A View of France
1. Prevalent Notions about France.
In India as elsewhere France is known to the people at large as the manufacturer of perfumeries. A firm like the Parfumerie Lubin of Paris has an extensive market in India. It is as old as 1798 and is proud of its association with Empress Josephine, a copy of one of whose orders the director would exhibit to the visitor. And he makes it a point also to emphasise that the stuff in which his firm deals is the essence of natural flowers worked up in the laboratory at Cannes in the Alpes-Maritimes province and is thus totally different in quality from the goods sold by other nations, say, by Germany.
Or perhaps the reputation of France consists in the glass products manufactured by the Compagnie des Cristalleries which has its usines or factories at Baccarat, a town located in the east between Nancy and Strasbourg. In this instance at least the reputation is well justified. For to enter the museum of the company in Paris and visit the collection of vases and furniture, all crystal ware, in its spacious showrooms, is once more experiencing the interplay of forms and colours with which one is familiar in the halls of porcelain in the Imperial Palace at Peking. Not until you go again to Kyoto to watch the living art of silk embroidery can you realise how in the twentieth century conditions of mechanical industries the French people are maintaining the tradition of medieval aesthetics in a manner which might excite the jealousy of the cloister-protected calligraphists and fresco-painters.
All the same, Baccarat is a synonym for luxury,—the company specializes in catering to the royalties and plutocracies of the world. But just as in regard to India the world has come to identify it with the land of the Buddhas and the Chaitauyas and ignore altogether its Charlemagnes and Richelieus, in regard to France also the modern mind, especially the Anglo-Saxon puritan or rather the Anglo-American Cato, has created an impression that the French people are past-masters chiefly, if not exclusively, in perfumeries, table services, ladies' garments, pastries, culinary arts and such luxuries all along the line. Nay, in certain quarters French society,—"gay Paris,"—is alleged to be the nurse of questionable morals.
2. The Atmosphere of Paris.
Young India has need to be thoroughly disabused of these notions.
Come to "Comedie Française", the theatre founded by Molière (1622-1673) and see the Maman Colibri, a prose play in four acts by Henry Bataille, and watch how one touch of the pathos of contemporary French "comedy" (which, by the bye, is steeped in the tragedy of King Lear or of Othello) makes the whole house sob like an assembly of infants with streams of tears rolling down their cheeks. It is a drama of family life conceived in the setting of modern social conditions. But this French masterpiece in the conflict of emotions exhibits a profound grasp of the spiritual urge of life, beside which, as artist, Goethe is nothing but medieval, Shakespeare too primitive and elementary, and Kalidas and Euripides simply archaic or pre-historic. And yet in his message Bataille is their peer. The playwright of Paris is a prophet like all great humanists of history.
The man in the street of Paris does not see only the advertisements of vaudevilles and cinemas. Lines like the following inscribed on the statue of Alfred de Musset (1810-1857) also arrest his attention on a foot-path at Palais Royal:
"Rein ne nous rend si grands qu'une grande douleur
... Les plus désespérés sont les chants les plux beaux
Et j'en sais d'immortels qui sont de purs sanglots."
Here is the French passport to romanticism. It declares:
"Nothing makes us so great as doth a great sorrow,
The most hopeless are the songs the most beautiful,
And I know some immortal songs which are nothing but sobs."
The world of which these lines from La Nuit de Mai gives a hint is, from another angle, Schiller's "einer andern Flur" and "einem andern Sonnenlichte, einer glücklichern Natur." Lovers of Shelley know how to "pine for what is not" and announce that "our sincerest laughter with some pain is ever fraught."
It is indisputable that nowhere else except in Paris can you find the stimulating atmosphere which one breathes in its art-galleries because nowhere else except in France have flourished the greatest painters of the present and the last generation. Today Bernheim-Jeune is exhibiting the new artistic anatomies created by Cézanne in his architectural grouping of colour-masses, and tomorrow one finds in the same Maison the dreamy violets "casting a dim religious light" over the floating flowers and nature's plenty of Claude-Monet's workmanship. Or, again, Renoir's sculpturesque construction of volumes in metallic red is presented to the public by Durand-Ruel, who on another occasion invites the city to view the peasants, meadows and towns in Pissarro's gouache and pastels.
