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Title: Nationalism

Author: Rabindranath Tagore

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LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd.

NATIONALISM

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MADRAS
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO

DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO

NATIONALISM

BY
SIR RABINDRANATH TAGORE

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1918

COPYRIGHT

First Edition 1917
Reprinted 1918 (twice)

CONTENTS
PAGE
Nationalism in the West 1
Nationalism in Japan 47
Nationalism in India 95
The Sunset of the Century 131

NATIONALISM IN THE WEST

NATIONALISM IN THE WEST
Man's history is being shaped according to the difficulties it encounters.
These have offered us problems and claimed their solutions from us, the
penalty of non-fulfilment being death or degradation.
These difficulties have been different in different peoples of the earth, and
in the manner of our overcoming them lies our distinction.
The Scythians of the earlier period of Asiatic history had to struggle with
the scarcity of their natural resources. The easiest solution that they could
think of was to organize their whole population, men, women, and children,
into bands of robbers. And they were irresistible to those who were chiefly
engaged in the constructive work of social co-operation.
But fortunately for man the easiest path is not his truest path. If his nature
were not as complex as it is, if it were as simple as that of a pack of hungry
wolves, then, by this time, those hordes of marauders would have overrun
the whole earth. But man, when confronted with difficulties, has to
acknowledge that he is man, that he has his responsibilities to the higher
faculties of his nature, by ignoring which he may achieve success that is
immediate, perhaps, but that will become a death-trap to him. For what are
obstacles to the lower creatures are opportunities to the higher life of man.
To India has been given her problem from the beginning of history—it is
the race problem. Races ethnologically different have in this country come
into close contact. This fact has been and still continues to be the most
important one in our history. It is our mission to face it and prove our
humanity by dealing with it in the fullest truth. Until we fulfil our mission
all other benefits will be denied us.

There are other peoples in the world who have to overcome obstacles in
their physical surroundings, or the menace of their powerful neighbours.
They have organized their power till they are not only reasonably free from
the tyranny of Nature and human neighbours, but have a surplus of it left in
their hands to employ against others. But in India, our difficulties being
internal, our history has been the history of continual social adjustment and
not that of organized power for defence and aggression.
Neither the colourless vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the fierce self-
idolatry of nation-worship, is the goal of human history. And India has been
trying to accomplish her task through social regulation of differences, on
the one hand, and the spiritual recognition of unity on the other. She has
made grave errors in setting up the boundary walls too rigidly between
races, in perpetuating in her classifications the results of inferiority; often
she has crippled her children's minds and narrowed their lives in order to fit
them into her social forms; but for centuries new experiments have been
made and adjustments carried out.
Her mission has been like that of a hostess who has to provide proper
accommodation for numerous guests, whose habits and requirements are
different from one another. This gives rise to infinite complexities whose
solution depends not merely upon tactfulness but upon sympathy and true
realization of the unity of man. Towards this realization have worked, from
the early time of the Upanishads up to the present moment, a series of great
spiritual teachers, whose one object has been to set at naught all differences
of man by the overflow of our consciousness of God. In fact, our history
has not been of the rise and fall of kingdoms, of fights for political
supremacy. In our country records of these days have been despised and
forgotten, for they in no way represent the true history of our people. Our
history is that of our social life and attainment of spiritual ideals.
But we feel that our task is not yet done. The world-flood has swept over
our country, new elements have been introduced, and wider adjustments are
waiting to be made.
We feel this all the more, because the teaching and example of the West
have entirely run counter to what we think was given to India to
accomplish. In the West the national machinery of commerce and politics

turns out neatly compressed bales of humanity which have their use and
high market value; but they are bound in iron hoops, labelled and separated
off with scientific care and precision. Obviously God made man to be
human; but this modern product has such marvellous square-cut finish,
savouring of gigantic manufacture, that the Creator will find it difficult to
recognize it as a thing of spirit and a creature made in His own divine
image.
But I am anticipating. What I was about to say is this. Take it in whatever
spirit you like, here is India, of about fifty centuries at least, who tried to
live peacefully and think deeply, the India devoid of all politics, the India of
no nations, whose one ambition has been to know this world as of soul, to
live here every moment of her life in the meek spirit of adoration, in the
glad consciousness of an eternal and personal relationship with it. It was
upon this remote portion of humanity, childlike in its manner, with the
wisdom of the old, that the Nation of the West burst in.
Through all the fights and intrigues and deceptions of her earlier history
India had remained aloof. Because her homes, her fields, her temples of
worship, her schools, where her teachers and students lived together in the
atmosphere of simplicity and devotion and learning, her village self-
government with its simple laws and peaceful administration—all these
truly belonged to her. But her thrones were not her concern. They passed
over her head like clouds, now tinged with purple gorgeousness, now black
with the threat of thunder. Often they brought devastations in their wake,
but they were like catastrophes of nature whose traces are soon forgotten.
But this time it was different. It was not a mere drift over her surface of life,
—drift of cavalry and foot soldiers, richly caparisoned elephants, white
tents and canopies, strings of patient camels bearing the loads of royalty,
bands of kettle-drums and flutes, marble domes of mosques, palaces and
tombs, like the bubbles of the foaming wine of extravagance; stories of
treachery and loyal devotion, of changes of fortune, of dramatic surprises of
fate. This time it was the Nation of the West driving its tentacles of
machinery deep down into the soil.
Therefore I say to you, it is we who are called as witnesses to give evidence
as to what our Nation has been to humanity. We had known the hordes of

Moghals and Pathans who invaded India, but we had known them as human
races, with their own religions and customs, likes and dislikes,—we had
never known them as a nation. We loved and hated them as occasions arose;
we fought for them and against them, talked with them in a language which
was theirs as well as our own, and guided the destiny of the Empire in
which we had our active share. But this time we had to deal, not with kings,
not with human races, but with a nation—we, who are no nation ourselves.
Now let us from our own experience answer the question, What is this
Nation?
A nation, in the sense of the political and economic union of a people, is
that aspect which a whole population assumes when organized for a
mechanical purpose. Society as such has no ulterior purpose. It is an end in
itself. It is a spontaneous self-expression of man as a social being. It is a
natural regulation of human relationships, so that men can develop ideals of
life in co-operation with one another. It has also a political side, but this is
only for a special purpose. It is for self-preservation. It is merely the side of
power, not of human ideals. And in the early days it had its separate place in
society, restricted to the professionals. But when with the help of science
and the perfecting of organization this power begins to grow and brings in
harvests of wealth, then it crosses its boundaries with amazing rapidity. For
then it goads all its neighbouring societies with greed of material prosperity,
and consequent mutual jealousy, and by the fear of each other's growth into
powerfulness. The time comes when it can stop no longer, for the
competition grows keener, organization grows vaster, and selfishness attains
supremacy. Trading upon the greed and fear of man, it occupies more and
more space in society, and at last becomes its ruling force.
It is just possible that you have lost through habit consciousness that the
living bonds of society are breaking up, and giving place to merely
mechanical organization. But you see signs of it everywhere. It is owing to
this that war has been declared between man and woman, because the
natural thread is snapping which holds them together in harmony; because
man is driven to professionalism, producing wealth for himself and others,
continually turning the wheel of power for his own sake or for the sake of
the universal officialdom, leaving woman alone to wither and to die or to
fight her own battle unaided. And thus there where co-operation is natural

has intruded competition. The very psychology of men and women about
their mutual relation is changing and becoming the psychology of the
primitive fighting elements, rather than of humanity seeking its
completeness through the union based upon mutual self-surrender. For the
elements which have lost their living bond of reality have lost the meaning
of their existence. Like gaseous particles forced into a too narrow space,
they come in continual conflict with each other till they burst the very
arrangement which holds them in bondage.
Then look at those who call themselves anarchists, who resent the
imposition of power, in any form whatever, upon the individual. The only
reason for this is that power has become too abstract—it is a scientific
product made in the political laboratory of the Nation, through the
dissolution of personal humanity.
And what is the meaning of these strikes in the economic world, which like
the prickly shrubs in a barren soil shoot up with renewed vigour each time
they are cut down? What, but that the wealth-producing mechanism is
incessantly growing into vast stature, out of proportion to all other needs of
society,—and the full reality of man is more and more crushed under its
weight? This state of things inevitably gives rise to eternal feuds among the
elements freed from the wholeness and wholesomeness of human ideals,
and interminable economic war is waged between capital and labour. For
greed of wealth and power can never have a limit, and compromise of self-
interest can never attain the final spirit of reconciliation. They must go on
breeding jealousy and suspicion to the end—the end which only comes
through some sudden catastrophe or a spiritual re-birth.
When this organization of politics and commerce, whose other name is the
Nation, becomes all-powerful at the cost of the harmony of the higher social
life, then it is an evil day for humanity. When a father becomes a gambler
and his obligations to his family take the secondary place in his mind, then
he is no longer a man, but an automaton led by the power of greed. Then he
can do things which, in his normal state of mind, he would be ashamed to
do. It is the same thing with society. When it allows itself to be turned into a
perfect organization of power, then there are few crimes which it is unable
to perpetrate. Because success is the object and justification of a machine,
while goodness only is the end and purpose of man. When this engine of

organization begins to attain a vast size, and those who are mechanics are
made into parts of the machine, then the personal man is eliminated to a
phantom, everything becomes a revolution of policy carried out by the
human parts of the machine, with no twinge of pity or moral responsibility.
It may happen that even through this apparatus the moral nature of man
tries to assert itself, but the whole series of ropes and pullies creak and cry,
the forces of the human heart become entangled among the forces of the
human automaton, and only with difficulty can the moral purpose transmit
itself into some tortured shape of result.
This abstract being, the Nation, is ruling India. We have seen in our country
some brand of tinned food advertised as entirely made and packed without
being touched by hand. This description applies to the governing of India,
which is as little touched by the human hand as possible. The governors
need not know our language, need not come into personal touch with us
except as officials; they can aid or hinder our aspirations from a disdainful
distance, they can lead us on a certain path of policy and then pull us back
again with the manipulation of office red tape; the newspapers of England,
in whose columns London street accidents are recorded with some decency
of pathos, need but take the scantiest notice of calamities which happen in
India over areas of land sometimes larger than the British Isles.
But we, who are governed, are not a mere abstraction. We, on our side, are
individuals with living sensibilities. What comes to us in the shape of a
mere bloodless policy may pierce into the very core of our life, may
threaten the whole future of our people with a perpetual helplessness of
emasculation, and yet may never touch the chord of humanity on the other
side, or touch it in the most inadequately feeble manner. Such wholesale
and universal acts of fearful responsibility man can never perform, with
such a degree of systematic unawareness, where he is an individual human
being. These only become possible, where the man is represented by an
octopus of abstractions, sending out its wriggling arms in all directions of
space, and fixing its innumerable suckers even into the far-away future. In
this reign of the nation, the governed are pursued by suspicions; and these
are the suspicions of a tremendous mass of organized brain and muscle.
Punishments are meted out, which leave a trail of miseries across a large
bleeding tract of the human heart; but these punishments are dealt by a mere

abstract force, in which a whole population of a distant country has lost its
human personality.
I have not come here, however, to discuss the question as it affects my own
country, but as it affects the future of all humanity. It is not a question of the
British Government, but of government by the Nation—the Nation which is
the organized self-interest of a whole people, where it is least human and
least spiritual. Our only intimate experience of the Nation is with the British
Nation, and as far as the government by the Nation goes there are reasons to
believe that it is one of the best. Then, again, we have to consider that the
West is necessary to the East. We are complementary to each other because
of our different outlooks upon life which have given us different aspects of
truth. Therefore if it be true that the spirit of the West has come upon our
fields in the guise of a storm it is nevertheless scattering living seeds that
are immortal. And when in India we become able to assimilate in our life
what is permanent in Western civilization we shall be in the position to
bring about a reconciliation of these two great worlds. Then will come to an
end the one-sided dominance which is galling. What is more, we have to
recognize that the history of India does not belong to one particular race but
to a process of creation to which various races of the world contributed—
the Dravidians and the Aryans, the ancient Greeks and the Persians, the
Mohammedans of the West and those of central Asia. Now at last has come
the turn of the English to become true to this history and bring to it the
tribute of their life, and we neither have the right nor the power to exclude
this people from the building of the destiny of India. Therefore what I say
about the Nation has more to do with the history of Man than specially with
that of India.
This history has come to a stage when the moral man, the complete man, is
more and more giving way, almost without knowing it, to make room for
the political and the commercial man, the man of the limited purpose. This
process, aided by the wonderful progress in science, is assuming gigantic
proportion and power, causing the upset of man's moral balance, obscuring
his human side under the shadow of soul-less organization. We have felt its
iron grip at the root of our life, and for the sake of humanity we must stand
up and give warning to all, that this nationalism is a cruel epidemic of evil
that is sweeping over the human world of the present age, and eating into its
moral vitality.

