z:\ ambedkar\vol-02\vol2-05.indd MK SJ+YS 21-9-2013/YS-8-11-2013 341
PROVINCIAL LEGISLATURE 341
my opinion, commit two mistakes. Their first mistake consists in their belief that an illiterate person is necessarily an unintelligent person. But everyone knows that, to maintain that an illiterate person can be a very intelligent person, is not to utter a paradox. Indeed an appeal to experience would fortify the conclusion that illiterate people all over the world including India have intelligence enough to understand and manage their own affairs. At any rate the law presumes that above a certain age every one has intelligence enough to be entrusted with the responsibility of managing his own affairs. The illiterate might easily commit mistakes in the exercise of the franchise. But then the Development Department of Bombay has fallen into mistakes of judgment equally great which though they are condemned, are all the same tolerated. And even if they fall into greater errors it may still be well that they should have franchise. For all belief in free and popular Government rests ultimately on the conviction that a people gains more by experience than it loses by the errors of liberty and it is difficult to perceive why a truth that holds good of individuals in non-political field should not hold good in the political field Their second mistake lies in supposing that literacy necessarily imports a higher level of intelligence or knowledge than what the illiterate possesses. On this point the words of Bryce might be quoted. In his survey of “Modern Democracies” he raises the question how far ability to read and write goes towards civic competence and answers thus : “Because it is the only test practically available, we assume it to be an adequate test. Is it really so ? Some of us remember, among the English rustics of sixty years ago shrewd men, unable to read but with plenty of mother wit, and by their strong sense and solid judgment quite as well qualified to vote as are their grand-children today who read a newspaper and revel in the cinema……The Athenian voters……were better……fitted for civic franchise than most of the voters in modern democracies. These Greek voters learnt politics not from the printed and, few even from any written page, but by listening to accomplished orators and by talking to one another. Talking has this advantage over reading, that in it mind is less passive. It is thinking that matters, not reading, and by thinking, I mean the power of getting at facts, and arguing consecutively from them. In conversation there is a clash of wits, and to that some mental exertion must go……But in these days of ours reading has become substitute for thinking. The man who reads only the newspaper of his own party, and reads its political intelligence in a medley of other stuff, narratives of crimes and descriptions of football matches, need not know that there is more than one side to a question and seldom asks if there is one, nor what is the evidence for what the paper tells him. The printed page, because it seems to represent some unknown power, is believed more readily than what he hears in talk. He takes from it statements, perhaps groundless, perhaps invented, which he would not take from one of his follows in the workshop or the counting house. Moreover, the Tree of Knowledge is the Tree of the Knowledge of Evil as well as of Good. On the Printed Page Truth