Sri Aurobindo
Karmayogin
Political Writings and Speeches — 1909-1910
Karmayogin: A Weekly Review
Saturday 27th November 1909 —No.21
Facts and Opinions
Mr. Macdonald's Visit
The tour undertaken by Mr. Ramsay Macdonald in India has been cut short by the call from England summoning him home to take his part in the great struggle which is the beginning of the end of Conservative and semi-aristocratic England.
In the peaceful revolution which that struggle presages and in which it must sooner or later culminate, Mr. Macdonald's party stands to be the final winners.
It is the semi-Socialistic Radical element in the Ministry attracted toward the Labour party to which the precipitation of this inevitable struggle is due.
The Labour party is now predominatingly Socialistic and is purging itself of the old individualistic leaven which looked forward to no higher ideal than an eight-hours day, Old Age pensions and Trade Union politics.
The Labour members, Messrs. Burt and Fenwick, who represent this old-world element, have received notice to quit from the Labour organisations which helped them into Parliament and much nonsense of a kind familiar to ourselves is 
being talked about the ingratitude of Labour to these veterans.
The only justification for the existence of these gentlemen in Parliament is that they stand for the new insurgent demos and, if they cannot keep pace with the advancing sentiment of the people who keep them in Parliament, their duty is to retire, and the ingratitude is theirs if they try to hamper the progress of their lifelong supporters by fighting the representatives of the new aspirations in the interests of a middle-class party.
Mr. Macdonald belongs to the new thought, but he is, we believe, one of those who would hasten slowly to the goal.
He has not the rugged personality of Mr. Keir Hardie, but combines in himself, in a way Mr. Hardie scarcely does, the old culture and the new spirit.
He has as broad a sympathy and as penetrating an intelligence as Mr. Nevinson, but not the latter's quick intensity.
Nevertheless, behind the slow consideration and calm thoughtfulness of his manner, one detects hidden iron and the concealed roughness of the force that has come to destroy and to build, some hint of the rugged outlines of Demogorgon, the claws of Narasingha.
For every man is not only himself, he is that which he represents.
Mr. Macdonald has been reserved and cautious during his visit and has spoken out only on the Reforms and Reuter, nor have his remarks on these subjects passed the limits of what any sincere Liberal would hold to be a moderate statement of the truth.
Mr. Macdonald is one who does not speak out the whole of himself, he is a politician born, and born politicians do not care to outpace by too great a stride the speedily accomplishable fact.
Whatever wider vistas they may see beyond, they prefer to move steadily towards them rather than to speak of them.
So far as an Englishman can help India, and that under present circumstances is hardly at all, he certainly wishes to help.
It is not his fault that the blindness of his countrymen and the conditions of the problem in India make men like him, perforce, little better than sympathetic spectators of the passionate struggle between established privilege and a nation in the making that the world watches now in India.