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 Cornell University Library 
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 Nationalism. 
 
 3 1924 014 721 975 
 
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 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924014721975 
 
NATIONALISM 
 
■Th^y^o 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
 ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., Limitkd 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY ■ CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO 
 
NATIONALISM 
 
 BY 
 
 SIR RABINDRANATH TAGORE 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 " GITANJALI," "the CRESCENT MOON," ETC. 
 
 We&j gotfe 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 A12 HgH-ts reserved 
 
Copyright, 1917, by The Atlantic Monthly Company. 
 
 Copyright, 1916 and 1917, 
 By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1917. 
 
 J. S. Gushing Co. — Berwiftk & Smith Co. 
 Norwood, Mass., IT.S.A. 
 
TO 
 
 C. F. ANDREWS 
 
PREFACE 
 
 " Nationalism in the West " is one of a series 
 of lectures delivered throughout the United 
 States during the winter of 1916-17. "National- 
 ism in Japan" is based upon two lectures de- 
 livered in Japan before the Imperial University 
 and the Keio Gijuku University in June and July, 
 1916. "Nationalism in India," written in the 
 United States late in 191 6, is the poet's reflection 
 upon the state of his own country, and gives 
 world-wide completeness to the discussion of 
 Nationalism. The poem at the conclusion of the 
 book, "The Sunset of the Century," was written 
 on the last day of the last century. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Nationalism in the West n 
 
 Nationalism in Japan 63 
 
 Nationalism in India nS 
 
 The Sunset of the Century i5S 
 
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 
 
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 
 
 Man's history is being shaped according to 
 the difficulties it encounters. These have offered 
 us problems and claimed their solutions from us, 
 the penalty of non-fulfilment being death or 
 degradation. 
 
 These difficulties have been different in different 
 peoples of the earth, and in the manner of our 
 overcoming them lies our distinction. 
 
 The Scythians of the earlier period of Asiatic 
 history had to struggle with the scarcity of their 
 natural resources. The easiest solution that they 
 could think of was to organize their whole popu- 
 lation, men, women, and children, into bands of 
 robbers. And they were irresistible to those 
 who were chiefly engaged in the constructive 
 work of social cooperation. 
 
 But fortunately for man the easiest path is not 
 his truest path. If his nature were not as com- 
 plex as it is, if it were as simple as that of a pack 
 
 13 
 
14 NATIONALISM 
 
 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 come in this 
 country in 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 in dealing with it in the fullest 
 truth. Until we fulfil our mission all other bene- 
 fits will be denied us. 
 
 There are other peoples in the world who have 
 obstacles in their physical surroundings to over- 
 come, or the menace of their powerful neighbours. 
 They have organized their power till they are not 
 only reasonably free from the tyranny of Nature 
 
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 15 
 
 and human neighbours, but have a surplus of it 
 left in their hands to employ against others. But 
 in India, our difficulties being internal, our history 
 has been the history of continual social adjust- 
 ment and not that of organized power for defence 
 and aggression. 
 
 Neither the colourless vagueness of cosmopoli- 
 tanism, nor the fierce self-idolatry of nation-wor- 
 ship 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 boun- 
 dary walls too rigidly between races, in perpetuat- 
 ing the results of inferiority in her classifications ; 
 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 to 
 provide proper accommodation to her numerous 
 guests whose habits and requirements are different 
 from one another. It is giving rise to infinite 
 complexities whose solution depends not merely 
 
l6 NATIONALISM 
 
 upon tactfulness but sympathy and true realiza- 
 tion of the unity of man. Towards this realiza- 
 tion have worked from the early time of the 
 Upanishads up to the present moment, a series of 
 great spiritual teachers, whose one object has been 
 to set at naught all differences of man by the over- 
 flow of our consciousness of God. In fact, our 
 history has not been of the rise and fall of king- 
 doms, 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 ele- 
 ments have been introduced, and wider adjust- 
 ments are waiting to be made. 
 
 We feel this all the more, because the teaching 
 and example of the West have entirely run counter 
 to what we think was given to India to accom- 
 plish. In the West the national machinery of 
 commerce and politics turns out neatly compressed 
 bales of humanity which have their use and high 
 
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 17 
 
 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 mar- 
 vellous square-cut finish, savouring of gigantic 
 manufacture, that the Creator will find it difiicult 
 to recognize it as a thing of spirit and a creature 
 made in his own divine image. 
 
 But I am anticipating. What I was about to 
 say is this, take it in whatever spirit you like, 
 here is India, of about fifty centuries at least, 
 who tried to live peacefully and think deeply, 
 the India devoid of all politics, the India of no 
 nations, whose one ambition has been to know 
 this world as of soul, to live here every moment 
 of her life in the meek spirit of adoration, in the 
 glad consciousness of an eternal and personal re- 
 lationship with it. This is the remote portion of 
 humanity, childlike in its manner, with the wis- 
 dom of the old, upon which burst the Nation of 
 the West. 
 
 Through all the fights and intrigues and decep- 
 tions of her earlier history India had remained 
 aloof. Because her homes, her fields, her 
 
i8 NATIONALISM 
 
 temples of worship, her schools, where her 
 teachers ' and students lived together in the 
 atmosphere of simplicity and devotion and 
 learning, her village self-government with its 
 simple laws and peaceful administration — all 
 these truly belonged to her. But her thrones 
 were not her concern. They passed over her head 
 like clouds, now tinged with purple gorgeousness, 
 now black with the threat of thunder. Often 
 they brought devastations in their wake, but 
 they were like catastrophes of nature whose traces 
 are soon forgotten. 
 
 But this time it was different. It was not a 
 mere drift over her surface of life, — drift of 
 cavalry and foot soldiers, richly caparisoned ele- 
 phants, white tents and canopies, strings of patient 
 camels bearing the loads of royalty, bands of ket- 
 tledrums and flutes, marble domes of mosques, 
 palaces and tombs, like the bubbles of the foam- 
 ing wine of extravagance; stories of treachery 
 and loyal devotion, of changes of fortune, of dra- 
 matic surprises of fate. This time It was the 
 Nation of the West driving its tentacles of ma- 
 chinery deep down into the soil.' 
 
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 19 
 
 Therefore, I say to you, it is we who are called 
 as witnesses to give evidence as to what the 
 Nation has been to humanity. We had known 
 the hordes of Moghals and Pathans who invaded 
 India, but we had known them as human races, 
 with their own religions and customs, likes and 
 dislikes, — we had never known them as a nation. 
 We loved and hated them as occasions arose ; we 
 fought for them and against them, talked with 
 them in a language which was theirs as well as 
 our own, and guided the destiny of the Empire in 
 which we had our active share. But this time 
 we had to deal, not with kings, not with human 
 races, but with a nation, — we, who are no nation 
 ourselves. 
 
 Now let us from our own experience answer 
 the question. What is this Nation i 
 
 ;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 rela- 
 
20 NATIONALISM 
 
 tionships, so that men can develop ideals of life in 
 cooperation 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 com- 
 petition grows keener, organization grows vaster, 
 and selfishness attains supremacy. Trading upon 
 the greed and fear of man, it occupies more and 
 more space in society, and at last becomes its 
 ruling force. 
 
 It is just possible that you have lost through 
 habit consciousness that the living bonds of 
 society are breaking up, and giving place to 
 merely mechanical organization. But you see 
 
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 21 
 
 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 un- 
 aided. And thus there where cooperation is 
 natural has intruded competition. The very 
 psychology of men and women about their mutual 
 relation is changing and becoming the psychology 
 of the primitive fighting elements rather than of 
 humanity seeking its completeness through the 
 union based upon mutual self-surrender. For the 
 elements which have lost their living bond of 
 reality have lost the meaning of their existence. 
 They, like gaseous particles, forced into a too 
 narrow space, come in continual conflict with each 
 other till they burst the very arrangement which 
 holds them in bondage. 
 
 Then look at those who call themselves anar- 
 chists, who resent the imposition of power, in any 
 
22 NATIONALISM 
 
 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 the 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 grow- 
 ing into vast stature, out of proportion to all 
 other needs of society, — and the full reality of 
 man is more and more crushed under its weight. 
 This state of things inevitably gives rise to eternal 
 feuds among the elements freed from the whole- 
 ness and wholesomeness of human ideals, and 
 interminable economic war is waged between 
 capital and labour. For greed of wealth and power 
 can never have a limit, and compromise of self- 
 interest can never attain the final spirit of recon- 
 ciliation. They must go on breeding jealousy and 
 suspicion to the end — the end which only comes 
 through some sudden catastrophe or a spiritual 
 rebirth. 
 
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 23 
 
 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 hu- 
 manity. When a father becomes a gambler and 
 his obligations to his family take the secondary 
 place in his mind, then he is no longer a man, but 
 an automaton led by the power of greed. Then 
 he can do things which, in his normal state of 
 mind, he would be ashamed to do. It is the 
 same thing with society. When it allows itself 
 to be turned into a perfect organization of power, 
 then there are few crimes which it is unable to 
 perpetrate. Because success is the object and 
 justification of a machine, while goodness only is 
 the end and purpose of man. When this engine 
 of organization begins to attain a vast size, and 
 those who are mechanics are made into parts of 
 the machine, then the personal man is eliminated 
 to a phantom, everything becomes a revolution 
 of policy carried out by the human parts of the 
 machine, requiring no twinge of pity or moral 
 responsibility. It is not unusual that even 
 through this apparatus the moral nature of man 
 
24 NATIONALISM 
 
 tries to assert itself, but the whole series of ropes 
 and pulleys 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 tor- 
 tured 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 with- 
 out 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 Lon- 
 don street accidents are recorded with some 
 decency of pathos, need but take the scantiest 
 notice of calamities happening in India over areas 
 of land sometimes larger than the British Isles. 
 
 But we, who are governed, are not a mere 
 
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 25 
 
 abstraction. We, on our side, are individuals 
 with living sensibilities. What comes to us in 
 the shape of a mere bloodless policy may pierce 
 into the very core of our life, may threaten the 
 whole future of our people with a perpetual help- 
 lessness 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 responsi- 
 bility man can never perform, with such a degree 
 of systematic unawareness, where he is an indi- 
 vidual human being. These only become pos- 
 sible where the man is represented by an octopus 
 of abstractions, sending out its wriggling arms in 
 all directions of space, and fixing its innumerable 
 suckers even into the far-away future. In this 
 reign of the nation, the governed are pursued by 
 suspicions ; and these are the suspicions of a tre- 
 mendous mass of organized brain and muscle. 
 Punishments are meted out, leaving 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. 
 
26 NATIONALISM 
 
 I have not come here, however, to discuss the 
 question as it affects my own country, but as it 
 affects the future of all humanity. It is not 
 about the British Government, but the govern- 
 ment by the Nation — the Nation which is the 
 organized self-interest of a whole people, where 
 it is the least human and the least spiritual. Our 
 only intimate experience of the Nation is with the 
 British Nation, and as far as the government by 
 the Nation goes there are reasons to believe that 
 it is one of the best. Then again we have to con- 
 sider 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 all the same 
 scattering living seeds that are immortal. And 
 when in India we shall be able to assimilate in 
 our life what is permanent in Western civilization 
 we shall be in the position to bring about a recon- 
 ciliation of these two great worlds. Then will 
 come to an end the one-sided dominance which 
 is galling. What is more, we have to recognize 
 
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 27 
 
 that the history of India does not belong to one 
 particular race but is of a process of cre- 
 ation to which various races of the world 
 contributed — the Dravidians and the Aryans, 
 the ancient Greeks and the Persians, the Mohame- 
 dans of the West and those of central Asia. At 
 last now has come the turn of the English to be- 
 come 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, 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. Its iron 
 grip we have felt at the root of our life, and for 
 the sake of humanity we must stand up and give 
 
28 NATIONALISM 
 
 warning to all, that this nationalism is a cruel 
 epidemic of evil that is sweeping over the human 
 world of the present age, eating into its moral 
 vitality. 
 