In Paris, however, one does not have to visit the Louvre or the Luxembourg galleries in order to get acquainted with specimens of beauty. The entire city with its Concorde and Carousel, its Champ de Mars and Avenue des Champs-Elysées, its Place de la Nation and Irocadero, is one mammoth museum of living glories in sculpture and architecture. Paris is unparalleled from the point of view of the "city as art-gallery."
In the number of librairies selling higher literature and of stores dealing in objets d'arts, curios and antiquities, Paris seems to lead off all first class cities. In the kiosks at the street corners the. Parisian buys not only the women's magazines and the journals of dress, sport and travel, not only the bourgeois Journal and Intransigeant and the bolshevik Humanité and Clarté but also serious periodicals like the Revue des deux mondes and La Nouvelle Revue Française, and magazines like the Revue Scientifique, La Nature, La Science et la Vie, Revue Generale des Sciences etc. A Japanese will easily appreciate the significance of this observation. For an American also it will be a rare experience to come across the Scientific Monthly, Science or the Journal of Industrial Hygiene in the newspaper booths of New York streets.
If church-going is a mark of religious life an occasional visitor may watch the kind of people who kneel down on their seats at the Notre Dame or the Madeleine to be satisfied that even the well-fed men and women of France,—bankers, journalists, lawyers, scientists,—have not yet bidden adieu to the conventional rituals of Catholicism. Notwithstanding the glare of cafés at night the home is still the centre of la vie parisienne almost exactly as it was in medieval Eur-Asia. And in the mentality of Young Paris such as one can size up in the vers libre of La Rochelle, the antimilitarist, one will come in touch with more genuine mysticism than one finds in that of the professional mystics and traders in spirituality who often hail from the East to the West.
The standard of Paris is set by a Le Chatelier, the metallurgist, author of Le Silice et les Silicates, and inventor of apparatus which transforms industrial processes in mining, explosives and furnaces, but who still preaches with all the emphasis he can command the value of theoretical studies, or a Painlévé, the mathematical genius, who was admitted into the Institut de France while quite young, and who was raised to the head of the war-office, nay, of the Cabinet during the most critical period in French history, in whom, moreover, not only Young China but all Asia can find a champion of independence.
Paris, again, is the city where Mercereau, the rising man of letters, in his small apartment draws once every week between 100 and 150 men and women representing the "seven arts" although he never offers the attractions of a salon, and where Gleizes, the most extreme of all cubists, lectures on the beauties of the novel forms in art, which perhaps are hardly intelligible except to the initiated, with the enthusiasm of a discoverer of the "new Egypt" in Mars.
3. French Discoveries and Inventions.
These are no doubt the superficial remarks of a casual traveller. But let us dive deeper. It is not necessary, however, to prepare an inventory of French achievements in modern culture from palaeontology to sinology by rummaging among the chapters of the two solid volumes of La Science Française (1915). We can sample out the general trend of life and level of thought in France by a much simpler process.
In 1907 a plebiscite was taken in France on the question as to who should be regarded as the greatest man of French history. Was it Victor Hugo? Was it Napoleon? Was it Rousseau? Was it Descartes? Was it Charlemagne? The verdict of the French nation was "Louis Pasteur" (1822-1893), the biologist, who had died fourteen years previous to this popular appraisal of the country's heroes.
It is not easy to label with Pasteur the name of any single science because his investigations, each a discovery, have renovated every science from chemistry to zoology. His researches in racemic acid and crystalline dissymmetry gave birth to the science of stereochemistry. His theory of fermentation brought forth bacteriology. He is universally recognized as the father of the "scientific" study of medicine, in as much as he founded the germ theory of disease with all its applications in the problems of infection, antiseptic surgery, microparasitology, toxins, anti-toxins, serums and vaccines. Today not only physicians interested in the cure of rabies have to look up to Pasteur as one of the greatest benefactors of humanity, but every class of biologists, no matter whether botanists, physiologists or zoologists, have to remember him while developing the lines of investigation initiated by him in the studies on micro-organism causing silk worm diseases and on the floating matter of the air.
