*W*E HAVE felt considerable delicacy hitherto in writing on the prosecution of Srijut Bepin Chandra Pal for refusing to take the oath in the /Bande Mataram /Case, as that prosecution has arisen directly out of our own. In fact, all the more important events of recent occurrence in Calcutta have been so closely connected, directly or indirectly, with this case that we have been practically compelled to keep our lip's closed on current public affairs. The imprisonment of the Nationalist orator and propagandist, the most prominent public figure of the New Party in Bengal , is nevertheless a matter of capital importance on which we cannot remain silent. Without touching on the relations of this affair with the /Bande Mataram /Case we shall say what we have to say on the political aspect of the vindictive sentence passed by the third Presidency Magistrate, an obscure servant of the bureaucracy, on the man with a great and historic mission whom the strange incongruous humour of Fate brought before his petty judgment-seat.size="3" Srijut Bepin Chandra Pal has been condemned to six months simple imprisonment, the maximum penalty permitted by the law for the crime of possessing a conscience, Mr. Hume asked for a conviction on the ground that Bepin Babu had baulked the prosecution in the /Bande Mataram /Case. Page 529, Bande Mataram , volume 1, SABCL

India has in herself a faith of superhuman virtue to accomplish miracles, to deliver herself out of irrefragable bondage, to bring God down upon earth. She has a secret of will power which no other nation possesses. All she needs to rouse in her that faith, that will, is an ideal which will induce her to make the effort. That ideal is now being preached by Srijut Bepin Chandra Pal in every speech he delivers and never has it been delivered with such beauty of expression, such a passion of earnestness and pathos, such a sublimity of feeling as at Uttarpara on Sunday when he addressed a meeting of the people in the compound of the Uttarpara Library. The ideal is that of humanity in God, of God in humanity, the ancient ideal of the /san//ā//tana dharma /but applied, as it has never been applied before, to the problem of politics and the work of national revival. Page 837, Bande Mataram , volume 1, SABCL