Page:Works of Tagore from the Modern Review, 1909-24 Segment 2.pdf/231

Rh consent? It was from the time that their pursuit of Science freed them from nameless fears, and they discovered that only those laws were true which could not be distorted or diverted by anyone's whim or fancy.

Giant Russia was so long the slave of her Czars, because her people relied in every matter on Providence and not in their own powers. Even now, when her Czar is gone that power which has taken his place is but dragging her through a sea of blood to the barren shore of starvation. The reason is that self-rule cannot be established through outside agency, but must be based on that self-reliance which is born of trust in one's own intellect.

I was once engaged in trying to improve one of our Bengal villages. There had been a fire and I asked the villagers how it was they had not been able to save a single homestead? "It was our fate!" they exclaimed. "Not fate," said I, "but the lack of wells. Why not make wells?" "That will be as the master pleases," was the reply. So it comes to pass that the people, whose homesteads are gutted by fate and whose wells await the master's pleasure, may lack all else but never a master.

From the very beginning God has given us Swarajya in His universe. That is to say He has given us for ourselves universal laws independent of Himself. We can not be prevented from bringing these under our control by anyone or anything except our own folly. So the Upanishat has it, that God has given us laws for our own material provisions, immutable for all time. That is to say those laws hold good for all people, and all periods, and all occasions. Had this not been so, man would have remained weakly dependent on God at every step, all his energies exhausted in propitiating, now this intermediary, now the other, in a chronic state of abject fear. But our God-given Magna Charta of Swaraj sets us for ever free from the wiles of all pretending intermediaries,— with our freedom firmly based on well-ordered and enduring laws. In the glowing letters of sun, moon and stars, God gives us his message: "You have no need of my help at every turn in the material world. I stand aside. On the one hand, you have the laws of matter; on the other, the laws of your mind. Use them together, and grow in greatness. The empire of the universe is yours; yours its wealth, yours its armoury of forces. May yours be the victory!"

He who accepts this charter of material Swaraj has the opportunity to achieve all other kinds of Swaraj and also to keep them when achieved. But those, who surrender their intellect to the slave-driver, have no help but to be slaves in politics as well. Those who insist on invoking masters, where God Himself has refrained from asserting His own mastery, those who court insult where God has granted them dignity,— their self-rule will certainly mean rule after rule, the only doubt being as to that little prefix "self".

The science of material existence is in the keeping of the professors of the West. This is the science which gives us food and clothing, health and longevity and preserves us from the attacks of matter, brute and barbarian. This is the science of the unchangeable laws of matter, and self-rule can only be achieved when these are brought into harmony with the laws of our mind. There is no other way.

Let us consider the case of a departure from this truth. Take the idea that, if a Mussalman draws water from the well of a Hindu, the water becomes impure. This is a confusion indeed! For, water belongs to the world of matter, and impurity to the realm of the spirit. Had it been said, that if the Hindu contemns the Mussalman, this shows the impurity of his mind, the proposition would have been intelligible, it would be wholly a spiritual question. But when impurity is imputed to the Mussalman's vessel, then that which belongs to the category of the material is taken entirely outside the scope of material laws. The intellect is defrauded of its legitimate scope. The Hindu disciple of the West will urge that this imputation of impurity is only a religious way of promulgating a sanitary doctrine. Sanitation, however, takes no account of moral purity. The answer is given us: "But it is only