A nation which has sense enough to single out such a man as A. I. in its calendar of notables is certainly not a crowd of pleasure-seekers, materialists and sybarites.
We shall now speak of another phase in the civilization of France, namely, of French engineering feats. The engineers of the United States are noted for their achievements in this direction. So let us see what a committee of American experts has to say about their French comrades. Here follows a rather long extract:
"It will suffice for our purpose to name a few of the great French engineers whose achievements have made them famous. Such are Ferdinand de Lesseps the builder of the Suez Canal; Eiffel, who conceived and constructed the tower that bears his name; Perronnet, Poncelet, Hennebique and Mesnager, civil engineers of world-wide reputation; Sauvage and Couche in railroad engineering; Sadi Carnot the discoverer of some of the most fundamental laws of thermodynamics; Etienne Lenoir; Beau de Rochas and Fernand Forest, who by their pioneer work in the development of the internal combustion engine prepared the way for the automobile and the aeroplane; Gramme, who developed the dynamo-electric machine, and took an important part in the discovery that dynamo machines are reversible, i. e., capable of being employed as motors; Baudot, the designer of a multiplex system extensively used; Marcel Depres, who was a pioneer in the electric transmission of power; Foucault, who first discovered the losses of power in dynamos due to eddy currents; Mascart; Joubert; Hospitalier; André Blondel and Mourice Le Blanc all of whom made important contributions to electrical engineering science and standards; the illustrious Ampere and Coulomb who, though generally classified as physicists, have powerfully contributed through their basic discoveries to the progress of applied electricity; Elie de Beaumont; Combes; Callon; Houy; Albert de Lapparent; Haton de La Goupilliere; de Launay; Daubree, all mining engineers or geologists who have contributed largely to engineering progress.
"In metallurgy may be mentioned Sainte-Claire Deville, whose laboratory experiments opened the way to much metallurgical progress; Reaumur, who discovered the process by which castings of cast-iron may be made malleable and which to-day is of great industrial importance; Moissan, who in his electric furnace first succeeded in reducing oxides hitherto deemed unreducible, and produced a whole series of new carbides; Grumer, to whom we owe many of our scientific conceptions of the complex reactions of the iron blast furnace; Pierre Martin, who first succeeded in manufacturing steel in an open hearth furnace; Osmond, the father of metallography; Heroult, who (though ignorant of the work done at the time by the American metallurgist Hall) invented the electrolytic method of extracting metallic aluminium from its ores, and whose electric furnaces are playing an increasingly important part in the metallurgy of steel; Pourcel, who contributed so much to the early introduction of the Bessemer process on the Continent and was a pioneer in the manufacture of ferro-manganese; Henri Le Chatelier, eminent chemist and metallurgist, whose inventions of the thermo-electric pyrometer and numerous other contributions have made possible much important progress in the art of treating metals; Schneider, of the Creusot Steel Works; Leon Guillet and George Charpy, productive workers of great talent."
The above report was drawn up by I. N. Hollis of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, H. M. Howe of Columbia University, A. C. Humphreys of Stevens Institute of Technology, and A. Saubeur of Harvard University and has been printed in Science and Learning in France (Chicago, 1917) edited by J. H. Wigmore.
4. Knowing France.
To say that France is unknown in India will, however, be resented as an insult and surely condemned as a hyperbole. For, the civilisation of France from Descartes to H. Poincaré, from Lamarck to Pasteur, from Molière to Maupassant, and from Montesquieu to Jean Jaurés conveys a distinct message which is as varied and complex as are the different cross-sections of the Indian intelligentsia to which it is addressed.
But the objective experience of the past sixteen years has endowed Young India with an altogether new and a higher standard in the very conception of "knowing" and understanding a thing. Out of its titanic conflicts with the world-forces India has evolved a theory of knowledge which, although not quite original in modern psychology, was at any rate unknown in Asia previous to 1905.
