“Let us try the experiment,” it said, “of a self-governing popular assembly, so far as is consistent with the existence of an alien bureaucracy seeking to restrict our independent activities in every possible way. No growth is possible under perpetual tutelage. We must devise means for stimulating activities on the part of our people. This cannot be better done than by organizing a really representative assembly that in its annual or periodic sittings will decide on our course of action. It does not necessarily follow that such an assembly will come into collision with the powers that be. We have every right to organize ourselves independently. The agitators have so long been taunted with absolute dependence on the bureaucracy that people cannot reasonably try to repress an assembly for the offence of carrying out their own precepts.... As they cannot see their way to giving us any real voice in the administration, even in a dim and distant future, we have no other course open to us. Let us relieve the bureaucratic administration of as much of its duties as we can by undertaking to govern ourselves in as many departments as possible.”[45] Courage, he rightly saw, was the first thing to maintain or to create in any people, especially in a subject people like the Bengalis, who had so long been taunted with cowardice by one master after another. The taunt of cowardice is like one of those prophecies that fulfil themselves. It implants the cowardice that it derides, and if you call a people timid they begin to shake. Ever since Macaulay wrote, the Anglo-Indians had been brought up by their schools and coaches to regard the Bengalis as the cowards of the world, and what was far worse, the educated Bengalis had been taught to regard themselves as the cowards of the world too, just because Macaulay had delighted himself one morning with a brilliant passage of rhetoric.[46] Where the consciousness of timidity exists among a people, the first duty of a patriot is to remove it at all costs. So in the columns of his paper and in his rare speeches Arabindo Ghose was insisting especially on the necessity of courage:—