Underlined
NATIONALISM
BY RABINDRANATH TAGORE
===
1918
irst Edition 191 7
Reprinted 19 18 {twice)
====
CONTENTS
Nationalism in the West ......
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 popula-
tion, 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
4 NATIONALISM
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
atrainst others. But in India, our difficulties
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 5
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 cosmo-
politanism, 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, v/hose one
6 NATIONALISM
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 teach-
ing 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 com-
pressed 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.
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 7
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 hve 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 conscious-
ness 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.
/
8 NATIONALISM
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 tlie 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 Moojhals and Pathans who invaded
CD *
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.
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 9
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
10 NATIONALISM
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 mean-
ing of their existence. Like gaseous particles
forced into a too narrow space, they come
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 11
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 inevit-
ably gives rise to eternal feuds among the
elements freed from the wholeness and whole-
someness 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
NATIONALISM
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 com-
merce, 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 organiza-
tion 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
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 13
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
^^
14 NATIONALISM
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 repre-
sented 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
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 15
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 govern-
ment 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 isl^
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 Dra vidians and
the Aryans, the ancient Greeks and the Persians,
the Mohammedans of the West and those of
16 NATIONALISM
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 vitahty.
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
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 17
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
18 NATIONALISM
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 diiFerence 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 relent-
lessly 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
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 19
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 comrade-
ship 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 domin-
ance 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 pheno-
menon prevails in this country also, where the
people are hospitable, but the Nation has proved
20 NATIONALISM
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 civiliza-
tion 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
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 21
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 com-
pared 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,
22 NATIONALISM
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
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 23
nearly dry, and sanitation sucks its own thumb
in despair, the military organization, the magis-
terial offices, the police, the Criminal Investiga-
tion Department, the secret spy system, attain
to an abnormal girth in their waists, occupying
every inch of our covmtry. 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
24 NATIONALISM
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 distaste-
ful 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 govern-
ment 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 Jo encounter in
former days with the paucity in the present
regime, they hardly touch the real points. It is
not a question of the number of outside obstacles
but the comparative powerlessness of the indi-
vidual 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
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 25
the most relentless and unbreakable that have
ever been manufactured hi the whole history of
man.
When the humanity of India was not under
the government of the Organization, the elas-
ticity 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
26 NATIONALISM
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
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 27
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 cele-
brated 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
/
28 NATIONALISM
days Sparta paid all her attention to becoming
powerful ; she did become so by crippling her
i 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 sub-
ject 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 wreck-
age 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
j 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 abstrac-
tion of the organizing man ? Can you put your-
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 29
self 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 tlieir manhood, but
even raise their voices in peeans 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 per-
petual distrust of its back where it has no eyes.
Every sound of a footstep, every rustle of move-
ment 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
30 NATIONALISM
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. There-
fore 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
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 31
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 sim-
plicity 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 our-
selves, 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
32 NATIONALISM
upon a conspiracy of fear. But will this federa-
tion 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 gre-
gariousness 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
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 33
convenient compartments for its preservation.
You cannot secure it for your home consump-
tion 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 mediaeval 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 great-
ness in humanity to that period of discipline,
D
34 NATIONALISM
— the discipline of the man in his human
integrity.
Then came the age of intellect, of science.
A^'^e 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 limita-
tions, 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
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 35
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 out-
runs 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 nourish-
ment is too late in reaching his digestive organs.
36 NATIONALISM
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
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 37
in the way. If you want me to take to butcher-
ing 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 ^nd 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
38 NATIONALISM
perfection of an automaton, it is causing disasters
of which the volcanic dissipations of the youth-
ful 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 anaemic 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 per-
formance of the political music hall.
I am just coming from my visit to Japan,
where 1 exhorted this young nation to take its
stand upon the higher ideals of humanity and
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 39
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 admira-
tion to those who have the power to deal it a
blow. Some of the newspapers praised my utter-
ances 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
40 NATIONALISM
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
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 41
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 corrup-
tion, 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 neces-
saries 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 sacri-
fice, 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
42 NATIONALISM
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 fort-
night. 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
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 43
powerful aiifiesthetics that man has mvented.
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 per-
manently 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.
44
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 perfec-
tion 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
45
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 vague-
ness 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 compart-
46
ments, 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
47
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 humilia-
tion 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. There-
fore 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 help-
less, 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 posses-
sions. 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 high-
52 NATIONALISM
road 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 fresh-
ness 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 pro-
duct 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, canmot 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 some-
thing 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 parapher-
nalia 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 head-
dress than on his head itself.
The whole world waits to see what this great
Eastern nation is going to do with the oppor-
tunities 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 debris carried by its innumer-
able 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 sordid-
ness, 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 obliga-
tion, 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.
58 NATIONALISM
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 respon-
sibility is all the greater, for in your voice Asia
shall answer the questions that Europe has sub-
mitted 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 livincj com-
munication 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 explora-
tion 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 approach-
ing 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 tenden-
cies, 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 bound-
aries, 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 cere-
monials 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
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN 61
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 relies 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 main-
stays 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 move-
ments 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 some-
thing 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 in-
ward progress of life. It lives, with its aspira-
tion 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 pro-
duct 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 con-
tradiction 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 in-
finite space and heaven's light to mature, and the
fruits that they produce can survive years of in-
sult 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 en-
gagements, 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 admira-
tion,— 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 cen-
turies 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 con-
sciously 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 ugli-
ness, 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 benefi-
cence 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 mechanic-
ally 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 pro-
ducing 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.
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 amaze-
ment. 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 pro-
fusion 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 grace-
ful 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 ha' your own
in love's delight, which is a work of true genius.