In regard to France, for instance, Indian thinkers have begun to interrogate themselves thus: "How much of our knowledge of French civilisation is the result of our own activities? Which contributions of France to the progress of mankind have we been able to assimilate through the endeavours of our own path-finders, scouts, and star-gazers? How many great men or great discoveries of France has India discovered for herself? In other words, how much of French science and learning in India is self-determined?" Evidently this self-questioning attitude is but a corollary to the methodology of swarâjic creation which is bound to belittle any consummation, however useful and lucrative at first sight, that is not conquered and possessed by dint of one's own shakti (force).
And certainly Young India is right in its self-criticism and in its doubts regarding the efficacy of the work accomplished by its immediate precursors. Because it is notorious that France has been made known in India almost exclusively by alien interpreters. The India of 1921 has to admit the defects of its great men of the recent past in so far as it has still to study the French revolution through British eyes and the French constitution in American translations. No Indian pioneer has yet been inspired to introduce French philosophy, science, or art to the attention of his compatriots. India's understanding of France is in consequence neither a creative process in her self-determined experimentations nor a product of her conscious energizings to grasp the world at every point.
In the second place, the tyranny of the English language in modern Indian life and culture has definitely been recognized as inconsistent with Young India's theory of knowledge. Knowledge is capture, conquest, possession, an intimate enjoyment of nature's secrets and mankind's glories. India cannot be said to possess France until the French arts and sciences are accessible in India's own language. India has long submitted to the despotic hegemony of a foreign tongue. In its attempts at understanding France, Young India cannot afford to continue that thraldom.
The problem is quite simple. If Charles Gide's book on economics is good enough to be swallowed line by line by the B. A. students of Indian universities when it is diluted in English and manufactured by a foreign publishing house, why should not the same material be considered palatable (perhaps even for the lower, the Intermediate, classes) once it is available in Telugu, Urdu, Marathi, Bengali or Hindi? The boycott of the foreign book-products is a most essential part in every scheme of swarâj in education.
Young India is therefore seriously demanding such an educational policy as will take immediate steps to render de Quatre-fage's De la méthode dans les sciences, Claude-Bernard's Introduction à l'étude de la médecine expérimentale, Orthlieb's L'Aeronautique, Moureu's Notions fondamentales de chimie organique, Moulon's Puéri culture, Brunhes' La géographie humaine, Meillet's Introduction à l'étude comparative des langues indo-européennes, Dwelshanver's La psychologie française contemporaine, Durkheim's Les regles de la méthode sociologique, Lévy-Bruhl's Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures, Joseph-Barthélemy's Le problème de la compétence dans la démocratie, Raphael-George Levy's Banques d'emission et trésors publics, Fauré's L'Art Moderne, Gide and Rist's Histoire des doctrines économiques, Pelliot's Asie Central, and other books available in the languages which the university students speak in their homes. Evidently such books produced by the German intelligentsia are also in need of being naturalized, so to say, in India.
To defer this question of enriching the vernaculars to an indefinite future while concentrating all or a principal part of the energy on buildings and furniture, indispensable as they are, can but betray a lamentable lack of statesmanship on the part of India's educational leaders. The assimilation of French or German culture in India is ultimately only a question of financial patronage to be extended by persons who are interested in national expansion to the compilers, translators, or authors of books in the Indian languages and to the publishing societies or scientific and literary academies.
The paucity of technical terms in the vernaculars is only an excuse of "politicians" who have no other weapon with which to combat Young India's theory of knowledge except sheer obstinacy and the Satanic will to retard human progress by any and every means. Japan did not wait for the evolution of scientific terms in the Japanese language before she proceeded to assimilate the standard European and American works on medicine, engineering, and metallurgy.
And yet the Japanese who know little English and less French, German, Dutch, or Russian, have learned how to direct the airplanes, sub-marines, and seismometres, conduct creditable experiments in biological chemistry, and play with financial statistics as nimbly as with the figures on the chessboard. But although Japan is a first-class power and has to her credit the event of Port Arthur, triumphs in the Yangstee Valley, and the famous "racial equality" doctrine broached at the Congress of Versailles, no philologist has yet ventured to assert that the capabilities of the Japanese language as an instrument of modern expression are richer than those of any of the Dravidian or the Aryan languages of India.
