Political Labels.

IN an article from which we have quoted, there is one passage which shows that the Civil and Military Gazette, at any rate, is moving, shall we say, towards a proper recognition of the actualities of the case. The journal divides opinion in India into five classes: conservative, moderate, progressive, reactionary and irreconcilable. The second, the fourth and the fifth it does not define, presumably because their import is unmistakably obvious. Of the remaining two, it defines the conservative as “the cautious friends of India and not reactionary living in the past of super-paternal Government,” while by the progressive, it means the man “whom more often than not we call the extremist or even the agitator, but not the man who is endeavouring to pledge himself and his misguided followers to those forms of political agitation that can never prove anything but destructive of all liberty and all constitutional progress.” We are not primarily concerned with the correctness or otherwise of the writer’s classification or of his definition of the several classes. What does concern us is to point out that this is the first time that a journal of this class has admitted that the men whom it and its friends have more often than not described as extremists or agitators are many of them only progressive. But while congratulating the journal on this somewhat belated discovery, we may perhaps point in all humility that when the process will have advanced a step further, it will begin to realise than even the “irreconcilable” of today is only the progressive differently writ. All these terms are only relative.