all intensively discussed in its pages. Significantly, the coming of political independence dealt a body blow to the journal. For its perspective was forward-looking, the nurturing of reforming sensibilities among the men and women who would one day come to rule India. When the former freedom fighters slipped comfortably into the chairs in the secretariat, the magazine seemed to have lost its bearing.

That its founder, Ramananda Chatterjee, had died in 1943 also contributed to its decline. Although The Modern Review limped along until 1965, its place had been taken by two new journals of opinion that more actively captured the trials of an independent (as distinct from colonized) nation. These were the Economic and Political Weekly, published out of Bombay; and Seminar, which was published out of New Delhi. More recently, we have seen the reinvented Caravan magazine, which, like Ramananda Chatterjee’s own journal, pays as much attention to culture and literature as to economics and politics.

The decline and disappearance of The Modern Review was symptomatic of the decline of the city where it was housed. Calcutta was no longer where the most interesting debates about India’s past and future took place.

It is a pleasure to introduce this anthology of essays from The Modern Review, which brings the richness and intensity of those times, those debates, to a modern audience. I hope this book will stimulate greater interest in this remarkable journal, perhaps leading to further (and thematically focused) anthologies from its archives.

Foreword

A Note from the Editors

R

amananda Chatterjee’s descendants had two clear intentions in mind when they revisited the vast and extensive archives of The Modern Review. The first was to pay tribute to his life’s work as an editor of a deliberately non-partisan periodical that was driven by the desire to chronicle India’s battle for Independence. The most appropriate way to do this was to bring out a volume of selected essays and writings from The Modern Review in his 150th birth centenary year.

The second was to pay tribute to the dozens and hundreds of journals like The Modern Review, published in several Indian languages, where several generations of Indian authors, artists, politicians, scientists, nation-builders, freedom fighters, dramatists, archaeologists, agricultural experts, soldiers, historians, environmentalists and the like had shared their experiences, argued over, and shaped the emerging nation of India.

By bringing out this volume, we hope to draw attention to the fact that much of India’s true, and often stirring, history lies in the archives of little magazines and turn-of-the-century journals. These periodicals, if curated and reissued, allow readers today to listen in to history as it was being made, with few filters between them and the leaders or brightest minds from the past. It is a heritage that belongs, properly, to the next generation of Indians, but it cannot be so easily claimed until it is brought out of our archives and libraries.

This is not an easy task, but we can testify that it is an exceptionally interesting one. The Modern Review archives run from 1907, when it was founded by Ramananda Babu, to the 1960s. Since this volume was intended to commemorate Ramananda Chatterjee, we looked only at volumes published between 1907 and 1943, the year of his death, including a few articles from the August 1947 issue as well.

The Modern Review, at its peak, ran to twelve volumes a year, with an average page extent of about 1,600 pages of published material for most years of its life. No 300, or even 500, page compilation would be sufficient to do justice to the roughly 50-65,000 pages of essays, notes, poems, original research, serialised novels, histories, sketches, travelogues, debates, book reviews, art biographies, military histories, polemics and memoirs that The Modern Review published during Ramananda Babu’s years as an editor. Once this was established, we felt no pressure to be comprehensive or to attempt a complete overview of the magazine’s contents.

As the editor, Ramananda Chatterjee shaped The Modern Review through two qualities. The first is a quality he had in common with a few Indian editors and academics, then and now – an open-ended curiosity about the world at large, and the confidence to let that spirit of inquiry roam free, from the Khasi Hills or the former United Provinces in India to Cambodia, Poland, and the US. He and the Review’s other editors, including his son Kedarnath Chatterjee, were equally eclectic in their choice of subjects. A typical selection, taken from 1927, might include articles on Chinese nationalism, progressive Islam, the war on opium, the crisis in South Rhodesia, ancient painting in Ceylon, recent Hindi literature, Upton Sinclair, the history of the Prarthana Samaj, Afsidal temples and Indian womanhood.

This sweeping interest in the world was certainly not a trait limited to The Modern Review – The Indian Mirror, The Hindustan Review, The Calcutta Gazette, Madras’s The Indian Social Reformer, for instance, shared that wide view. But The Modern Review made a speciality of pulling in experts from all across India, and all across other nations. It might also be argued that The Modern Review, and its journalistic predecessors in India and elsewhere, were quite familiar with what is now called longform journalism, and what was then practised as ordinary, everyday, leisurely investigative journalism.