 I have a deep love and a great respect for the 
 British race as human beings. It has produced 
 great-hearted men, thinkers of great thoughts, 
 doers of great deeds. It has given rise to a great 
 literature. I know that these people love justice 
 and freedom, and hate lies. They are clean in 
 their minds, frank in their manners, true in their 
 friendships; in their behaviour they are honest 
 and reliable. The personal experience which I 
 have had of their literary men has roused my 
 admiration not merely for their power of thought 
 or expression but for their chivalrous humanity. 
 We have felt the greatness of this people as we feel 
 the sun ; but as for the Nation, it is for us a thick 
 mist of a stifling nature covering the sun itself. 
 
 This government by the Nation is neither 
 British nor anything else ; it is an applied science 
 and therefore more or less similar in its principles 
 wherever it is used. It is like a hydraulic press, 
 whose pressure is impersonal and on that account 
 
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 29 
 
 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 organiza- 
 tion might not have been so densely perfect, and, 
 therefore, some shreds of the human might still 
 have been clinging to the wreck, allowing us to 
 deal with something which resembles our own 
 throbbing heart. 
 
 Before the Nation came to rule over us we had 
 other governments which were foreign, and these, 
 like all governments, had some element of the 
 machine in them. But the difference between 
 them and the government by the Nation is like 
 the difference between the hand loom and the 
 power loom. In the products of the hand loom 
 the magic of man's living fingers finds its expres- 
 sion, and its hum harmonizes with the music of 
 life. But the power loom is relentlessly lifeless 
 and accurate and monotonous in its production. 
 
30 NATIONALISM 
 
 We must admit that during the personal gov- 
 ernment of the former days there have been in- 
 stances 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 neces- 
 sary for the stability of civilization and conti- 
 nuity of progress. We are realizing through it that 
 there is a universal standard of justice to which 
 all men irrespective of their caste and colour have 
 their equal claim. 
 
 This reign of law in our present Government 
 in India has established order in this vast land 
 inhabited by peoples different in their races and 
 customs. It has made it possible for these peo- 
 ples 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 
 
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 31 
 
 had been able to resist the dominance of this West- 
 ern Nation could she acquire the benefit of the 
 Western Civilization in fullest measure. Though 
 China has been poisoned at the very spring of her 
 moral and physical life by this Nation, her struggle 
 to receive the best lessons of the West may yet be 
 successful if not hindered by the Nation. It was 
 only the other day that Persia woke up from 
 her age-long sleep at the call of the West to be 
 instantly trampled into stillness by the Nation. 
 The same phenomenon prevails in this country also, 
 where the people are hospitable but the nation has 
 proved itself to be otherwise, making an Eastern 
 guest feel humiliated to stand before you as a 
 member of the humanity of his own mother- 
 land. 
 
 In India we are suffering from this conflict be- 
 tween the spirit of the West and the Nation of the 
 West. The benefit of the Western civilization is 
 doled out to us in a miserly measure by the 
 Nation trying 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 
 
32 NATIONALISM 
 
 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 re- 
 ducing our education to a minimum required for 
 conducting a foreign government, this Nation 
 pacifies its conscience by calling us names, by 
 sedulously giving currency to the arrogant cyni- 
 cism that the East is east and the West is west 
 and never the twain shall meet. If, we must be- 
 lieve our schoolmaster in his taunt that after 
 nearly two centuries of his tutelage, India not 
 only remains unfit for self-government but unable 
 to display originality in her intellectual attain- 
 ments, must we ascribe it to something in the 
 nature of Western culture and our inherent in- 
 capacity to receive it or to the judicious niggard- 
 liness of the Nation that has taken upon itself 
 the white man's burden of civilizing the East? 
 That Japanese people have some qualities which 
 
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 33 
 
 we lack we may admit, but that our intellect is 
 naturally unproductive compared to theirs we 
 cannot accept even from them whom it is danger- 
 ous for us to contradict. 
 
 The truth is that the spirit of conflict and con- 
 quest is at the origin and in the centre of the 
 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 
 the Western civilization into the country of the 
 No-Nation. Because this civilization is the civili- 
 zation of power, therefore it is exclusive, it is 
 naturally unwilling to open its sources of power 
 to those whom it has selected for its purposes of 
 exploitation. 
 
 But all the same moral law is the law of hu- 
 manity, and the exclusive civilization which 
 
34 NATIONALISM 
 
 thrives upon others who are barred from its benefit 
 carries its own death sentence in its moral limi- 
 tations. The slavery that it gives rise to uncon- 
 sciously drains its own love of freedom dry. 
 The helplessness with which it weighs down its 
 world of victims exerts its force of gravitation 
 every moment upon the power that creates it. 
 And the greater part of the world which is being 
 denuded of its self-sustaining life by the Nation 
 will one day become the most terrible of all its 
 burdens ready to drag it down into the bottom 
 of destruction. Whenever Power removes all 
 checks from its path to make its career easy, it 
 triumphantly rides into its ultimate crash of 
 death. Its moral brake becomes slacker every 
 day without its knowing it, and its slippery path 
 of ease becomes its path of doom. 
 
 Of all things in Western civilization, those 
 which this Western Nation has given us in a 
 most generous measure are law and order. While 
 the small feeding bottle of our education is nearly 
 dry, and sanitation sucks its own thumb in de- 
 spair, the military organization, the magisterial 
 offices, the police, the Criminal Investigation 
 
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 35 
 
 Department, the secret spy system, attain to an 
 abnormal girth in their waists, occupying every 
 inch of our country. This is to maintain order. 
 But is not this order merely a negative good ? 
 Is it not for giving people's life greater oppor- 
 tunities 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 con- 
 venience 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 wofully 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 
 
36 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 a ground strewn with gravel, 
 gradually our feet come to adjust themselves to 
 the caprices of the inhospitable earth ; while if 
 the tiniest particle of a gravel finds its lodg- 
 ment inside our shoes we can never forget and 
 forgive its intrusion. And these shoes are the 
 government by the Nation, — it is tight, it regu- 
 lates 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 num- 
 ber of gravels which our feet had to encounter 
 in former days with the paucity in the present 
 regime, they hardly touch the real points. It is 
 not the numerousness of the 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 be- 
 cause of its quantity but because of its nature. 
 And we cannot but acknowledge this paradox, 
 
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 37 
 
 that while the spirit of the West inarches under 
 its banner of freedom, the Nation of the West 
 forges its iron chains of organization which are 
 the most relentless and unbreakable that have 
 ever been manufactured in the whole history of 
 man. 
 
 When the humanity of India was not under 
 the government of the Organization, the 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, both on the part 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 gtiarding against the ex- 
 pression 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 na- 
 tion, — whose tireless vigilance, being the vigi- 
 
38 NATIONALISM 
 
 lance of a machine, has not the human power to 
 overlook or to discriminate. At the least press- 
 ing of its button the monster organization becomes 
 all eyes, whose ugly stare of inquisitiveness cannot 
 be avoided by a single person amongst the im- 
 mense multitude of the ruled. At the least turn 
 of its screw, by the fraction of an inch, the grip 
 is tightened to the point of suffocation around 
 every man, woman and child of a vast popula- 
 tion, 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 press- 
 ure of this unhuman 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 poison- 
 ous 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 
 
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 39 
 
 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 com- 
 plete welding of them into one uniform mass 
 according to its own recipe. The people accept 
 this all-pervading mental slavery with cheerfulness 
 and pride because of their nervous desire to turn 
 themselves into a machine of power, called the 
 Nation, and emulate other machines in their 
 collective worldliness. 
 
 When questioned as to the wisdom of its course 
 the newly converted fanatic of nationalism answers 
 that "so long as nations are rampant in this 
 world we have not the option freely to develop 
 our higher humanity. We must utilize every 
 faculty that we possess to resist the evil by as- 
 suming 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- 
 
40 NATIONALISM 
 
 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 wrest- 
 ling match of powerfulness. In the ancient days 
 Sparta paid all her attention to becoming powerful 
 — and she did become so by crippling her hu- 
 manity, and she died of the amputation. 
 
 But it is no consolation to us to know that the 
 weakening of humanity from which the present 
 age is suffering is not limited to the subject 
 races, and that its ravages are even more radical 
 because insidious and voluntary in peoples who 
 are hypnotized into believing that they are free. 
 This bartering of your higher aspirations of life 
 for profit and power has been your own free 
 choice, and I leave you there, at the wreckage of 
 
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 41 
 
 your soul, contemplating your protuberant pros- 
 perity. But will you never be called to answer 
 for organizing the instincts of self-aggrandizement 
 of whole peoples into perfection, and calling it 
 good ? I ask you what disaster has there ever 
 been in the history of man, in its darkest period, 
 like this terrible disaster of the Nation fixing its 
 fangs deep into the naked flesh of the world, 
 taking permanent precautions against its natural 
 relaxation ? 
 
 You, the people of the West, who have manu- 
 factured this abnormality, can you imagine the 
 desolating despair of this haunted world of suffer- 
 ing man possessed by the ghastly abstraction of 
 the organizing man ? Can you put yourself into 
 the position of the peoples, who seem to have 
 been doomed to an eternal damnation of their 
 own humanity, who not only must suffer con- 
 tinual curtailment of their manhood, but even 
 raise their voices in pseans of praise for the 
 benignity of a mechanical apparatus in its inter- 
 minable parody of providence ? 
 
 Have you not seen, since the commencement 
 of the existence of the Nation, that the dread of 
 
42 NATIONALISM 
 
 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 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 al- 
 most openly unashamed of inhumanity. Clever 
 lies become matters of self-congratulation. 
 Solemn pledges become a farce, — laughable for 
 their very solemnity. The Nation, with all its 
 paraphernalia of power and prosperity, its flags 
 and pious hymns, its blasphemous prayers in the 
 churches, and the literary mock thunders of its 
 patriotic bragging, cannot hide the fact that the 
 Nation is the greatest evil for the Nation, that 
 all its precautions are against it, and any new 
 birth of its fellow in the world is always followed 
 in its mind by the dread of a new peril. Its one 
 wish is to trade on the feebleness of the rest of 
 the world, like some insects that are bred in the 
 paralyzed flesh of victims kept just enough alive 
 
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 43 
 
 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 to 
 drill herself into modern efficiency, is thwarted 
 at every step by the Nation. It is tightening its 
 financial ropes round her, trying to drag her up 
 on the shore and cut her into pieces, and then 
 go and offer public thanksgiving to God for 
 supporting the one existing evil and shattering 
 the possibility of a new one. And for all this 
 the Nation has been claiming the gratitude of 
 history, and all eternity for its exploitation; 
 ordering its band of praise to be struck up from 
 
44 NATIONALISM 
 
 end to end of the world, declaring itself to be the 
 salt of the earth, the flower of humanity, the 
 blessing of God hurled with all his force upon the 
 naked skulls of the world of no nations. 
 
 I know what your advice will be. You will 
 say, form yourselves into a nation, and resist 
 this encroachment of the Nation. But is this 
 the true advice ? that of a man to a man ? Why 
 should this be a necessity } I could well believe 
 you, if you had said. Be more good, more just, 
 more true in your relation to man, control your 
 greed, make your life wholesome in its simplicity 
 and let your consciousness of the divine in hu- 
 manity 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 f 
 
 You say, these machines will come into an 
 agreement, for their mutual protection, based 
 
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 45. 
 
