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
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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