The day of bamboozling Young India is gone. Young India is thoroughly conscious that technical terms "grow" in exactly the same manner as the thought itself or the expression thereof tends to grow. It knows moreover that the vocabulary can be "made" to order, i.e., created by the fiat of a parishat, sammelan or mandala, to serve as conventional symbols for certain defined purposes. And finally, the technical terms can be revised and improved at will from year to year or from quinquennium to quinquennium, whether by the authors themselves or by learned societies.
The question of the Indian language thus occupies to-day a foremost place in the thought in connection with the problem of knowing and understanding or Indianizing the civilization of France. But the theory of knowledge as a function of linguistic digvijaya, as conquest of the world by means of one's own language, or as absorption of the resources of human attainments in the sârva-bhaumic (universal) empire of one's mother-tongue, came into prominence with the birth throes of the National Council of Education, Bengal, in 1905. It remains for the stalwarts of the national education movement in its second phase, which is developing before our eyes, to place the "ideas of 1905" on the annual budget of Young India and systematically carry them out as one of the irreducible minima of its constructive educational policy. Not more than a sum of Rs. 500,000 is likely to be needed in order to equip within three years any leading Indian language as the medium to be used in the highest instruction corresponding to the standard which the existing universities offer at the present moment.
5. The Challenge to Young India.
Knowing and understanding are not however passive receiving, they involve reacting and reconstructing as well. For, knowledge is a function of life; it is a process in utilization, i.e., creation of values. This doctrine of life as self-assertion is Young India's distinctive contribution in contemporary social philosophy. It has been formulated in unmistakable terms in Jagadish Chunder Bose's comprehensive analysis of the "responses", which in its entirety is but the theoretic correlate of the modern Indian sâdhanâ (strivings) for conquest and expansion. Young India therefore does not believe that one can be said to know or understand a thing as long as one is not in a position to exploit and transform it for one's own ends.
In examining Young India by its own standard France might therefore naturally ask: "What have the Indians done in the way of making use of French institutions, movements and ideals in order to promote their own vital principle; in order to advance the interests of India's own growth and development?" France has not as yet had palpable evidences of India's self-consciousness. Where in France are the French people to look for the manifestations of Indian energy and self-assertion, for the responses of India's life-force to the thousand and one stimuli of the world forces? France can feel the vital urge of Poland, Tchecho-Slovakia, Roumania and Jugo-Slavia, for they are all active and persistent in their pressure on French resources. But to France India is a cipher, an inert automaton, a geographical expression and not a living organism.
All that the French people know about the India that is dead has come to them through the antiquarian efforts of their own indianistes from Chézy, Bergaigne and Burnouf to Sénart, Lévi and Foucher. Their Société Asiatique does not seem ever to have felt the impress of an Indian "indianist". The economics and politics of India since 1857 have likewise found a place in French consciousness through the investigations of France's own consuls and diplomats like Valbazen, S. H. Barthélemy, Maindron, Aubin, Metin, Piriou, Chailley, Clavery, etc. Has any Indian publicist ever thought of addressing the French democracy on the question of India in world-politics?
Even the latest of the political movements in India (1905-1921) has been made known to France in Le Monde Illustré, a weekly, in as complete and succinct a manner as possible not by an Indian but by a Frenchman, Maurice Bourgeois. Finally, again, on the cultural aspects the nationalist activity in India is being interpreted by another Frenchman, Leandre Vaillat, who has been contributing a series of articles to the daily Figaro.
Altogether France has not learned a single thing about India or the world from the work of an Indian of the present age.
India has not declared herself in France, she has lacked self-expression. India has failed to take advantage of the French language in order to convey to the world what is her standpoint in science, arts, philosophy and international relations. India does not maintain in Paris a single bureau of information, commercial, political or cultural, in order to let the French sociétés, clubs, réunions, maisons, and académies feel that she is doing something to recreate mankind. India is not represented in France by a single delegation of responsible individuals who might collaborate with the leaders of French life on their own platforms in the field of thought or of social endeavour. In the French world of experience, therefore, India does not figure as a conscious unit.
