RANADE, GANDHI AND JINNAH 231
crude which have volume but no effect and which are neither fool-proof nor knave-proof and which break the back even of the most earnest and sincere servants of the country and disable them from further effort. In short Ranade was like the wise Captain who knows that his duty is not to play with his ship clever and masterful tricks, just for effect and show in the midst of the ocean but to take it safely to its appointed port. In short Ranade was not a forged bank note and in worshipping him we have no feeling of kneeling before anything that is false.
In the second place this celebration of Ranade’s birthday is not all an act of hero-worship. Hero-worship in the sense of expressing our unbounded admiration is one thing. To obey the hero is a totally different kind of heroworship. There is nothing wrong in the former while the latter is no doubt a most pernicious thing. The former is only man’s respect for everything which is noble and of which the great man is only an embodiment. The latter is the villain’s fealty to his lord. The former is consistent with respect, but the latter is a sign of debasement. The former does not take away one’s intelligence to think and independence to act. The latter makes one a perfect fool. The former involves no disaster to the State. The latter is the source of positive danger to it. In short in celebrating Ranade’s birthday we are not worshipping a boss who is elected by no one, accountable to no one and removable by no one, but paying our tribute of admiration to a leader who led and did not drive people, who sought to give effect to their deliberate judgment and did not try to impose his own will upon them by trickery or by violence.
In the third place it is not for hero-worship for which this gathering has assembled. This is an occasion to remind ourselves of the political philosophy of Ranade. To my mind it has become necessary to remind ourselves of it from time to time. For his is a philosophy which is safe and sound, sure if slow. Even if it does not glitter it is nonetheless gold. Do any have doubt ? If they have let them ponder over the following utterances of Bismark, Balfour and Morley. Bismark the great German Statesman said :
“Politics is the game of the possible.”
Balfour in his Introduction to Walter Bagehot’s well-known book on the English Constitution says :
“If we would find the true basis of the long drawn process which has gradually converted medieval monarchy into a modern democracy the process by which so much has been changed and so little destroyed, we must study temperament and character rather than intellect and theory. This is a truth which those who recommend the wholesale adoption of British Institutions in strange lands might remember with advantage. Such an experiment can hardly be without its dangers. Constitutions are easily copied ; temperaments are not ; and if it should happen that the borrowed constitution and the native temperament fail to correspond, the misfit may