Politicians and Criminals.

Can it be denied that in the eyes of too many of those who are now sought to be armed with new powers, the politician is only the criminal (of the political species) who is at large and the criminal is the politician who has been arrested and placed in safe custody? So the terms are quite interchangeable. Mr. Tilak, for instance, was a criminal when he was sentenced to six years’ transportation. On the other hand, he had been a politician before and has been once since, though in the eyes of some of the Local Governments he is still a semi-criminal, for he is still excluded from their territory. May we enquire what there is in all this to comfort the heart of honest public workers and produce in them a sense of security?