“Mr. Keir Hardie’s reception in Bombay was thoroughly in keeping with the rest of his experiences, and foolishly ebullient proceedings. All along the mountains have been in labour; to the disappointment of excited and expectant Babudom the mighty throes have never produced more than here and there the proverbial mouse. Fifty Hindus, and a couple of Parsis: what a deputation from the wealthiest and most progressive commercial city of the East, what a characteristic greeting from the great heart of Indian labour to the personification of the political labourite spirit! Even this bathotic manifestation of the deplorable fact that the Oriental is almost entirely devoid of humour, as completely so as the labouring man and his chosen apostle, must needs miscarry. The fifty Hindu schoolboys and their two Parsi companions cannot find the god of their idolatry. Perchance he sleepeth, and cannot hear, or will not hear the piping yell of ‘Bande Mataram’; at any rate look where they will in the compartments commonly occupied by their beloved agitators and demagogues, not a sign of this one is to be found. Topknots and draperies flying wildly to the winds, they race up and down chattering discordantly, baffled, desperate till at last, ‘proh pudor,’ they find him, not occupied in great meditations, not even spouting platitudes to the circumambient air, but prosaically strapping up his exiguous baggage, in a second-class compartment. ‘Cophinus foenumque supellex.’ A damper this and no mistake. Deputation from the dumb millions of India brimming over with enthusiasm and verbosity, subconsciously dominated by the traditional respect of the East for superior men, men to be looked up to, men on the summits, what to say to this essentially and markedly labelled second-class product!... “Does it not occur to this man of the people, uncultured, illiterate, with at the best a stunted and perverted imagination, does it not occur to him, and the astuter ones who are making him their cat’s-paw, that his enterprise is not only radically mischievous but overwhelmingly ridiculous? The appeal from masses to masses, the slogan of gutter to gutter, cementing all the forces of inferiority, inefficiency, and serfdom, preludes war against all that is best and sanest and strongest in life. It is the voiced concentration of hatred, the hatred which the sick and the feeble and the bad by some strange law of antagonism cannot help cherishing against the healthy, the great and the good. On the one hand Aristocracy, the rule of the best, on the other Democracy, the rule of the mob, that ‘bellua centiceps’ representing again by the inexorable laws of nature what for the time being is the worst.”[49] And for the time being we certainly need not look, even from Democracy, for anything worse than that! FOOTNOTES: