United States Constitution, and the South African Constitution are each in their not dissimilar ways a noble monument to the constructive genius of mankind applied to political science. The circumstances of their birth were also strangely parallel. The United States, after long and ardu ous travail, herself hammered out her scheme of self-government at the close of a successful rebellion against Great Britain. South Africa's Constitution was a gift to her from Great Britain at the close of a rebellious war in which the Transvaal had shown herself no mean adversary. It was a gift of generosity tempered largely by prudence. Those disposed may well speculate what might have happened from 1914 to 1918 had South Africa been held down by a military occupation as a merely conquered dependency. Such thoughts have the tendency to arouse in the mind the old, old question as to the morality of rebellion and the wisdom of revolt. Is it justifiable to gain liberty by the sword, to take Heaven by violence? Why do rebellions in some cases, such as the Scottish War of Independence, or as in the ones Lord Southborough has by implication cited, lead straight to freedom, and in others, such as Ireland's 1798 and 1916, simply make the situation

worse and darken counsel? Probably, if a dozen different historians and philosophers were asked this question there would be a dozen different replies. From one point of view the answer would seem to be that the insurgent country should be so sufficiently the match for the dominant as to create a perpetually impossible situation. even if the conqueror repeated his subjugations time after time. His victories should never be more than Pyrrhic ones, whilst his defeats should be Waterloos. From this point of view alone, common sense, if nothing else, demonstrates that India's. way to Liberty does not lie along the melancholy path of war whether marked by such happenings as Lexington, Spion Kop, or Vinegar Hill. Freedom ought to be hers by the inalienable rights of human dignity, by methods of reason, by honour, and by mutual respect. If one could conceive such an utterly desolating spectacle as India forcibly withdrawing from the connection with Great Britain the saddest thought of all would be the state of affairs and the train of events which must have been precedent to such a severance.

But it is certainly permissible to ask the reason why India should not receive a Washington or South African constitution. The sapient will some of

D

them reply that they do not admit her fitness for it. Those who do not care to advance this plea are logically driven back upon the unfortunate position that loyalty and service are less useful in securing a genuine constitution than is open rebellion.

The first argument is barely worth rebuttal. The whole world is asking in these democratic days whether any individual or nation has the right to judge of another's fitness for self-government, America at any rate does not think herself qualified to withhold autonomy from the Philippines on any such plea, and has recently granted them all free institutions. Can it seriously be contended that Indians, civilised down the centuries as they understand civilisation, are to be considered as lower in the scale of ability than the Philipinos, of whom the Americans gave the world such scarifying descriptions a bare score of years ago? The second argument would be as damaging as ungrateful. It is not the serious and considered state policy of this Imperial Commonwealth to place success in rebellion as a better claim to self-determination than are the claims of reason, tradition, and co-operation. No one is base enough to suppose that India made her gallant and magnificent effort in the war with her gaze fixed upon what benefits to herself

might come of it. Her devotion was not the price of her liberty-but it should be both a cause and the measure of it.

A little tentative reform in the direction of Indian Home Rule is not a bad thing. But a free constitution planned on a trustful and a noble scale would be a far better policy. One might seek in vain for any mandate from the constituencies of Great Britain for a niggardly, grudging, diarchical, and artificial Indian constitution. A timid Parliament underrates its own powers to do justice whilst its Ministers all but ignore the demands of the Indian National Congress. It would be difficult to conceive of any political task more solemn than devising a new scheme of government for over three hundred million people. It is just in the spirit of Washington that such a task could be fulfilled. However, we have Lord Southborough's melancholy assurance for it, that whatever the constitution will be, it is at all events "Not Washington."-August

1, 1920.

IV

INDIAN WOMEN AS CITIZENS *

THERE was a time in the struggle for the enfranchisement of British women when one prominent anti-feminist used to wind up all his lugubrious prophecies with the dark menace: Remember the bee.

The precise application of this cryptic exordium was, one believes, never distinctly pointed out; it may have had reference to the elimination of sex in the person of the worker-bee, or to the slaying of the male by Queen Bee in her aerial nuptial flight. But whatever the coming of Woman Suffrage may have done, the destruction of the male is not one of its marks. That function is too efficiently provided for in human society by the institution of Nevertheless the injunction quoted can be applied to the reply made by Secretary of State for India to the recent deputation asking for the enfranchisement of women. The bee is chiefly

war.

* The action of the new Legislative Councils in India has confirmed the predictions of this article. How Mr. Montagu, after excluding the women of India from the benefits of his Act, can have anything to say against Non-Co-operation is impossible for a logical mind to see. Mr. Montagu was the first Non-Co-operator on a grand scale.