Sri Aurobindo
Karmayogin
Political Writings and Speeches — 1909-1910
Karmayogin: A Weekly Review
Saturday 11th September 1909 — No.12
Facts and Opinions
The Question of Fitness
It is possible the President had his eye on the question of fitness or unfitness which is the stock sophistry of the opponents of progress.
One of the delegates strangely enough selected the occasion of moving the colonial self-government resolution for airing this effete fallacy.
The storm of disapprobation which his lapse evoked proves that in Bengal at least that superstition is dead in the minds of the people, and it is well, for no nation can live which at the bidding of foreigners consents to despise itself and distrust its capacities.
We freely admit that no nation can be fit for liberty unless it is free, none can be wholly capable of self-government until it governs itself.
We freely admit that if we were given self-government we should commit mistakes which we would have to rectify, as has been done even by nations which were old in the exercise of free and self-governing functions.
We freely admit that the liberated nation would have to face many and most serious problems even as Turkey and Persia have to face such problems today, as Japan had to face them in the period of its own revolution.
But to argue from 
these propositions to the refusal of self-government is to use a sophistry which can only impose on the minds of children.
In the nineteenth century owing to a stupefying education we had contracted the trustfulness, naivety and incapacity to think for itself of the childish intellect and we swallowed whole the sophisms which were administered to us.
But we have thrown off that spell and if the impatient idealists of the Nationalist party had done nothing else for their country this would be sufficient justification for their existence that they have made a clean sweep of all this garbage and purified the intellect and the morale of the nation.
It is enough if the capacity is there in the race and if we can show by our action that it is not dead.
This we have shown by organised successful and national action under circumstances of unprecedented difficulty.
If the success is now jeopardised, it is because of the temporary revival of the weaknesses of our nineteenth century politics and the desire to fall back into safe and easy methods in spite of their unfruitfulness.
That is a weakness which is not shared by the whole nation, but is only temporarily suffered because a situation of unprecedented difficulty has been created in which it was not easy to see our way and in the silence that was unfortunately allowed to fall on the country and deepen the uncertainty, the forces of reaction found their opportunity.
In times of difficulty to stop still for a long time is a cardinal error, the best way is to move slowly forward, warily watching each step but never faltering.
Action solves the difficulties which action creates.
Inaction can only paralyse and slay.