 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 
 
46 NATIONALISM 
 
 agree to believe it, but because it is so in truth 
 which would be dangerous for us to ignore. And 
 this moral nature of man cannot be divided into 
 convenient compartments for its preservation. 
 You cannot secure it for your home 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 rec- 
 onciliation in the conflict between the flesh and 
 
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 47 
 
 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 cbmpleteness of moral 
 personality. Europe owes all her greatness 
 in humanity to that period of discipline, — 
 the discipline of the man in his human integ- 
 rity. 
 
 Then came the age of intellect, of science. 
 We all know that intellect is impersonal. Our 
 life is one with us, also our heart, 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 
 
48 NATIONALISM 
 
 is a power, — the power which fulfils some special 
 usefulness, some particular need of man. 
 
 Reality is the harmony which gives to the 
 component parts of a thing the equilibrium of 
 the whole. You break it, and have in your hands 
 the nomadic atoms fighting against one another, 
 therefore unmeaning. Those who covet power 
 try to get mastery of these aboriginal fighting 
 elements and through some narrow channels 
 force them into some violent service for some 
 particular needs of man. 
 
 This satisfaction of man's needs is a great 
 thing. It gives him freedom in the material 
 world. It confers on him the benefit of a greater 
 range of time and space. He can do things in a 
 shorter time and occupies a larger space with 
 more thoroughness of advantage. Therefore he 
 can easily outstrip those who live in a world of a 
 slower time and of space less fully occupied. 
 
 This progress of power attains more and more 
 rapidity of pace. And, for the reason that it is a 
 detached part of man, it soon outruns the com- 
 plete humanity. The moral man remains behind, 
 because it has to deal with the whole reality, not 
 
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 49 
 
 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 ex- 
 aggerated giraffe whose head has suddenly shot 
 up miles away from the rest of him, making normal 
 communication difficult to establish. This greedy 
 head, with its huge dental organization, has been 
 munching all the topmost foliage of the world, 
 but the nourishment is too late in reaching his 
 digestive organs, and his heart is suffering from 
 want of blood. Of this present disharmony in 
 man's nature the West seems to have been bliss- 
 fully 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 
 
50 NATIONALISM 
 
 his hungry humanity. Logic does not know 
 that, under the lowest bed of endless strata of 
 wealth and comforts, earthquakes are being 
 hatched to restore the balance of the moral 
 world, and one day the gaping gulf of spiritual 
 vacuity will draw into its bottom the store of 
 things that have their eternal love for the dust. 
 
 Man in his fulness is not powerful, but perfect. 
 Therefore, to turn him into mere power, you 
 have to curtail his soul as much as possible. 
 When we are fully human, we cannot fly at one 
 another's throats ; our instincts of social life, 
 our traditions of moral ideals stand in the way. 
 If you want me to take to butchering human 
 beings, you must break up that wholeness of 
 my humanity through some discipline which 
 makes my will dead, my thoughts numb, my 
 movements automatic, and then from the dis- 
 solution 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 ful- 
 ness of his communal life, with all its living 
 
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 51 
 
 associations of beauty and love and social ob- 
 ligations, and you will be able to turn him into 
 so many fragments of a machine for the produc- 
 tion of wealth on a gigantic scale. Turn a tree 
 into a log and it will burn for you, but it will 
 never bear living flowers and fruit. 
 
 This process of dehumanizing has been going 
 on in commerce and politics. And out of the 
 long birth-throes of mechanical energy has been 
 born this fully developed apparatus of magnificent 
 power and surprising appetite, which has been 
 christened in the West as the Nation. As I have 
 hinted before, because of its quality of abstraction 
 it has, with the greatest ease, gone far ahead of 
 the complete moral man. And having the con- 
 science of a ghost and the callous perfection of an 
 automaton, it is causing disasters of which the 
 volcanic dissipations of the youthful moon would 
 be ashamed to be brought into comparison. As 
 a result, the suspicion of man for man stings all 
 the limbs of this civilization like the hairs of the 
 nettle. Each country is casting its net of es- 
 pionage into the slimy bottom of the others, 
 fishing for their secrets, the treacherous secrets 
 
52 NATIONALISM 
 
 brewing 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 inter- 
 national 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 accord- 
 ing to the variation of time and to the altered 
 groupings of the alliances of diplomacy, that it 
 can be enjoyed with amusement as the variety 
 performance of the political music hall. 
 
 I am just coming from my visit to Japan, where 
 I exhorted this young nation to take its stand 
 upon the higher ideals of humanity and never 
 to follow the West in its acceptance of the or- 
 ganized 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 im- 
 punity, while turning its right cheek of brighter 
 
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 53 
 
 humanity for the kiss of admiration to those who 
 have the power to deal it a blow. Some of the 
 newspapers praised my utterances for their poetical 
 qualities while adding with a leer that it was the 
 poetry of a defeated people. I felt they were 
 right. Japan had been taught in a modern school 
 the lesson how to become powerful. The school- 
 ing 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 n;iust keep itself drunk with a con- 
 tinual dose of self-laudation. But the same vices 
 which seem so natural and innocuous in its own 
 life make it surprised and angry at their un- 
 pleasantness when seen in other nations. There- 
 
54 NATIONALISM 
 
 fore 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 contra- 
 dicts all that is highest in Man and proves by 
 its success that unscrupulousness is the way to 
 prosperity, — and goodness is good for the weak 
 
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 55 
 
 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 sacrifice, 
 but by intellectual power. In quantity it is great, 
 but it springs from the surface and spreads over 
 the surface. Knowledge and efficiency are power- 
 ful 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 con- 
 venient than hospitable. 
 
56 NATIONALISM 
 
 Therefore we must not forget that the scientific 
 organizations vastly spreading in all directions 
 are strengthening our power, but not our hu- 
 manity. With the growth of power the cult of 
 the self-worship of the Nation grows in ascen- 
 dency; and the individual willingly allows the 
 nation to take donkey rides upon his back; and 
 there happens the anomaly which must have its 
 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 in- 
 dividual. 
 
 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 
 
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 57 
 
 of innocent creatures when he drugs his feelings 
 with the abstract idea of "sport." Because 
 these ideas are the creations of our intellect, be- 
 cause they are logical classifications, therefore they 
 can so easily hide in their mist the personal man. 
 
 And the idea of the Nation is one of the most 
 powerful anaesthetics that man has invented. 
 Under the influence of its fumes the whole people 
 can carry out its systematic programme of the 
 most virulent self-seeking without being in the 
 least aware of its moral perversion, — in fact 
 feeling dangerously resentful if it is pointed out. 
 
 But can this go on indefinitely ? continually 
 producing barrenness of moral insensibility upon 
 a large tract of our living nature ? Can it escape 
 its nemesis forever ? 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 ? 
 
S8 NATIONALISM 
 
 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 ab- 
 surdity of the thing called the Nation. 
 
 The Nation has thriven long upon mutilated 
 humanity. Men, the fairest creations of God, 
 came out of the National manufactory in huge 
 numbers as war-making and money-making pup- 
 pets, ludicrously vain of their pitiful perfection 
 of mechanism. Human society grew more and 
 more into a marionette show of politicians, soldiers, 
 manufacturers and bureaucrats, pulled by wire 
 arrangements of wonderful efficiency. 
 
 But the apotheosis of selfishness can never make 
 its interminable breed of hatred and greed, fear 
 and hypocrisy, suspicion and tyranny, an end 
 in themselves. These monsters grow into huge 
 shapes but never into harmony. And this Na- 
 tion may grow on to an unimaginable corpulence, 
 
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 59 
 
 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, shatter- 
 ing its own limbs, scattering them into the dust. 
 It is the fifth act of the tragedy of the unreal. 
 
 Those who have any faith in Man cannot but 
 fervently hope that the tyranny of the Nation 
 will not be restored to all its former teeth and 
 claws, to its far-reaching iron arms and its im- 
 mense 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 
 
6o NATIONALISM 
 
 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 brother- 
 hood founded upon self-seeking, those who will 
 own themselves as God's children and as no bond- 
 slaves of machinery, which turns souls into com- 
 modities and life into compartments, which, with 
 its iron claws, scratches out the heart of the 
 world and knows not what it has done. 
 
 And we of no nations of the world, whose heads 
 have been bowed to the dust, will know that this 
 dust is more sacred than the bricks which build 
 the pride of power. For this dust is fertile of 
 life, and of beauty and worship. We shall thank 
 God that we were made to wait in silence through 
 the night of despair, had to bear the insult of the 
 proud and the strong man's burden, yet all through 
 
NATIONALISM IN THE WEST 6l 
 
 it, though our hearts quaked with doubt and fear, 
 never could we blindly believe in the salvation 
 which machinery offered to man, but we held 
 fast to our trust in God and the truth of the 
 human soul. And we can still cherish the hope, 
 that, when power becomes ashamed to occupy 
 its throne'and is ready to make way for love, 
 when the morning comes for cleansing the blood- 
 stained steps of the Nation along the highroad 
 of humanity, we shall be called upon to bring 
 our own vessel of sacred water — the water of 
 worship — to sweeten the history of man into 
 purity, and with its sprinkling make the trampled 
 dust of the centuries blessed with fruitfulness. 
 
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN 
 
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN 
 I 
 
 The worst form of bondage is the bondage of 
 dejection which keeps men hopelessly chained in 
 loss of faith in themselves. We have been re- 
 peatedly 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 re- 
 sources 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 
 
 E 6j 
 
66 NATIONALISM 
 
 rose from her dreams, and in giant strides left 
 centuries of inaction behind, overtaking the present 
 time in its foremost achievement. This has 
 broken the spell under which we lay in torpor for 
 ages, taking it to be the normal condition of 
 certain races living in certain geographical limits. 
 We forgot that in Asia great kingdoms were 
 founded, philosophy, science, arts and literatures 
 flourished, and all the great religions of- the world 
 had their cradles. Therefore it cannot be said, 
 that there is anything inherent in the soil and 
 climate of Asia that produces mental inactivity 
 and atrophies 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 
 
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN d'j 
 
 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 in- 
 definitely, 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 
 endeavors. It tries completely to enjoy 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- 
 
68 NATIONALISM 
 
 sions. It is miserliness. The living ideals must 
 not lose their touch with the growing and chang- 
 ing life. Their real freedom is not within the 
 boundaries of security, but in the highroad of ad- 
 ventures full of the risk of new experiences. 
 
 One morning the whole world looked up in sur- 
 prise, 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 con- 
 clusively that this sudden revealment of her power 
 is not a short-lived wonder, a chance product 
 of time and tide, thrown up from the depth of 
 obscurity to be swept away the next moment into 
 the sea of oblivion. 
 
 The truth is that Japan is old and new at the 
 
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN 69 
 
 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 count- 
 ing 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, use- 
 less accumulations of the lazy mind, seeking 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 respon- 
 sibilities 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 
 
70 NATIONALISM 
 
 removed. We have seen that taking shelter in the 
 dead is death itself, and only taking all the risk 
 of life to the fullest extent is living. 
 
 I, for myself, cannot believe that Japan has 
 become what she is by imitating the West. We 
 cannot imitate life, we cannot simulate strength 
 for long, nay, what is more, a mere imitation is 
 a source of weakness. For it hampers our true 
 nature, it is always in our way. It is like dress- 
 ing 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 
 
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN 71 
 
 some real truth. We are afraid of leaving out 
 something valuable and efficacious by not swallow- 
 ing 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 accord- 
 ing 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 
 
72 NATIONALISM 
 
 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 opportuni- 
 ties and responsibilities she has accepted from 
 the hands of the modern time. If it be a mere 
 reproduction of the West, then the great expec- 
 tation she has raised will remain unfulfilled. For 
 there are grave questions that the Western civ- 
 ilization 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 
 
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN 73 
 
 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 be- 
 cause they are unseen, or because they assume 
 the names and appearance of freedom. We have 
 seen, under the spell of its gigantic sordidness, man 
 losing faith in all the heroic ideals of life which 
 have made him great. 
 