I have a deep love and a great respect for the British race as human beings.
It has produced great-hearted men, thinkers of great thoughts, doers of great
deeds. It has given rise to a great literature. I know that these people love
justice and freedom, and hate lies. They are clean in their minds, frank in
their manners, true in their friendships; in their behaviour they are honest
and reliable. The personal experience which I have had of their literary men
has roused my admiration not merely for their power of thought or
expression but for their chivalrous humanity. We have felt the greatness of
this people as we feel the sun; but as for the Nation, it is for us a thick mist
of a stifling nature covering the sun itself.
This government by the Nation is neither British nor anything else; it is an
applied science and therefore more or less similar in its principles wherever
it is used. It is like a hydraulic press, whose pressure is impersonal, and on
that account completely effective. The amount of its power may vary in
different engines. Some may even be driven by hand, thus leaving a margin
of comfortable looseness in their tension, but in spirit and in method their
differences are small. Our government might have been Dutch, or French,
or Portuguese, and its essential features would have remained much the
same as they are now. Only perhaps, in some cases, the organization might
not have been so densely perfect, and, therefore, some shreds of the human
might still have been clinging to the wreck, allowing us to deal with
something which resembles our own throbbing heart.
Before the Nation came to rule over us we had other governments which
were foreign, and these, like all governments, had some element of the
machine in them. But the difference between them and the government by
the Nation is like the difference between the hand-loom and the power-
loom. In the products of the hand-loom the magic of man's living fingers
finds its expression, and its hum harmonizes with the music of life. But the
power-loom is relentlessly lifeless and accurate and monotonous in its
production.
We must admit that during the personal government of the former days
there have been instances of tyranny, injustice and extortion. They caused
sufferings and unrest from which we are glad to be rescued. The protection
of law is not only a boon, but it is a valuable lesson to us. It is teaching us
the discipline which is necessary for the stability of civilization and for

continuity of progress. We are realizing through it that there is a universal
standard of justice to which all men, irrespective of their caste and colour,
have their equal claim.
This reign of law in our present Government in India has established order
in this vast land inhabited by peoples different in their races and customs. It
has made it possible for these peoples to come in closer touch with one
another and cultivate a communion of aspiration.
But this desire for a common bond of comradeship among the different
races of India has been the work of the spirit of the West, not that of the
Nation of the West. Wherever in Asia the people have received the true
lesson of the West it is in spite of the Western Nation. Only because Japan
had been able to resist the dominance of this Western Nation could she
acquire the benefit of the Western Civilization in fullest measure. Though
China has been poisoned at the very spring of her moral and physical life by
this Nation, her struggle to receive the best lessons of the West may yet be
successful if not hindered by the Nation. It was only the other day that
Persia woke up from her age-long sleep at the call of the West to be
instantly trampled into stillness by the Nation. The same phenomenon
prevails in this country also, where the people are hospitable, but the Nation
has proved itself to be otherwise, making an Eastern guest feel humiliated
to stand before you as a member of the humanity of his own motherland.
In India we are suffering from this conflict between the spirit of the West
and the Nation of the West. The benefit of the Western civilization is doled
out to us in a miserly measure by the Nation, which tries to regulate the
degree of nutrition as near the zero-point of vitality as possible. The portion
of education allotted to us is so raggedly insufficient that it ought to outrage
the sense of decency of a Western humanity. We have seen in these
countries how the people are encouraged and trained and given every
facility to fit themselves for the great movements of commerce and industry
spreading over the world, while in India the only assistance we get is
merely to be jeered at by the Nation for lagging behind. While depriving us
of our opportunities and reducing our education to the minimum required
for conducting a foreign government, this Nation pacifies its conscience by
calling us names, by sedulously giving currency to the arrogant cynicism
that the East is east and the West is west and never the twain shall meet. If

we must believe our schoolmaster in his taunt that, after nearly two
centuries of his tutelage, India not only remains unfit for self-government
but unable to display originality in her intellectual attainments, must we
ascribe it to something in the nature of Western culture and our inherent
incapacity to receive it or to the judicious niggardliness of the Nation that
has taken upon itself the white man's burden of civilizing the East? That
Japanese people have some qualities which we lack we may admit, but that
our intellect is naturally unproductive compared to theirs we cannot accept
even from them whom it is dangerous for us to contradict.
The truth is that the spirit of conflict and conquest is at the origin and in the
centre of Western nationalism; its basis is not social co-operation. It has
evolved a perfect organization of power, but not spiritual idealism. It is like
the pack of predatory creatures that must have its victims. With all its heart
it cannot bear to see its hunting-grounds converted into cultivated fields. In
fact, these nations are fighting among themselves for the extension of their
victims and their reserve forests. Therefore the Western Nation acts like a
dam to check the free flow of Western civilization into the country of the
No-Nation. Because this civilization is the civilization of power, therefore it
is exclusive, it is naturally unwilling to open its sources of power to those
whom it has selected for its purposes of exploitation.
But all the same moral law is the law of humanity, and the exclusive
civilization which thrives upon others who are barred from its benefit
carries its own death-sentence in its moral limitations. The slavery that it
gives rise to unconsciously drains its own love of freedom dry. The
helplessness with which it weighs down its world of victims exerts its force
of gravitation every moment upon the power that creates it. And the greater
part of the world which is being denuded of its self-sustaining life by the
Nation will one day become the most terrible of all its burdens, ready to
drag it down into the bottom of destruction. Whenever Power removes all
checks from its path to make its career easy, it triumphantly rides into its
ultimate crash of death. Its moral brake becomes slacker every day without
its knowing it, and its slippery path of ease becomes its path of doom.
Of all things in Western civilization, those which this Western Nation has
given us in a most generous measure are law and order. While the small
feeding-bottle of our education is nearly dry, and sanitation sucks its own

thumb in despair, the military organization, the magisterial offices, the
police, the Criminal Investigation Department, the secret spy system, attain
to an abnormal girth in their waists, occupying every inch of our country.
This is to maintain order. But is not this order merely a negative good? Is it
not for giving people's life greater opportunities for the freedom of
development? Its perfection is the perfection of an egg-shell, whose true
value lies in the security it affords to the chick and its nourishment and not
in the convenience it offers to the person at the breakfast table. Mere
administration is unproductive, it is not creative, not being a living thing. It
is a steam-roller, formidable in its weight and power, having its uses, but it
does not help the soil to become fertile. When after its enormous toil it
comes to offer us its boon of peace we can but murmur under our breath
that "peace is good, but not more so than life, which is God's own great
boon."
On the other hand, our former governments were woefully lacking in many
of the advantages of the modern government. But because those were not
the governments by the Nation, their texture was loosely woven, leaving big
gaps through which our own life sent its threads and imposed its designs. I
am quite sure in those days we had things that were extremely distasteful to
us. But we know that when we walk barefooted upon ground strewn with
gravel, our feet come gradually to adjust themselves to the caprices of the
inhospitable earth; while if the tiniest particle of gravel finds its lodgment
inside our shoes we can never forget and forgive its intrusion. And these
shoes are the government by the Nation,—it is tight, it regulates our steps
with a closed-up system, within which our feet have only the slightest
liberty to make their own adjustments. Therefore, when you produce your
statistics to compare the number of gravels which our feet had to encounter
in former days with the paucity in the present régime, they hardly touch the
real points. It is not a question of the number of outside obstacles but the
comparative powerlessness of the individual to cope with them. This
narrowness of freedom is an evil which is more radical, not because of its
quantity but because of its nature. And we cannot but acknowledge this
paradox, that while the spirit of the West marches under its banner of
freedom, the Nation of the West forges its iron chains of organization which
are the most relentless and unbreakable that have ever been manufactured in
the whole history of man.

When the humanity of India was not under the government of the
Organization, the elasticity of change was great enough to encourage men
of power and spirit to feel that they had their destinies in their own hands.
The hope of the unexpected was never absent, and a freer play of
imagination, on the part both of the governor and the governed, had its
effect in the making of history. We were not confronted with a future, which
was a dead white wall of granite blocks eternally guarding against the
expression and extension of our own powers, the hopelessness of which lies
in the reason that these powers are becoming atrophied at their very roots
by the scientific process of paralysis. For every single individual in the
country of the No-Nation is completely in the grip of a whole nation,—
whose tireless vigilance, being the vigilance of a machine, has not the
human power to overlook or to discriminate. At the least pressing of its
button the monster organization becomes all eyes, whose ugly stare of
inquisitiveness cannot be avoided by a single person amongst the immense
multitude of the ruled. At the least turn of its screw, by the fraction of an
inch, the grip is tightened to the point of suffocation around every man,
woman and child of a vast population, for whom no escape is imaginable in
their own country, or even in any country outside their own.
It is the continual and stupendous dead pressure of this inhuman upon the
living human under which the modern world is groaning. Not merely the
subject races, but you who live under the delusion that you are free, are
every day sacrificing your freedom and humanity to this fetich of
nationalism, living in the dense poisonous atmosphere of world-wide
suspicion and greed and panic.
I have seen in Japan the voluntary submission of the whole people to the
trimming of their minds and clipping of their freedom by their government,
which through various educational agencies regulates their thoughts,
manufactures their feelings, becomes suspiciously watchful when they
show signs of inclining toward the spiritual, leading them through a narrow
path not toward what is true but what is necessary for the complete welding
of them into one uniform mass according to its own recipe. The people
accept this all-pervading mental slavery with cheerfulness and pride
because of their nervous desire to turn themselves into a machine of power,
called the Nation, and emulate other machines in their collective
worldliness.

When questioned as to the wisdom of its course the newly converted fanatic
of nationalism answers that "so long as nations are rampant in this world we
have not the option freely to develop our higher humanity. We must utilize
every faculty that we possess to resist the evil by assuming it ourselves in
the fullest degree. For the only brotherhood possible in the modern world is
the brotherhood of hooliganism." The recognition of the fraternal bond of
love between Japan and Russia, which has lately been celebrated with an
immense display of rejoicing in Japan, was not owing to any sudden
recrudescence of the spirit of Christianity or of Buddhism, but it was a bond
established according to the modern faith in a surer relationship of mutual
menace of bloodshedding. Yes, one cannot but acknowledge that these facts
are the facts of the world of the Nation, and the only moral of it is that all
the peoples of the earth should strain their physical, moral and intellectual
resources to the utmost to defeat one another in the wrestling match of
powerfulness. In the ancient days Sparta paid all her attention to becoming
powerful; she did become so by crippling her humanity, and died of the
amputation.
But it is no consolation to us to know that the weakening of humanity from
which the present age is suffering is not limited to the subject races, and
that its ravages are even more radical because insidious and voluntary in
peoples who are hypnotized into believing that they are free. This bartering
of your higher aspirations of life for profit and power has been your own
free choice, and I leave you there, at the wreckage of your soul,
contemplating your protuberant prosperity. But will you never be called to
answer for organizing the instincts of self-aggrandizement of whole peoples
into perfection and calling it good? I ask you what disaster has there ever
been in the history of man, in its darkest period, like this terrible disaster of
the Nation fixing its fangs deep into the naked flesh of the world, taking
permanent precautions against its natural relaxation?
You, the people of the West, who have manufactured this abnormality, can
you imagine the desolating despair of this haunted world of suffering man
possessed by the ghastly abstraction of the organizing man? Can you put
yourself into the position of the peoples, who seem to have been doomed to
an eternal damnation of their own humanity, who not only must suffer
continual curtailment of their manhood, but even raise their voices in pæans

of praise for the benignity of a mechanical apparatus in its interminable
parody of providence?
Have you not seen, since the commencement of the existence of the Nation,
that the dread of it has been the one goblin-dread with which the whole
world has been trembling? Wherever there is a dark corner, there is the
suspicion of its secret malevolence; and people live in a perpetual distrust
of its back where it has no eyes. Every sound of a footstep, every rustle of
movement in the neighbourhood, sends a thrill of terror all around. And this
terror is the parent of all that is base in man's nature. It makes one almost
openly unashamed of inhumanity. Clever lies become matters of self-
congratulation. Solemn pledges become a farce,—laughable for their very
solemnity. The Nation, with all its paraphernalia of power and prosperity, its
flags and pious hymns, its blasphemous prayers in the churches, and the
literary mock thunders of its patriotic bragging, cannot hide the fact that the
Nation is the greatest evil for the Nation, that all its precautions are against
it, and any new birth of its fellow in the world is always followed in its
mind by the dread of a new peril. Its one wish is to trade on the feebleness
of the rest of the world, like some insects that are bred in the paralysed flesh
of victims kept just enough alive to make them toothsome and nutritious.
Therefore it is ready to send its poisonous fluid into the vitals of the other
living peoples, who, not being nations, are harmless. For this the Nation has
had and still has its richest pasture in Asia. Great China, rich with her
ancient wisdom and social ethics, her discipline of industry and self-control,
is like a whale awakening the lust of spoil in the heart of the Nation. She is
already carrying in her quivering flesh harpoons sent by the unerring aim of
the Nation, the creature of science and selfishness. Her pitiful attempt to
shake off her traditions of humanity, her social ideals, and spend her last
exhausted resources in drilling herself into modern efficiency, is thwarted at
every step by the Nation. It is tightening its financial ropes round her, trying
to drag her up on the shore and cut her into pieces, and then go and offer
public thanksgiving to God for supporting the one existing evil and
shattering the possibility of a new one. And for all this the Nation has been
claiming the gratitude of history, and all eternity for its exploitation;
ordering its band of praise to be struck up from end to end of the world,
declaring itself to be the salt of the earth, the flower of humanity, the

blessing of God hurled with all His force upon the naked skulls of the world
of No-Nations.
I know what your advice will be. You will say, form yourselves into a
nation, and resist this encroachment of the Nation. But is this the true
advice? that of a man to a man? Why should this be a necessity? I could
well believe you if you had said, Be more good, more just, more true in
your relation to man, control your greed, make your life wholesome in its
simplicity and let your consciousness of the divine in humanity be more
perfect in its expression. But must you say that it is not the soul, but the
machine, which is of the utmost value to ourselves, and that man's salvation
depends upon his disciplining himself into a perfection of the dead rhythm
of wheels and counterwheels? that machine must be pitted against machine,
and nation against nation, in an endless bull-fight of politics?
You say, these machines will come into an agreement, for their mutual
protection, based upon a conspiracy of fear. But will this federation of
steam-boilers supply you with a soul, a soul which has her conscience and
her God? What is to happen to that larger part of the world where fear will
have no hand in restraining you? Whatever safety they now enjoy, those
countries of No-Nation, from the unbridled license of forge and hammer
and turn-screw, results from the mutual jealousy of the powers. But when,
instead of being numerous separate machines, they become riveted into one
organized gregariousness of gluttony, commercial and political, what
remotest chance of hope will remain for those others, who have lived and
suffered, have loved and worshipped, have thought deeply and worked with
meekness, but whose only crime has been that they have not organized?
But, you say, "That does not matter, the unfit must go to the wall—they
shall die, and this is science."
No, for the sake of your own salvation, I say, they shall live, and this is
truth. It is extremely bold of me to say so, but I assert that man's world is a
moral world, not because we blindly agree to believe it, but because it is so
in truth which would be dangerous for us to ignore. And this moral nature
of man cannot be divided into convenient compartments for its
preservation. You cannot secure it for your home consumption with

