Sri Aurobindo
Bande Mataram
Political Writings and Speeches. 1890–1908
Appendixes
Draft of the Opening of “In Praise of Honest John”1
The onslaught of the bureaucracy on the Nationalists of Bengal has to a certain extent found the
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There is no more common question on men’s lips nowadays than the question which is naturally suggested by our apparent inability to answer the attacks of a bureaucracy armed with all the weapons of the law and not overscrupulous as to their use, the question “What shall we do?”
The bureaucracy is determined 
to crush the movement.
It has no qualms, no scruples; for has not Mr. Morley, the great Radical philosopher, justified anything and everything they may do by the immortal dictum that the eternal principles which apply to Britain or Ireland or Canada are not eternal and need not exist in India?
The analogy of the fur coat need not stop with political conduct, it may be extended to moral conduct.
For
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Mr. John Morley is a very great man, a very remarkable and exceptional man. I have been reading his Arbroath speech again and my admiration for him has risen to boiling point, so that I am at last obliged to let it bubble over into the columns of the Bande Mataram. Mr. Morley differs from ordinary mortals in three very important respects; first, he is a literary man; secondly, he is a philosopher, thirdly he is a politician. This would not matter much if he kept his literature, philosophy and politics apart; but he doesn’t. He is a literary philosopher or a philosophic litterateur; better than this he is a literary philosopher-politician. This is a superlative combination; God cannot better it and the devil does not want to. For if an ordinary man steals, he steals and no more bones are made about it; he gets caught and is sent to prison, or he is not and goes on his way rejoicing; in either case the matter is a simple one without any artistic possibilities; but if a literary philosopher steals, he steals on the basis of the great and eternal verities and in the choicest and most poetical English. An ordinary man may be illogical and silly and everybody realizes that he is illogical and silly. But the philosopher is logically illogical and talks nonsense according to the strictest rules of philosophical reasoning, and the literary man will be brilliantly foolish and illogically convincing. An ordinary man may turn his back on his principles and he will be called a turncoat, or break all the commandments and be punished by the law and society, unless, of course, he is a millionaire or a member of the ruling race in India – but the literary philosopher will reconcile his principles and his conduct by an appeal to a fur-coat or a syllogism from a pair of Northampton boots. He will abrogate all the ten commandments on the strength of a solar topi.
A politician again will lie and people will perceive it and take it as a matter of course; but a literary philosopher politician will easily prove to you that when he is most a liar, then he is most truthful and when he is juggling most cynically with truth and principle, then he most deserves the name of Honest John; and he will do it in such well turned periods that one must have a very bad ear for the rhythm of sentences to quarrel with his logic.
Oh yes, a literary philosopher politician is the choicest work of Heaven, when he is not the most splendid instrument in the hands of the Prince of Darkness.
For the Prince of Darkness is not only a gentlemen, as Shakespeare discovered, but a gentlemen of artistic perceptions who knows a fine and carefully-worked tool when he sees it and loves to handle it with the best dexterity and grace of which he is capable.
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There are other reasons for which I admire Mr. John Morley.
I admire him for what he has done not only for the way in which he has done it.
It is true he is not so great a man as his master Gladstone, who was the biggest opportunist and most adroit political gambler democracy has till now engendered and yet persuaded the world that he was an enthusiast and a man of high religious feeling and principle.
But Gladstone was a genius and his old henchman is only a man of talent.
Still Mr. Morley has done the best of which he is capable and that is by no means a poor best.
He has served the devil in the name of God with signal success on two occasions.
The first was when he championed the cause of the financiers in Egypt, the men who gamble with the destinies of nations, who make money out of the groans of the people and coin into gold the blood of patriots and the tears of widows and when, abusing his position as an influential journalist, he lied to the British public about Arabi and urged on Gladstone to crush the movement of democratic and humanitarian Nationalism in Egypt, that movement in which all that is noble, humane and gracious in Islam sought to find fulfilment and a small field on earth for the fine flowering of a new Mahomedan civilisation.
The second is now when he is trying in the sordid interests of British capital to crush the 
resurgent life of India and baffle the attempt of the children of Vedanta to recover their own country for the development of a revivified Indian civilisation.
The two foulest crimes against the future of humanity which any statesman in recent times could possibly have committed have been engineered under the name and by the advocacy of Mr. John Morley.
Truly, Satan knows his own and sees to it that they do not their great work negligently.
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Mr. Morley is a great bookman, a great democrat, a great exponent of principles. No man better fitted than he to prove that when great human movements are being suppressed by the sword and the prison, it is done in the interests of humanity; that when a people struggling to live is trampled down by repression, pushed back by the use of the Goorkha and the hooligan, the warder’s lash and the whipping post into the hell of misery and famine and starvation, of insult and ignominy and bondage from which it dared to hope for an escape, the motive of the oppressor finds its root in a very agony of conscientiousness, and it is with a sobbing and bleeding heart that he presses his heel on the people’s throat for their own good; that the ruthless exploitation and starvation of a country by foreign leeches is one of the best services that can be done to mankind; the international crimes of the great captains of finance a work of civilisation and the brutal and selfish immolation of nations to Mammon an acceptable offering on the altar of the indwelling God in humanity. But these things have been said and done before; they are the usual and blasphemous cant of nineteenth-century devilworship formulated when Commerce began to take the place once nominally allowed to Christ and the ledger became Europe’s Bible. Mr. Morley does it with more authority than others, but his own particular original faculty lies in the direction we indicated when we drew the distinction between the ordinary man and the extraordinary Morley. What he has done has been, after all, largely on the initiative of others; what he has said about it, is his own, and nothing more his own than the admirably brilliant and inconsequential phrases in which he has justified wickedness to an admiring nation.
This work was not included in SABCL, vol.1 and it was not compared with other editions.