The second quality is both easy and hard to describe: Ramananda Chatterjee’s love and concern for his country was, in many ways, the driving force behind the Review, the reason for its existence in the decades before Independence. But his patriotism was not of the glib, slogan-shouting, flag-waving kind – the relationship he had with the nation as it shaped itself during the years of the freedom struggle was loyal, intimate, questioning and always fearless.

As we read through the fragile pages of the Review or flipped through virtual pages in digital format, the voices of the nationalists, and then the writers the Review backed and published, began to emerge most powerfully. In the pages of the Review, it’s possible to see how close, how open and how respectful the relationships between India’s nationalists were, despite and perhaps because of their often blunt airing of their disagreements.

That formed one theme for this compilation: from Annie Besant to Netaji Bose, Mahatma Gandhi and Tagore skirmishing over swaraj, Nehru speaking his mind as though the Review were an extension of his diary, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur writing a piece that would later fuel a key charter of women’s rights, we began to get a sense of what it would have felt like to live through the freedom struggle.

The decision to include writers, and three startling interviews that match subject to interview in the most unexpected combinations, was our way of acknowledging the Review’s long tradition of publishing original writing, poetry, drama and art. Though it is best known for publishing Tagore’s works, chiefly in translation, there were surprises – Bibhutibhushan, Verrier Elwin, Sita Devi and even Premchand had offered stories or poems to the Review at different stages.

The omissions are large and many who are familiar with The Modern Review may regret the absence of pieces or authors they particularly loved. But there was too much to include. We regret that for reasons of pressure of time, we could not include art and architecture articles, because we could not find an easy way to reproduce the drawings and artwork so essential to most of them, given the condition of the original magazines.

But zealous editors could make separate thematic collections of The Modern Review’s writings on art and architecture, music and dance, religion, scripture and spirituality, history and archaeology, travel and global diplomacy, natural history and the environment, politics and political biography, and probably science, too, given that it often featured contributors such as J.C. Bose, who sparked off a memorable correspondence in the ‘Letters’ section over the question of how to properly treat the menace posed by water hyacinths.

This does not mean that everything in The Modern Review archives was pure gold: it had its fair share of abstruse articles, pointless and meandering novels, painfully bad poetry, and journalism that faded as fast as the issue of the day that sparked those quick columns. But one of Ramananda Chatterjee’s most remarkable achievements was to keep the standard surprisingly high, and surprisingly consistent: over thirty-seven years, it is rare to find a single issue that does not have something of solid and lasting value – and that is a claim few contemporary magazines could make.

Retrieving articles from the archive was a challenge. Though the family has copies of The Modern Review, the physical copies we could access were often too fragile to be safely scanned. The journal is available in digital archives and in several libraries, from the National Library and the Digital Library of India to the Santiniketan Library, but converting files from PDF and other versions to a suitable format was not always possible. We have elected to retain the original spellings, turns of phrase and place names, rather than to bring these in line with contemporary spellings and usage, since these pieces are part of the historical record and to correct them would be to exceed our brief as editors. For the same reason we have not changed archaic or jarring phrases, so as not to tamper with the record.

To ensure that no errors crept in, we chose to type in articles wherever possible and re-checked them against the originals. This was not the hardship it may seem; it is when you type in the original words and sentences of a Bankim or of Lala Lajpat Rai that you begin to get a real feel for how they thought, and felt, and wrote.

They stop being distant figures from a history textbook, and become, for a moment, the living writers, thinkers and patriots whom Ramananda Chatterjee, J.B. Sutherland, Kedarnath Chatterjee and the rest at The Modern Review offices must have commissioned, asking them to send in a piece for the next issue, to share their next novel with the Review and its thousands of readers across India and the world.

Our thanks to Ms Nandita Sen, Ms Anuradha Chatterjee and Ms Aloka Mitter for their generous assistance, permissions and advice, and to Ramachandra Guha for his suggestions and valuable perspective.

Anikendra Sen

Devangshu Datta

Nilanjana S. Roy

PATRIOTS AND PRISONERS

The Modern Review published its first issue in 1907, and plunged straightaway into the debate over self-rule and home rule for Indians. In 1917, Ramananda Chatterjee collected his strongest editorials and pieces by others in a pamphlet, Towards Home Rule. It was part of his strategy to include British writers on this subject as well as Indian experts, who were often also contributors of original research to the Review.