protective tariff walls, while in foreign parts making it enormously
accommodating in its free trade of license.
Has not this truth already come home to you now, when this cruel war has
driven its claws into the vitals of Europe? when her hoard of wealth is
bursting into smoke and her humanity is shattered into bits on her
battlefields? You ask in amazement what has she done to deserve this? The
answer is, that the West has been systematically petrifying her moral nature
in order to lay a solid foundation for her gigantic abstractions of efficiency.
She has all along been starving the life of the personal man into that of the
professional.
In your mediæval age in Europe, the simple and the natural man, with all
his violent passions and desires, was engaged in trying to find out a
reconciliation in the conflict between the flesh and the spirit. All through
the turbulent career of her vigorous youth the temporal and the spiritual
forces both acted strongly upon her nature, and were moulding it into
completeness of moral personality. Europe owes all her greatness in
humanity to that period of discipline,—the discipline of the man in his
human integrity.
Then came the age of intellect, of science. We all know that intellect is
impersonal. Our life, and our heart, are one with us, but our mind can be
detached from the personal man and then only can it freely move in its
world of thoughts. Our intellect is an ascetic who wears no clothes, takes no
food, knows no sleep, has no wishes, feels no love or hatred or pity for
human limitations, who only reasons, unmoved, through the vicissitudes of
life. It burrows to the roots of things, because it has no personal concern
with the thing itself. The grammarian walks straight through all poetry and
goes to the root of words without obstruction, because he is not seeking
reality, but law. When he finds the law, he is able to teach people how to
master words. This is a power,—the power which fulfils some special
usefulness, some particular need of man.
Reality is the harmony which gives to the component parts of a thing the
equilibrium of the whole. You break it, and have in your hands the nomadic
atoms fighting against one another, therefore unmeaning. Those who covet
power try to get mastery of these aboriginal fighting elements, and through

some narrow channels force them into some violent service for some
particular needs of man.
This satisfaction of man's needs is a great thing. It gives him freedom in the
material world. It confers on him the benefit of a greater range of time and
space. He can do things in a shorter time and occupies a larger space with
more thoroughness of advantage. Therefore he can easily outstrip those who
live in a world of a slower time and of space less fully occupied.
This progress of power attains more and more rapidity of pace. And, for the
reason that it is a detached part of man, it soon outruns the complete
humanity. The moral man remains behind, because it has to deal with the
whole reality, not merely with the law of things, which is impersonal and
therefore abstract.
Thus, man with his mental and material power far outgrowing his moral
strength, is like an exaggerated giraffe whose head has suddenly shot up
miles away from the rest of him, making normal communication difficult to
establish. This greedy head, with its huge dental organization, has been
munching all the topmost foliage of the world, but the nourishment is too
late in reaching his digestive organs, and his heart is suffering from want of
blood. Of this present disharmony in man's nature the West seems to have
been blissfully unconscious. The enormity of its material success has
diverted all its attention toward self-congratulation on its bulk. The
optimism of its logic goes on basing the calculations of its good fortune
upon the indefinite prolongation of its railway lines toward eternity. It is
superficial enough to think that all to-morrows are merely to-days, with the
repeated additions of twenty-four hours. It has no fear of the chasm, which
is opening wider every day, between man's ever-growing storehouses and
the emptiness of his hungry humanity. Logic does not know that, under the
lowest bed of endless strata of wealth and comforts, earthquakes are being
hatched to restore the balance of the moral world, and one day the gaping
gulf of spiritual vacuity will draw into its bottom the store of things that
have their eternal love for the dust.
Man in his fulness is not powerful, but perfect. Therefore, to turn him into
mere power, you have to curtail his soul as much as possible. When we are
fully human, we cannot fly at one another's throats; our instincts of social

life, our traditions of moral ideals stand in the way. If you want me to take
to butchering human beings, you must break up that wholeness of my
humanity through some discipline which makes my will dead, my thoughts
numb, my movements automatic, and then from the dissolution of the
complex personal man will come out that abstraction, that destructive force,
which has no relation to human truth, and therefore can be easily brutal or
mechanical. Take away man from his natural surroundings, from the fulness
of his communal life, with all its living associations of beauty and love and
social obligations, and you will be able to turn him into so many fragments
of a machine for the production of wealth on a gigantic scale. Turn a tree
into a log and it will burn for you, but it will never bear living flowers and
fruit.
This process of dehumanizing has been going on in commerce and politics.
And out of the long birth-throes of mechanical energy has been born this
fully developed apparatus of magnificent power and surprising appetite
which has been christened in the West as the Nation. As I have hinted
before, because of its quality of abstraction it has, with the greatest ease,
gone far ahead of the complete moral man. And having the conscience of a
ghost and the callous perfection of an automaton, it is causing disasters of
which the volcanic dissipations of the youthful moon would be ashamed to
be brought into comparison. As a result, the suspicion of man for man stings
all the limbs of this civilization like the hairs of the nettle. Each country is
casting its net of espionage into the slimy bottom of the others, fishing for
their secrets, the treacherous secrets which brew in the oozy depths of
diplomacy. And what is their secret service but the nation's underground
trade in kidnapping, murder and treachery and all the ugly crimes bred in
the depth of rottenness? Because each nation has its own history of thieving
and lies and broken faith, therefore there can only flourish international
suspicion and jealousy, and international moral shame becomes anæmic to a
degree of ludicrousness. The nation's bagpipe of righteous indignation has
so often changed its tune according to the variation of time and to the
altered groupings of the alliances of diplomacy, that it can be enjoyed with
amusement as the variety performance of the political music hall.
I am just coming from my visit to Japan, where I exhorted this young nation
to take its stand upon the higher ideals of humanity and never to follow the
West in its acceptance of the organized selfishness of Nationalism as its

religion, never to gloat upon the feebleness of its neighbours, never to be
unscrupulous in its behaviour to the weak, where it can be gloriously mean
with impunity, while turning its right cheek of brighter humanity for the
kiss of admiration to those who have the power to deal it a blow. Some of
the newspapers praised my utterances for their poetical qualities, while
adding with a leer that it was the poetry of a defeated people. I felt they
were right. Japan had been taught in a modern school the lesson how to
become powerful. The schooling is done and she must enjoy the fruits of
her lessons. The West in the voice of her thundering cannon had said at the
door of Japan, Let there be a nation—and there was a Nation. And now that
it has come into existence, why do you not feel in your heart of hearts a
pure feeling of gladness and say that it is good? Why is it that I saw in an
English paper an expression of bitterness at Japan's boasting of her
superiority of civilization—the thing that the British, along with other
nations, has been carrying on for ages without blushing? Because the
idealism of selfishness must keep itself drunk with a continual dose of self-
laudation. But the same vices which seem so natural and innocuous in its
own life make it surprised and angry at their unpleasantness when seen in
other nations. Therefore, when you see the Japanese nation, created in your
own image, launched in its career of national boastfulness you shake your
head and say, it is not good. Has it not been one of the causes that raise the
cry on these shores for preparedness to meet one more power of evil with a
greater power of injury? Japan protests that she has her bushido, that she
can never be treacherous to America, to whom she owes her gratitude. But
you find it difficult to believe her,—for the wisdom of the Nation is not in
its faith in humanity but in its complete distrust. You say to yourself that it
is not with Japan of the bushido, the Japan of the moral ideals, that you
have to deal—it is with the abstraction of the popular selfishness, it is with
the Nation; and Nation can only trust Nation where their interests coalesce,
or at least do not conflict. In fact your instinct tells you that the advent of
another people into the arena of nationality makes another addition to the
evil which contradicts all that is highest in Man and proves by its success
that unscrupulousness is the way to prosperity,—and goodness is good for
the weak and God is the only remaining consolation of the defeated.
Yes, this is the logic of the Nation. And it will never heed the voice of truth
and goodness. It will go on in its ring-dance of moral corruption, linking

steel unto steel, and machine unto machine; trampling under its tread all the
sweet flowers of simple faith and the living ideals of man.
But we delude ourselves into thinking that humanity in the modern days is
more to the front than ever before. The reason of this self-delusion is
because man is served with the necessaries of life in greater profusion, and
his physical ills are being alleviated with more efficacy. But the chief part
of this is done, not by moral sacrifice, but by intellectual power. In quantity
it is great, but it springs from the surface and spreads over the surface.
Knowledge and efficiency are powerful in their outward effect, but they are
the servants of man, not the man himself. Their service is like the service in
a hotel, where it is elaborate, but the host is absent; it is more convenient
than hospitable.
Therefore we must not forget that the scientific organizations vastly
spreading in all directions are strengthening our power, but not our
humanity. With the growth of power the cult of the self-worship of the
Nation grows in ascendancy; and the individual willingly allows the Nation
to take donkey-rides upon his back; and there happens the anomaly which
must have such disastrous effects, that the individual worships with all
sacrifices a god which is morally much inferior to himself. This could never
have been possible if the god had been as real as the individual.
Let me give an illustration of this in point. In some parts of India it has been
enjoined as an act of great piety for a widow to go without food and water
on a particular day every fortnight. This often leads to cruelty, unmeaning
and inhuman. And yet men are not by nature cruel to such a degree. But this
piety being a mere unreal abstraction completely deadens the moral sense of
the individual, just as the man, who would not hurt an animal unnecessarily,
would cause horrible suffering to a large number of innocent creatures
when he drugs his feelings with the abstract idea of "sport." Because these
ideas are the creations of our intellect, because they are logical
classifications, therefore they can so easily hide in their mist the personal
man.
And the idea of the Nation is one of the most powerful anæsthetics that man
has invented. Under the influence of its fumes the whole people can carry
out its systematic programme of the most virulent self-seeking without

being in the least aware of its moral perversion,—in fact feeling
dangerously resentful if it is pointed out.
But can this go on indefinitely? continually producing barrenness of moral
insensibility upon a large tract of our living nature? Can it escape its
nemesis for ever? Has this giant power of mechanical organization no limit
in this world against which it may shatter itself all the more completely
because of its terrible strength and velocity? Do you believe that evil can be
permanently kept in check by competition with evil, and that conference of
prudence can keep the devil chained in its makeshift cage of mutual
agreement?
This European war of Nations is the war of retribution. Man, the person,
must protest for his very life against the heaping up of things where there
should be the heart, and systems and policies where there should flow living
human relationship. The time has come when, for the sake of the whole
outraged world, Europe should fully know in her own person the terrible
absurdity of the thing called the Nation.
The Nation has thriven long upon mutilated humanity. Men, the fairest
creations of God, came out of the National manufactory in huge numbers as
war-making and money-making puppets, ludicrously vain of their pitiful
perfection of mechanism. Human society grew more and more into a
marionette show of politicians, soldiers, manufacturers and bureaucrats,
pulled by wire arrangements of wonderful efficiency.
But the apotheosis of selfishness can never make its interminable breed of
hatred and greed, fear and hypocrisy, suspicion and tyranny, an end in
themselves. These monsters grow into huge shapes but never into harmony.
And this Nation may grow on to an unimaginable corpulence, not of a
living body, but of steel and steam and office buildings, till its deformity
can contain no longer its ugly voluminousness,—till it begins to crack and
gape, breathe gas and fire in gasps, and its death-rattles sound in cannon
roars. In this war the death-throes of the Nation have commenced.
Suddenly, all its mechanism going mad, it has begun the dance of the
Furies, shattering its own limbs, scattering them into the dust. It is the fifth
act of the tragedy of the unreal.

Those who have any faith in Man cannot but fervently hope that the tyranny
of the Nation will not be restored to all its former teeth and claws, to its far-
reaching iron arms and its immense inner cavity, all stomach and no heart;
that man will have his new birth, in the freedom of his individuality, from
the enveloping vagueness of abstraction.
The veil has been raised, and in this frightful war the West has stood face to
face with her own creation, to which she had offered her soul. She must
know what it truly is.
She had never let herself suspect what slow decay and decomposition were
secretly going on in her moral nature, which often broke out in doctrines of
scepticism, but still oftener and in still more dangerously subtle manner
showed itself in her unconsciousness of the mutilation and insult that she
had been inflicting upon a vast part of the world. Now she must know the
truth nearer home.
And then there will come from her own children those who will break
themselves free from the slavery of this illusion, this perversion of
brotherhood founded upon self-seeking, those who will own themselves as
God's children and as no bond-slaves of machinery, which turns souls into
commodities and life into compartments, which, with its iron claws,
scratches out the heart of the world and knows not what it has done.
And we of no nations of the world, whose heads have been bowed to the
dust, will know that this dust is more sacred than the bricks which build the
pride of power. For this dust is fertile of life, and of beauty and worship. We
shall thank God that we were made to wait in silence through the night of
despair, had to bear the insult of the proud and the strong man's burden, yet
all through it, though our hearts quaked with doubt and fear, never could we
blindly believe in the salvation which machinery offered to man, but we
held fast to our trust in God and the truth of the human soul. And we can
still cherish the hope that, when power becomes ashamed to occupy its
throne and is ready to make way for love, when the morning comes for
cleansing the blood-stained steps of the Nation along the highroad of
humanity, we shall be called upon to bring our own vessel of sacred water
—the water of worship—to sweeten the history of man into purity, and with

its sprinkling make the trampled dust of the centuries blessed with
fruitfulness.

NATIONALISM IN JAPAN

NATIONALISM IN JAPAN
I
The worst form of bondage is the bondage of dejection, which keeps men
hopelessly chained in loss of faith in themselves. We have been repeatedly
told, with some justification, that Asia lives in the past,—it is like a rich
mausoleum which displays all its magnificence in trying to immortalize the
dead. It was said of Asia that it could never move in the path of progress, its
face was so inevitably turned backwards. We accepted this accusation, and
came to believe it. In India, I know, a large section of our educated
community, grown tired of feeling the humiliation of this charge against us,
is trying all its resources of self-deception to turn it into a matter of
boasting. But boasting is only a masked shame, it does not truly believe in
itself.
When things stood still like this, and we in Asia hypnotized ourselves into
the belief that it could never by any possibility be otherwise, Japan rose
from her dreams, and in giant strides left centuries of inaction behind,
overtaking the present time in its foremost achievement. This has broken
the spell under which we lay in torpor for ages, taking it to be the normal
condition of certain races living in certain geographical limits. We forgot
that in Asia great kingdoms were founded, philosophy, science, arts and
literatures flourished, and all the great religions of the world had their
cradles. Therefore it cannot be said that there is anything inherent in the soil
and climate of Asia to produce mental inactivity and to atrophy the faculties
which impel men to go forward. For centuries we did hold torches of
civilization in the East when the West slumbered in darkness, and that could
never be the sign of sluggish mind or narrowness of vision.

Then fell the darkness of night upon all the lands of the East. The current of
time seemed to stop at once, and Asia ceased to take any new food, feeding
upon its own past, which is really feeding upon itself. The stillness seemed
like death, and the great voice was silenced which sent forth messages of
eternal truth that have saved man's life from pollution for generations, like
the ocean of air that keeps the earth sweet, ever cleansing its impurities.
But life has its sleep, its periods of inactivity, when it loses its movements,
takes no new food, living upon its past storage. Then it grows helpless, its
muscles relaxed, and it easily lends itself to be jeered at for its stupor. In the
rhythm of life, pauses there must be for the renewal of life. Life in its
activity is ever spending itself, burning all its fuel. This extravagance
cannot go on indefinitely, but is always followed by a passive stage, when
all expenditure is stopped and all adventures abandoned in favour of rest
and slow recuperation.
The tendency of mind is economical, it loves to form habits and move in
grooves which save it the trouble of thinking anew at each of its steps.
Ideals once formed make the mind lazy. It becomes afraid to risk its
acquisitions in fresh endeavours. It tries to enjoy complete security by
shutting up its belongings behind fortifications of habits. But this is really
shutting oneself up from the fullest enjoyment of one's own possessions. It
is miserliness. The living ideals must not lose their touch with the growing
and changing life. Their real freedom is not within the boundaries of
security, but in the highroad of adventures, full of the risk of new
experiences.
One morning the whole world looked up in surprise when Japan broke
through her walls of old habits in a night and came out triumphant. It was
done in such an incredibly short time that it seemed like a change of dress
and not like the building up of a new structure. She showed the confident
strength of maturity, and the freshness and infinite potentiality of new life at
the same moment. The fear was entertained that it was a mere freak of
history, a child's game of Time, the blowing up of a soap-bubble, perfect in
its rondure and colouring, hollow in its heart and without substance. But
Japan has proved conclusively that this sudden revealment of her power is
not a short-lived wonder, a chance product of time and tide, thrown up from

the depth of obscurity to be swept away the next moment into the sea of
oblivion.
The truth is that Japan is old and new at the same time. She has her legacy
of ancient culture from the East,—the culture that enjoins man to look for
his true wealth and power in his inner soul, the culture that gives self-
possession in the face of loss and danger, self-sacrifice without counting the
cost or hoping for gain, defiance of death, acceptance of countless social
obligations that we owe to men as social beings. In a word, modern Japan
has come out of the immemorial East like a lotus blossoming in easy grace,
all the while keeping its firm hold upon the profound depth from which it
has sprung.
And Japan, the child of the Ancient East, has also fearlessly claimed all the
gifts of the modern age for herself. She has shown her bold spirit in
breaking through the confinements of habits, useless accumulations of the
lazy mind, which seeks safety in its thrift and its locks and keys. Thus she
has come in contact with the living time and has accepted with eagerness
and aptitude the responsibilities of modern civilization.
This it is which has given heart to the rest of Asia. We have seen that the
life and the strength are there in us, only the dead crust has to be removed.
We have seen that taking shelter in the dead is death itself, and only taking
all the risk of life to the fullest extent is living.
I, for myself, cannot believe that Japan has become what she is by imitating
the West. We cannot imitate life, we cannot simulate strength for long, nay,
what is more, a mere imitation is a source of weakness. For it hampers our
true nature, it is always in our way. It is like dressing our skeleton with
another man's skin, giving rise to eternal feuds between the skin and the
bones at every movement.
The real truth is that science is not man's nature, it is mere knowledge and
training. By knowing the laws of the material universe you do not change
your deeper humanity. You can borrow knowledge from others, but you
cannot borrow temperament.
But at the imitative stage of our schooling we cannot distinguish between
the essential and the non-essential, between what is transferable and what is

not. It is something like the faith of the primitive mind in the magical
properties of the accidents of outward forms which accompany some real
truth. We are afraid of leaving out something valuable and efficacious by
not swallowing the husk with the kernel. But while our greed delights in
wholesale appropriation, it is the function of our vital nature to assimilate,
which is the only true appropriation for a living organism. Where there is
life it is sure to assert itself by its choice of acceptance and refusal
according to its constitutional necessity. The living organism does not allow
itself to grow into its food, it changes its food into its own body. And only
thus can it grow strong and not by mere accumulation, or by giving up its
personal identity.
Japan has imported her food from the West, but not her vital nature. Japan
cannot altogether lose and merge herself in the scientific paraphernalia she
has acquired from the West and be turned into a mere borrowed machine.
She has her own soul, which must assert itself over all her requirements.
That she is capable of doing so, and that the process of assimilation is going
on, have been amply proved by the signs of vigorous health that she
exhibits. And I earnestly hope that Japan may never lose her faith in her
own soul, in the mere pride of her foreign acquisition. For that pride itself is
a humiliation, ultimately leading to poverty and weakness. It is the pride of
the fop who sets more store on his new headdress than on his head itself.
The whole world waits to see what this great Eastern nation is going to do
with the opportunities and responsibilities she has accepted from the hands
of the modern time. If it be a mere reproduction of the West, then the great
expectation she has raised will remain unfulfilled. For there are grave
questions that the Western civilization has presented before the world but
not completely answered. The conflict between the individual and the state,
labour and capital, the man and the woman; the conflict between the greed
of material gain and the spiritual life of man, the organized selfishness of
nations and the higher ideals of humanity; the conflict between all the ugly
complexities inseparable from giant organizations of commerce and state
and the natural instincts of man crying for simplicity and beauty and fulness
of leisure,—all these have to be brought to a harmony in a manner not yet
dreamt of.

We have seen this great stream of civilization choking itself from débris
carried by its innumerable channels. We have seen that with all its vaunted
love of humanity it has proved itself the greatest menace to Man, far worse
than the sudden outbursts of nomadic barbarism from which men suffered
in the early ages of history. We have seen that, in spite of its boasted love of
freedom, it has produced worse forms of slavery than ever were current in
earlier societies,—slavery whose chains are unbreakable, either because
they are unseen, or because they assume the names and appearance of
freedom. We have seen, under the spell of its gigantic sordidness, man
losing faith in all the heroic ideals of life which have made him great.
Therefore you cannot with a light heart accept the modern civilization with
all its tendencies, methods and structures, and dream that they are
inevitable. You must apply your Eastern mind, your spiritual strength, your
love of simplicity, your recognition of social obligation, in order to cut out a
new path for this great unwieldy car of progress, shrieking out its loud
discords as it runs. You must minimize the immense sacrifice of man's life
and freedom that it claims in its every movement. For generations you have
felt and thought and worked, have enjoyed and worshipped in your own
special manner; and this cannot be cast off like old clothes. It is in your
blood, in the marrow of your bones, in the texture of your flesh, in the
tissue of your brains; and it must modify everything you lay your hands
upon, without your knowing, even against your wishes. Once you did solve
the problems of man to your own satisfaction, you had your philosophy of
life and evolved your own art of living. All this you must apply to the
present situation, and out of it will arise a new creation and not a mere
repetition, a creation which the soul of your people will own for itself and
proudly offer to the world as its tribute to the welfare of man. Of all
countries in Asia, here in Japan you have the freedom to use the materials
you have gathered from the West according to your genius and your need.
Therefore your responsibility is all the greater, for in your voice Asia shall
answer the questions that Europe has submitted to the conference of Man.
In your land the experiments will be carried on by which the East will
change the aspects of modern civilization, infusing life in it where it is a
machine, substituting the human heart for cold expediency, not caring so
much for power and success as for harmonious and living growth, for truth
and beauty.

I cannot but bring to your mind those days when the whole of Eastern Asia
from Burma to Japan was united with India in the closest tie of friendship,
the only natural tie which can exist between nations. There was a living
communication of hearts, a nervous system evolved through which
messages ran between us about the deepest needs of humanity. We did not
stand in fear of each other, we had not to arm ourselves to keep each other
in check; our relation was not that of self-interest, of exploration and
spoliation of each other's pockets; ideas and ideals were exchanged, gifts of
the highest love were offered and taken; no difference of languages and
customs hindered us in approaching each other heart to heart; no pride of
race or insolent consciousness of superiority, physical or mental, marred our
relation; our arts and literatures put forth new leaves and flowers under the
influence of this sunlight of united hearts; and races belonging to different
lands and languages and histories acknowledged the highest unity of man
and the deepest bond of love. May we not also remember that in those days
of peace and goodwill, of men uniting for those supreme ends of life, your
nature laid by for itself the balm of immortality which has helped your
people to be born again in a new age, to be able to survive its old outworn
structures and take on a new young body, to come out unscathed from the
shock of the most wonderful revolution that the world has ever seen?
The political civilization which has sprung up from the soil of Europe and is
overrunning the whole world, like some prolific weed, is based upon
exclusiveness. It is always watchful to keep the aliens at bay or to
exterminate them. It is carnivorous and cannibalistic in its tendencies, it
feeds upon the resources of other peoples and tries to swallow their whole
future. It is always afraid of other races achieving eminence, naming it as a
peril, and tries to thwart all symptoms of greatness outside its own
boundaries, forcing down races of men who are weaker, to be eternally
fixed in their weakness. Before this political civilization came to its power
and opened its hungry jaws wide enough to gulp down great continents of
the earth, we had wars, pillages, changes of monarchy and consequent
miseries, but never such a sight of fearful and hopeless voracity, such
wholesale feeding of nation upon nation, such huge machines for turning
great portions of the earth into mince-meat, never such terrible jealousies
with all their ugly teeth and claws ready for tearing open each other's vitals.
This political civilization is scientific, not human. It is powerful because it

concentrates all its forces upon one purpose, like a millionaire acquiring
money at the cost of his soul. It betrays its trust, it weaves its meshes of lies
without shame, it enshrines gigantic idols of greed in its temples, taking
great pride in the costly ceremonials of its worship, calling this patriotism.
And it can be safely prophesied that this cannot go on, for there is a moral
law in this world which has its application both to individuals and to
organized bodies of men. You cannot go on violating these laws in the name
of your nation, yet enjoy their advantage as individuals. This public sapping
of ethical ideals slowly reacts upon each member of society, gradually
breeding weakness, where it is not seen, and causing that cynical distrust of
all things sacred in human nature, which is the true symptom of senility.
You must keep in mind that this political civilization, this creed of national
patriotism, has not been given a long trial. The lamp of ancient Greece is
extinct in the land where it was first lighted, the power of Rome lies dead
and buried under the ruins of its vast empire. But the civilization, whose
basis is society and the spiritual ideal of man, is still a living thing in China
and in India. Though it may look feeble and small, judged by the standard
of the mechanical power of modern days, yet like small seeds it still
contains life and will sprout and grow, and spread its beneficent branches,
producing flowers and fruits when its time comes and showers of grace
descend upon it from heaven. But ruins of sky-scrapers of power and
broken machinery of greed, even God's rain is powerless to raise up again;
for they were not of life, but went against life as a whole,—they are relics
of the rebellion that shattered itself to pieces against the eternal.
But the charge is brought against us that the ideals we cherish in the East
are static, that they have not the impetus in them to move, to open out new
vistas of knowledge and power, that the systems of philosophy which are
the mainstays of the time-worn civilizations of the East despise all outward
proofs, remaining stolidly satisfied in their subjective certainty. This proves
that when our knowledge is vague we are apt to accuse of vagueness our
object of knowledge itself. To a Western observer our civilization appears as
all metaphysics, as to a deaf man piano-playing appears to be mere
movements of fingers and no music. He cannot think that we have found
some deep basis of reality upon which we have built our institutions.
Unfortunately all proofs of reality are in realization. The reality of the scene
before you depends only upon the fact that you can see, and it is difficult for

us to prove to an unbeliever that our civilization is not a nebulous system of
abstract speculations, that it has achieved something which is a positive
truth,—a truth that can give man's heart its shelter and sustenance. It has
evolved an inner sense,—a sense of vision, the vision of the infinite reality
in all finite things.
But he says, "You do not make any progress, there is no movement in you."
I ask him, "How do you know it? You have to judge progress according to
its aim. A railway train makes its progress towards the terminus station,—it
is movement. But a full-grown tree has no definite movement of that kind,
its progress is the inward progress of life. It lives, with its aspiration
towards light tingling in its leaves and creeping in its silent sap."
We also have lived for centuries, we still live, and we have our aspiration
for a reality that has no end to its realization,—a reality that goes beyond
death, giving it a meaning, that rises above all evils of life, bringing its
peace and purity, its cheerful renunciation of self. The product of this inner
life is a living product. It will be needed when the youth returns home
weary and dust-laden, when the soldier is wounded, when the wealth is
squandered away and pride is humbled, when man's heart cries for truth in
the immensity of facts and harmony in the contradiction of tendencies. Its
value is not in its multiplication of materials, but in its spiritual fulfilment.
There are things that cannot wait. You have to rush and run and march if
you must fight or take the best place in the market. You strain your nerves
and are on the alert when you chase opportunities that are always on the
wing. But there are ideals which do not play hide-and-seek with our life;
they slowly grow from seed to flower, from flower to fruit; they require
infinite space and heaven's light to mature, and the fruits that they produce
can survive years of insult and neglect. The East with her ideals, in whose
bosom are stored the ages of sunlight and silence of stars, can patiently wait
till the West, hurrying after the expedient, loses breath and stops. Europe,
while busily speeding to her engagements, disdainfully casts her glance
from her carriage window at the reaper reaping his harvest in the field, and
in her intoxication of speed cannot but think him as slow and ever receding
backwards. But the speed comes to its end, the engagement loses its
meaning and the hungry heart clamours for food, till at last she comes to the
lowly reaper reaping his harvest in the sun. For if the office cannot wait, or

the buying and selling, or the craving for excitement, love waits and beauty
and the wisdom of suffering and the fruits of patient devotion and reverent
meekness of simple faith. And thus shall wait the East till her time comes.
I must not hesitate to acknowledge where Europe is great, for great she is
without doubt. We cannot help loving her with all our heart, and paying her
the best homage of our admiration,—the Europe who, in her literature and
art, pours out an inexhaustible cascade of beauty and truth fertilizing all
countries and all time; the Europe who, with a mind which is titanic in its
untiring power, is sweeping the height and the depth of the universe,
winning her homage of knowledge from the infinitely great and the
infinitely small, applying all the resources of her great intellect and heart in
healing the sick and alleviating those miseries of man which up till now we
were contented to accept in a spirit of hopeless resignation; the Europe who
is making the earth yield more fruit than seemed possible, coaxing and
compelling the great forces of nature into man's service. Such true greatness
must have its motive power in spiritual strength. For only the spirit of man
can defy all limitations, have faith in its ultimate success, throw its search-
light beyond the immediate and the apparent, gladly suffer martyrdom for
ends which cannot be achieved in its lifetime and accept failure without
acknowledging defeat. In the heart of Europe runs the purest stream of
human love, of love of justice, of spirit of self-sacrifice for higher ideals.
The Christian culture of centuries has sunk deep in her life's core. In Europe
we have seen noble minds who have ever stood up for the rights of man
irrespective of colour and creed; who have braved calumny and insult from
their own people in fighting for humanity's cause and raising their voices
against the mad orgies of militarism, against the rage for brutal retaliation
or rapacity that sometimes takes possession of a whole people; who are
always ready to make reparation for wrongs done in the past by their own
nations and vainly attempt to stem the tide of cowardly injustice that flows
unchecked because the resistance is weak and innocuous on the part of the
injured. There are these knight-errants of modern Europe who have not lost
their faith in the disinterested love of freedom, in the ideals which own no
geographical boundaries or national self-seeking. These are there to prove
that the fountainhead of the water of everlasting life has not run dry in
Europe, and from thence she will have her rebirth time after time. Only
there, where Europe is too consciously busy in building up her power,

defying her deeper nature and mocking it, she is heaping up her iniquities to
the sky, crying for God's vengeance and spreading the infection of ugliness,
physical and moral, over the face of the earth with her heartless commerce
heedlessly outraging man's sense of the beautiful and the good. Europe is
supremely good in her beneficence where her face is turned to all humanity;
and Europe is supremely evil in her maleficent aspect where her face is
turned only upon her own interest, using all her power of greatness for ends
which are against the infinite and the eternal in Man.
Eastern Asia has been pursuing its own path, evolving its own civilization,
which was not political but social, not predatory and mechanically efficient
but spiritual and based upon all the varied and deeper relations of humanity.
The solutions of the life problems of peoples were thought out in seclusion
and carried out behind the security of aloofness, where all the dynastic
changes and foreign invasions hardly touched them. But now we are
overtaken by the outside world, our seclusion is lost for ever. Yet this we
must not regret, as a plant should never regret when the obscurity of its
seed-time is broken. Now the time has come when we must make the world
problem our own problem; we must bring the spirit of our civilization into
harmony with the history of all nations of the earth; we must not, in foolish
pride, still keep ourselves fast within the shell of the seed and the crust of
the earth which protected and nourished our ideals; for these, the shell and
the crust, were meant to be broken, so that life may spring up in all its
vigour and beauty, bringing its offerings to the world in open light.
In this task of breaking the barrier and facing the world Japan has come out
the first in the East. She has infused hope in the heart of all Asia. This hope
provides the hidden fire which is needed for all works of creation. Asia now
feels that she must prove her life by producing living work, she must not lie
passively dormant, or feebly imitate the West, in the infatuation of fear or
flattery. For this we offer our thanks to this Land of the Rising Sun and
solemnly ask her to remember that she has the mission of the East to fulfil.
She must infuse the sap of a fuller humanity into the heart of modern
civilization. She must never allow it to get choked with the noxious
undergrowth, but lead it up towards light and freedom, towards the pure air
and broad space, where it can receive, in the dawn of its day and the
darkness of its night, heaven's inspiration. Let the greatness of her ideals
become visible to all men like her snow-crowned Fuji rising from the heart

of the country into the region of the infinite, supremely distinct from its
surroundings, beautiful like a maiden in its magnificent sweep of curve, yet
firm and strong and serenely majestic.
II
I have travelled in many countries and have met with men of all classes, but
never in my travels did I feel the presence of the human so distinctly as in
this land. In other great countries signs of man's power loomed large, and I
saw vast organizations which showed efficiency in all their features. There,
display and extravagance, in dress, in furniture, in costly entertainments, are
startling. They seem to push you back into a corner, like a poor intruder at a
feast; they are apt to make you envious, or take your breath away with
amazement. There, you do not feel man as supreme; you are hurled against
a stupendousness of things that alienates. But in Japan it is not the display
of power, or wealth, that is the predominating element. You see everywhere
emblems of love and admiration, and not mostly of ambition and greed. You
see a people whose heart has come out and scattered itself in profusion in
its commonest utensils of everyday life, in its social institutions, in its
manners, which are carefully perfect, and in its dealings with things which
are not only deft but graceful in every movement.
What has impressed me most in this country is the conviction that you have
realized nature's secrets, not by methods of analytical knowledge, but by
sympathy. You have known her language of lines, and music of colours, the
symmetry in her irregularities, and the cadence in her freedom of
movements; you have seen how she leads her immense crowds of things yet
avoids all frictions; how the very conflicts in her creations break out in
dance and music; how her exuberance has the aspect of the fulness of self-
abandonment, and not a mere dissipation of display. You have discovered
that nature reserves her power in forms of beauty; and it is this beauty
which, like a mother, nourishes all the giant forces at her breast, keeping
them in active vigour, yet in repose. You have known that energies of nature
save themselves from wearing out by the rhythm of a perfect grace, and that
she with the tenderness of her curved lines takes away fatigue from the
world's muscles. I have felt that you have been able to assimilate these
secrets into your life, and the truth which lies in the beauty of all things has
passed into your souls. A mere knowledge of things can be had in a short

enough time, but their spirit can only be acquired by centuries of training
and self-control. Dominating nature from outside is a much simpler thing
than making her your own in love's delight, which is a work of true genius.
Your race has shown that genius, not by acquirement, but by creation; not
by display of things, but by manifestation of its own inner being. This
creative power there is in all nations, and it is ever active in getting hold of
men's natures and giving them a form according to its ideals. But here, in
Japan, it seems to have achieved its success, and deeply sunk into the minds
of all men, and permeated their muscles and nerves. Your instincts have
become true, your senses keen, and your hands have acquired natural skill.
The genius of Europe has given her people the power of organization,
which has specially made itself manifest in politics and commerce and in
co-ordinating scientific knowledge. The genius of Japan has given you the
vision of beauty in nature and the power of realizing it in your life.
All particular civilization is the interpretation of particular human
experience. Europe seems to have felt emphatically the conflict of things in
the universe, which can only be brought under control by conquest.
Therefore she is ever ready for fight, and the best portion of her attention is
occupied in organizing forces. But Japan has felt, in her world, the touch of
some presence, which has evoked in her soul a feeling of reverent
adoration. She does not boast of her mastery of nature, but to her she brings,
with infinite care and joy, her offerings of love. Her relationship with the
world is the deeper relationship of heart. This spiritual bond of love she has
established with the hills of her country, with the sea and the streams, with
the forests in all their flowery moods and varied physiognomy of branches;
she has taken into her heart all the rustling whispers and sighing of the
woodlands and sobbing of the waves; the sun and the moon she has studied
in all the modulations of their lights and shades, and she is glad to close her
shops to greet the seasons in her orchards and gardens and cornfields. This
opening of the heart to the soul of the world is not confined to a section of
your privileged classes, it is not the forced product of exotic culture, but it
belongs to all your men and women of all conditions. This experience of
your soul, in meeting a personality in the heart of the world, has been
embodied in your civilization. It is a civilization of human relationship.
Your duty towards your state has naturally assumed the character of filial
duty, your nation becoming one family with your Emperor as its head. Your

national unity has not been evolved from the comradeship of arms for
defensive and offensive purpose, or from partnership in raiding adventures,
dividing among each member the danger and spoils of robbery. It is not an
outcome of the necessity of organization for some ulterior purpose, but it is
an extension of the family and the obligations of the heart in a wide field of
space and time. The ideal of "maitri" is at the bottom of your culture,
—"maitri" with men and "maitri" with Nature. And the true expression of
this love is in the language of beauty, which is so abundantly universal in
this land. This is the reason why a stranger, like myself, instead of feeling
envy or humiliation before these manifestations of beauty, these creations of
love, feels a readiness to participate in the joy and glory of such revealment
of the human heart.
And this has made me all the more apprehensive of the change which
threatens Japanese civilization, as something like a menace to one's own
person. For the huge heterogeneity of the modern age, whose only common
bond is usefulness, is nowhere so pitifully exposed against the dignity and
hidden power of reticent beauty as in Japan.
But the danger lies in this, that organized ugliness storms the mind and
carries the day by its mass, by its aggressive persistence, by its power of
mockery directed against the deeper sentiments of heart. Its harsh
obtrusiveness makes it forcibly visible to us, overcoming our senses,—and
we bring sacrifices to its altar, as does a savage to the fetich which appears
powerful because of its hideousness. Therefore its rivalry with things that
are modest and profound and have the subtle delicacy of life is to be
dreaded.
I am quite sure that there are men in your country who are not in sympathy
with your inherited ideals; whose object is to gain, and not to grow. They
are loud in their boast that they have modernized Japan. While I agree with
them so far as to say that the spirit of the race should harmonize with the
spirit of the time, I must warn them that modernizing is a mere affectation
of modernism, just as affectation of poesy is poetizing. It is nothing but
mimicry, only affectation is louder than the original, and it is too literal.
One must bear in mind that those who have the true modern spirit need not
modernize, just as those who are truly brave are not braggarts. Modernism
is not in the dress of the Europeans; or in the hideous structures, where their

children are interned when they take their lessons; or in the square houses
with flat, straight wall-surfaces, pierced with parallel lines of windows,
where these people are caged in their lifetime; certainly modernism is not in
their ladies' bonnets, carrying on them loads of incongruities. These are not
modern, but merely European. True modernism is freedom of mind, not
slavery of taste. It is independence of thought and action, not tutelage under
European schoolmasters. It is science, but not its wrong application in life,
—a mere imitation of our science teachers who reduce it into a superstition,
absurdly invoking its aid for all impossible purposes.
Life based upon mere science is attractive to some men, because it has all
the characteristics of sport; it feigns seriousness, but is not profound. When
you go a-hunting, the less pity you have the better; for your one object is to
chase the game and kill it, to feel that you are the greater animal, that your
method of destruction is thorough and scientific. And the life of science is
that superficial life. It pursues success with skill and thoroughness, and
takes no account of the higher nature of man. But those whose minds are
crude enough to plan their lives upon the supposition that man is merely a
hunter and his paradise the paradise of sportsmen will be rudely awakened
in the midst of their trophies of skeletons and skulls.
I do not for a moment suggest that Japan should be unmindful of acquiring
modern weapons of self-protection. But this should never be allowed to go
beyond her instinct of self-preservation. She must know that the real power
is not in the weapons themselves, but in the man who wields those
weapons; and when he, in his eagerness for power, multiplies his weapons
at the cost of his own soul, then it is he who is in even greater danger than
his enemies.
Things that are living are so easily hurt; therefore they require protection. In
nature, life protects itself within its coverings, which are built with life's
own material. Therefore they are in harmony with life's growth, or else
when the time comes they easily give way and are forgotten. The living
man has his true protection in his spiritual ideals, which have their vital
connection with his life and grow with his growth. But, unfortunately, all
his armour is not living,—some of it is made of steel, inert and mechanical.
Therefore, while making use of it, man has to be careful to protect himself
from its tyranny. If he is weak enough to grow smaller to fit himself to his

covering, then it becomes a process of gradual suicide by shrinkage of the
soul. And Japan must have a firm faith in the moral law of existence to be
able to assert to herself that the Western nations are following that path of
suicide, where they are smothering their humanity under the immense
weight of organizations in order to keep themselves in power and hold
others in subjection.
What is dangerous for Japan is, not the imitation of the outer features of the
West, but the acceptance of the motive force of the Western nationalism as
her own. Her social ideals are already showing signs of defeat at the hands
of politics. I can see her motto, taken from science, "Survival of the Fittest,"
writ large at the entrance of her present-day history—the motto whose
meaning is, "Help yourself, and never heed what it costs to others"; the
motto of the blind man who only believes in what he can touch, because he
cannot see. But those who can see know that men are so closely knit that
when you strike others the blow comes back to yourself. The moral law,
which is the greatest discovery of man, is the discovery of this wonderful
truth, that man becomes all the truer the more he realizes himself in others.
This truth has not only a subjective value, but is manifested in every
department of our life. And nations who sedulously cultivate moral
blindness as the cult of patriotism will end their existence in a sudden and
violent death. In past ages we had foreign invasions, but they never touched
the soul of the people deeply. They were merely the outcome of individual
ambitions. The people themselves, being free from the responsibilities of
the baser and more heinous side of those adventures, had all the advantage
of the heroic and the human disciplines derived from them. This developed
their unflinching loyalty, their single-minded devotion to the obligations of
honour, their power of complete self-surrender and fearless acceptance of
death and danger. Therefore the ideals, whose seats were in the hearts of the
people, would not undergo any serious change owing to the policies
adopted by the kings or generals. But now, where the spirit of the Western
nationalism prevails, the whole people is being taught from boyhood to
foster hatreds and ambitions by all kinds of means—by the manufacture of
half-truths and untruths in history, by persistent misrepresentation of other
races and the culture of unfavourable sentiments towards them, by setting
up memorials of events, very often false, which for the sake of humanity
should be speedily forgotten, thus continually brewing evil menace towards

neighbours and nations other than their own. This is poisoning the very
fountainhead of humanity. It is discrediting the ideals, which were born of
the lives of men who were our greatest and best. It is holding up gigantic
selfishness as the one universal religion for all nations of the world. We can
take anything else from the hands of science, but not this elixir of moral
death. Never think for a moment that the hurts you inflict upon other races
will not infect you, or that the enmities you sow around your homes will be
a wall of protection to you for all time to come. To imbue the minds of a
whole people with an abnormal vanity of its own superiority, to teach it to
take pride in its moral callousness and ill-begotten wealth, to perpetuate
humiliation of defeated nations by exhibiting trophies won from war, and
using these in schools in order to breed in children's minds contempt for
others, is imitating the West where she has a festering sore, whose swelling
is a swelling of disease eating into its vitality.
Our food crops, which are necessary for our sustenance, are products of
centuries of selection and care. But the vegetation, which we have not to
transform into our lives, does not require the patient thoughts of
generations. It is not easy to get rid of weeds; but it is easy, by process of
neglect, to ruin your food crops and let them revert to their primitive state
of wildness. Likewise the culture, which has so kindly adapted itself to your
soil—so intimate with life, so human—not only needed tilling and weeding
in past ages, but still needs anxious work and watching. What is merely
modern—as science and methods of organization—can be transplanted; but
what is vitally human has fibres so delicate, and roots so numerous and far-
reaching, that it dies when moved from its soil. Therefore I am afraid of the
rude pressure of the political ideals of the West upon your own. In political
civilization, the state is an abstraction and relationship of men utilitarian.
Because it has no root in sentiments, it is so dangerously easy to handle.
Half a century has been enough for you to master this machine; and there
are men among you whose fondness for it exceeds their love for the living
ideals, which were born with the birth of your nation and nursed in your
centuries. It is like a child who, in the excitement of his play, imagines he
likes his playthings better than his mother.
Where man is at his greatest, he is unconscious. Your civilization, whose
mainspring is the bond of human relationship, has been nourished in the
depth of a healthy life beyond reach of prying self-analysis. But a mere