 Therefore you cannot with a light heart accept 
 the modern civilization with all its tendencies, 
 methods and structures, and dream that they are 
 inevitable. You must apply your Eastern mind, 
 your spiritual strength, your love of simplicity, 
 your recognition of social obligation, in order to 
 
74 NATIONALISM 
 
 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 move- 
 ment. 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 mar- 
 row of your bones, in the texture of your flesh, in 
 the tissue of your brains ; and it must modify 
 everything you lay your hands upon, without 
 your knowing, even against your wishes. Once 
 you did solve the problems of man to your own 
 satisfaction, you had your philosophy of life and 
 evolved your own art of living. All this you must 
 apply to the present situation and out of it will 
 arise a new creation and not a mere repetition, a 
 creation which the soul of your people will own 
 for itself and proudly offer to the world as its 
 tribute to the welfare of man. Of all countries 
 in Asia, here in Japan you have the freedom 
 to use the materials you have gathered from the 
 West according to your genius and your need. 
 Therefore your responsibility is all the greater, for 
 
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN 75 
 
 in your voice Asia shall answer the questions that 
 Europe has submitted to the conference of Man. 
 In your land the experiments will be carried on 
 by which the East will change the aspects of the 
 modern civilization, infusing life in it where it is 
 a machine, substituting human heart for cold ex- 
 pediency, not caring so much for power and 
 success as for harmonious and living growth, for 
 truth and beauty. 
 
 I cannot but bring to your mind those days 
 when the whole of Eastern Asia from Burma to 
 Japan was united with India in the closest tie of 
 friendship, the only natural tie which can exist 
 between nations. There was a living communi- 
 cation of hearts, a nervous system evolved through 
 which messages ran between us about the deepest 
 needs of humanity. We did not stand in fear of 
 each other, we had not to arm ourselves to keep 
 each other in check ; our relation was not that of 
 self-interest, of exploration and spoliation of each 
 other's pockets ; ideas and ideals were exchanged, 
 gifts of the highest love were offered and taken ; 
 no difference of languages and customs hindered 
 us in approaching each other heart to heart; 
 
76 NATIONALISM 
 
 no pride of race or insolent consciousness of su- 
 periority, 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 at bay the aliens 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 
 
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN ^^ 
 
 always afraid of other races achieving eminence, 
 naming it as a peril, and tries to thwart all symp- 
 toms of greatness outside its own boundaries, 
 forcing down races of men who are weaker, to 
 be eternally fixed in their weakness. Before 
 this political civilization came to its power and 
 opened its hungry jaws wide enough to gulp 
 down great continents of the earth, we had wars, 
 pillages, changes of monarchy and consequent 
 miseries, but never such a sight of fearful and 
 hopeless voracity, such wholesale feeding of 
 nation upon nation, such huge machines for turn- 
 ing great portions of the earth into mincemeat, 
 never such terrible jealousies with all their ugly 
 teeth and claws ready for tearing open each 
 other's vitals. This political civilization is scien- 
 tific, not human. It is powerful because it con- 
 centrates all its forces upon one purpose, like a 
 millionaire acquiring money at the cost of his 
 soul. It betrays its trust, it weaves its meshes 
 of lies without shame, it enshrines gigantic idols 
 of greed in its temples, taking great pride in the 
 costly ceremonials of its worship, calling this 
 patriotism. And it can be safely prophesied that 
 
78 NATIONALISM 
 
 this cannot go on, for there is a moral law in this 
 world which has its application both to individuals 
 and to organized bodies of men. You cannot go 
 on violating these laws in the name of your na- 
 tion, yet enjoy their advantage as individuals. 
 This public sapping of the 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 pa- 
 triotism, 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 lilie small 
 seeds it still contains life and will sprout and 
 grow, and spread its beneficent branches, pro- 
 ducing flowers and fruits when its time comes, and 
 
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN 79 
 
 showers of grace descend upon it from heaven. 
 But ruins of sky-scrapers of power and broken 
 machinery of greed, even God's rain is powerless 
 to raise up again ; for they were not of life, but 
 went against life as a whole, — they are relics of 
 the rebellion that shattered itself to pieces against 
 the eternal. 
 
 But the charge is brought against us that 
 the ideals we cherish in the East are static, that 
 they have not the impetus in them to move, to 
 open out new vistas of knowledge and power, 
 that the systems of philosophy which are the 
 mainstays of the time-worn civilizations of the 
 East despise all outward proofs, remaining stolidly 
 satisfied in their subjective certainty. This proves 
 that when our knowledge is vague, we are apt 
 to accuse of vagueness our object of knowledge 
 itself. To a Western observer our civilization 
 appears as all metaphysics, as to a deaf man piano 
 playing appears to be mere movements of fingers 
 and no music. He cannot think that we have 
 found some deep basis of reality upon which we 
 have built our institutions. 
 
 Unfortunately all proofs of reality are in reali- 
 
8o NATIONALISM 
 
 zation. 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 prog- 
 ress, 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 sta- 
 tion, — it is movement. But a full-grown tree 
 has no definite movement of that kind, its prog- 
 ress is the inward progress of life. It lives, with 
 its aspiration towards light tingling in its leaves 
 and creeping in its silent sap." 
 
 We also have lived for centuries, we still live, 
 and we have our aspiration for a reality that has 
 no end to its realization, — a reality that goes 
 beyond death, giving it a meaning, that rises 
 above all evils of life, bringing its peace and purity, 
 
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN 8l 
 
 its cheerful renunciation of self. The product of 
 this inner life is a living product. It will be 
 needed when the youth returns home weary and 
 dust-laden, when the soldier is wounded, when the 
 wealth is squandered away and pride is humbled, 
 when man's heart cries for truth in the immensity 
 of facts and harmony in the contradiction of ten- 
 dencies. 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 their wings. 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 insult and neglect. The East with her ideals, 
 in whose bosom are stored the ages of sunlight 
 and silence of stars, can patiently wait till the 
 West, hurrying after the expedient, loses breath 
 and stops. Europe, while busily speeding to her 
 
82 NATIONALISM 
 
 engagements, disdainfully casts her glance from 
 her carriage window to 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 har- 
 vest 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, 
 is pouring 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 
 
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN 83 
 
 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 mak- 
 ing the earth yield more fruit than seemed pos- 
 sible, coaxing and compelling the great forces 
 of nature into man's service. Such true great- 
 ness 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 ac- 
 cept 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 centu- 
 ries 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 
 
84 NATIONALISM 
 
 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 rep- 
 aration for wrongs done in the past by their own 
 nations and vainly attempt to stem the tide of 
 cowardly injustice that flows unchecked because 
 the resistance is weak and innocuous on the part 
 of the injured. There are these knight-errants of 
 modern Europe who have not lost their faith in 
 the disinterested love of freedom, in the ideals 
 which own no geographical boundaries or national 
 self-seeking. These are there to prove that the 
 fountainhead of the water of everlasting life has 
 not run dry in Europe, and from thence she will 
 have her rebirth time after time. Only there, 
 where Europe is too consciously busy in building 
 up her power, defying her deeper nature and 
 mocking it, she is heaping up her iniquities to the 
 sky crying for God's vengeance and spreading 
 the infection of ugliness, physical and moral, over 
 the face of the earth with her heartless commerce 
 heedlessly outraging man's sense of the beautiful 
 and the good. Europe is supremely good in her 
 
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN 85 
 
 beneficence where her face is turned to all human- 
 ity; and Europe is supremely evil in her malefic 
 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 mechani- 
 cally 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 forever. Yet this 
 we must not regret, as a plant should never re- 
 gret 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 
 
86 NATIONALISM 
 
 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 fac- 
 ing the world Japan has come out the first in the 
 East. She has infused hope in the heart of all 
 Asia. This hope provides the hidden fire which 
 is needed for all works of creation. Asia now 
 feels that she must prove her life by producing 
 living work, she must not lie passively dormant, 
 or feebly imitate the West, in the infatuation of 
 fear or flattery. For this we offer our thanks to 
 this land of the rising sun and solemnly ask her 
 to remember that she has the mission of the 
 East to fulfil. She must infuse the sap of a 
 fuller humanity into the heart of the 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 
 
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN 87 
 
 night, heaven's inspiration. Let the greatness of 
 her ideals become visible to all men like her 
 snow-crowned Fuji rising from the heart of the 
 country into the region of the infinite, supremely 
 distinct from its surroundings, beautiful like a 
 maiden in its magnificent sweep of curve, yet 
 firm and strong and serenely majestic. 
 
 II 
 
 I have travelled in many countries and have 
 met with men of all classes, but never in my 
 travels did I feel the presence of the human so 
 distinctly as in this land. In other great coun- 
 tries, signs of man's power loomed large, and I 
 saw vast organizations which showed efficiency 
 in all their features. There, display and ex- 
 travagance, in dress, in furniture, in costly enter- 
 tainments, are startling. They seem to push you 
 back into a corner, like a poor intruder at a 
 feast ; they are apt to make you envious, or take 
 your breath away with amazement. There, you 
 do not feel man as supreme; you are hurled 
 against a stupendousness of things that alienates. 
 But in Japan, it is not the display of power, or 
 
88 NATIONALISM 
 
 wealth, that is the predominating element. You 
 see everywhere emblems of love and admiration, 
 and not mostly of ambition and greed. You see 
 a people, whose heart has come out and scattered 
 itself in profusion in its commonest utensils of 
 everyday life, in its social institutions, in its 
 manners, which are carefully perfect, and in Its 
 dealings with things which are not only deft, but 
 graceful in every movement. 
 
 What has impressed me most in this country 
 is the conviction that you have realized nature's 
 secrets, not by methods of analytical knowledge, 
 but by sympathy. You have known her language 
 of lines, and music of colours, the symmetry in 
 her irregularities, and the cadence in her freedom 
 of movements ; you have seen how she leads her 
 immense crowds of things yet avoids all frictions ; 
 how the very conflicts in her creations break out 
 in dance and music ; how her exuberance has the 
 aspect of the fulness of self-aban<ionment, and not 
 a mere dissipation of display. You have dis- 
 covered 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, 
 
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN 89 
 
 keeping them in active vigour, yet in repose. 
 You have known that energies of nature save 
 themselves from wearing out by the rhythm of 
 a perfect grace, and that she with the tenderness 
 of her curved lines takes away fatigue from the 
 world's muscles. I have felt that you have been 
 able to assimilate these secrets into your life, and 
 the truth which lies in the beauty of all things 
 has passed into your souls. A mere knowledge 
 of things can be had in a short enough time, 
 but their spirit can only be acquired by centuries 
 of training and self-control. Dominating nature 
 from outside is a much simpler thing than making 
 her your own in love's delight, which is a work 
 of true genius. Your race has shown that genius, 
 not by acquirements, but by creations; 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, 
 
90 NATIONALISM 
 
 your senses keen, and your hands have acquired 
 natural skill. The genius of Europe has given 
 her people the power of organization, which has 
 specially made itself manifest in politics and com- 
 merce and in coordinating scientific knowledge. 
 The genius of Japan has given you the vision of 
 beauty in nature and the power of realizing it in 
 your life. 
 
