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[Page 225]

WORLD UNITY

A Monthly Magazine for those who seek the world outlook upon present developments of philosophy, science, religion, ethics and the arts

JOHN HERMAN RANDALL, Editor HORACE HOLLEY, Managing Editor HELEN B. MACMILLAN, Business Manager

Contributing Editors C. F. ANSLEY, W. W. ATWOOD, MARY AUSTIN, A. MENDELSOHN BARTHOLDY, BARON BAUDRAN, L. F. DE BEAUFORT, GERRIT A. BENEKER, PIERRE BOVET, HARRY CHARLESWORTH, No POON CHEW, RUDOLPH I. COFFEE, GEORGES DUHAMEL, ANNA B. ECKSTEIN, HAVELOCK ELLIS, AUGUSTE FOREL, C. F. GATES, V. SCHULZE GÄVERNITZ, HELLMUTH VON GERLACH, HERBERT ADAM GIBBONS, KAHLIL GIBRAN, CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN, FRANK H. HANKINS, WILL HAYES, YAMATO ICHICHASHI, RUFUS M. JONES, MORDECAI W. JOHNSON, DAVID STARR JORDAN, SAMUEL LUCAS JOSHI, ERNEST JUDET, VLADIMIR KARAPETOFF, P. W. KUO, RICHARD LEE, HARRY LEVI, ALAIN LOCKE, LOUIS MANN, SIR JAMES MARCHANT, VICTOR MARGUERITTTE, R. H. MARKHAM, ALFRED W. MARTIN, F. S. MARVIN, KIRTLEY F. MATHER, LUCIA AMES MEAD, MARJA GRUNDMANN-KOSCIENSKA, KARIN MICH..ELIS, HERBERT A. MILLER, FRED MERRIFIELD, DHAN GOPAL MUKERJI, IDA MÜLLER, HARRY ALLEN OVERSTREET, DEXTER PERKINS, JOHN HERMAN RANDALL, JR., CHARLES RICHET, FORREST RIED, TH. RUYSSEN, WILLIAM R. SHEPHERD, MARY SIEGRIST, ABBA HILLEL SILVER, ISIDOR SINGER, AUGUSTUS O. THOMAS, GILBERT THOMAS, RUSTUM VAMBÉRY, WALTER WALSH, HANS WEHBERG, M. P. WILLCOCKS, FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT.

Editorial Office:—4 East 12th Street, New York City

WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE is published by WORLD UNITY PUBLISHING CORPORATION, 4 East 12th Street, New York City. MARY RUMSEY MOVIUS, president; HORACE HOLLEY, vice-president; FLORENCE MORTON, treasurer; JOHN HERMAN RANDALL, secretary.

Published monthly, 35 cents a copy, $3.50 a year in the United States, $4.00 in Canada and $4.50 in all other countries (postage included). THE WORLD UNITY PUBLISHING CORPORATION and its editors do not invite unsolicited manuscripts and art material, but welcome correspondence on articles related to the aims and purposes of the magazine. Printed in U. S. A. Contents copyrighted 1928 by WORLD UNITY PUBLISHING CORPORATION. [Page 226]THE World-interest today differs notably from that which gave it enthusiasm and stability in the past, for, within the last thirty years the tempo of the whole world has been enormously accelerated. It is still accelerating, and the technique that we inherited, in whatever art, from a leisured society is not equal to the demands that are now made upon it, and which demands are still incoherent if not unconscious. We must evolve a new technique or we must continue to compose and paint and write in the only form that can deal with an interim situation, or with speed—the lyrical form.

A revival of epic is not to be wished; nor, while the general mind is steeped in what is practically a new element, is such a revival possible. Epic will only deal with matured, with thoroughly absorbed, mental or spiritual cognitions. It comes at the end of an era, and is a summary, or a reduction to mythological form, of all that its era meant. We are at the beginning of an era, and who creates a new world must create a new art to express it. Already a large proportion of the writings that we call classical have lost their authority, and that not by being outmoded. It is not time but change that is consigning these to oblivion. Another mind than that they reckoned with is consigning them to oblivion, and thumbs may be turned down to all that could interest and excite the elite of only a generation ago.

It is almost terrifying to consider upon how slight a basis of agreement and tact are founded all our ideas of art or philosophy or, even, religion, and how small a universal change could transform these out of all recognition. The change that man makes without him is summed in the mind, and must at some time recognize itself. But occultations of whatever nature are not to be over-mourned. The earth is not the poorer for the lost leaves of yesteryear; nor, whatever he seems to lose, will man really suffer a deprivation. The earth, and he—what they have they hold, and all their phases are normal.

—Introduction to Collected Poems, JAMES STEPHENS [Page 227]

MUST IT BE WAR?

The observance of Armistice Day has come to furnish the opportunity for the expression of the hopes and fears that center in the great ideal of World Peace. The newspaper reports of various addresses given in all parts of this country and also in England and France on Armistice Day this year reveal with singular unanimity the general conviction that the immediate future is dark with menace for world peace.

The World Alliance for International Friendship issued an Armistice Day statement declaring cooperative methods must replace "mutual slaughter" if civilization is to survive. "Nothing else that we do as Churches matters much, if another World War shatters civilization altogether—Convinced that narrow nationalism, economic imperialism, racial bitterness, cynical distrust of human nature's potentialities for peace, and all the other causes and abettors of war are still dominant among all the nations, we plead against complacent optimism concerning international affairs. The reality of the danger never was more manifest."

In England, Armistice Day witnessed the opening of an organized campaign by statesmen, newspaper publishers and men of letters to center national attention on disarmament as the only means of preventing a new world war. Viscount Rothermere whose newspapers reach millions of readers daily, and Lord Riddell with one weekly paper of more than three million circulation headed the list of publishers who demanded immediate action by the British government to start disarmament machinery moving.

Lord Riddell said, "We are sitting on a collection of bomb shells and are taking no precautions to prevent an explosion." [Page 228]Viscount Rothermere asserted, "Nine years after the War, Europe is sinking into an attitude of armed expectancy exactly similar to that of 1914."