political relationship is all-conscious; it is an eruptive inflammation of
aggressiveness. It has forcibly burst upon your notice. And the time has
come when you have to be roused into full consciousness of the truth by
which you live, so that you may not be taken unawares. The past has been
God's gift to you; about the present, you must make your own choice.
So the questions you have to put to yourselves are these—"Have we read
the world wrong, and based our relation to it upon an ignorance of human
nature? Is the instinct of the West right, where she builds her national
welfare behind the barricade of a universal distrust of humanity?"
You must have detected a strong accent of fear whenever the West has
discussed the possibility of the rise of an Eastern race. The reason of it is
this, that the power by whose help she thrives is an evil power; so long as it
is held on her own side she can be safe, while the rest of the world trembles.
The vital ambition of the present civilization of Europe is to have the
exclusive possession of the devil. All her armaments and diplomacy are
directed upon this one object. But these costly rituals for invocation of the
evil spirit lead through a path of prosperity to the brink of cataclysm. The
furies of terror, which the West has let loose upon God's world, come back
to threaten herself and goad her into preparations of more and more
frightfulness; this gives her no rest, and makes her forget all else but the
perils that she causes to others and incurs herself. To the worship of this
devil of politics she sacrifices other countries as victims. She feeds upon
their dead flesh and grows fat upon it, so long as the carcasses remain fresh,
—but they are sure to rot at last, and the dead will take their revenge, by
spreading pollution far and wide and poisoning the vitality of the feeder.
Japan had all her wealth of humanity, her harmony of heroism and beauty,
her depth of self-control and richness of self-expression; yet the Western
nations felt no respect for her till she proved that the bloodhounds of Satan
are not only bred in the kennels of Europe but can also be domesticated in
Japan and fed with man's miseries. They admit Japan's equality with
themselves, only when they know that Japan also possesses the key to open
the floodgate of hell-fire upon the fair earth whenever she chooses, and can
dance, in their own measure, the devil dance of pillage, murder and
ravishment of innocent women, while the world goes to ruin. We know that,
in the early stage of man's moral immaturity, he only feels reverence for the
god whose malevolence he dreads. But is this the ideal of man which we

can look up to with pride? After centuries of civilization nations fearing
each other like the prowling wild beasts of the night-time; shutting their
doors of hospitality; combining only for purpose of aggression or defence;
hiding in their holes their trade secrets, state secrets, secrets of their
armaments; making peace-offerings to each other's barking dogs with the
meat which does not belong to them; holding down fallen races which
struggle to stand upon their feet; with their right hands dispensing religion
to weaker peoples, while robbing them with their left,—is there anything in
this to make us envious? Are we to bend our knees to the spirit of this
nationalism, which is sowing broadcast over all the world seeds of fear,
greed, suspicion, unashamed lies of its diplomacy, and unctuous lies of its
profession of peace and good-will and universal brotherhood of Man? Can
our minds be free from doubt when we rush to the Western market to buy
this foreign product in exchange for our own inheritance? I am aware how
difficult it is to know one's self; and the man who is intoxicated furiously
denies his drunkenness; yet the West herself is anxiously thinking of her
problems and trying experiments. But she is like a glutton, who has not the
heart to give up his intemperance in eating, and fondly clings to the hope
that he can cure his nightmares of indigestion by medicine. Europe is not
ready to give up her political inhumanity, with all the baser passions of man
attendant upon it; she believes only in modification of systems, and not in
change of heart.
We are willing to buy their machine-made systems, not with our hearts, but
with our brains. We shall try them and build sheds for them, but not
enshrine them in our homes or temples. There are races who worship the
animals they kill; we can buy meat from them when we are hungry, but not
the worship which goes with the killing. We must not vitiate our children's
minds with the superstition that business is business, war is war, politics is
politics. We must know that man's business has to be more than mere
business, and so should be his war and politics. You had your own industry
in Japan; how scrupulously honest and true it was, you can see by its
products,—by their grace and strength, their conscientiousness in details,
where they can hardly be observed. But the tidal wave of falsehood has
swept over your land from that part of the world where business is business,
and honesty is followed merely as the best policy. Have you never felt
shame when you see the trade advertisements, not only plastering the whole

town with lies and exaggerations, but invading the green fields, where the
peasants do their honest labour, and the hill-tops, which greet the first pure
light of the morning? It is so easy to dull our sense of honour and delicacy
of mind with constant abrasion, while falsehoods stalk abroad with proud
steps in the name of trade, politics and patriotism, that any protest against
their perpetual intrusion into our lives is considered to be sentimentalism,
unworthy of true manliness.
And it has come to pass that the children of those heroes who would keep
their word at the point of death, who would disdain to cheat men for vulgar
profit, who even in their fight would much rather court defeat than be
dishonourable, have become energetic in dealing with falsehoods and do
not feel humiliated by gaining advantage from them. And this has been
effected by the charm of the word "modern." But if undiluted utility be
modern, beauty is of all ages; if mean selfishness be modern, the human
ideals are no new inventions. And we must know for certain that however
modern may be the proficiency which cripples man for the sake of methods
and machines, it will never live to be old.
But while trying to free our minds from the arrogant claims of Europe and
to help ourselves out of the quicksands of our infatuation, we may go to the
other extreme and blind ourselves with a wholesale suspicion of the West.
The reaction of disillusionment is just as unreal as the first shock of
illusion. We must try to come to that normal state of mind by which we can
clearly discern our own danger and avoid it without being unjust towards
the source of that danger. There is always the natural temptation in us of
wishing to pay back Europe in her own coin, and return contempt for
contempt and evil for evil. But that again would be to imitate Europe in one
of her worst features, which comes out in her behaviour to people whom
she describes as yellow or red, brown or black. And this is a point on which
we in the East have to acknowledge our guilt and own that our sin has been
as great, if not greater, when we insulted humanity by treating with utter
disdain and cruelty men who belonged to a particular creed, colour or caste.
It is really because we are afraid of our own weakness, which allows itself
to be overcome by the sight of power, that we try to substitute for it another
weakness which makes itself blind to the glories of the West. When we
truly know the Europe which is great and good, we can effectively save
ourselves from the Europe which is mean and grasping. It is easy to be

unfair in one's judgment when one is faced with human miseries,—and
pessimism is the result of building theories while the mind is suffering. To
despair of humanity is only possible if we lose faith in truth which brings to
it strength, when its defeat is greatest, and calls out new life from the depth
of its destruction. We must admit that there is a living soul in the West
which is struggling unobserved against the hugeness of the organizations
under which men, women and children are being crushed, and whose
mechanical necessities are ignoring laws that are spiritual and human,—the
soul whose sensibilities refuse to be dulled completely by dangerous habits
of heedlessness in dealings with races for whom it lacks natural sympathy.
The West could never have risen to the eminence she has reached if her
strength were merely the strength of the brute or of the machine. The divine
in her heart is suffering from the injuries inflicted by her hands upon the
world,—and from this pain of her higher nature flows the secret balm which
will bring healing to those injuries. Time after time she has fought against
herself and has undone the chains which with her own hands she had
fastened round helpless limbs; and though she forced poison down the
throat of a great nation at the point of the sword for gain of money, she
herself woke up to withdraw from it, to wash her hands clean again. This
shows hidden springs of humanity in spots which look dead and barren. It
proves that the deeper truth in her nature, which can survive such a career
of cruel cowardliness, is not greed, but reverence for unselfish ideals. It
would be altogether unjust, both to us and to Europe, to say that she has
fascinated the modern Eastern mind by the mere exhibition of her power.
Through the smoke of cannons and dust of markets the light of her moral
nature has shone bright, and she has brought to us the ideal of ethical
freedom, whose foundation lies deeper than social conventions and whose
province of activity is world-wide.
The East has instinctively felt, even through her aversion, that she has a
great deal to learn from Europe, not merely about the materials of power,
but about its inner source, which is of mind and of the moral nature of man.
Europe has been teaching us the higher obligations of public good above
those of the family and the clan, and the sacredness of law, which makes
society independent of individual caprice, secures for it continuity of
progress, and guarantees justice to all men of all positions in life. Above all
things Europe has held high before our minds the banner of liberty, through

centuries of martyrdom and achievement,—liberty of conscience, liberty of
thought and action, liberty in the ideals of art and literature. And because
Europe has won our deep respect, she has become so dangerous for us
where she is turbulently weak and false,—dangerous like poison when it is
served along with our best food. There is one safety for us upon which we
hope we may count, and that is, that we can claim Europe herself as our ally
in our resistance to her temptations and to her violent encroachments; for
she has ever carried her own standard of perfection, by which we can
measure her falls and gauge her degrees of failure, by which we can call her
before her own tribunal and put her to shame,—the shame which is the sign
of the true pride of nobleness.
But our fear is, that the poison may be more powerful than the food, and
what is strength in her to-day may not be the sign of health, but the
contrary; for it may be temporarily caused by the upsetting of the balance of
life. Our fear is that evil has a fateful fascination when it assumes
dimensions which are colossal,—and though at last it is sure to lose its
centre of gravity by its abnormal disproportion, the mischief which it
creates before its fall may be beyond reparation.
Therefore I ask you to have the strength of faith and clarity of mind to know
for certain that the lumbering structure of modern progress, riveted by the
iron bolts of efficiency, which runs upon the wheels of ambition, cannot
hold together for long. Collisions are certain to occur; for it has to travel
upon organized lines, it is too heavy to choose its own course freely; and
once it is off the rails, its endless train of vehicles is dislocated. A day will
come when it will fall in a heap of ruin and cause serious obstruction to the
traffic of the world. Do we not see signs of this even now? Does not the
voice come to us, through the din of war, the shrieks of hatred, the wailings
of despair, through the churning up of the unspeakable filth which has been
accumulating for ages in the bottom of this nationalism,—the voice which
cries to our soul that the tower of national selfishness, which goes by the
name of patriotism, which has raised its banner of treason against heaven,
must totter and fall with a crash, weighed down by its own bulk, its flag
kissing the dust, its light extinguished? My brothers, when the red light of
conflagration sends up its crackle of laughter to the stars, keep your faith
upon those stars and not upon the fire of destruction. For when this
conflagration consumes itself and dies down, leaving its memorial in ashes,

the eternal light will again shine in the East,—the East which has been the
birthplace of the morning sun of man's history. And who knows if that day
has not already dawned, and the sun not risen, in the Easternmost horizon of
Asia? And I offer, as did my ancestor rishis, my salutation to that sunrise of
the East, which is destined once again to illumine the whole world.
I know my voice is too feeble to raise itself above the uproar of this bustling
time, and it is easy for any street urchin to fling against me the epithet of
"unpractical." It will stick to my coat-tail, never to be washed away,
effectively excluding me from the consideration of all respectable persons. I
know what a risk one runs from the vigorously athletic crowds in being
styled an idealist in these days, when thrones have lost their dignity and
prophets have become an anachronism, when the sound that drowns all
voices is the noise of the market-place. Yet when, one day, standing on the
outskirts of Yokohama town, bristling with its display of modern
miscellanies, I watched the sunset in your southern sea, and saw its peace
and majesty among your pine-clad hills,—with the great Fujiyama growing
faint against the golden horizon, like a god overcome with his own
radiance,—the music of eternity welled up through the evening silence, and
I felt that the sky and the earth and the lyrics of the dawn and the dayfall are
with the poets and idealists, and not with the marketmen robustly
contemptuous of all sentiment,—that, after the forgetfulness of his own
divinity, man will remember again that heaven is always in touch with his
world, which can never be abandoned for good to the hounding wolves of
the modern era, scenting human blood and howling to the skies.

NATIONALISM IN INDIA

NATIONALISM IN INDIA
Our real problem in India is not political. It is social. This is a condition not
only prevailing in India, but among all nations. I do not believe in an
exclusive political interest. Politics in the West have dominated Western
ideals, and we in India are trying to imitate you. We have to remember that
in Europe, where peoples had their racial unity from the beginning, and
where natural resources were insufficient for the inhabitants, the civilization
has naturally taken the character of political and commercial
aggressiveness. For on the one hand they had no internal complications, and
on the other they had to deal with neighbours who were strong and
rapacious. To have perfect combination among themselves and a watchful
attitude of animosity against others was taken as the solution of their
problems. In former days they organized and plundered, in the present age
the same spirit continues—and they organize and exploit the whole world.
But from the earliest beginnings of history India has had her own problem
constantly before her—it is the race problem. Each nation must be
conscious of its mission, and we, in India, must realize that we cut a poor
figure when we are trying to be political, simply because we have not yet
been finally able to accomplish what was set before us by our providence.
This problem of race unity which we have been trying to solve for so many
years has likewise to be faced by you here in America. Many people in this
country ask me what is happening as to the caste distinctions in India. But
when this question is asked me, it is usually done with a superior air. And I
feel tempted to put the same question to our American critics with a slight
modification, "What have you done with the Red Indian and the Negro?"
For you have not got over your attitude of caste toward them. You have

used violent methods to keep aloof from other races, but until you have
solved the question here in America, you have no right to question India.
In spite of our great difficulty, however, India has done something. She has
tried to make an adjustment of races, to acknowledge the real differences
between them where these exist, and yet seek for some basis of unity. This
basis has come through our saints, like Nanak, Kabir, Chaitnaya and others,
preaching one God to all races of India.
In finding the solution of our problem we shall have helped to solve the
world problem as well. What India has been, the whole world is now. The
whole world is becoming one country through scientific facility. And the
moment is arriving when you also must find a basis of unity which is not
political. If India can offer to the world her solution, it will be a contribution
to humanity. There is only one history—the history of man. All national
histories are merely chapters in the larger one. And we are content in India
to suffer for such a great cause.
Each individual has his self-love. Therefore his brute instinct leads him to
fight with others in the sole pursuit of his self-interest. But man has also his
higher instincts of sympathy and mutual help. The people who are lacking
in this higher moral power and who therefore cannot combine in fellowship
with one another must perish or live in a state of degradation. Only those
peoples have survived and achieved civilization who have this spirit of co-
operation strong in them. So we find that from the beginning of history men
had to choose between fighting with one another and combining, between
serving their own interest or the common interest of all.
In our early history, when the geographical limits of each country and also
the facilities of communication were small, this problem was comparatively
small in dimension. It was sufficient for men to develop their sense of unity
within their area of segregation. In those days they combined among
themselves and fought against others. But it was this moral spirit of
combination which was the true basis of their greatness, and this fostered
their art, science and religion. At that early time the most important fact that
man had to take count of was the fact of the members of one particular race
of men coming in close contact with one another. Those who truly grasped
this fact through their higher nature made their mark in history.