 All particular civilization is the interpretation 
 of particular human experience. Europe seems 
 to have felt emphatically the conflict of things in 
 the universe, which can only be brought under 
 control by conquest. Therefore she is ever ready 
 for fight, and the best portion of her attention is 
 occupied in organizing forces. But Japan has 
 felt, in her world, the touch of some presence, 
 which has evoked in her soul a feeling of reverent 
 adoration. She does not boast of her mastery of 
 nature, but to her she brings, with infinite care 
 and joy, her offerings of love. Her relationship 
 with the world is the deeper relationship of heart. 
 This spiritual bond of love she has established 
 with the hills of her country, with the sea and 
 the streams, with the forests in all their flowery 
 
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN 91 
 
 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 
 outcome of the necessity of organization for some 
 
92 NATIONALISM 
 
 ulterior purpose, but it is an extension of the 
 family and the obligations of the heart in a wide 
 field of space and time. The ideal of "maitri" 
 is at the bottom of your culture, — "maitri" with 
 men and "maitri" with Nature. And the true 
 expression of this love is in the language of 
 beauty, which is so abundantly universal in this 
 land. This is the reason why a stranger, like 
 myself, instead of feeling envy or humiliation 
 before these manifestations of beauty, these crea- 
 tions 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 
 
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN 93 
 
 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 to its altar sacrifices, 
 as does a savage to the fetich which appears 
 powerful because of its hideousness. Therefore 
 its rivalry to things that are modest and pro- 
 found and have the subtle delicacy of life is to be 
 dreaded. 
 
 I am quite sure that there are men in your 
 country who are not in sympathy with your 
 inherited ideals ; whose object is to gain, and not 
 to grow. They are loud in their boast that they 
 have modernized Japan. While I agree with 
 them so far as to say, that the spirit of the race 
 should harmonize with the spirit of the time, I 
 must warn them that modernizing is a mere 
 affectation of rhodernism, 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 
 
94 NATIONALISM 
 
 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 ap- 
 plication in life, — a mere imitation of our science 
 teachers who reduce it into a superstition absurdly 
 invoking its aid for all impossible purposes. 
 
 Life based upon mere science is attractive to 
 some men, because it has all the characteris- 
 tics of sport; it feigns seriousness, but is not 
 profound. When you go a-hunting, the less pity 
 you have the better; for your one object is 
 to chase the game and kill it, to feel that you 
 are the greater animal, that your method of de- 
 struction is thorough and scientific. And the life 
 of science is that superficial life. It pursues 
 
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN 95 
 
 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 sports- 
 men, 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 weap- 
 ons of self-protection. But this should never be 
 allowed to go beyond her instinct of self-preserva- 
 tion. 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 eager- 
 ness 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 ; there- 
 fore they require protection. In nature, life pro- 
 tects itself within its coverings, which are built 
 with life's own material. Therefore they are in 
 harmony with life's growth, or else when the time 
 comes they easily give way and are forgotten. 
 The living man has his true protection in his 
 
96 NATIONALISM 
 
 spiritual ideals, which have their vital connection 
 with his life and grow with his growth. But, un- 
 fortunately, all his armour is not living, — some of 
 it is made of steel, inert and mechanical. There- 
 fore, while making use of it, man has to be careful 
 to protect himself from its tyranny. If he is 
 weak enough to grow smaller to fit himself to his 
 covering, then it becomes a process of gradual 
 suicide by shrinkage of the soul. And Japan must 
 have a firm faith in the moral law of existence to 
 be able to assert to herself that the Western 
 nations are following that path of suicide, where 
 they are smothering their humanity under the 
 immense weight of organizations in order to keep 
 themselves in power and hold others in subjection. 
 What is dangerous for Japan is, not the imita- 
 tion 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 al- 
 ready showing signs of defeat at the hands of poli- 
 tics. I can see her motto, taken from science, 
 "Survival of the Fittest," writ large at the en- 
 trance of her present-day history — the motto 
 whose meaning is, "Help yourself, and never heed 
 
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN 97 
 
 what it costs to others " ; the motto of the blind 
 man who only believes in what he can touch, be- 
 cause 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 de- 
 partment of our life. And nations, who sedu- 
 lously 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 devo- 
 tion to the obligations of honour, their power of 
 complete self-surrender and fearless acceptance of 
 
98 NATIONALISM 
 
 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 pre- 
 vails, the whole people is being taught from boy- 
 hood to foster hatreds and ambitions by all kinds 
 of means, — by the manufacture of half-truths and 
 untruths in history, by persistent misrepresenta- 
 tion 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 con- 
 tinually brewing evil menace towards neighbours 
 and nations other than their own. This is poison- 
 ing 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, and the en- 
 
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN 99 
 
 mities 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 ab- 
 normal vanity of its own superiority, to teach it to 
 take pride in its moral callousness and ill-begotten 
 wealth, to perpetuate humiliation of defeated na- 
 tions by exhibiting trophies won from war, and us- 
 ing 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 pro- 
 cess of neglect, to ruin your food crops and let 
 them revert to their primitive state of wildness. 
 Likewise the culture, which has so kindly adapted 
 itself to your soil, — so intimate with life, so 
 human, — not only needed tilling and weeding 
 in past ages, but still needs anxious work and 
 watching. What is merely modern — as science 
 
lOO NATIONALISM 
 
 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 civiliza- 
 tion, the state is an abstraction and relationship 
 of men utilitarian. Because it has no root in senti- 
 ments, it is so dangerously easy to handle. Half 
 a century has been enough for you to master this 
 machine ; and there are men among you, whose 
 fondness for It exceeds their love for the living 
 ideals, which were born with the birth of your 
 nation and nursed in your centuries. It is like a 
 child who, in the excitement of his play, imagines 
 he likes his playthings better than his mother. 
 
 Where man is at his greatest, he is unconscious. 
 Your civilization, whose mainspring is the bond 
 of human relationship, has been nourished in the 
 depth of a healthy life beyond reach of prying 
 self-analysis. But a mere political relationship is 
 all conscious ; it is an eruptive inflammation of 
 aggressiveness. It has forcibly burst upon your 
 notice. And the time has come, when you have 
 
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN loi 
 
 to be roused into full consciousness of the truth 
 by which you live, so that you may not be taken 
 unawares. The past has been God's gift to you ; 
 about the present, you must make your own 
 choice. 
 
 So the questions you have to put to yourselves 
 are these, — "Have we read the world wrong, 
 and based our relation to it upon an ignorance of 
 human nature ? Is the instinct of the West right, 
 where she builds her national welfare behind the 
 barricade of a universal distrust of humanity?" 
 
 You must have detected a strong accent of 
 fear, whenever the West has discussed the possi- 
 bility 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 owii 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 
 
I02 NATIONALISM 
 
 the West has let loose upon God's world, come 
 back to threaten herself and goad her into prep- 
 arations 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 domes- 
 ticated 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. 
 
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN 103 
 
 murder and ravishment of innocent women, 
 while the world goes to ruin. We know that, 
 in the early stage of man's moral immaturity, 
 he only feels reverence for the god whose malev- 
 olence 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 offer- 
 ings to the barking dogs of each other with the 
 meat which does not belong to them ; holding 
 down fallen races struggling to stand upon their 
 feet; with their right hands dispensing religion 
 to weaker peoples, while robbing them with their 
 left, — is there anything in this to make us 
 envious .? Are we to bend our knees to the spirit 
 of this nationalism, which is sowing broadcast 
 over all the world seeds of fear, greed, suspicion, 
 unashamed lies of its diplomacy, and unctuous 
 lies of its profession of peace and good-will and 
 universal brotherhood of Man ? Can we have 
 
I04 NATIONALISM 
 
 no doubt in our minds, when we rush to the 
 Western market to buy this foreign product in 
 exchange for our own inheritance ? I am aware 
 how difficult it is to know one's self; and the 
 man who is intoxicated furiously denies his 
 drunkenness ; yet the West herself is anxiously 
 thinking of her problems and trying experiments. 
 But she is like a glutton, who has not the heart 
 to give up his intemperance in eating, and fondly 
 clings to the hope that he can cure his nightmares 
 of indigestion by medicine. Europe is not ready 
 to give up her political inhumanity, with all the 
 baser passions of man attendant upon it; she 
 believes only in modification of systems, and not 
 in change of heart. 
 
 We are willing to buy their machine-made 
 systems, not with our hearts, but with our brains. 
 We shall try them and build sheds for them, but 
 not enshrine them in our homes, or temples. 
 There are races who worship the animals they 
 kill ; we can buy meat from them, when we are 
 hungry, but not the worship which goes with the 
 killing. We must not vitiate our children's minds 
 with the superstition, that business is business, 
 
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN 105 
 
 war is war, politics is politics. We must know 
 that man's business has to be more than mere 
 business, and so have to be his war and politics. 
 You had your own industry in Japan ; how scru- 
 pulously honest and true it was, you can see by 
 its products, — by their grace and strength, their 
 conscientiousness in details, where they can hardly 
 be observed. But the tidal wave of falsehood has 
 swept over your land from that part of the world, 
 where business is business, and honesty is followed 
 in it 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 perpetual intrusion 
 into our lives is considered to be sentimentalism, 
 unworthy of true manliness. 
 And it has come to pass that the children 
 
io6 NATIONALISM 
 
 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 un- 
 diluted utility be modern, beauty is of all ages ; 
 if mean selfishness be modern, the human ideals 
 are no new inventions. And we must know for 
 certain, that however modern may be the pro- 
 ficiency which cripples man for the sake of 
 methods and machines, it will never live to be 
 old. 
 
 But while trying to free our minds from the 
 arrogant claims of Europe and to help ourselves 
 out of the quicksands of our infatuation, we may 
 go to the other extreme and blind ourselves with 
 a wholesale suspicion of the West. The reaction 
 of disillusionment is just as unreal as the first 
 shock of illusion. We must try to come to that 
 normal state of mind, by which we can clearly 
 discern our own danger and avoid it, without 
 
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN 107 
 
 being unjust towards the source of that danger. 
 There is always the natural temptation in us of 
 wishing to pay back Europe in her own coin, 
 and return contempt for contempt and evil for 
 evil. But that again would be to imitate Europe 
 in one of her worst features which comes out in 
 her behaviour to people whom she describes as 
 yellow or red, brown or black. And this is a 
 point on which we in the East have to acknowl- 
 edge our guilt and own that our sin has been as 
 great, if not greater, when we insulted humanity 
 by treating with utter disdain and cruelty men 
 who belonged to a particular creed, colour or 
 caste. It is really because we are afraid of our 
 own weakness, which allows itself to be overcome 
 by the sight of power, that we try to substitute 
 for it another weakness which makes itself blind 
 to the glories of the West. When we truly 
 know the Europe which is great and good, we 
 can effectively save ourselves from the Europe 
 which is mean and grasping. It is easy to be 
 unfair in one's judgment when one is faced with 
 human miseries, — and pessimism is the result 
 of building theories while the mind is suffering. 
 
lo8 NATIONALISM 
 
 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 mechani- 
 cal necessities are ignoring laws that are spiritual 
 and human, — the soul whose sensibilities refuse 
 to be dulled completely by dangerous habits of 
 heedlessness in dealings with races for whom it 
 lacks natural sympathy. The West could never 
 have risen to the eminence she has reached, if 
 her strength were merely the strength of the 
 brute, or of the machine. The divine in her 
 heart is suffering from the injuries inflicted by 
 her hands upon the world, — and from this pain 
 of her higher nature flows the secret balm which 
 will bring healing to those injuries. Time after 
 time she has fought against herself and has un- 
 done the chains, which with her own hands she 
 had fastened round helpless limbs ; and though 
 she forced poison down the throat of a great na- 
 
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN 109 
 
 tion at the point of 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 coward- 
 liness, is not greed, but reverence for unselfish 
 ideals. It would be altogether unjust, both to us 
 and to Europe, to say that she has fascinated the 
 modern Eastern mind by the mere exhibition of 
 her power. Through the smoke of cannons and 
 dust of markets the light of her moral nature has 
 shone bright, and she has brought to us the ideal 
 of ethical freedom, whose foundation lies deeper 
 than social conventions and whose province of 
 activity is world-wide. 
 
