Sri Aurobindo

Bande Mataram

Political Writings and Speeches. 1890–1908

Appendixes

Incomplete Draft of an Unpublished Article

It is always useful to inquire into the inner psychology of common and vulgar types. Their very crudeness and coarseness is an advantage, because we see in them in the rough and laid bare to a surface analysis the secret motives which in the higher evolutions of the type are too self-conscious and self-concealing to be easily detected. It is not easy to detect at first the common Britishness, if we may be allowed the word, of two men so different, at such opposite poles of human evolution as Mr. John Morley, the litterateur, politician, philosopher and fine perfection of the most serious and sober British culture, and the vulgar Newmaniac, the loud, ranting, blustering, impudently lying Yahoo of Hare Street. And yet it is by understanding the Newmaniac that we shall best understand not only John Morley but his whole race and understand too that the policy which Morley accepted from the first to the wonder and dismay of his Indian worshippers, was the only policy he or any other Englishman could have accepted. It is the common Briton in each which forms the bond of sympathy between the Newmaniac and Mr. John Morley and makes them think so wonderfully alike. That is the only answer which we can give to the question why Englishmen professing to be just, beneficent and all that is noble and unique, have so readily accepted a mingled policy of brutal repression and false conciliation in India – because it is the nature of the beast. The Britisher may wish to be or at least to seem just, noble, generous, humane, beneficent; but what is the use? “To their nature all things at the last return, and what shall coercing it avail?”

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