Mussolini is preparing Italy for a crisis somewhere around 1936, and De Jouvenel of France foresees a crucial moment at approximately the same period. These dates coincide with the completion of Italy's great military program, the evacuation of the Rhineland, France's small military classes due to the low birth rate during the war, and the termination of the Washington naval treaties limiting the battle fleets of the first five powers.

Meantime relations between Britain and Russia are tense. Roumania and Russia are at odds over Bessarabia, and Roumania and Hungary over Transylvania. Italy and Jugoslavia are quarrelling over Albania, and Italy and France over the future of the shores of the Mediterranean. Bulgaria and Greece, Italy and Turkey, Germany and Poland, Poland and Lithuania, Russia and Poland, Austria and her neighbors, Jugoslavia and Bulgaria,—not to mention the civil strife in China and the increasing hostility of "Latin America" toward the United States,—are all struggling uncomfortably near the precipice at the bottom of which waits war.

To quote Mr. Wells, it is indeed "a race between education and catastrophe—which for us of the present generation means nothing less than a re-education that shall lead to a speedy revision of all our ideas as to the kind of a world into which we have come, bringing the clear conviction that the old ideas, ideals and methods are no longer adequate to this new world and its complex problems and must give way to the new spirit that seeks for unity and co-operation and understanding between races and nations and men.

Can we awaken in the people of all lands the new intelligence that sees and understands the world in which we are living as it really is? And through this intelligence can we create the consciousness of the new human relations into which we have come on this planet that shall find expression increasingly in the spirit of unity and the will to peace? On the answers to these questions hangs the immediate future of humanity. [Page 229]

THE VEXED PROBLEM OF INDIAN UNITY

by KENNETH JAMES SAUNDERS Department of History of Religion, Pacific School of Religion

DURING a recent visit to India, I had occasion to discuss this subject with Indians and Englishmen. It had been raised once more by a message to the people of India from Lord Birkenhead, the new Secretary of State. “India,” he said, “is not a nation.”

Many English officials were in agreement with him, though some felt the remark was uncalled for, and many pointed to Hindu-Mohammedan riots, of which several score had taken place in the past year. The Indians I met were naturally indignant: and only one or two thoughtfully distinguished between a cultural nationhood and a political expression of it. Dr. Tagore agrees that India is not a nation, and rejoices that so far she has not developed what he considers to be a disease of our time. On the whole I got the impression that even the small group of Indians who have been educated in the western sense had not thought this matter through to any conclusions. The only Indian writer who has, as far as I know, dealt systematically with it, is Dr. Radhakumud Mookerji in his “The Fundamental Unity of India”, and this deals almost entirely with the question of the geographical basis of unity as found in ancient Hindu sources. To it Mr. Ramsay McDonald contributed a sympathetic preface, which reveals a much more intimate knowledge of India than Lord Birkenhead can claim.

To illustrate the difficulty of the theme one may glance at the question of language. The Hindu scholar argues that behind the babel of tongues—there are about one hundred and fifty languages and over five hundred spoken dialects—there is only one classical tongue in which India’s great literature is written. There are also [Page 230]two great linguae francae, Hindi in the north, and Tamil in the south, representing the invading Aryans on the one hand, and the Dravidian peoples on the other. Here are real bonds of union. Yet the Indian National Congress has been accustomed to use the English language as one common to educated men of these two great racial elements of the population, and it is an unpalatable fact to the more passionate nationalist that English has indeed become a means to unity, without which North and South can hardly understand one another.

It is even less pleasing to be told that it is British rule which at present holds together Hindus, of whom there are some two hundred and thirty million, and Mohammedans, of whom there are over sixty million. English writers emphasize this tremendous religious barrier between the two communities; but there is of course no truth in the cynical charge that responsible officials try and deepen it. There is far too much at stake, not only local riots and destruction of property and life, but a possible pan-Islamic revolt which no sane man would wish to contemplate, nor dare to provoke. But an attitude of laissez-faire is not enough.

The true Indian nationalist and the sincere British official will alike seek those things which can bring Hindu and Mohammedan together, and while they do not shut their eyes to the very patent fact of the gulf between them, will seek the foundation-stones upon which an enduring bridge may be built. What, then, are the facts which make for unity?

"The one clear unity which India has possessed throughout history has been geographical," says Sir Halford Mackinder, in the Cambridge History of India, and this may be accepted, if it is put in a less negative form. "India, encircled as she is by seas and mountains, is indisputably a geographical unity, and as such is rightly designated by one name," says Dr. Vincent Smith in the Oxford History.

Here, then, is a fact of great importance. India, which is more than ten times the size of the British Isles and is often called a sub-continent, with all its varieties of climate and physical conformation, is one land and has been recognized down the ages as [Page 231]

THE VEXED PROBLEM OF INDIAN UNITY

one. "In no other part of the world, unless perhaps in South America, are the physical features on a grander scale. Yet nowhere else are they more simply combined into a single natural region," says the first of the two writers we have quoted.

With this fact and closely related to it goes another, even more important in the building up of an Indian nation. "The real unity of India lies in its religious thought," says Dr. Das Gupta.* "In this there has been amazing continuity. The prayers that a Brahmin now says three times a day are the same selections of Vedic verses as were used. . . two or three thousand years ago." This is a true statement, if we remember that outside this religious culture there lie at present two vast communities, each numbering about one-fifth of the population, the Mohammedans on the one hand and the Panchamas, outcasts, on the other. For the one group the great bulk of this religious thought is a despised superstition; for the other, demon-worshippers for the most part, it is an unattainable culture from which they are most rigidly debarred. There are other smaller communities such as the very influential Parsis, the rapidly growing Christian church, and other groups for whom this ancient culture of India means little more, yet who are increasingly prepared to study it and to claim certain parts of it as their own. That even Mohammedans may come to take a different attitude to it we shall see below.

