Sri Aurobindo
Karmayogin
Political Writings and Speeches - 1909-1910
Karmayogin: A Weekly Review
Saturday 26th June 1909 — No.2
Facts and Opinions
British Fears
The genesis of the Imperial Press Conference is to be found in that feeling of insecurity which is driving England to seek allies on the Continent and gather round her the children of her loins beyond the seas.
During the better part of the nineteenth century after her triumph over Napoleon and her amazing expansion in India, she felt too strong to need extraneous assistance.
Mistress of the seas, enormously wealthy, monopolist almost of the world's commerce, she followed on the Continent a policy of splendid isolation broken only by the ill-starred alliance with the third Napoleon.
She fought for her own hand everywhere and felt strong enough to conquer.
Her Colonies she regarded only as a nuisance.
They were a moral asset, probably, but hardly a material.
They assisted her in no way, they excluded her commerce by tariffs, they took her protection without payment and yet exacted internal independence with an inordinate and querulous jealousy of her interference and unwillingness to allow even the slightest iota of British control to mar the perfection of their autonomy.
But a change has come over the spirit of her dream.
Mighty powers have arisen in the world, young, ardent, ambitious, rapidly expanding, magnificently equipped, moving with the sureness and swiftness of material forces towards empire and aggrandisement.
Their armies are gigantic forces against which England's would be as helpless as a boy in the hands of a Titan.
Their wealth increases.
They are beating England out of the chosen fields of her commercial expansion, and it is only by bringing out all the reserves of her old energy that she can just keep a first place; worst of all, their navies grow and if they cannot keep pace with hers in numbers, equal it in efficiency.
On the other hand India, her passive source of wealth, strength and prestige, is struggling in her turn to exclude British commerce and assert autonomy without British control.
England is uneasy; she cannot slumber at night for thinking of 
her precarious future.
To her excited imagination German airships fill the skies and the myriad tramp of the Teuton is heard already marching on London, while huge conspiracies spring up like mushrooms in India and evade the eager grasp of the Police with a diabolical skill which leaves behind only arrests and persecution of innocent men, hard judicial comments, a discredited C.I.D. and a desperate weeping Englishman.
One can no longer recognise the strong, stolid, practical, invincible Britisher in the emotional, hysterical, excitable, panic-stricken race dancing to the tune of its newly liberated imagination.