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Nationalism
Rabindranath Tagore

Translated by The Author

The Macmillan Company, New York, 1917
 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
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
(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