A great meeting, what you call
a mass meeting, is really one of the oldest and most popular of
Indian institutions In the case of the Congress meetings, the only
notable fact is that the priests of the altar are British, not Buddhist,
Jam or Brahmanical, and that the whole thing is a British
contrivance kept alive by the efforts of Messrs. Hume, Eardley,
Norton, and Digby."
"You mean to say, then, it s not a spontaneous movement?"
"What movement was ever spontaneous in any true sense of the
word? This seems to be more factitious than usual. You seem to
know a great deal about it; try it by the touchstone of
subscriptions, a coarse but fairly trustworthy criterion, and there is
scarcely the color of money in it. The delegates write from
England that they are out of pocket for working expenses, railway
fares, and stationery--the mere pasteboard and scaffolding of their
show. It is, in fact, collapsing from mere financial inanition."
"But you cannot deny that the people of India, who are, perhaps,
too poor to subscribe, are mentally and morally moved by the
agitation," Pagett insisted.
"That is precisely what I do deny. The native side of the movement
is the work of a limited class, a microscopic minority, as Lord
Dufferin described it, when compared with the people proper, but
still a very interesting class, seeing that it is of our own creation.
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