Bande Mataram

Cool Courage and Not Blood-and-Thunder Speeches

28-May-1907

It seems that our Local Columns Editor yesterday, seeing the name of Srijut Bipin Chandra Pal at the head of the report of the Shaktipuja meeting in Sobhabazar, thought it unnecessary to examine the matter closely. The report can hardly be correct. So far as we are aware, Srijut Bipin Chandra has come to no final conclusion on the question of holding or not holding public meetings in East Bengal at the present moment. The Nationalist leaders in Bengal are in consultation at present on the best way

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of meeting the new situation and until the opinions of all are known, no definite pronouncement on the matter of the Ordinance is likely to be made. If the report is correct, it appears that a gentleman from Madras got up at the end and made the occasion ridiculous by a blood-and-thunder speech about bombs and the Czar of Russia. We would advise all who have the cause at heart to refrain from such frantic flights of eloquence. The situation is serious enough in all conscience and we need all the statesmanship and courage there is among us to meet it. We must decide on a line of policy which will effectively and resolutely repel the determined onslaught the bureaucracy is making on the movement, while avoiding the mistake of playing into its hands. Cool courage is, as we have said before, the supreme need of the moment; exaggeration and unmeaning talk about bombs and human sacrifices can only weaken the seriousness of our action and hamper the hands of those who are trying to grapple with the problem before us. We would request the public neither to be depressed nor to lose their heads,—of both which contingencies there seems to be some danger,—but to remember that by their handling of the present crisis the people of Bengal will either keep or lose their political lead in the Nationalist movement.

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