The most important fact of the present age is that all the different races of
men have come close together. And again we are confronted with two
alternatives. The problem is whether the different groups of peoples shall go
on fighting with one another or find out some true basis of reconciliation
and mutual help; whether it will be interminable competition or co-
operation.
I have no hesitation in saying that those who are gifted with the moral
power of love and vision of spiritual unity, who have the least feeling of
enmity against aliens, and the sympathetic insight to place themselves in the
position of others, will be the fittest to take their permanent place in the age
that is lying before us, and those who are constantly developing their
instinct of fight and intolerance of aliens will be eliminated. For this is the
problem before us, and we have to prove our humanity by solving it
through the help of our higher nature. The gigantic organizations for hurting
others and warding off their blows, for making money by dragging others
back, will not help us. On the contrary, by their crushing weight, their
enormous cost and their deadening effect upon living humanity, they will
seriously impede our freedom in the larger life of a higher civilization.
During the evolution of the Nation the moral culture of brotherhood was
limited by geographical boundaries, because at that time those boundaries
were true. Now they have become imaginary lines of tradition divested of
the qualities of real obstacles. So the time has come when man's moral
nature must deal with this great fact with all seriousness or perish. The first
impulse of this change of circumstance has been the churning up of man's
baser passions of greed and cruel hatred. If this persists indefinitely, and
armaments go on exaggerating themselves to unimaginable absurdities, and
machines and storehouses envelop this fair earth with their dirt and smoke
and ugliness, then it will end in a conflagration of suicide. Therefore man
will have to exert all his power of love and clarity of vision to make another
great moral adjustment which will comprehend the whole world of men and
not merely the fractional groups of nationality. The call has come to every
individual in the present age to prepare himself and his surroundings for
this dawn of a new era, when man shall discover his soul in the spiritual
unity of all human beings.

If it is given at all to the West to struggle out of these tangles of the lower
slopes to the spiritual summit of humanity then I cannot but think that it is
the special mission of America to fulfil this hope of God and man. You are
the country of expectation, desiring something else than what is. Europe has
her subtle habits of mind and her conventions. But America, as yet, has
come to no conclusions. I realize how much America is untrammelled by
the traditions of the past, and I can appreciate that experimentalism is a sign
of America's youth. The foundation of her glory is in the future, rather than
in the past; and if one is gifted with the power of clairvoyance, one will be
able to love the America that is to be.
America is destined to justify Western civilization to the East. Europe has
lost faith in humanity, and has become distrustful and sickly. America, on
the other hand, is not pessimistic or blasé. You know, as a people, that there
is such a thing as a better and a best; and that knowledge drives you on.
There are habits that are not merely passive but aggressively arrogant. They
are not like mere walls, but are like hedges of stinging nettles. Europe has
been cultivating these hedges of habits for long years, till they have grown
round her dense and strong and high. The pride of her traditions has sent its
roots deep into her heart. I do not wish to contend that it is unreasonable.
But pride in every form breeds blindness at the end. Like all artificial
stimulants its first effect is a heightening of consciousness, and then with
the increasing dose it muddles it and brings an exultation that is misleading.
Europe has gradually grown hardened in her pride in all her outer and inner
habits. She not only cannot forget that she is Western, but she takes every
opportunity to hurl this fact against others to humiliate them. This is why
she is growing incapable of imparting to the East what is best in herself, and
of accepting in a right spirit the wisdom that the East has stored for
centuries.
In America national habits and traditions have not had time to spread their
clutching roots round your hearts. You have constantly felt and complained
of your disadvantages when you compared your nomadic restlessness with
the settled traditions of Europe—the Europe which can show her picture of
greatness to the best advantage because she can fix it against the
background of the Past. But in this present age of transition, when a new era
of civilization is sending its trumpet-call to all peoples of the world across
an unlimited future, this very freedom of detachment will enable you to

accept its invitation and to achieve the goal for which Europe began her
journey but lost herself midway. For she was tempted out of her path by her
pride of power and greed of possession.
Not merely your freedom from habits of mind in individuals, but also the
freedom of your history from all unclean entanglements, fits you in your
career of holding the banner of civilization of the future. All the great
nations of Europe have their victims in other parts of the world. This not
only deadens their moral sympathy but also their intellectual sympathy,
which is so necessary for the understanding of races which are different
from one's own. Englishmen can never truly understand India, because their
minds are not disinterested with regard to that country. If you compare
England with Germany or France you will find she has produced the
smallest number of scholars who have studied Indian literature and
philosophy with any amount of sympathetic insight or thoroughness. This
attitude of apathy and contempt is natural where the relationship is
abnormal and founded upon national selfishness and pride. But your history
has been disinterested, and that is why you have been able to help Japan in
her lessons in Western civilization, and that is why China can look upon
you with her best confidence in this her darkest period of danger. In fact
you are carrying all the responsibility of a great future because you are
untrammelled by the grasping miserliness of a past. Therefore of all
countries of the earth America has to be fully conscious of this future, her
vision must not be obscured and her faith in humanity must be strong with
the strength of youth.
A parallelism exists between America and India—the parallelism of
welding together into one body various races.
In my country we have been seeking to find out something common to all
races, which will prove their real unity. No nation looking for a mere
political or commercial basis of unity will find such a solution sufficient.
Men of thought and power will discover the spiritual unity, will realize it,
and preach it.
India has never had a real sense of nationalism. Even though from
childhood I had been taught that idolatry of the Nation is almost better than
reverence for God and humanity, I believe I have outgrown that teaching,

and it is my conviction that my countrymen will truly gain their India by
fighting against the education which teaches them that a country is greater
than the ideals of humanity.
The educated Indian at present is trying to absorb some lessons from history
contrary to the lessons of our ancestors. The East, in fact, is attempting to
take unto itself a history which is not the outcome of its own living. Japan,
for example, thinks she is getting powerful through adopting Western
methods, but, after she has exhausted her inheritance, only the borrowed
weapons of civilization will remain to her. She will not have developed
herself from within.
Europe has her past. Europe's strength therefore lies in her history. We, in
India, must make up our minds that we cannot borrow other people's
history, and that if we stifle our own we are committing suicide. When you
borrow things that do not belong to your life, they only serve to crush your
life.
And therefore I believe that it does India no good to compete with Western
civilization in its own field. But we shall be more than compensated if, in
spite of the insults heaped upon us, we follow our own destiny.
There are lessons which impart information or train our minds for
intellectual pursuits. These are simple and can be acquired and used with
advantage. But there are others which affect our deeper nature and change
our direction of life. Before we accept them and pay their value by selling
our own inheritance, we must pause and think deeply. In man's history there
come ages of fireworks which dazzle us by their force and movement. They
laugh not only at our modest household lamps but also at the eternal stars.
But let us not for that provocation be precipitate in our desire to dismiss our
lamps. Let us patiently bear our present insult and realize that these
fireworks have splendour but not permanence, because of the extreme
explosiveness which is the cause of their power, and also of their
exhaustion. They are spending a fatal quantity of energy and substance
compared to their gain and production.
Anyhow, our ideals have been evolved through our own history, and even if
we wished we could only make poor fireworks of them, because their
materials are different from yours, as is also their moral purpose. If we

cherish the desire of paying our all to buy a political nationality it will be as
absurd as if Switzerland had staked her existence on her ambition to build
up a navy powerful enough to compete with that of England. The mistake
that we make is in thinking that man's channel of greatness is only one—the
one which has made itself painfully evident for the time being by its depth
of insolence.
We must know for certain that there is a future before us and that future is
waiting for those who are rich in moral ideals and not in mere things. And it
is the privilege of man to work for fruits that are beyond his immediate
reach, and to adjust his life not in slavish conformity to the examples of
some present success or even to his own prudent past, limited in its
aspiration, but to an infinite future bearing in its heart the ideals of our
highest expectations.
We must recognize that it is providential that the West has come to India.
And yet some one must show the East to the West, and convince the West
that the East has her contribution to make to the history of civilization.
India is no beggar of the West. And yet even though the West may think she
is, I am not for thrusting off Western civilization and becoming segregated
in our independence. Let us have a deep association. If Providence wants
England to be the channel of that communication, of that deeper
association, I am willing to accept it with all humility. I have great faith in
human nature, and I think the West will find its true mission. I speak bitterly
of Western civilization when I am conscious that it is betraying its trust and
thwarting its own purpose. The West must not make herself a curse to the
world by using her power for her own selfish needs, but, by teaching the
ignorant and helping the weak, she should save herself from the worst
danger that the strong is liable to incur by making the feeble acquire power
enough to resist her intrusion. And also she must not make her materialism
to be the final thing, but must realize that she is doing a service in freeing
the spiritual being from the tyranny of matter.
I am not against one nation in particular, but against the general idea of all
nations. What is the Nation?
It is the aspect of a whole people as an organized power. This organization
incessantly keeps up the insistence of the population on becoming strong

and efficient. But this strenuous effort after strength and efficiency drains
man's energy from his higher nature where he is self-sacrificing and
creative. For thereby man's power of sacrifice is diverted from his ultimate
object, which is moral, to the maintenance of this organization, which is
mechanical. Yet in this he feels all the satisfaction of moral exaltation and
therefore becomes supremely dangerous to humanity. He feels relieved of
the urging of his conscience when he can transfer his responsibility to this
machine which is the creation of his intellect and not of his complete moral
personality. By this device the people which loves freedom perpetuates
slavery in a large portion of the world with the comfortable feeling of pride
of having done its duty; men who are naturally just can be cruelly unjust
both in their act and their thought, accompanied by a feeling that they are
helping the world to receive its deserts; men who are honest can blindly go
on robbing others of their human rights for self-aggrandizement, all the
while abusing the deprived for not deserving better treatment. We have seen
in our everyday life even small organizations of business and profession
produce callousness of feeling in men who are not naturally bad, and we
can well imagine what a moral havoc it is causing in a world where whole
peoples are furiously organizing themselves for gaining wealth and power.
Nationalism is a great menace. It is the particular thing which for years has
been at the bottom of India's troubles. And inasmuch as we have been ruled
and dominated by a nation that is strictly political in its attitude, we have
tried to develop within ourselves, despite our inheritance from the past, a
belief in our eventual political destiny.
There are different parties in India, with different ideals. Some are
struggling for political independence. Others think that the time has not
arrived for that, and yet believe that India should have the rights that the
English colonies have. They wish to gain autonomy as far as possible.
In the beginning of the history of political agitation in India there was not
the conflict between parties which there is to-day. At that time there was a
party known as the Indian Congress; it had no real programme. They had a
few grievances for redress by the authorities. They wanted larger
representation in the Council House, and more freedom in Municipal
government. They wanted scraps of things, but they had no constructive
ideal. Therefore I was lacking in enthusiasm for their methods. It was my

conviction that what India most needed was constructive work coming from
within herself. In this work we must take all risks and go on doing the
duties which by right are ours, though in the teeth of persecution; winning
moral victory at every step, by our failure and suffering. We must show
those who are over us that we have in ourselves the strength of moral
power, the power to suffer for truth. Where we have nothing to show, we
have only to beg. It would be mischievous if the gifts we wish for were
granted to us at once, and I have told my countrymen, time and again, to
combine for the work of creating opportunities to give vent to our spirit of
self-sacrifice, and not for the purpose of begging.
The party, however, lost power because the people soon came to realize
how futile was the half policy adopted by them. The party split, and there
arrived the Extremists, who advocated independence of action, and
discarded the begging method,—the easiest method of relieving one's mind
from his responsibility towards his country. Their ideals were based on
Western history. They had no sympathy with the special problems of India.
They did not recognize the patent fact that there were causes in our social
organization which made the Indian incapable of coping with the alien.
What should we do if, for any reason, England was driven away? We should
simply be victims for other nations. The same social weaknesses would
prevail. The thing we in India have to think of is this—to remove those
social customs and ideals which have generated a want of self-respect and a
complete dependence on those above us,—a state of affairs which has been
brought about entirely by the domination in India of the caste system, and
the blind and lazy habit of relying upon the authority of traditions that are
incongruous anachronisms in the present age.
Once again I draw your attention to the difficulties India has had to
encounter and her struggle to overcome them. Her problem was the
problem of the world in miniature. India is too vast in its area and too
diverse in its races. It is many countries packed in one geographical
receptacle. It is just the opposite of what Europe truly is, namely, one
country made into many. Thus Europe in its culture and growth has had the
advantage of the strength of the many as well as the strength of the one.
India, on the contrary, being naturally many, yet adventitiously one, has all
along suffered from the looseness of its diversity and the feebleness of its
unity. A true unity is like a round globe, it rolls on, carrying its burden

easily; but diversity is a many-cornered thing which has to be dragged and
pushed with all force. Be it said to the credit of India that this diversity was
not her own creation; she has had to accept it as a fact from the beginning
of her history. In America and Australia, Europe has simplified her problem
by almost exterminating the original population. Even in the present age
this spirit of extermination is making itself manifest, in the inhospitable
shutting out of aliens, by those who themselves were aliens in the lands
they now occupy. But India tolerated difference of races from the first, and
that spirit of toleration has acted all through her history.
Her caste system is the outcome of this spirit of toleration. For India has all
along been trying experiments in evolving a social unity within which all
the different peoples could be held together, while fully enjoying the
freedom of maintaining their own differences. The tie has been as loose as
possible, yet as close as the circumstances permitted. This has produced
something like a United States of a social federation, whose common name
is Hinduism.
India had felt that diversity of races there must be and should be, whatever
may be its drawback, and you can never coerce nature into your narrow
limits of convenience without paying one day very dearly for it. In this
India was right; but what she failed to realize was that in human beings
differences are not like the physical barriers of mountains, fixed for ever—
they are fluid with life's flow, they are changing their courses and their
shapes and volume.
Therefore in her caste regulations India recognized differences, but not the
mutability which is the law of life. In trying to avoid collisions she set up
boundaries of immovable walls, thus giving to her numerous races the
negative benefit of peace and order but not the positive opportunity of
expansion and movement. She accepted nature where it produces diversity,
but ignored it where it uses that diversity for its world-game of infinite
permutations and combinations. She treated life in all truth where it is
manifold, but insulted it where it is ever moving. Therefore Life departed
from her social system and in its place she is worshipping with all
ceremony the magnificent cage of countless compartments that she has
manufactured.