Here, then, with these tremendous exceptions, India possesses a real unity which has its roots far back in the past, and which claims the careful and sympathetic study of all who wish her well, and desire to know what is the special contribution which she has to make to the life of the world. There are not wanting among Western scholars extravagant enthusiasts on the one side and captious critics on the other. But we have moved a long way since Macaulay dismissed this ancient culture in a few harsh sentences, and since, on the other hand, Schopenhauer claimed to find in it the light in which he hoped to live and die. Indian religion and philosophy, Indian painting and sculpture, even Indian drama and mathematics are becoming better known in the West,

• intury of Indian Philosophy, p. 11.

[Page 232]though they have had to wait too long for this recognition. In the Far East they have been longer known and valued, and at times have been recognized as a real bond uniting the peoples of Asia. It is a remarkable fact that the Chinese, even more ancient and proud than the Indians, accepted so much from India, and handed it on as a precious gift to Korea and Japan. As we study the spread of this Indian culture as far south as Java, where it produced so noble a monument as Borobodur, as far north as Chinese Turkestan where it is seen blending with other cultures in frescoes wonderfully preserved, and as far east as Horiuji where it can be traced setting a standard for the great things of Japanese ar we realize how great was its influence and how continuous its growth. Too much has been made of the debt of Indian art to Greece, and as for the religion and philosophy which inspired it, it is distinctively Indian. In this region it was more probably India which influenced Greece, and through Greece the Western world.

The forces which thus spread Indian culture throughout the neighbouring lands were centripetal as well as centrifugal; they united India within her own boundaries. Thus, under great Buddhist emperors like Asoka, she was united though for a brief moment, from the Himalayas as far south as the modern Nellore, and from the Ocan on the west to the Ganges Delta on the east. During Buddhist times great pilgrimages began, and this process continued until the pilgrim roads of the Hindus formed a vast network. She was not only the Motherland of these pilgrims, but their Holy Land, and her great forests, her broad rivers, her palm-fringed sea-shore, above all the great snowy range of the Himalayas, were loved and venerated with religious awe. "The pilgrim was equally at home among the snows of Badrinath or on the burning sands of Rama's Bridge." The Englishman returning from exile may realize something of what the Indian pilgrim feels for these holy places if he will make the journey from the South Coast on foot along the ancient Pilgrim Way to Canterbury-and if, like the Indian he is religious as well as patriotic. India is not only a beloved Motherland rich in varied beauty, she is the birthplace of his only literature, the cradle and home of the gods. [Page 233]

THE VEXED PROBLEM OF INDIAN UNITY

Let us watch this crowd of high-caste pilgrims saluting the sun with the ancient Vedic prayer, the gayatri: May we attain the radiance of the Sun The Life-giving god. Be thou our Guide, And quicken thou our devotion.

Then, dressed in clean white garments, they pass solemnly into the temple of Vishnu, an ancient Sun-god, now thought of as the immanent sustainer of the world, incarnate as need arises. Passing under its richly carved Eastern portal, they study the claborate sculptures thrown into strong relief as the fierce Indian sun mounts the heavens. Here are his three strides, represented in bold relief, and here he is found as the young and attractive cowherd, Krishna, fluting, with his cattle about him. Or here are scenes from the Mahabharata, the Great Epic, which tells of his deeds as hero and demi-god, and at last in the section known as the Lord's Song, or Bhagavad Gita, he is revealed as the Eternal dwelling in time and saving those who accept him as Friend. They study these, passing sunwise through the temple court, with right hands always towards the central shrine, and as they enter this at last they are hushed and expectant. There, towering in the gloom, is the vast figure of Vishnu, to whom they offer their fruit and flowers. Then another ancient Vedic verse is chanted by the Brahmin, the Purusa Sukta, which has been called the charter of caste, and which describes the origin of the four great castes from the head, chest, thighs, and feet of the primitive male. Here, then, in the Vaishnavite Holy of Holies sounds the tremendous claim that the time-honored social structure of India is of divine origin. This is the Dharma of the Hindu. It is what makes him a Hindu. Today even social reformers like Mr. Gandhi accept it as a scientific and essential ordering of the lives of his fellow countrymen, and seek only to purge it of its abuses. Indian society in fact is ruled by the ancient religious beliefs which have come down from the Rishis, or seers of old, and a man is a Hindu because he is born into this vasi social organism, with its rigid rules as to the ordering of every detail of life.

This, for good or evil, is a tremendous factor in Indian life, [Page 234]at once an element of unity and of disunion. One of the most stable forms of human society, it may also be one of the most rigid. How can it be so purged of its abuses as to be made a strong factor in Indian unity? This is the question which Indian thinkers such as Tagore and Gandhi are asking. The caste system, they say, is India’s attempt to solve the race-problem; “India,” says Dr. Tagore, “has tried to make an adjustment of races, to acknowledge the real differences where they exist, and yet seek for some basis of unity.” Yet it has grown into a rigid framework: “By squeezing human beings in the grip of an inelastic system and forcibly holding them fixed, we have ignored the laws of life and growth.”*

The caste-system had its origin in color and succeeded for a time in adjusting the scales between the white invaders and the dark aborigines. But at what a cost to both! The religion of the invaders was forced to recognize the dark gods of pre-Aryan India. Let us take a brief glance at a shrine at one of these earth-goddesses of the aboriginal cults. On the outskirts of the great city of Calcutta, which is as typical of British rule as Benares is of the Hindu kingdoms and Delhi of the Empire of the Moguls, is a shrine representing a cult far older than Christianity, Mohammedanism, or even Hinduism. It is the shrine of Kali, worshipped by untold millions as Mother. Here is a remnant of ancient fire-sacrifices which came in with the Aryans; here a crowd sits and listens to the recital of the Vedas; and here are sacrificial priests at their horrid task in a court-yard running with the blood of kids and goats. And at the center of all this is a dark and narrow shrine filled with eager crowds struggling furiously to get a glimpse of the hideous image with chaplet of skulls and protruding tongue, herself a little ashamed as she dances upon her prostrate lord. It is easy to be impatient, difficult to understand how cultured people can keep this primitive cult alive; yet I have seen a Brahmin scholar of profound learning and great insight fall prostrate before this hideous figure, and have reflected that in Ephesus itself the Greeks adopted the Earth-Mother of an earlier civilization, with her orgiastic cult, her eunuchs, and her very ugly image.