 The East has instinctively felt, even through 
 her aversion, that she has a great deal to learn 
 from Europe, not merely about the materials of 
 power, but about its inner source, which is of 
 mind and of the moral nature of man. Europe 
 has been teaching us the higher obligations of 
 public good above those of the family and the 
 clan, and the sacredness of law, which makes 
 
no NATIONALISM 
 
 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 con- 
 science, liberty of thought and action, liberty in 
 the ideals of art and literature. And because 
 Europe has won our deep respect, she has be- 
 come so dangerous for us where she is turbu- 
 lently 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 encroach- 
 ments ; for she has ever carried her own standard 
 of perfection, by which we can measure her falls 
 and gauge her degrees of failure, by which we 
 can call her before her own tribunal and put her 
 to shame, — the shame which is the sign of the 
 true pride of nobleness. 
 
 But our fear is, that the poison may be more 
 powerful than the food, and what is strength in her 
 
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN iii 
 
 to-day may not be the sign of health, but the con- 
 trary; 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 repara- 
 tion. 
 
 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, riv- 
 eted 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 dis- 
 located. A day will come, when it will fall in 
 a heap of ruin and cause serious obstruction to 
 the traffic of the world. Do we not see signs of 
 this even now .'' Does not the voice come to us, 
 through the din of war, the shrielcs of hatred, the 
 wailings of despair, through the churning up of 
 
112 NATIONALISM 
 
 the unspeakable filth which has been accumulat- 
 ing 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 trea- 
 son against heaven, must totter and fall with a 
 crash, weighed down by its own bulk, its flag 
 kissing the dust, its light extinguished ? My 
 brothers, when the red light of conflagration 
 sends up its crackle of laughter to the stars, keep 
 your faith upon those stars and not upon the fire 
 of destruction. For when this conflagration con- 
 sumes itself and dies down, leaving its memorial 
 in ashes, the eternal light will again shine in the 
 East, — the East which has been the birth-place 
 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 
 
NATIONALISM IN JAPAN 113 
 
 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 to be 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 senti- 
 ments, — that, after the forgetfulness of his own 
 divinity, man will remember again that heaven is 
 
114 NATIONALISM 
 
 always in touch with his world, which can never 
 be abandoned for good to the hounding wolves 
 of the modern era, scenting human blood and 
 howling to the skies. 
 
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 
 
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 
 
 Our real problem in India is not political. It 
 is social. This is a condition not onl7 prevailing 
 in India, but among all nations. I do not be- 
 lieve in an exclusive political interest. Politics 
 in the West have dominated Western ideals, and 
 we in India are trying to imitate you. We have 
 to remember that in Europe, where peoples had 
 their racial unity from the beginning, and where 
 natural resources were insufficient for the in- 
 habitants, 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 prob- 
 lems. In former days they organized and 
 
 / "7 
 
Il8 NATIONALISM 
 
 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 Red Indian and the Negro ?" For you have 
 not got over your attitude of caste toward them. 
 You have used violent methods to keep aloof 
 from other races, but until you have solved the 
 
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 119 
 
 question here in America, you have no right to 
 question India. 
 
 In spite of our great difficulty, however, India 
 has done something. She has tried to make an 
 adjustment of races, to acknowledge the real 
 differences between them where these exist, and 
 yet seek for some basis of unity. This basis has 
 come through our saints, like Nanak, Kabir, 
 Chaitnaya and others, preaching one God to all 
 races of India. 
 
 In finding the solution of our problem we shall 
 have helped to solve the world problem as well. 
 What India has been, the whole world is now. 
 The whole world is becoming one country through 
 scientific facility. And the moment is arriving 
 when you also must find a basis of unity which is 
 not political. If India can offer to the world her 
 solution, it will be a contribution to humanity. 
 There is only one history — the history of man. 
 All national histories are merely chapters in the 
 larger one. And we are content in India to suffer 
 for such a great cause. 
 
 Each individual has his self-love. Therefore 
 his brute instinct leads him to fight with others 
 
I20 NATIONALISM 
 
 in the sole pursuit of his self-interest. But man 
 has also his higher instincts of sympathy and 
 mutual help. The people who are lacking in 
 this higher moral power and who therefore cannot 
 combine in fellowship with one another must 
 perish or live in a state of degradation. Only 
 those peoples have survived and achieved civiliza- 
 tion who have this spirit of cooperation strong 
 in them. So we find that from the beginning of 
 history men had to choose between fighting with 
 one another and combining, between serving 
 their own interest or the common interest of all. 
 In our early history when the geographical 
 limits of each country and also the facilities of 
 communication were small, this problem was 
 comparatively small in dimension. It was suffi- 
 cient for men to develop their sense of unity 
 within their area of segregation. In those days 
 they combined among themselves and fought 
 against others. But it was this moral spirit of 
 combination which was the true basis of their 
 greatness, and this fostered their art, science and 
 religion. At that early time the most important 
 fact that man had to take count of was the fact 
 
NATIONALISM IN INDIA I2I 
 
 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 differ- 
 ent groups of peoples shall go on fighting with one 
 another or find out some true basis of reconcilia- 
 tion and mutual help ; whether it will be inter- 
 minable competition or cooperation. 
 
 I have no hesitation in saying that those who 
 are gifted with the moral power of love and vision 
 of spiritual unity, who have the least feeling of 
 enmity against aliens, and the sympathetic in- 
 sight to place themselves in the position of others 
 will be the fittest to take their permanent place 
 in the age that is lying before us, and those who 
 are constantly developing their instinct of fight 
 and intolerance of aliens will be eliminated. For 
 this is the problem before us, and we have to prove 
 our humanity by solving it through the help of 
 our higher nature. The gigantic organizations 
 
122 NATIONALISM 
 
 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 the living humanity they will seriously 
 impede our freedom in the larger life of a higher 
 civilization. 
 
 During the evolution of the Nation the moral 
 culture of brotherhood was limited by geographi- 
 cal boundaries, because at that time those boun- 
 daries were true. Now they have become imagi- 
 nary lines of tradition divested of the qualities 
 of real obstacles. So the time has come when 
 man's moral nature must deal with this great 
 fact with all seriousness or perish. The first 
 impulse of this change of circumstance has been 
 the churning up of man's baser passions of greed 
 and cruel hatred. If this persists indefinitely and 
 armaments go on exaggerating themselves to un- 
 imaginable absurdities, and machines and store- 
 houses envelop this fair earth with their dirt and 
 smoke and ugliness, then it will end in a confla- 
 gration of suicide. Therefore man will have to 
 exert all his power of love and clarity of vision to 
 
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 123 
 
 make another great moral adjustment which will 
 comprehend the whole world of men and not 
 merely the fractional groups of nationality. The 
 call has come to every individual in the present 
 age to prepare himself and his surroundings for 
 this dawn of a new era when man shall discover 
 his soul in the spiritual unity of all human beings. 
 
 If it is given at all to the West to struggle out 
 of these tangles of the lower slopes to the spiritual 
 summit of humanity, then I cannot but think 
 that it is the special mission of America to fulfil 
 this hope of God and man. You are the country 
 of expectation, desiring something else than what 
 is. Europe has her subtle habits of mind and her 
 conventions. But America, as yet, has come to 
 no conclusions. I realize how much America is 
 untrammelled by the traditions of the past, and 
 I can appreciate that experimentalism is a sign of 
 America's youth. The foundation of her glory 
 is in the future, rather than in the past; and if 
 one is gifted with the power of clairvoyance, one 
 will be able to love the America that is to be. 
 
 America is destined to justify Western civili- 
 zation to the East. Europe has lost faith in 
 
124 NATIONALISM 
 
 humanity, and has become distrustful and sickly, 
 America, on the other hand, is not pessimistic or 
 blase. You know, as a people, that there is such 
 a thing as a better and a best ; and that knowl- 
 edge 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 
 it and brings an exultation that is misleading. 
 Europe has gradually grown hardened in her 
 pride of 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 
 
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 125 
 
 the wisdom that the East has stored for cen- 
 turies. 
 
 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 its disadvantages when you com- 
 pared your nomadic restlessness with the settled 
 traditions of Europe — the Europe which can 
 show her picture of greatness to the best advan- 
 tage 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 trum- 
 pet call to all peoples of the world across an un- 
 limited future, this very freedom of detachment 
 will enable you to accept its invitation and to 
 achieve the goal for which Europe began her 
 journey but lost herself midway. For she was 
 tempted out of her path by her pride of power and 
 greed of possession. 
 
 Not merely your freedom from habits of mind 
 in the individuals but also the freedom of your 
 history from all unclean entanglements fits you 
 in your career of holding the banner of civiliza- 
 tion of the future. All the great nations of 
 
126 NATIONALISM 
 
 Europe have their victims in other parts of the 
 world. This not only deadens their moral sym- 
 pathy but also their intellectual sympathy, which 
 is so necessary for the understanding of races 
 which are different from one's own. English- 
 men can never truly understand India because 
 their minds are not disinterested with regard to 
 that country. If you compare England with 
 Germany or France you will find she has produced 
 the smallest number of scholars who have studied 
 Indian literature and philosophy with any amount 
 of sympathetic insight or thoroughness. This 
 attitude of apathy and contempt is natural where 
 the relationship is abnormal and founded upon 
 national selfishness and pride. But your history 
 has been disinterested and that is why you have 
 been able to help Japan in her lessons in Western 
 civilization and that is why China can look upon 
 you with her best confidence in this her darkest 
 period of danger. In fact you are carrying all 
 the responsibility of a great future because you 
 are untrammelled by the grasping miserliness of a 
 past. Therefore of all countries of the earth 
 America has to be fully conscious of this future, 
 
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 127 
 
 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 the idolatry of 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 gain truly their India 
 by fighting against that education which teaches 
 them that a country is greater than the ideals of 
 humanity. 
 
 The educated Indian at present is trying to 
 absorb some lessons from history contrary to the 
 
128 NATIONALISM 
 
 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 there- 
 fore lies in her history. We, in India, must make 
 up our minds that we cannot borrow other 
 people's history, and that if we stifle our own, 
 we are committing suicide. When you borrow 
 things that do not belong to your life, they only 
 serve to crush your life. 
 
 And therefore I believe that it does India no 
 good to compete with Western civilization in its 
 own field. But we shall be more than 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 
 
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 129 
 
 our deeper nature and change our direction of 
 life. Before we accept them and pay their value 
 by selling our own inheritance, we must pause and 
 think deeply. In man's history there come ages 
 of fireworks which dazzle us by their force and 
 movement. They laugh not only at our modest 
 household lamps but also at the eternal stars. 
 But let us not for that provocation be precipitate 
 in our desire to dismiss our lamps. Let us 
 patiently bear our present insult and realize that 
 these fireworks have splendour but not perma- 
 nence, because of the extreme explosiveness 
 which is the cause of their power, and also of 
 their exhaustion. They are spending a fatal 
 quantity of energy and substance compared to 
 their gain and production. 
 
 Anyhow our ideals have been evolved through 
 our own history and even if we wished we could 
 only make poor fireworks of them, because their 
 materials are different from yours, as is also their 
 moral purpose. If we cherish the desire of pay- 
 ing our all for buying a political nationality it 
 will be as absurd as if Switzerland had staked her 
 existence in her ambition to build up a navy 
 
130 NATIONALISM 
 
 powerful enough to compete with that of Eng- 
 land. The mistake that we make is in thinking 
 that man's channel of greatness is only one — the 
 one which has made itself painfully evident for 
 the time being by its depth of insolence. 
 