He and his contributors skilfully rebutted the arguments of the day against granting Indians a measure of independence – that Indians were not fit to govern their own country, that the Orient had no history of self-government, that India could not be compared to Ireland or other colonies that had gained autonomy, for example. Some key articles and a long excerpt from his main essay, ‘Towards Home Rule’, which laid down the foundation for the demands made for self-rule, are presented here. In 1917, few Indians imagined a time when the English would leave India – but they could, and did, imagine a time when Indians ruled their own country.

Towards Home Rule

Ramananda Chatterjee

Fitness for self-rule: practical unanimity as regards the goal and ideal.

T

hat India should one day become self-ruling, either within or outside the British Empire, is a political ideal which was not absent from the minds of all British statesmen. Some of them have left it on record that that was in their opinion India’s destiny. For instance, the Marquess of Hastings wrote in his Private Journal (May 17th, 1818):

A time not very remote will arrive when England will, on sound principles of policy, wish to relinquish the domination which she has gradually and unintentionally assumed over this country, and from which she cannot at present recede. In that hour it would be the proudest boast and most delightful reflection that she had used her sovereignty towards enlightening her temporary subjects, so as to enable the native communities to walk alone in the paths of justice, and to maintain with probity towards their benefactors that commercial intercourse in which we should then find a solid interest. (p. 361-362, Panini Office Edition).

That self-government is our goal is admitted by all. Even British officials in India have in some recent utterances admitted that self-rule is the ideal towards which India should move. Among the latest is that of His Excellency Lord Chelmsford, Viceroy of India, who, in the course of his reply to the address of the Indian Association of Calcutta, said (December, 1916): ‘I hope some day to see India hold a position of equality among the sister nations of which the British Empire is composed.’

Self-government has found place among the subjects discussed approvingly by members of the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League parties. Both these representative bodies have in their latest sessions demanded self-government. It is the declared object of the Home Rule League.

While all agree that self-rule is our goal and ideal, there are widely divergent opinions as to the time needed for the realization of this ideal. Lord Morley, the radical statesman, could not imagine a time when India would cease to be under personal rule. Others, gifted with a little more political imagination, place the time of the fulfilment of our hopes in the very remote future. Others, again, say that though the time is distant, it is not very distant. Some are of [the] opinion that Indians ought at once to have some powers of control over the administration given them; while some others think that a complete scheme of self-rule should be immediately prepared, and powers should at once begin to be given to the representatives of the people in accordance with that scheme, full control over the administration, civil and military, being vested in them in the course of the next ten, or at the most, twenty years, thus taking an effective step towards the perfect nationalisation of the government within a decade or so following. Under the circumstances it may be of some use to try to understand what is implied in fitness for self-rule.

What self-rule implies

What is the work that a self-ruling nation does or is expected to do? Or, in other words, what is meant by managing the affairs of a country? The principal duties of a government are to defend the country from foreign aggression, to maintain peace and order within its borders by preventing or suppressing rebellion, revolution and robberies, to raise a sufficient revenue by means of taxation of various kinds, to spend this revenue in the most economical and beneficial way, to make and enforce laws, to administer justice, and to make arrangements for education and sanitation, to maintain communications throughout the country by means of waterways, roads and railways for facilitating travelling and commerce, to make the country rich by helping and encouraging the people to develop its agriculture, industries and commerce, to help the growth and expansion of a mercantile marine for the purposes of international commerce and intercourse, to encourage the growth of its literature and fine arts, &c.

Government with foreign and national personnel

These duties can never be performed satisfactorily by any foreign government. They can be so performed only where the government is national. For the foreigners, constituting a foreign government, having a duty to perform both to their own country and the subject country they govern, cannot pay undivided and single-minded attention to the welfare of the latter, and, in case of a conflict of interests between the two countries, cannot prefer those of the subject country, as it is natural for men to be more anxious for the welfare of their own country than for that of other countries.

What the British Government has and has not done

In India, during the last century and a half, the British Government has been doing almost all the duties of a government, some energetically, some in a lukewarm manner, and some with indifference. To some duties it has not yet set its hands. For instance, there is no Indian navy, and Government has not helped or encouraged the building up of a fleet of mercantile vessels. On the contrary, it is during the British period of Indian history that the indigenous shipping and ship-building industry have declined and almost entirely disappeared. The Indian army is not manned in all its arms by Indians, there is no aerial fleet, and the commissioned officers are all non-Indians. But this is a digression.