The reproach is not unfounded. The world has indeed a right to say: "You Indians were forced to learn English virtually, if not ostensibly, at the point of the bayonet. Your Rammohan Roys had no alternative before them but found English colleges. Thus came to be adopted the ways and means of making a foreign domination over you easy and perhaps permanent. Incidentally, of course, you have been able to assimilate something of the modern spirit owing to the education you have received in your English schools. And you have also been able to show a little sign of rejuvenation during the last three generations by literary, scientific or journalistic activity. But all these marks of new life in India manifest themselves chiefly in English and are to that extent some of the phases of Great Britain's colonial culture. Altogether they indicate your own weakness and the strength of your alien master by whose administration and educational system you have been introduced to the larger world."
Undoubtedly India has yet to demonstrate before the bar of civilised humanity that like the people of Japan she has the virility in her to make use of western civilisation, or for that matter, the institutions and ideals of modern life, without the compulsion, tacit or open, from a western rule. For, a race that is alive and wishes to remain alive would know how to seek the best allies of its life and power from here and there and everywhere.
And the Frenchman may be pardoned if he throws out the same challenge in the following manner: "Let India show her mettle to the world by displaying her strength in French language, in French institutions, and in French public life. Let India be determined to prove that at least in one instance she has learned to choose her love independently and through her own eyes. We shall then recognize that foreign subjection has not been able to extinguish the freedom of the Indian mind." The same challenge may come to India from the German or the Russian side as well.
This challenge is an invitation to a trial of strength. It is worthy the serious consideration of those who represent and engineer the vital impulses of Young India. It is time that Indian intellectuals should begin to be in evidence among Latin, Teutonic, Slavic, Yellow and Semitic peoples.
India has to give solid testimony to the fact that she does not claim her position in international polity on the strength of an English chaperon. India has to make known by her daily attitudes and reactions that she is a respectable colleague and peer of the other nations. Further, India is to demand her place in the sun on the ground that she is capable of interpreting herself in her own way and also of having herself heard in the standard dialect, whatever it be, of diplomacy and science.
It thus becomes absolutely necessary for several hundred Indians of distinction to experience equality and practise comradeship not in an intermittent or casual fashion but from year's end to year's end, with the other makers of current history and with the other founders of new landmarks in human civilisation. To establish this kinship with vishva-shakti (the world-forces) and to help reconstructing the world-structure are important aspects in the foreign policy of Young India which can no longer be overlooked by its leaders whether interested in the sciences, industries and arts, or in politics, public life and journalism.
6. A Call to Comradeship.
The moment is opportune. For, Young India's achievements in diverse fields since 1905 have already won for it a recognition in Asia, Europe and America,—not only in council-chambers and in the lobbies of parliaments but also in scientific associations and among the people at large. The world is therefore now willing to know India "intensively" and meet her on terms of friendship and equality. Thus, on behalf of the Frenchmen of science Paul Appell, one of the most renowned mathematicians of the present day, offers his greetings to Indian intellectuals and cordially invites them to co-operate with savants in France in the work of extending the bounds of learning and enlarging the domain of the rights of man.
The letter of welcome, dated Paris, the 9th February 1921, is being reproduced below:
"C'est du fond du coeur que j'envoie aux savants et aux étudiants hindsous l'expression des affectueuses sympathies des professeurs et des élèves de l'Université de Paris. Nous travaillerons avec eux aux progrés d'une culture humaine, mise désormais au service de la Liberté et de la Justice."
The letter is signed by Appell in his capacity as member of the Institut de France and as rector of the University of Paris. The "French Institute" is the central scientific organisation founded by Napoleon in 1795 to co-ordinate the activities of all the highest learned societies of France, called the Académies which are at present five in number. In the estimation of the world of savants the Institute of France corresponds to the Royal Society of Great Britain.
The Rector of a French University may be described as roughly equivalent to the chancellor or president of English and American universities. But there is one important distinction. In France the head of a university is the administrator also of secondary instruction for one of the seventeen educational districts (technically known as Académies) into which France (including Algeria) is divided. In French official language Appell is recteur de l'Académie de Paris. Says President Appell:
"It is from the bottom of my heart, that I send to the savants and students of India (N. B. In France as in the United States the term "hindou" is geographical and therefore includes Mussalmans and others who are not Hindu by faith) the warm sympathies of the professors and students of the University of Paris. We shall work with them for the advancement of a human civilisation such as will be directed henceforth to the service of Liberty and Justice."