• Creative Unity, p. 134.

[Page 235]ancient culture of India then is a compromise between Aryan, Dravidian, and aboriginal elements, and it has filtered down amongst her humblest villagers. I went recently to a great Mela, a religious fair in Bengal. As our little bullock cart bumped over the mud roads and into deep ditches, my companion, a noted Sanskrit scholar, remarked that neither the roads nor the wagons had changed since the Aryan invaders poured into India in the dim dawn of history. There must have been some thirty thousand pilgrims gathered by the side of a broad shallow river, and towards evening we gathered under a great banyan and listened as the village minstrel sang ecstatic love songs to Krishna. In this way, as Dr. Tagore has shown, the thought of India is spread amongst her people, and he has described for us a scene which suggests that this culture is known and appreciated also among Mohammedans in some parts of Bengal.

"Once when I was on a visit to a small Bengali village, mostly inhabited by Mohammedan cultivators, the villagers entertained me with an opera performance, the literature of which belonged to an obsolete religious sect that had wide influence centuries ago. Though the religion itself is dead, its voice still continues preaching its philosophy to a people, who, in spite of their different culture, are not tired of listening. . . . Under a tattered canopy held on bamboo poles and lighted by a few smoking kerosene lamps, the village crowd, occasionally interrupted by howls of jackals in the neighboring paddy fields, attended with untired interest, till the small hours of the morning, the performance of a drama that discussed the ultimate meaning of all things in a seemingly incongruous setting of dance, music, and humorous dialogue."*

Mohammedans, then, are to some extent familiar with Hindu culture. Nor are the outcasts wholly outside it. I remember a striking scene in an Indian cavalry camp in France. After the performance of a spirited Urdu version of the Merchant of Venice, the sweepers staged a Hindi rendering of the old Indian drama, Harischandra, with such feeling that the audience was moved to

• The Philosophy of Our People, in The Modern Review.

[Page 236]tears. They had no books with them, and they knew this old story by heart—it and the epics and legends are now common to all.

It is not impossible, then, that the real element of unity which already exists in Indian thought may be made the basis for a united Indian nation. The Mohammedan community, difficult as the task is, must face it and make this ancient culture its own. Already it has become largely Indian, and a considerable part of it is built up of converts from Hinduism who should not find it impossible to go back, at any rate to the epics, and to the old folklore, even if they are necessarily intolerant of the gods and ritual of the country. The Mogul emperors succeeded to some extent in the difficult task of blending Hindu and Mohammedan cultures, as is evident in their buildings at Delhi, Agra, Ahmedabad, and other cities.

Yet few Hindus wish to go back to a Muslim rule and there are many Mohammedan leaders who claim that they are Mohammedans first and Indians afterwards. Those of India's great religious leaders who have preached one God for all India, Kabir, Nanak, Rammohun Roy, and Tagore in our own day, have met with but partial success.

In spite of their greatest teachers from Sakyamuni to Gandhi, the attitude of caste Hindus towards the outcasts has changed but little, and today the vast majority of Hindus have no thought of healing that other great breach in Hindu society and admitting these millions to their rightful heritage.

Nationality is a sentiment based upon a common heritage, upon common interests, and upon a common ideal for the future. Until Hindu and Mohammedan, caste and outcast, can agree in these matters, Indian nationality flies with broken wings. This, her reformers realize. To foster this sentiment is their urgent task, and all educational movements, which ignore the heritage of India and divide her aims are to be looked upon with distrust. The Indian Christian community, drawn though it is mostly from the lower strata of society, has a great opportunity of building bridges between the communities. For it is able to take a detached attitude, and should be able to appreciate and cherish what is [Page 237]

THE VEXED PROBLEM OF INDIAN UNITY

great alike in the heritage of Hinduism and of Indian Mohammedanism. Moreover, it has succeeded, poor and humble as it is, in penetrating both communities with Christian ideas of God and man which tend to bring together those who are alienated. The spirit of service has spread through Christianity to the followers of the other faiths and in such institutions as Dr. Tagore's Shantiniketan, Hindu and Mohammedan boys unite in social service, the inspiration to which is Christian. Hindu leaders gratefully acknowledge this and many realize with Tagore that India's problem is rather social than political. They see that her Dharma, or social structure, has proved itself amazingly stable and yet flexible, and they believe that, purged of abuses, it is capable of standing the strain of these days. They point with pride to India's solution of the race problem, to the amazing continuity of Indian culture, which, in spite of almost incessant wars, has gone on from century to century.

Mr. K. T. Paul, an Indian Christian leader has said:

"The political history of India, from Chandragupta to Victoria, was a series of invasions and wars, seldom broken in any part of India by a peace of fifty years. But turn from the political history to the history of the people, and you are in a totally different world. Great religions rise and spread through the land, great universities flourish, drawing students from every part of the country, whole languages are born and issue in literatures of infinite beauty and power, and social systems are evolved whose influence penetrates beyond barriers of mountains, rivers, and primeval forests. Imagine a student without any knowledge of the political history of India, starting with Gotama Buddha (525 B. C. circ.) and following the life streams of the people of India through a thousand years to Sankara (788-850 A. D.), then three centuries more to Ramanuja (1100 A. D. circ.), on through five hundred years of the activities and the inter-activities of the Vedantins and the Bhaktas to Kabir (1440-1518 A.D.), Chaitanya 1485-1533 A. D.), and Nanak (1468-1538 A. D.), still onward through the clashes of the Saivites and the Vaishnavites down to the first indication of European influence in Rammohun Roy [Page 238](1772-1833 A.D.), he cannot but imagine that the people of India had the blessing of a Pax Britannica for 2,500 years. The secret of this stability, possibly unique in the world, is to be found in the effective hold of grahastadharma on millions of Hindus through twenty-five centuries of a most chequered political history. It bent before every storm, only to rear its head with added strength for the next trial. In such adjustments important provincial diversities have necessarily developed. But the essential secret of its strength and the fundamental features of its character remained the same as when in the early days of its origin it got the mighty reinforcement of the doctrine of karma."*

The writer of these words realizes that in spite of this underlying intellectual unity India never attained real political union. The very idea of nationality has come out of the system of education introduced by the British. "We were taken to the top of a high mountain and shown all the kingdoms of this earth, and were told: 'If you fall down and worship me, you too can have an empire. What wonder that the situation is delirious and the effects unsettling beyond limit."