The same thing happened where she tried to ward off the collisions of trade
interests. She associated different trades and professions with different
castes. This had the effect of allaying for good the interminable jealousy
and hatred of competition—the competition which breeds cruelty and
makes the atmosphere thick with lies and deception. In this also India laid
all her emphasis upon the law of heredity, ignoring the law of mutation, and
thus gradually reduced arts into crafts and genius into skill.
However, what Western observers fail to discern is that in her caste system
India in all seriousness accepted her responsibility to solve the race problem
in such a manner as to avoid all friction, and yet to afford each race freedom
within its boundaries. Let us admit India has not in this achieved a full
measure of success. But this you must also concede, that the West, being
more favourably situated as to homogeneity of races, has never given her
attention to this problem, and whenever confronted with it she has tried to
make it easy by ignoring it altogether. And this is the source of her anti-
Asiatic agitations for depriving aliens of their right to earn their honest
living on these shores. In most of your colonies you only admit them on
condition of their accepting the menial position of hewers of wood and
drawers of water. Either you shut your doors against the aliens or reduce
them into slavery. And this is your solution of the problem of race-conflict.
Whatever may be its merits you will have to admit that it does not spring
from the higher impulses of civilization, but from the lower passions of
greed and hatred. You say this is human nature—and India also thought she
knew human nature when she strongly barricaded her race distinctions by
the fixed barriers of social gradations. But we have found out to our cost
that human nature is not what it seems, but what it is in truth; which is in its
infinite possibilities. And when we in our blindness insult humanity for its
ragged appearance it sheds its disguise to disclose to us that we have
insulted our God. The degradation which we cast upon others in our pride
or self-interest degrades our own humanity—and this is the punishment
which is most terrible, because we do not detect it till it is too late.
Not only in your relation with aliens but with the different sections of your
own society you have not achieved harmony of reconciliation. The spirit of
conflict and competition is allowed the full freedom of its reckless career.
And because its genesis is the greed of wealth and power it can never come
to any other end but to a violent death. In India the production of

commodities was brought under the law of social adjustments. Its basis was
co-operation, having for its object the perfect satisfaction of social needs.
But in the West it is guided by the impulse of competition, whose end is the
gain of wealth for individuals. But the individual is like the geometrical
line; it is length without breadth. It has not got the depth to be able to hold
anything permanently. Therefore its greed or gain can never come to
finality. In its lengthening process of growth it can cross other lines and
cause entanglements, but will ever go on missing the ideal of completeness
in its thinness of isolation.
In all our physical appetites we recognize a limit. We know that to exceed
that limit is to exceed the limit of health. But has this lust for wealth and
power no bounds beyond which is death's dominion? In these national
carnivals of materialism are not the Western peoples spending most of their
vital energy in merely producing things and neglecting the creation of
ideals? And can a civilization ignore the law of moral health and go on in its
endless process of inflation by gorging upon material things? Man in his
social ideals naturally tries to regulate his appetites, subordinating them to
the higher purpose of his nature. But in the economic world our appetites
follow no other restrictions but those of supply and demand which can be
artificially fostered, affording individuals opportunities for indulgence in an
endless feast of grossness. In India our social instincts imposed restrictions
upon our appetites,—maybe it went to the extreme of repression,—but in
the West the spirit of economic organization with no moral purpose goads
the people into the perpetual pursuit of wealth; but has this no wholesome
limit?
The ideals that strive to take form in social institutions have two objects.
One is to regulate our passions and appetites for the harmonious
development of man, and the other is to help him to cultivate disinterested
love for his fellow-creatures. Therefore society is the expression of those
moral and spiritual aspirations of man which belong to his higher nature.
Our food is creative, it builds our body; but not so wine, which stimulates.
Our social ideals create the human world, but when our mind is diverted
from them to greed of power then in that state of intoxication we live in a
world of abnormality where our strength is not health and our liberty is not
freedom. Therefore political freedom does not give us freedom when our

mind is not free. An automobile does not create freedom of movement,
because it is a mere machine. When I myself am free I can use the
automobile for the purpose of my freedom.
We must never forget in the present day that those people who have got
their political freedom are not necessarily free, they are merely powerful.
The passions which are unbridled in them are creating huge organizations
of slavery in the disguise of freedom. Those who have made the gain of
money their highest end are unconsciously selling their life and soul to rich
persons or to the combinations that represent money. Those who are
enamoured of their political power and gloat over their extension of
dominion over foreign races gradually surrender their own freedom and
humanity to the organizations necessary for holding other peoples in
slavery. In the so-called free countries the majority of the people are not
free, they are driven by the minority to a goal which is not even known to
them. This becomes possible only because people do not acknowledge
moral and spiritual freedom as their object. They create huge eddies with
their passions, and they feel dizzily inebriated with the mere velocity of
their whirling movement, taking that to be freedom. But the doom which is
waiting to overtake them is as certain as death—for man's truth is moral
truth and his emancipation is in the spiritual life.
The general opinion of the majority of the present-day nationalists in India
is that we have come to a final completeness in our social and spiritual
ideals, the task of the constructive work of society having been done several
thousand years before we were born, and that now we are free to employ all
our activities in the political direction. We never dream of blaming our
social inadequacy as the origin of our present helplessness, for we have
accepted as the creed of our nationalism that this social system has been
perfected for all time to come by our ancestors, who had the superhuman
vision of all eternity and supernatural power for making infinite provision
for future ages. Therefore, for all our miseries and shortcomings, we hold
responsible the historical surprises that burst upon us from outside. This is
the reason why we think that our one task is to build a political miracle of
freedom upon the quicksand of social slavery. In fact we want to dam up the
true course of our own historical stream, and only borrow power from the
sources of other peoples' history.

Those of us in India who have come under the delusion that mere political
freedom will make us free have accepted their lessons from the West as the
gospel truth and lost their faith in humanity. We must remember whatever
weakness we cherish in our society will become the source of danger in
politics. The same inertia which leads us to our idolatry of dead forms in
social institutions will create in our politics prison-houses with immovable
walls. The narrowness of sympathy which makes it possible for us to
impose upon a considerable portion of humanity the galling yoke of
inferiority will assert itself in our politics in creating the tyranny of
injustice.
When our nationalists talk about ideals they forget that the basis of
nationalism is wanting. The very people who are upholding these ideals are
themselves the most conservative in their social practice. Nationalists say,
for example, look at Switzerland where, in spite of race differences, the
peoples have solidified into a nation. Yet, remember that in Switzerland the
races can mingle, they can intermarry, because they are of the same blood.
In India there is no common birthright. And when we talk of Western
Nationality we forget that the nations there do not have that physical
repulsion, one for the other, that we have between different castes. Have we
an instance in the whole world where a people who are not allowed to
mingle their blood shed their blood for one another except by coercion or
for mercenary purposes? And can we ever hope that these moral barriers
against our race amalgamation will not stand in the way of our political
unity?
Then again we must give full recognition to this fact that our social
restrictions are still tyrannical, so much so as to make men cowards. If a
man tells me he has heterodox ideas, but that he cannot follow them
because he would be socially ostracized, I excuse him for having to live a
life of untruth, in order to live at all. The social habit of mind which impels
us to make the life of our fellow-beings a burden to them where they differ
from us even in such a thing as their choice of food, is sure to persist in our
political organization and result in creating engines of coercion to crush
every rational difference which is the sign of life. And tyranny will only add
to the inevitable lies and hypocrisy in our political life. Is the mere name of
freedom so valuable that we should be willing to sacrifice for its sake our
moral freedom?

The intemperance of our habits does not immediately show its effects when
we are in the vigour of our youth. But it gradually consumes that vigour,
and when the period of decline sets in then we have to settle accounts and
pay off our debts, which leads us to insolvency. In the West you are still
able to carry your head high, though your humanity is suffering every
moment from its dipsomania of organizing power. India also in the heyday
of her youth could carry in her vital organs the dead weight of her social
organizations stiffened to rigid perfection, but it has been fatal to her, and
has produced a gradual paralysis of her living nature. And this is the reason
why the educated community of India has become insensible of her social
needs. They are taking the very immobility of our social structures as the
sign of their perfection,—and because the healthy feeling of pain is dead in
the limbs of our social organism they delude themselves into thinking that it
needs no ministration. Therefore they think that all their energies need their
only scope in the political field. It is like a man whose legs have become
shrivelled and useless, trying to delude himself that these limbs have grown
still because they have attained their ultimate salvation, and all that is
wrong about him is the shortness of his sticks.
So much for the social and the political regeneration of India. Now we
come to her industries, and I am very often asked whether there is in India
any industrial regeneration since the advent of the British Government. It
must be remembered that at the beginning of the British rule in India our
industries were suppressed, and since then we have not met with any real
help or encouragement to enable us to make a stand against the monster
commercial organizations of the world. The nations have decreed that we
must remain purely an agricultural people, even forgetting the use of arms
for all time to come. Thus India is being turned into so many predigested
morsels of food ready to be swallowed at any moment by any nation which
has even the most rudimentary set of teeth in its head.
India therefore has very little outlet for her industrial originality. I
personally do not believe in the unwieldy organizations of the present day.
The very fact that they are ugly shows that they are in discordance with the
whole creation. The vast powers of nature do not reveal their truth in
hideousness, but in beauty. Beauty is the signature which the Creator
stamps upon His works when He is satisfied with them. All our products
that insolently ignore the laws of perfection and are unashamed in their

display of ungainliness bear the perpetual weight of God's displeasure. So
far as your commerce lacks the dignity of grace it is untrue. Beauty and her
twin brother Truth require leisure and self-control for their growth. But the
greed of gain has no time or limit to its capaciousness. Its one object is to
produce and consume. It has pity neither for beautiful nature nor for living
human beings. It is ruthlessly ready without a moment's hesitation to crush
beauty and life out of them, moulding them into money. It is this ugly
vulgarity of commerce which brought upon it the censure of contempt in
our earlier days, when men had leisure to have an unclouded vision of
perfection in humanity. Men in those times were rightly ashamed of the
instinct of mere money-making. But in this scientific age money, by its very
abnormal bulk, has won its throne. And when from its eminence of piled-up
things it insults the higher instincts of man, banishing beauty and noble
sentiments from its surroundings, we submit. For we in our meanness have
accepted bribes from its hands and our imagination has grovelled in the dust
before its immensity of flesh.
But its very unwieldiness and its endless complexities are its true signs of
failure. The swimmer who is an expert does not exhibit his muscular force
by violent movements, but exhibits some power which is invisible and
which shows itself in perfect grace and reposefulness. The true distinction
of man from animals is in his power and worth which are inner and
invisible. But the present-day commercial civilization of man is not only
taking too much time and space but killing time and space. Its movements
are violent, its noise is discordantly loud. It is carrying its own damnation
because it is trampling into distortion the humanity upon which it stands. It
is strenuously turning out money at the cost of happiness. Man is reducing
himself to his minimum in order to be able to make amplest room for his
organizations. He is deriding his human sentiments into shame because they
are apt to stand in the way of his machines.
In our mythology we have the legend that the man who performs penances
for attaining immortality has to meet with temptations sent by Indra, the
Lord of the immortals. If he is lured by them he is lost. The West has been
striving for centuries after its goal of immortality. Indra has sent her the
temptation to try her. It is the gorgeous temptation of wealth. She has
accepted it, and her civilization of humanity has lost its path in the
wilderness of machinery.

This commercialism with its barbarity of ugly decorations is a terrible
menace to all humanity, because it is setting up the ideal of power over that
of perfection. It is making the cult of self-seeking exult in its naked
shamelessness. Our nerves are more delicate than our muscles. Things that
are the most precious in us are helpless as babes when we take away from
them the careful protection which they claim from us for their very
preciousness. Therefore, when the callous rudeness of power runs amuck in
the broad-way of humanity it scares away by its grossness the ideals which
we have cherished with the martyrdom of centuries.
The temptation which is fatal for the strong is still more so for the weak.
And I do not welcome it in our Indian life, even though it be sent by the
lord of the Immortals. Let our life be simple in its outer aspect and rich in
its inner gain. Let our civilization take its firm stand upon its basis of social
co-operation and not upon that of economic exploitation and conflict. How
to do it in the teeth of the drainage of our life-blood by the economic
dragons is the task set before the thinkers of all oriental nations who have
faith in the human soul. It is a sign of laziness and impotency to accept
conditions imposed upon us by others who have other ideals than ours. We
should actively try to adapt the world powers to guide our history to its own
perfect end.
From the above you will know that I am not an economist. I am willing to
acknowledge that there is a law of demand and supply and an infatuation of
man for more things than are good for him. And yet I will persist in
believing that there is such a thing as the harmony of completeness in
humanity, where poverty does not take away his riches, where defeat may
lead him to victory, death to immortality, and where in the compensation of
Eternal Justice those who are the last may yet have their insult transmuted
into a golden triumph.

THE SUNSET OF THE CENTURY

THE SUNSET OF THE CENTURY
(Written in the Bengali on the last day of last century)
1

The last sun of the century sets amidst the blood-red
clouds of the West and the whirlwind of
hatred.
The naked passion of self-love of Nations, in its
drunken delirium of greed, is dancing to the
clash of steel and the howling verses of
vengeance.

2

The hungry self of the Nation shall burst in a
violence of fury from its own shameless
feeding.
For it has made the world its food,
And licking it, crunching it and swallowing it in big
morsels,
It swells and swells
Till in the midst of its unholy feast descends the
sudden shaft of heaven piercing its heart of
grossness.

3

The crimson glow of light on the horizon is not the
light of thy dawn of peace, my Motherland.
It is the glimmer of the funeral pyre burning to ashes
the vast flesh,—the self-love of the Nation—
dead under its own excess.
Thy morning waits behind the patient dark of the
East,
Meek and silent.

4

Keep watch, India.
Bring your offerings of worship for that sacred
sunrise.

Let the first hymn of its welcome sound in your
voice and sing
"Come, Peace, thou daughter of God's own great
suffering.
Come with thy treasure of contentment, the sword of
fortitude,
And meekness crowning thy forehead."
5

Be not ashamed, my brothers, to stand before the
proud and the powerful
With your white robe of simpleness.
Let your crown be of humility, your freedom the
freedom of the soul.
Build God's throne daily upon the ample bareness of
your poverty
And know that what is huge is not great and pride is
not everlasting.

THE END

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