In these few lines as in everything that he has done in his life Appell is recognized by the representative men of France as a true child of the French revolution. And India finds her "ideas of 1905" fraternizing herein with the spirit of 1789, another instance of the elderly West lending a helping hand to the rising East.
There are universities and some very celebrated too where a man becomes president, chancellor or governor not because his scientific attainments, if fortunately he should happen to possess any, automatically raise him to the head of the Faculties, but because he commands a social pull, perhaps because he is a successful broker. Such presidents might as well have shone as directors of a brewery or of a cigarette-manufacturing company, for the simple reason that the accident of their birth enables them to gracefully approach the moneyed aristocracy for funds; a no mean qualification, however, in contemporary civilisation when the efficiency of instruction and the heightening of the educational standard are invariably dependent on the expansion of the budget.
But Appell owes his position entirely to his address in the world of science. Specialists in mathematics can judge for themselves the value of his Théorie des fonctions algébriques et leurs integrals, Principes de la théorie des fonctions elliptiques and Traité de mécanique rationnelle (in three volumes). In astronomy also his name is quite well known. And just as during the war another French mathematician, Painlévè, rose to the highest political office in the state and came to be the most discussed man of France, so also the name of Monsieur Appell became a household word in the city and in mofussil in connection with his services as director of Secour National (or Jâtiya Sevâ Samiti, to use the current Indian expression) which was instituted by the government to relieve the people in distress of all sorts.
The call to comradeship from Paul Appell is for the people of India a message of welcome into a life of expansion. It furnishes an atmosphere of co-operation between the East and the West on the one hand and of unhindered competition in brain-powers between India and the world on the other. And coming as it does from one of the first citizens of the French republic the noble message deserves a generous response from the apostles of Greater India.
7. French Economics and India.
Business men in India will be interested. to learn that some of the greatest bankers, engineers, statisticians, and manufacturers of France are keenly studying the trend of Indian trade. The success of Japan and the United States in their trade relations with India during the last few years has opened France's eyes to the possibilities in the same direction.
So far as India is concerned, she has everything to gain by the entry of another industrial power in her sphere whether as intermediary between market and market or as ally in the development of her own resources. For, the soundest economic policy for India is certainly to provide for the fullest and widest competition between the foreign forces of capital and talent in her agriculture, mining, forestry, workshop, and commerce.
Now, there is another angle of approach from which France has been taking interest in India's work. Herewith a letter which Monsieur Yves-Guyot, president of the Société d'Economie Politique of Paris, has been pleased to address to the economists of India.
Yves-Guyot was formerly a member of the Chamber of Deputies. He was also the minister of public works. He has for some long time been the editor of the Journal des Economistes, a monthly publication. His Agence Economique et Financière is a daily. Ives-Guyot's writings on economics are known in Italy, Great Britain and the United States, some of them being available in English.
Here follows the letter in the original from which the first line wich is of a personal character is being removed (Paris, le 20. février, 1921):
"La science économique est une science internationale comme l'arithmétique et la géométrie. Les frontières ne delimitent pas les vérités qu'elle a acquisés et celles qu'elle recherche. Ce n'est pas d'elle qu'on peut dire: vérité en déjà du Pyrénées, erreur au delà. Ce qui est vrai à Paris c'est également à Bombay ou Calcutta.
"Les physiocrates français du XVIIIe siècle sont les veritables fondateurs de la science économique: et Hume et Adam Smith n'ont pas nié l'influence qu'ils avaient exercée sur eux. Jean Baptiste Say, Frederic Bastiat, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu ont maintenu leur tradition qui représente la société d'économie politique de Paris.
"Nous serions très heureux d'entrer en communication regulière avec les économistes de l'Inde. Nous sommes convainçus que les échanges des idées qui en resulteraient seriéent utiles au progrès de la science économique.
"Les faits qui viennent de se derouler ont trouvé que son importance ne cesser de grandir. La plus grande partie des calamités qui affligent le monde proviennent de l'ignorance des lois scientifiques qu'elle a dégagés."