Yet other nations have had to make changes equally revolutionary. And, as Mr. Paul shows, the idea of empire is familiar to India. She has had almost from the beginning of her history the concept of a cakkrabarti ruler, and thus the change from the mogul to the British regime was made without great upheavals. But it is another thing to evolve democratic institutions. "The essential democratic spirit has yet to arrive," says Mr. Paul. And Dr. Tagore confesses that, "In India there is no common birthright." The education of a proud and ancient people in citizenship is a colossal task and India is fortunate in having leaders like Srinivasa Sastri and his carefully trained colleagues of the Servants of India Society to lead in the patient and scientific approach to these problems. Fortunate too is the nation which has a Tagore to express its high ideals of patriotism.

\*From an address by Mr. K. T. Paul, national secretary, Y. M. C. A., India. [Page 239]

THE WORLD WE LIVE IN

Men live less and less in geographical and more and more in spiritual communities. The involuntary elements of existence tend to be limited to the regional area, the voluntary elements find increasing opportunity of self-expression through association of likeminded people selected out of the entire population by identity of interests and ideals. In this department, World Unity Magazine will publish cach month a brief description of some important modern movement, voluntary in character and humanitarian in aim, believing that knowledge of these activities is not only essential to the world outlook, but also offers the true remedy for the sense of isolation and loneliness which has followed the breakdown of the traditional local neighborhood.

THE AMOS SOCIETY, Inc.

by ISIDOR SINGER Literary Director

FOUNDED August, 1923, in New York City, the Amos Society affirms the spirit of its purpose in the statement: "Mankind must be made ripe for the proclamation of a Religion of the Prophets, built on Truth, Justice and Peace." It is our aim to offer spiritual hospitality to all Jews and Christians who desire to enter into religious unity and cooperation and rise above the historic differences of creed and race.

The officers are: Dr. John H. Finley, President; Dr. George F. Moore, Vice-President; Dr. Charles P. Fagnani, Secretary of the Amos Council; William H. Short, Secretary; Dr. Isidor Singer, Literary Director; and David Steckler, Treasurer. The Amos Society maintains offices at 51 Chambers Street, New York.

Among those included as members of the Amos Council are: Dr. S Parkes Cadman, President of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ; Dr. Samuel Harden Church, President of the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh; Dr. Glenn Frank, President of the University of Wisconsin; Rev. John Haynes Holmes, Minister of the Community Church of New York; Dr. David Starr Jordan, President Emeritus of Leland Stanford Jr. University; Samuel A. Lewisohn, banker; Edwin Markham, poet; Roger W. Strauss, President of the National Federation of Temple Brotherhood; Dr. Stephen S. [Page 240]Wise, Minister of the Free Synagogue and President of the Jewish Institute of Religion.

The Amos Society represents an established and active effort to lead the way back to the 'living waters' of the Jewish Prophets and their continuator, Jesus of Nazareth, whose teachings have given the West its noblest ideals and most powerful moral impulse. The Society bridges the chasm between Judaism and Christianity dug by misunderstanding and lack of true spiritual vision in the past. Membership is open to those who share the Society's ideal of unity and wish to participate in a vital movement of reconciliation. Annual membership dues, $10.00; Life Membership. $250.00; Founder, $1000. Members receive all publications of the Society without charge, including the volume "A Religion of Truth, Justice and Peace" by Dr. Isidor Singer, the source of the Amos Movement.

The possibility of reconciliation envisaged by the Amos Society, with all its vast implications of past bitterness and future solidarity, is suggested by the following Peace Message recently addressed to the Amos Council by Milton M. Schayer, President of the Bankers Building and Loan Association, Denver, Colorado. Mr. Schayer wrote, in part, as follows: "Every great movement is dependent upon three essentials for its success: first, enthusiastic leadership; second, a genuine constructive program; third, a solid organization. The Amos Movement, the latest comer among the religious movements of our time, which however, in spite of its youth, has been rightly called by a prominent student of religion 'the most significant spiritual movement since the Reformation of Martin Luther', already has two of the guarantees of final success, namely, enthusiastic leadership and a genuinely constructive program. It is now our, Israel's, duty to rally in ever-increasing numbers to the banner of Dr. Singer and his illustrious associates. The Synagogue has still a great message of salvation to deliver to the world, and mankind is more than ever eager to accept, from whosoever may deliver it first, a gospel redeeming it from the present welter of political, social and moral confusion and ruin." [Page 241]THE WISDOM OF THE AGES Edited by ALFRED W. MARTIN Society for Ethical Culture, New York

Getting Together at Lausanne*

THE World Conference on Faith and Order held in Lausanne, Switzerland, last August was the largest assembly of its kind in the history of Christian gatherings. Nearly five hundred delegates were present from all over the world, speaking many different languages and representing nearly ninety denominations. The purpose of the Conference was not, as is commonly supposed, to formulate terms of reunion, nor was it to draw up a uniform system of doctrines or of ecclesiastical government or of ceremonial rites. The Conference distinguished carefully between uniformity and unity, realizing that organic unity in religion no more involves uniformity than does the organic political unity of the United States involve uniformity of statutes, or of rights, or of customs. On the other hand, the Conference was held on the assumption that it is reasonable to believe that there will be a steady increase of agreement on debated religious questions, just as in the field of natural science unanimity has already been reached on many a disputed issue. Moreover, it was realized that no one need fear universal uniformity even then because no matter what measure of unanimity be reached there will always be in a growing world a residuum in theology as in physics upon which agreement remains to be realized.