 We must know for certain that there is a future 
 before us and that future is waiting for those who 
 are rich in moral ideals and not in mere things. 
 And it is the privilege of man to work for fruits 
 that are beyond his immediate reach, and to 
 adjust his life not in slavish conformity to the 
 examples of some present success or even to his 
 own prudent past, limited in its aspiration, but 
 to an infinite future bearing in its heart the ideals 
 of our highest expectations. 
 
 We must, however, know it is providential 
 that the West has come to India. Yet, some one 
 must show the East to the West, and convince 
 the West that the East has her contribution to 
 make in the history of civilization. India is no 
 beggar of the West. And yet even though the 
 West may think she is, I am not for thrusting off 
 Western civilization and becoming segregated in 
 our independence. Let us have a deep associa- 
 
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 131 
 
 tion. If Providence wants England to be the 
 channel of that communication, of that deeper 
 association, I am willing to accept it with all 
 humility. I have great faith in human nature, 
 and I think the West will find its true mission. 
 I speak bitterly of Western civilization when I 
 am conscious that it is betraying its trust and 
 thwarting its own purpose. The West must not 
 make herself a curse to the world by using her 
 power for her own selfish needs, but by teaching 
 the ignorant and helping the weak, by saving 
 herself from the worst danger that the strong is 
 liable to incur by making the feeble to 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 or- 
 ganized power. This organization incessantly 
 keeps up the insistence of the population on be- 
 
132 NATIONALISM 
 
 coming strong and efficient. But this strenuous 
 effort after strength and efficiency drains man's 
 energy from his higher nature where he is self- 
 sacrificing and creative. For thereby man's 
 power of sacrifice is diverted from his ultimate 
 object, which is moral, to the maintenance of 
 this organization, which is mechanical. Yet in 
 this he feels all the satisfaction of moral exalta- 
 tion and therefore becomes supremely dangerous 
 to humanity. He feels relieved of the urging of 
 his conscience when he can transfer his responsi- 
 bility to this machine which is the creation of his 
 intellect and not of his complete moral per- 
 sonality. By this device the people which loves 
 freedom perpetuates slavery in a large por- 
 tion 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 in receiving its 
 deserts ; men who are honest can blindly go 
 on robbing others of their human rights for self- 
 aggrandizement, all the while abusing the de- 
 prived for not deserving better treatment. We 
 
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 133 
 
 have seen in our everyday life even small organiza- 
 tions of business and profession produce callous- 
 ness of feeling in men who are not naturally bad, 
 and we can well imagine what a moral havot 
 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 partic- 
 ular thing which for years has been at the bottom 
 of India's troubles. And inasmuch as we have 
 been ruled and dominated by a nation that is 
 strictly political in its attitude, we have tried to 
 develop within ourselves, despite our inheritance 
 from the past, a belief in our eventual political 
 destiny. 
 
 There are different parties in India, with differ- 
 ent 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 our history of political 
 agitation in India there was not that conflict 
 
134 NATIONALISM 
 
 between parties which there is to-day. In that 
 time there was a party known as the Indian Con- 
 gress; 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 the Municipal gov- 
 ernment. 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 our duties which by right are ours, though in 
 the teeth of persecution; winning moral victory 
 at every step, by our failure, and suffering. We 
 must show those who are over us that we have the 
 strength of moral power in ourselves, the power 
 to suffer for truth. Where we have nothing to 
 show, we only have to beg. It would be mis- 
 chievous if the gifts we wish for were granted to 
 us right now, and I have told my countrymen, 
 time and time 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. 
 
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 135 
 
 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 would we do if, for any 
 reason, England was driven away ? We should 
 simply be victims for other nations. The same 
 social weaknesses would prevail. The thing we, 
 in India, have to think of is this — to remove 
 those social customs and ideals which have gen- 
 erated 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. 
 
136 NATIONALISM 
 
 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 prob- 
 lem 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 re- 
 ceptacle. 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 adventi- 
 tiously one, has all along suffered from the loose- 
 ness of its diversity and the feebleness of its 
 unity. A true unity is like a round globe, it 
 rolls on, carrying its burden easily ; but diversity 
 is a many-cornered thing which has to be dragged 
 and pushed with all force. Be it said to the 
 credit of India that this diversity was not her 
 own creation ; she has had to accept it as a fact 
 from the beginning of her history. In America 
 and Australia, Europe has simplified her problem 
 by almost exterminating the original population. 
 Even in the present age this spirit of extermina- 
 
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 137 
 
 tion is making itself manifest, by inhospitably 
 shutting out aliens, through 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 try- 
 ing experiments in evolving a social unity within 
 which all the different peoples could be held to- 
 gether, yet fully enjoying the freedom of main- 
 taining their own differences. The tie has been 
 as loose as possible, yet as close as the circum- 
 stances permitted. This has produced some- 
 thing like a United States of a social federation, 
 whose common name is Hinduism. 
 
 India had felt that diversity of races there must 
 be and should be, whatever may be its drawback, 
 and you can never coerce nature into your narrow 
 limits of convenience without paying one day very 
 dearly for it. In this India was right ; but what she 
 failed to realize was that in human beings differ- 
 ences are not like the physical barriers of moun- 
 tains, fixed forever — they are fluid with life's 
 
138 NATIONALISM 
 
 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 all ceremony the 
 magnificent cage of countless compartments that 
 she has manufactured. 
 
 The same thing happened where she tried to 
 ward off the collisions of trade interests. She 
 associated different trades and professions with 
 different castes. It had the effect of allaying 
 for good the interminable jealousy and hatred of 
 competition — the competition which breeds cru- 
 
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 139 
 
 elty 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 dis- 
 cern is that in her caste system India in all serious- 
 ness 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 in this India has 
 not achieved a full measure of success. But this 
 you must also concede, that the West, being more 
 favorably situated as to homogeneity of races, 
 has never given her attention to this problem, 
 and whenever confronted with it she has tried to 
 make it easy by ignoring it altogether. And 
 this is the source of her anti-Asiatic agitations for 
 depriving the aliens of 'their right to earn their 
 honest living on these shores. In most of your 
 colonies you only admit them on condition of 
 their accepting the menial position of hewers of 
 wood and drawers of water. Either you shut 
 your doors against the aliens or reduce them 
 
I40 NATIIONALISM 
 
 into slavery. And this is your solution of the 
 problem of race-conflict. Whatever may be its 
 merits you will have to admit that it does not 
 spring from the higher impulses of civilization, 
 but from the lower passions of greed and hatred. 
 You say this is human nature — and India also 
 thought she knew human nature when she 
 strongly barricaded her race distinctions by the 
 fixed barriers of social gradations. But we 
 have found out to our cost that human nature is 
 not what it seems, but what it is in truth ; which 
 is in its infinite possibilities. And when we in 
 our blindness insult humanity for its ragged 
 appearance it sheds its disguise to disclose to us 
 that we have insulted our God. The degradation 
 which we cast upon others in our pride or self- 
 interest degrades our own humanity — and this 
 is the punishment which is most terrible because 
 we do not detect it till it is too late. 
 
 Not only in your relation with aliens but also 
 with the different sections of your own society 
 you have not brought harmony of reconciliation. 
 The spirit of conflict and competition is allowed 
 the full freedom of its reckless career. And be- 
 
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 141 
 
 cause its genesis is the greed of wealth and power 
 it can never come to any other end but a vio- 
 lent death. In India the production of com- 
 modities was brought under the law of social 
 adjustments. Its basis was cooperation having 
 for its object the perfect satisfaction of social 
 needs. But in the West it is guided by the im- 
 pulse 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 length- 
 ening 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 carni- 
 vals of materialism are not the Western peoples 
 spending most of their vital energy in merely 
 
142 NATIONALISM 
 
 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 pur- 
 pose of his nature. But in the economic world 
 our appetites follow no other restrictions but 
 those of supply and demand which can be ar- 
 tificially 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 the economic organization 
 having no moral purpose goads the people into 
 the perpetual pursuit of wealth ; — but has this 
 no wholesome limit ? 
 
 The ideals that strive to take form in social 
 institutions have two objects. One is to regulate 
 our passions and appetites for harmonious de- 
 velopment of man, and the other is to help him 
 in cultivating disinterested love for his fellow- 
 creatures. Therefore society is the expression of 
 
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 143 
 
 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 po- 
 litical freedom does not give us freedom when our 
 mind Is not free. An automobile does not create 
 freedom of movement, because it is a mere ma- 
 chine. 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 power- 
 ful. 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 
 
144 NATIONALISM 
 
 gloat over their extension of dominion over foreign 
 races gradually surrender their own freedom and 
 humanity to the organizations necessary for 
 holding other peoples in slavery. In the so- 
 called free countries the majority of the people 
 are not free, they are driven by the minority to 
 a goal which is not even known to them. This • 
 becomes possible only because people do not 
 acknowledge moral and spiritual freedom as 
 their object. They create huge eddies with their 
 passions and they feel dizzily inebriated with 
 the mere velocity of their whirling movement, 
 taking that to be freedom. But the doom which 
 is waiting to overtake them is as certain as death 
 — for man's truth is moral truth and his eman- 
 cipation 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 po- 
 litical direction. We never dream of blaming 
 
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 145 
 
 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 an- 
 cestors who had the superhuman vision of all 
 eternity, and supernatural power for making 
 infinite provision for future ages. Therefore 
 for all our miseries and shortcomings we hold 
 responsible the historical surprises that burst 
 upon us from outside. This is the reason why 
 we think that our one task is to build a political 
 miracle of freedom upon the quicksand of social 
 slavery. In fact we want to dam up the true 
 course of our own historical stream and only 
 borrow power from the sources of other peoples' 
 history. 
 
 Those of us in India who have come under the 
 delusion that mere political freedom will make 
 us free have accepted their lessons from the West 
 as the gospel truth and lost their faith in hu- 
 manity. We must remember whatever weakness 
 we cherish in our society will become the source 
 of danger in politics. The same inertia which 
 leads us to our idolatry of dead forms in social 
 
146 NATIONALISM 
 
 institutions will create in our politics prison 
 houses with immovable walls. The narrowness 
 of sympathy which makes it possible for us to 
 impose upon a considerable portion of humanity 
 the galling yoke of inferiority will assert itself 
 in our politics in creating 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 dif- 
 ferences, 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 Na- 
 tionality we forget that the nations there do not 
 have that physical repulsion, one for the other, 
 that we have between different castes. Have 
 we an instance in the whole world where a people 
 who are not allowed to mingle their blood shed 
 their blood for one another except by coercion 
 or for mercenary purposes ? And can we ever 
 
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 147 
 
 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 dif- 
 ference 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 free- 
 dom so valuable that we should be willing to 
 sacrifice for its sake our moral freedom ? 
 
 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 
 
148 NATIONALISM 
 
 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 ministration. 
 Therefore they think that all their energies need 
 their only scope in the political field. It is like 
 a man whose legs have become shrivelled and 
 useless, trying to delude himself that these limbs 
 have grown still because they have attained 
 their ultimate salvation, and all that is wrong 
 about him is the shortness of his sticks. 
 
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 149 
 
 So much for the social and the political regen- 
 eration of India. Now we come to her indus- 
 tries, and I am very often asked whether there 
 is in India any industrial regeneration since the 
 advent of the British Government. It must 
 be remembered that at the beginning of the 
 British rule in India our industries were suppressed 
 and since then we have not met with any real 
 help or encouragement to enable us to make a 
 stand against the monster commercial organiza- 
 tions of the world. The nations have decreed 
 that we must remain purely an agricultural 
 people, even forgetting the use of arms for all 
 time to come. Thus India is being turned into 
 so many predigested morsels of food ready to be 
 swallowed at any moment by any nation which 
 has even the most rudimentary set of teeth in 
 its head. 
 