The letter reads in English as follows:
"Economics is an international science like arithmetic and geometry. The frontiers do not set any limits to the truths it has discovered nor to those which it seeks to bring out. It is not of this science that one might say: truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error on the other. What is true at Paris is equally true at Bombay or Calcutta.
"The French physiocrats of the eighteenth century are the real founders of economic science; and Hume and Adam Smith have not denied the influence which they had exercised upon them. J. B. Say, F. Bastiat, P. Leroy-Beaulieu have maintened their tradition which is represented also by thé Société d'Economie Politique of Paris.
"We shall be very happy to enter into regular intercourse with the economists of India. We are sure that the exchange of ideas which will result therefrom will be useful to the progress of economics.
"The events which have come to pass of late have proved that the importance of this exchange will not cease to grow. The greatest part of the calamities which afflict the world arise out of the ignorance of the laws which the science has revealed."
The political economy adumbrated here is the well known orthodox economics of the classical school. One of its special features is the emphasis on the doctrine of free trade (libre-échange). Not that entire French thought is obsessed by this economic theory. Professor Charles Gide, for instance, maintains a different attitude in his Revue d'Economie Politique.
We need not enter into a discussion of the merits of the several schools of economic thought. It need only be observed that Yves-Guyot's letter embodies the message of official French economics to India for scientific cooperation and intellectual exchange. The world of science will value it as a document of contemporary civilization similar to many others in and through which India's expansion is being achieved, i.e. a Greater India is being born and bred.
8. India in French Communism.
French interest in India is not confined within the circle of intellectuals, bourgeoisie and commercial classes.
The French dailies not only of Paris but also of the provinces, representing all shades of public opinion and political grouping, have begun to enlighten their constituencies in regard to the recent developments of what they invariably characterize as the "revolution" in India.
A writer in the Clarté, the Communist weekly of Paris, interprets the movement on the basis of the current news in the following manner. Every day, says he, "the nationalist movement is growing in India." It is being "definitely directed towards the achievement of an entirely independent government, swa-râj, a word synonymous with sinn-fein. The leaders of the revolution have been working along several lines simultaneously.
"At Calcutta the conductors of the taxis, tramways, and autobus went on strike in conjunction with the students of schools and colleges. This combined action had the object of boycotting the reception organized by the government in honour of the Duke of Connaught. The strikers declared that they would resume their normal functions as soon as the Duke left the city.
"The second line of revolutionary activity in India is manifest in the agitation and turmoil among the agriculturists. At Muzzaffarpur in Bihar and at Fyzabad in the United Provinces have been repeated the events of Rai Bareilly. Over two thousand peasants took part in the rising and tried to paralyse the actions of the police."
"The reason for such revolutions," says the French communist, "is not far to seek. The most important cause is the fact that Great Britain has systematically prevented the development of India's national industries. The Indians want to build factories in order to exploit the natural resources of the country. But the British government has for a long time adopted the policy which is the surest to counteract such enterprise on the part of the people. For it has by all means prohibited in India the development of scientific and technical education.
"The nationalist leaders have therefore embarked on a program of founding industrial and commercial schools. These technical schools are known generally as "national" schools. Recently, as may be gathered from the Bulletin d'Information Indienne (Paris) such schools have been founded at Ahmedabad, Surat, Lahore, Benares, Bombay, Calcutta, Aligarh, etc. These institutions are all independent of the control of Great Britain.
"Another cause of revolt is the press legislation by which Great Britain has sought to crush the freedom of thought and the growth of democratic opinion. Since 1910, 350 printing presses and 300 journals have been suppressed, 500 publications proscribed, £40,000 sterling has been demanded as security and forfeited—think of such a large sum lost by the people in a country so poor as India—and 200 presses and 130 journals have been prevented from making their appearance."
The Paris Bolshevist points out, further, that "in the budget of the British Indian government 63 per cent of the expenses is ear-marked for the army and the navy while only 6 per cent is devoted to public instruction. At present not more than 8 per cent of the entire population can read and write. And not more than 4 per cent of the children of school-going age can attend schools."
Indian revolution has thus succeeded in finding an able interpreter in the ranks of French communism. The labour leaders of France have come in line with those of the United States in championing the right to freedom of the Indian people.