As against the aforementioned supposed purposes of the Conference, its aim was to discover what measure of agreement exists in the fundamentals of Christian faith and to discuss in a wholly uncontroversial spirit, with the hope of mutual understanding,

• An address delivered at Brown University under the auspices of The World Unity Conferences.

[Page 242]the disagreements. In the language of the preamble, unanimously adopted by the full Conference August 20, 1927: "This is a Conference summoned to consider matters of Faith and Order. It is emphatically not attempting to define the conditions of future reunion. Its object is to register the apparent level of fundamental agreements within the Conference and the grave points of disagreements remaining; also to suggest certain lines of thought which may in the future tend to a fuller measure of agreement." To quote the words of Bishop Brent, chairman of the Conference: "The aim was the frank discussion of differences in the spirit of love and brotherhood with the hope that through such discussion misunderstandings may be removed, differing positions may be more clearly and justly understood, and the way opened for definite steps towards reunion."

I most emphatically dissent from the view expressed by the Rev. John Haynes Holmes in his weekly periodical "Unity" for September 26: "Of all the farces staged in our time this Conference takes the cake. The whole affair was simply one gigantic farce, a disgrace to Christendom." Rather do I think that the Conference was a concrete fulfilment, within the pale of orthodox Christendom, of the noble plea made by Bahá’u’lláh, founder of the Bahá’í movement, which has for one of its nine cardinal principles the promotion of world unity in religion. Said Bahá’u’lláh to his followers, as early as 1850: "Associate with men of all religious persuasions, in concord and harmony, in the spirit of perfect joy and fragrance. Remind them of that which is for the benefit of all, but beware lest you make the word of God the cause of opposition and stumbling, or the source of hatred among you. If you have a word which another has not, say it with the tongue of love and kindness. If it be accepted, the end is attained; if not, leave him to himself, do not molest him. Creatures were created through love; let them live in friendship and love." Far from being "farce" or a "disgrace to Christendom", the Conference embodied the desire to fulfil, in some measure at least, the prayer attributed to Jesus by the author of the fourth gospel, "that they all may be one." [Page 243]

GETTING TOGETHER AT LAUSANNE

However far short the Conference may have fallen of what was expected of it by its friends, it must be credited with the following four results, all of them of paramount importance as pointing to eventual realization of an ideal higher still than that contemplated by the Conference. The first result was an increase of mutual understanding, mutual charity and mutual teachableness, and tolerance too, for tolerance is the willing consent to have other people hold opinions different from one’s own. As such, tolerance is to be contrasted with forbearance, which is the unwilling consent to have other people hold opinions different from one’s own. The Conference gave proof that the transition from forbearance to tolerance had been fully made.

Second, the Conference scored a real gain in the practice of appreciation—that modern religious virtue to which the world has been slowly climbing. For, after all, tolerance can not be regarded as the acme of spiritual attainment. It is not what a distinguished Unitarian divine called it,—"the loveliest flower on the rose-bush of liberalism", because tolerance always implies a measure of concession; we tolerate what we cannot help, but would suppress if we could; tolerance has an air of patronizing condescension about it. Lovelier by far is appreciation, which, while wholly free from the blemish that mars the beauty of tolerance, adds to that beauty fresh graces all its own.

• Third, the Conference brought to light the truth that the only unity attainable is unity in diversity, analogous to what we see in the tree. The differentiation of the tree into trunk, branches, boughs, twigs, leaves, far from implying any mutual rivalry or antagonism, means cooperation in a common life, the unity of organic harmony in which all the parts are coordinated with one another and simultaneously subordinated to the larger whole of which each is only a part. But alas, the Christian sects have not looked upon themselves in this light and the utter lack of a sense of organic unity is accentuated by the actual rivalries and jealousies of sectarian life. Instead of perceiving the unity of common origin and a common relation to a larger whole, instead of recognizing their common parent, Protestantism, and their common [Page 244]grandparent, Christianity, each of these sects has with more or less insistence set itself up as the one true Protestant Christian Church; each, though a mere branch, has claimed to be the tree; the part has professed to be the whole, thereby precluding the possibility of that ideal unity in diversity which we see in the tree. And so we of the World Unity movement welcome this latest undertaking which aims at the cessation of sectarianism through recognition of that unity in diversity, that organic relation which makes mutual rivalry and jealousy impossible. Welcome say we to any concerted effort that seeks to reproduce in religion Nature's pattern of unity.

Fourth, the Conference prepared the way for a later world conference to which not only Universalists and Unitarians will be invited, but also Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Mohammedists. Zoroastrists, Confucians. Far nobler and grander than any Christian unity is the Human unity which embraces representatives of every species of faith. Pray do not misunderstand me at this juncture. I will be second to no man in my appreciation and reverence for. the person and teachings of Jesus, yet I hold that Christian exclusiveness is every whit as intolerable as any other kind. In other words, it is not enough for us to be brothers and sisters in Christ. We must be brothers and sisters in Humanity with all the rest of mankind; that is what ideal fellowship involves. Think of the million and more representatives of non-Christian religions that live in the United States. What else would it be but a gratuitous insult to invite these men to "accept Jesus Christ as God"? The only religion we can rightly ask them to accept is the religion of universal Man, the religion that recognizes unity in and through diversity, and that pays due homage to every religious teacher. be he the Buddha, Zoroaster, Confucius, Mohammed, Moses, Jesus, Bahá’u’lláh, according to the amount of truth he has to teach and the inspiration that can be drawn from his life.