 India, therefore has very little outlet for her 
 industrial originality. I personally do not be- 
 lieve 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 
 
I50 NATIONALISM 
 
 reveal their truth in hideousness, but in beauty. 
 Beauty is the signature which the Creator stamps 
 upon his works when he is satisfied with them. 
 All our products that insolently ignore the laws 
 of perfection and are unashamed in their display 
 of ungainliness bear the perpetual weight of 
 God's displeasure. So far as your commerce 
 lacks the dignity of grace it is untrue. Beauty 
 and her twin brother Truth require leisure, 
 and self-control for their growth. But the greed 
 of gain has no time or limit to its capaciousness. 
 Its one object is to produce and consume. It 
 has neither pity 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 
 
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 151 
 
 of piled-up things it insults the higher instincts 
 of man, banishing beauty and noble sentiments 
 from its surroundings, we submit. For we in 
 our meanness have accepted bribes from its hands 
 and our imagination has grovelled in the dust 
 before its immensity of flesh. 
 
 But its unwieldiness itself 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 tram- 
 pling 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 de- 
 
152 NATIONALISM 
 
 riding his human sentiments into shame because 
 they are apt to stand in the way of his machines. 
 
 In our mythology we have the legend that 
 the man who performs penances for attaining 
 immortality has to meet with temptations sent 
 by Indra, the Lord of the immortals. If he is 
 lured by them he is lost. The West has been 
 striving for centuries after its goal of immortality. 
 Indra has sent her the temptation to try her. 
 It is the gorgeous temptation of wealth. She 
 has accepted it and her civilization of humanity 
 has lost its path in the wilderness of machinery. 
 
 This commercialism with its barbarity of ugly 
 decorations is a terrible menace to all humanity. 
 Because it is setting up the ideal of power over 
 that of perfection. It is making the cult of self- 
 seeking exult in its naked shamelessness. Our 
 nerves are more delicate than our muscles. Things 
 that are the most precious in us are helpless as 
 babes when we take away from them the careful 
 protection which they claim from us for their 
 very preciousness. Therefore when the callous 
 rudeness of power runs amuck in the broad-way 
 of humanity it scares away by its grossness the 
 
NATIONALISM IN INDIA 153 
 
 ideals which we have cherished with the martyr- 
 dom of centuries. 
 
 The temptation which is fatal for the strong 
 is still more so for the weak. And I do not wel- 
 come it in our Indian life even though it be sent 
 by the lord of the Immortals. Let our life be 
 simple in its outer aspect and rich in its inner 
 gain. Let our civilization take its firm stand upon 
 its basis of social cooperation 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 complete- 
 
154 NATIONALISM 
 
 ness in humanity, where poverty does not take 
 away his riches, where defeat may lead him to 
 victory, death to immortality, and in the com- 
 pensation of Eternal Justice those who are the 
 last may yet have their insult transmuted into 
 a golden triumph. 
 
THE SUNSET OF THE CENTURY 
 
THE SUNSET OF THE CENTURY 
 
 (Written in the Bengali on the last day of last 
 century) 
 
 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, 
 And licking it, crunching it, and swallowing it in 
 big morsels, 
 
 It swells and swells 
 IS7 
 
IS8 NATIONALISM 
 
 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. 
 
 Keep watch, India. 
 
 Bring your offerings of worship for that sacred 
 
 sunrise. 
 Let the first hymn of its welcome sound in your 
 
 voice, and sing, 
 "Come, Peace, thou daughter of God's own great 
 
 suffering. 
 Come with thy treasure of contentment, the sword 
 
 of fortitude, 
 
 And meekness crowning thy forehead." 
 
THE SUNSET OF THE CENTURY 159 
 
 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. 
 
 Printed in the United States of America. 
 
'T'HE following pages contain advertisements of 
 Macmillan books by the same author. 
 
THE WORKS OF SIR RABINDRANATH TAGORE 
 Personality 
 
 Preparing 
 
 An interesting series of lectures among which are "What Is 
 Art," "Meditation," "My School," "The Second Birth," and 
 "The World of Personality." 
 
 The Cycle of Spring 
 
 Preparing 
 
 Tagore represents a rare development of dramatic genius, one 
 peculiarly Indian in character. In his plays there is little striv- 
 ing after ordinary stage effects, no bid for a curtain, no holding 
 up of the moment of suspense, in order to force a sensation with 
 which we are so familiar on our American stage. He attains a 
 naturalness of style, a simplicity of mode, a fluidity of movement, 
 which is congenially influenced by the musical affinity of his 
 themes and the leisurely drama of the open air and the courtyard. 
 
 Sacrifice and Other Plays 
 
 Preparing 
 
 A book containing four separate plays consisting of " Sacri- 
 fice," "King and Queen," "The Ascetic," and "Malini." 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 FubliBlierg 64-66 Fifth Avenue New To;k 
 
THE WORKS OF SIR RABINDRANATH TAGORE 
 
 Stray Birds 
 
 Cloth, izmo, ^r.jo 
 Frontispiece in color and decorations by Willy Pogany. 
 
 Here is the kernel of the wisdom and insight of the great 
 Hindu seer in the form of short extracts. These sayings are 
 largely taken from his other works, and are the essence of his 
 Eastern message to the Western world. The frontispiece and 
 decorations by Willy Pogany are beautiful in themselves and en- 
 hance the spiritual significance of this extraordinary book. 
 
 Fruit Gathering 
 
 Cloth, $1.2; and$i.jo 
 Leather, $/.6o and$2.oo 
 
 "Tagore shows us a shining pathway up which we can con- 
 fidentially travel to those regions of wisdom and experience which 
 consciously or unconsciously we try to reach." — Boston Tran- 
 script. 
 
 The Hungry Stones and Other Stories 
 
 Cloth, $i.3S and $1. JO 
 leather, $i.6o and $2.00 
 
 " These short stories furnish a double guarantee of the Hindu 
 Nobel Prize winner's rightful place among the notable literary 
 figures of our time." — New York Globe. 
 
 "Imagination, charm of style, poetry, and depth of feeling 
 without gloominess, characterize this volume of stories of the 
 Eastern poet." — Boston Transcript. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Fubliataera 64-66 Fitth Avenue New York 
 
THE WORKS OF SIR RABINDRANATH TAGORE 
 Chitra: A Play in One Act 
 
 Cloth, $r.oo and $i.^o; leather, $i.6o and$z.oo 
 
 " He has given us the soul of the East disembodied of its sen- 
 suality, and within it shines the most perfect tribute to true 
 womanhood and its claims." — Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
 " The play is told with the simplicity and wonder of imagery 
 always characteristic of Rabindranath Tagore." — Cleveland 
 Plain Dealer. 
 
 The Crescent Moon : Child Poems 
 
 Cloth, %i.2S and $1.^0 ; leather, $i.6o and$z.oo 
 
 "Comes closest to life as we know it and to the spirit of the 
 West. . . . We can accept his lyrics of children in full com- 
 prehension of their worth, even though we have few poets who 
 speak with such understanding." — The Outlook. 
 
 " Tagore is probably the greatest living poet, and this book of 
 child poems has the bloom of all young life upon it faithfully 
 transcribed by genius." — Metropolitan. 
 
 The Gardener 
 
 Cloth, $1.2^ and $/.jo ; leather, $i.6o and %2.oo 
 
 " The very stuff of imagination. . . . Their beauty is as deli- 
 cate as the reflection of the color of a flower." — Westminster 
 Gazette. 
 
 " The verses in this book are far finer and more genuine than 
 even the best in ' Gitanjali.' " — The Daily News (London) . 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 FubliBhers 64-66 Fifth Avenae New York 
 
THE WORKS OF SIR RABINDRANATH TAGORE 
 
 Gitanjali : Song Offerings 
 
 CloiA, $i.zj and $i.jo 
 Leather, $i.6o and $2.00 
 
 "Mr. Tagore's translations are of trance-like beauty." 
 
 — The London Athenceum. 
 
 " These poems are representative of the highest degree of cul- 
 ture, and yet instinct with the simplicity and directness of the 
 dweller on the soil." — New York Sun. 
 
 " . . . it is the essence of all poetry of East and West alike — 
 the language of the soul." — The Indian Magazine and Review. 
 
 Songs of Kabir 
 
 Cloth, $i.zs and tijo 
 Leather, $1.60 and $2.00 
 
 " Wonderfully graphic, conveying the universal thought of the 
 Hindu poet, yet retaining mystic Eastern symbolism in express- 
 ing it." — Baltimore Sun. 
 
 " The trend of Mr. Tagore's mystical genius makes him a pecul- 
 iarly sympathetic interpreter of Kabir's vision and thought, and 
 the book is perhaps one of the most important which that famous 
 Hindu has introduced to the western world." — Hartford Post. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 FuliliBliers 64-66 Fifth Avenue Nev York 
 
THE WORKS OF SIR RABINDRANATH TAGORE 
 
 The King of the Dark Chamber 
 
 Cloth, $i.3J and $1.^0 
 Leather, $i.6o and $2,00 
 
 " The most careless reader can hardly proceed far into these 
 inspired pages without realizing that he is in the presence of holy 
 things — of an allegory of the soul as has not before been told in 
 the English tongue.'' — Chicago Evening Post. 
 
 The Post Office 
 
 Cloth, $1.00 and $r.jo 
 Leather, $i.6o and $3.oo 
 
 "Once more Tagore demonstrates the universality of his 
 genius ; once more he shows how art and true feeling know no 
 racial and religious lines.'' — Kentucky Post. 
 
 Sadhana : The Realization of Life 
 
 Cloth, $1.25 and $1.30 
 Leather, $1.60 and $2.00 
 
 "The broad and sympathetic treatment of the subject should 
 recommend it to intelligent readers of whatever type of re- 
 ligion." — Boston Herald. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New Tork 
 
THE WORKS OF SIR RABINDRANATH TAGORE 
 
 THE NEW BOLPUR EDITION OF 
 "The Standard Edition of Tagore's Works" 
 
 Eaci volume in the Bolpur Edition, cloth, $i.J0 ; leather, $2.00 
 
 This beautiful new edition, named after Tagore's famous school at Bol- 
 pur, India, is a fitting celebration of his recent visit to America. There are 
 ten volumes in the Bolpur Edition, representing Tagore's previously pub- 
 lished poems, plays and essays, and his two new books just issued, " Fruit 
 Gathering," and " The Hungry Stones, and Other Stories." 
 
 The paper, printing and general appearance of the volumes are unusual, 
 carrying out the intention of the publishers to make these books the stand- 
 ard editions of this distinguished poet's works. 
 
 A special design has been made for the covers, the end papers and title 
 pages are in colors, and each volume contains a photogravure frontispiece, 
 one of these from a portrait of Tagore taken during his recent visit to Japan. 
 
 SIR RABINDRANATH TAGORE'S WORKS 
 
 {^Complete in the Bolpur Edition) 
 
 FRUIT GATHERING. (Just published.) A sequel to the famous 
 
 Gitanjali. 
 
 THE HUNGRY STONES, AND OTHER STORIES. (Just 
 
 published.) 
 CHITRA : A Play in One Act. 
 THE CRESCENT MOON : ChUd Poems. 
 THE GARDENER: Love Poems. 
 GITANJALI : Religious Poems. 
 
 THE KING OF THE DARK CHAMBER. A Play. 
 SONGS OF KABIR. 
 SADHANA . The Realization of Life. 
 THE POST OFFICE : A Play. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64-66 Fifth Aveuue New Tork 
 

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