Our fitness in British and pre-British periods

Those State duties which the British Government in India performs, are performed more or less with the help of the people of India. They were performed by Hindus and Musalmans in the age immediately preceding the British period, and in still more ancient times by Hindus and Buddhists alone. But whether Hindus, Buddhists, or Musalmans, those who managed the affairs of the country in the pre-British period were Indians. Englishmen did not come to a country of savages, but to one where the art of Government had in previous ages made great progress.

In the British period, too, Indians have, on the whole, proved their fitness for any kind of work, civil or military, which they have been allowed to do. So it cannot be said that they are totally unfit for the performance of all kinds of civil and military work.

Subordinate and independent duties

It may be objected, that it is in subordinate capacities that Indians have done their work and proved their capacity. That is true in the main. But in those cases also in which Indians have held independent charges, they have proved their capacity. Moreover, as they have not been given opportunities to prove their power of initiative and their fitness for independent work in most departments, logically it can only be said that in these departments neither the fitness nor the unfitness of Indians has been demonstrated. It should be borne in mind that this applies only to the British period. In the pre-British period Indians could and did do all kinds of work. Should it be said that there had been a deterioration since then, Indians alone could not be logically held responsible for such a result.

Proof of worth and its recognition

Government may say, We would have given you high posts if you had proved your worth. But that is begging the question. How can fitness for a particular kind of work be proved unless one gets an opportunity to do that sort of work? It is like saying, prove that you can swim and then you will be allowed to plunge into water. Moreover, it is not true that Indians get those appointments to which their qualifications entitle them. Take the educational department. Here the rule is to appoint even raw British and Colonial graduates to the higher service to the exclusion of Indians of superior, and often tried, merit.

In executive and administrative work, too, we find that men like Romesh Chunder Dutt and Krishna Govinda Gupta could not get a lieutenant-governorship or even a chief-commissionership, though it cannot be said that they were inferior in ability to the general run of those British officers who have filled these posts. There are many Deputy Collectors who can teach many Magistrates their duties. But the former always occupy a subordinate position. In the army even Indian winners of the Victoria Cross cannot hope even to be lieutenants.

There is, no doubt, a natural reluctance on the part of Englishmen to acknowledge our fitness. For if our fitness were admitted, there would be only two courses open. One would be to give us all the posts for which we were declared fit; but that would mean the exclusion of Englishmen from many lucrative careers. The other would be to declare practically that, though Indians might be fit, Englishmen, for selfish reasons, were resolved by the exercise of political power to prevent them from getting their due. But the rulers of India could not naturally make such a brutal declaration.

The following observations of the Philippine Review (May, 1916) may be quoted in this connection:

Dependent peoples are always looked upon by westerners as short of qualifications; and, whatever their actual merits may be, they (their merits) are lost sight of under cover of such advisably prevailing belief that they (said people) are short of qualifications.

Their failures are magnified, and their successes minimized. Their failures are theirs, and their successes not theirs, and the latter are necessarily the work of their masters.

The mistakes of independent peoples are not mistakes to them; but the same mistakes, if made by dependent peoples even [in] the minimum degree, are considered mistakes in the maximum degree, deserving the most spirited condemnation, the result of their alleged lack of qualifications, character or what not.

Besides, dependent peoples are not in a position to act for themselves; for others act for them – those who, for one reason or another, in one way or another, have assumed responsibility for their tutelage – and are always discriminated against, and subject to the pleasure of their masters, whose convenience must obtain.

On the other hand, an independent people are free from outside prejudices, none cares to waste time searching for their virtues and vices, and they are per se considered as fully qualified people, particularly if before and behind them big modern guns can deafeningly roar defensively and offensively.

Present-day Indian achievement: correlation of capacities

The successful management of the affairs of a country is neither so mysterious nor so intricate and complicated a matter as to be beyond the powers of Indians to tackle and master. The historian Lecky says:

"Statesmanship is not like poetry, or some of the other forms of higher literature, which can only be brought to perfection by men endowed with extraordinary natural gifts. The art of management, whether applied to public business or to assemblies, lies strictly within the limits of education, and what is required is much less transcendental abilities than early practice, tact, courage, good temper, courtesy, and industry.

"In the immense majority of cases the function of statesmen is not creative, and its excellence lies much more in execution than in conception. In politics possible combinations are usually few, and