Be it ours to keep a window of the soul open toward a temple larger than all the churches, to a fellowship wider than all communions, to a morality more inclusive than all the codes, to a truth greater than all the creeds! [Page 245]

THE INTERACTION OF EUROPE AND ASIA

by WILLIAM R. SHEPHERD Department of History, Columbia University

II. Western Ways in Eastern Lands

THE ways of the West in the East have appeared mainly in the course of the past hundred and fifty years. Before that time certain agricultural products, like the potato, maize and tobacco of America, and in particular the precious metals of its mines employed in exchange for the manufactured goods of the Orient, were virtually the sole commodities of importance brought by Europeans which served to affect Asiatic modes of life. Late in the nineteenth century came rubber and petroleum, both destined to have a due share in the process. Cultivation of rubber-trees transplanted from the Amazonian forests to southern Asia and its islands has produced a supply of one of the world’s chief articles of commerce far exceeding the entire output of its original habitat. And in untold millions of Eastern homes the kerosene lamp is a household fixture, even if nought else foreign be known.

Rubber and petroleum, however, were merely accompaniments of the entry into the Orient of the greatest material force that the West has communicated—the outcome of the Industrial Revolution. It is the mighty change in the life of mankind accomplished by the invention of machinery which has enabled Europeans to make their impact upon Asia so powerful. Discovery of the vast resources of nature and application of them to practical uses on an enormously diversified scale have provided the West with the instrumentalities for spreading its influence far and wide over the lands of the East. [Page 246]Facilitated by mechanical means productive of speed, energy and skill, the several processes of trade, conquest, political pressure and missionary endeavor have imparted to the Asiatic much of the European outlook on life. On its good side it includes the basic idea of systematic cooperation on behalf of mankind at large attainable through the introduction of humane concepts and usages, through the employment of mechanical devices for saving time of which for centuries past the East in general has had much—and of vigor—of which it has had little to spare; and of articles for the increase of comfort and convenience. On its evil side it comprises the application of contrivances for destroying human beings more effectively and the communication of not a few vices and other moral shortcomings.

WESTERN COMMUNITIES IN THE ORIENT

The more the communities from the West planted along Asiatic shores have become definitely fixed among peoples vastly their superior in numbers and clinging tenaciously to the essentials of their type of civilization, the greater the social contrast and the sharper the feeling of mutual intolerance. These tiny reflections of European homelands, separate and apart from their immediate environment rest, like alien islands, on a scarcely noted, faintly comprehended, many-colored sea of Oriental life. Members of a master race, they long had little trouble with their swarming neighbors. They did pretty much as they pleased, whether those neighbors liked it or not.

As a rule the Europeans domiciled in the East have carried thither a marked sense of racial superiority. It may be said to constitute the essence of their rule or control. Because numerically they are so inferior to the mass of the native population about them, and are compelled by custom, tradition and consciousness of kind to dwell in relatively small and more or less isolated settlements, maintaining personal contacts only among themselves by means of clubs and similar devices for enhancing a spirit of close association, the status thus created tends to integrate them into a sort of caste determined by affinities of race, rather [Page 247]

WESTERN WAYS IN EASTERN LANDS

than by the religious sanctions of the East or merely the social conventions of the West. In that capacity they are prone to have a duality of feeling: one toward their immediate fellows and another toward all who are found beyond the pale.

The fact that European communities in Oriental lands are organized so as to intensify a sense of kinship and solidarity tends inevitably to enhance a like state of mind on the part of the people who surround them. Two more or less hostile and mutually exclusive camps are brought into being, both of them inclined to disregard any consciousness of individual right and wrong in order that each may oppose to the other a united front. Efforts, accordingly, on the part of Europeans to retain and strengthen their attitude of social apartness can hardly fail to engender among their Oriental neighbors opinions and emotions provocative of anti-Western sentiment.

When the two states of mind and action come into contact they assume toward each other an aspect of the utterly foreign, distinct and even repellent, which would justify continued apartness. The Europeans observe that Orientals among themselves are not at all so formal, self-conscious and restrained as they ordinarily appear in the company of Western folk. The reason for it, however, may lie specifically in the fact that they are made to feel alien and different. A vicious circle is thus created. Where racial distinctions between civilized East and civilized West are reciprocally emphasized by divergence in attitude and treatment, the more intense obviously becomes the sense of self and kind, the drift apart correspondingly wider.

An example of the attitude is furnished by the more or less common Western dislike of the Japanese. This seems to be made up of the four ingredients of contempt, antipathy, repugnance and displeasure. The European dweller in China, for instance, cherishes and not infrequently expresses a profound contempt for Orientals as such, senses antipathy on account of differences in color and teature; and feels repugnance due to variance in moral conceptions and social usages. His displeasure is kindled because of trade competition, often by means that he regards as unfair, because of [Page 248]the success of Japan in becoming a great power capable of disputing with Europeans any prizes to be won in Asia, and because of the Japanese desire for an international recognition of equality. The attitude indeed is that of the person already established toward the upstart and the parvenu.

The chief problem of social maladjustment between Europeans and Asiatics in the latter’s homeland arises more specifically out of the "drawing of the color-line". Race prejudice attributed to hues of the skin and differences of physiognomy is quite a new phenomenon in mankind. Hardly traceable as such back of the seventeenth century, it appears to have sprung directly out of the institution by Europeans of negro slavery, the enforced servitude for the first time in history of one race to another. Then, as the peoples of the West made themselves the masters of so many parts of Asia and widened steadily their sphere of control, they found it quite natural to extend their attitude toward negroes to Asiatics who had been unable to withstand their advance. Between Occidentals and Orientals, however, the problem is not primarily one of color and feature at all, but one determinable of relative superiority and inferiority. Its essential forms are found in aversion to intermarriage, in the difficulty if not impossibility of assimilation on account of differences in traditions, psychology and custom, and in antagonism also because of economic and political competition.

RISE OF INDUSTRIALISM IN THE EAST

Influential as they have been along social lines, the ways of the West in the East are marked by a more or less corresponding advance in the economic phases of life. The introduction and development during the past seventy years in particular of mechanical means of production, transportation and communication through machinery, steamships, railways, telegraphs, cables, telephones, photography, motion pictures and most recently aviation, as well as through diffusion of the postal system, have bound Orient and Occident in an association that becomes steadily closer. They have affected Japan and India in particular. The former country indeed has become so appreciably Europeanized in its [Page 249]use of these material agencies of modern progress as to furnish the main example of Western influence.