Your race has shown that genius, not by acquire-
ment, 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 polities and
commerce and in co-ordinating scientific know-
ledge. 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 corn-
fields. 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 civiliza-
tion. 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 out-
come 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. Ana 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 appre-
hensive 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 useful-
ness, 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 power-
ful 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 yoiu-
inherited ideals ; whose'object is to gain, and not
to grow. Tliey 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 incon-
gruities. 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 supersti-
tion, 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 pro-
found. 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 destruc-
tion 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 for-
gotten. The living man has his true protection
in his spiritual ideals, which have their vital con-
nection 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 organiza-
tions 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 neigh-
bours 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 wild-
ness. 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 trans-
planted ; 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. Haifa 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 un-
conscious. 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 nnay 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 your-
selves 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 dis-
trust 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 ravish-
ment 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, un-
ashamed 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
m 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 conscientious-
ness 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 advertise-
ments, 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 per-
petual 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 dis-
honourable, 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 inven-
tions. 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 our-
selves 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 con-
tempt 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 weak-
ness, 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 com-
pletely 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 conven-
tions 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.
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN 91
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 ob-
struction 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 extin-
guished ? My brothers, when the red Hght 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 re-
spectable 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 hori-
zon, 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.
95
NATIONALISM IN INDIA
OuE 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 tVie
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 inhabit-
ants, the civilization has naturally taken the
character of political and commercial aggressive-
ness. 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 like-
wise 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 Bed 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
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 99
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 his-
tory 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 j
perish or live in a state of degradation. Only
those peoples have survived and achieved civiliza-
tion 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 com-
paratively 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 combina-
tion 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 fight-
ing with one another or find out some true basis
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 101
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 sym-
pathetic insight to place themselves in the posi-
tion 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 eliminatfid^t 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 im-
pede 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
102 NATIONALISM
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 in-
definitely, 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 ad-
justment which will comprehend the whole world
of men and not merely the fractional groups of
nationality. The call has come to every in-
dividual 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
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 103
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 clair-
voyance, one will be able to love the America
that is to be.
America is destined to justify Western civiliza-
tion to the East. Europe has lost faith in
humanity, and has become distrustful and sickly.
America, on the other hand, is not pessimistic or
blas^. You know, as a people, that there is such
a thing as a better and a best ; and that know-
ledge 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 stimu-
lants its first effect is a heightening of conscious-
ness, and then with the increasing dose it muddles
104 NATIONALISM
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 free-
dom of detachment will enable you to accept its
invitation and to achieve the goal for which
Europe began her journey but lost herself mid-
way. For she was tempted out of her path by
her pride of power and greed of possession.
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 105
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
106 NATIONALISM
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
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 107
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 be-
long to your life, they only serve to crush your j
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 compen-
sated 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
108 NATIONALISM
life. Before we accept them and pay their vahie
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 als6 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 ex-
plosiveness which is the cause of their power,
and also of their exhaustion. They are spend-
ing 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 mans channel of greatness is
only one — the one which has made itself pain-
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 109
fully 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 con-
formity 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 con-
vince the West that the East has her contribu-
tion 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 thrust-
ing oif Western civilization and becoming segre-
gated 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
110 NATIONALISM
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 strenu-
ous 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 main-
tenance of this organization, which is mechanical.
Yet in this he feels all the satisfaction of moral
exaltation and therefore becomes supremely
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 111
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 every-
day 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
V
112 NATIONALISM
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
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 113
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 organiza-
tion 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
I
114 NATIONALISM
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 diffi-
culties 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 ad-
ventitiously 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
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 115
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 extermina-
tion 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
116 NATIONALISM
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 recog-
nized 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 ail 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
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 117
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 agita-
tions for depriving aliens of their right to earn
their honest living on these shores. In most
of your colonies you only admit them on con-
dition 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
118 NATIONALISM
its merits you will have to admit that it does
not spring from the higher impulses of civiliza-
tion, 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 hisult humanity for its ragged
appearance it sheds its disguise to disclose to us
that we have insulted our God. The degrada-
tion 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
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 119
for its object the perfect satisfaction of social
needs. Bat 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
120 NATIONALISM
but those of supply and demand which can be
artificially fostered, affording individuals oppor-
tunities 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 per-
petual 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
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 121
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 sur-
render 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
122 NATIONALISM
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.
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 123
Those of us in India who have come under
the delusion that mere pohtical freedom will \
make us free have accepted their lessons from
the West as the gospel truth and lost their
faith m humanity. We must remember what-
ever 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 in-
feriority 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
124 NATIONALISM
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 ?
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 125
The intemperance of our habits does not im-
mediately 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 them-
selves into thinking that it needs no ministra-
tion. 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
126 NATIONALISM
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 sup-
pressed, 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 agri-
cultural 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
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 127
signature which the Creator stamps upon His
works when He is satisfied with them. All our
products that insolently ignore the laws of per-
fection 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 mean-
ness have accepted bribes from its hands and our
128 NATIONALISM
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 ex-
hibits 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 tramp-
ling 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
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 129
lured by them he is lost. The West has been
striving for centuries after its goal of im-
mortality. 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
K
130 NATIONALISM
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 com-
pleteness 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 qf last
^ century)
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.
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,
133
134 NATIONALISM
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.
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.
THE SUNSET OF THE CENTUKY 135
Come with thy treasure of contentment, the
sword of fortitude,
And meekness crowning thy forehead."
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 bare-
ness of your poverty
And know that what is huge is not great and pride
is not everlasting.
THE END