The East, therefore, begins to reveal the spectacle of an industrialism similar in its initial forms to that which the West beheld a century or less ago. With the new methods of utilizing energy is coming a new philosophy of life. Derived from European antecedents, it has started to invade ancient civilizations whose theories of existence are of quite another sort. Yet since human nature the world over differs but little in essentials, much the same processes are commencing to affect the working folk of Asia as moved their brethren of the West, when the forces of industry, impelled by steam and electricity, drive the household arts altogether from the hearthstone and into the factory.

Out of the introduction of capitalism, machinery and factory into the Orient are rising in slow but sure fashion industrial problems like those which have beset Europe. Matters of wages, working conditions, hours of labor, tenure of jobs and all the other elements of difference between employed and employer now emerging there must be put sooner or later upon a just and humane basis that will approximate that of the West, despite many of its all too patent defects. Industrialism with its concomitant divergence of interest between capital that seeks large profits and labor that demands betterment of its own position, the huge and complicated organizations of business which distribute the output of both factors of production, the processes of commerce on an ever-increasing scale, will bring forth inevitably a situation akin to the one that Europe itself has known. Nor are these the sole distinctive phases of the matter. In proportion as Western capital imports into Oriental lands machines to be manned by cheap labor and sends their products out into the world at large to compete with those fabricated with machines run by workmen of the West employed under a capitalistic system that displays a sense of altruism, of human decency and industrial justice in the treatment of its employees, the effects of such competition are likely to be grave indeed.

An Asia that is undergoing, however gradually, an industrial [Page 250]transformation offers both an opportunity and a challenge. Untold millions there are coming to want the manufactures of the West. Payment for them in money alone is impossible. It will have to be made in an exchange of goods, which means increased production in the Orient itself. The more, accordingly, the West pushes the sale of its wares in the East, the more certain becomes the competition between the two great centers of civilization. Again, as Western capital invests in Asiatic industrial enterprises, just to the extent of such promotion will the nations of the West be compelled to protect it and the Asiatics themselves demand a concession of rights and privileges quite beyond those which Europeans thus far have seen fit to grant.

RE-ACTION UPON THE CASTE SYSTEM

Considering the spread of Western ways farther to the eastward, the obvious question arises, whether they have had much effect upon that peculiar institution of India called "caste". Strongly rooted in Hindu custom, it has long been regarded as perhaps the chief obstacle to the diffusion of European influence there. When examined closely, however, the institution is seen to differ in essentials from its counterpart in the West only in one great respect. The four primary tests of it which serve the purpose of social demarcation are intermarriage, commensality or eating together, personal contact or association, and kinds of occupation. These self-same modes of social differentiation are found in the customs and usages of Europeans and their descendants. Between the Hindu and the European practice of fixing cleavages among classes the distinction lies in the fact that the former is consecrated by religion and the latter determined by social convention alone.

The very presence of the British in India and all that they have introduced from the West are contributing to break down the system of caste. Among the innovations which work to that end are railways and railway restaurants, the post office, the telegraph and telephone, radio and the motion picture. So, too, the establishment of the British type of university, with its colleges, [Page 251]class rooms and commons, has been a factor of importance. Social changes of the sort make segregation by caste increasingly difficult. None of them can operate without bringing into more or less indiscriminate contact people of various social stations. Marked influence also has been exerted by Indians themselves who have resided in Western countries.

On the other hand, the social differentiation between European and Oriental to which attention earlier has been called, is probably nowhere so sharp as in India. Here the master race holds absolute sway. However much an Indian of high degree may find himself treated as an equal or with due deference to his rank in Great Britain, he becomes only too conscious cf inferiority when he returns to his homeland. Exclusion from clubs frequented by Europeans is one evidence of it. And the efforts occasionally made to bring West and East together on a footing of social friendliness seem to enhance rather than diminish the sense of apartness.

Among the economic consequences of the entry of Western ways, the importation into India of articles of British manufacture, notably cotton goods, ruined industries that had been sources of great wealth and prosperity. This dislocation of their industrial life drove vast numbers of artisans and craftsmen without adequate training or equipment for the purpose out on a land already impoverished by over-cultivation. It has been a prolific cause of the famines that from time to time have desolated the population of the country, and is responsible in part also for the awful poverty in which a huge percentage of the people lives.

Remedial measures, like the equalization of tariff duties and the establishment of irrigation works, have helped to render the situation less acute; but the natives of India, who hardly know what it means to have one real meal a day from one year’s end to another, are still reckoned by the many millions.

BRITISH RULE IN INDIA

From the standpoint of administration, and especially since the latter part of the nineteenth century, British rule in India has sought to be just and liberal, so far at least as a policy of the sort [Page 252]be consistent with the maintenance of effective control and the welfare of British private interests. For the purpose the country is divided into two parts: British India, comprising two-thirds of the territory and four-fifths of the population, and the so-called "native states", under Indian princes who govern subject to the supervision of British officials known as "Residents" or "Agents". This dual arrangement is a politic device that serves to relieve the British administrators of considerable responsibility and to furnish support if need be from rivalries and jealousies among the princes and peoples.

In British India a different sort of duality exists. Here the powers of government are shared between British officials and representatives of the Indian people elected under a highly restricted suffrage. But since in all important matters, including control of the purse, the ultimate decision rests with the British authorities themselves, a system of self-government on the order for example of that existing under American rule in the Philippines has not been set up in India. That example indeed is not relished by British Indian officials of the routine type. They view with disapproval such an experiment of entrusting an Oriental folk politically subject to a Western nation with a large amount of freedom in the management of their internal affairs.

The problem of the British in India undoubtedly is an arduous one: how to govern wisely and well 320,000,000 people, the greatest empire of humanity ever falling under the control, first of a trading corporation, the East India Company, and later of. European state of little more than 40,000,000 inhabitants. From their standpoint, the task has required the upholding of peace and order in a land earlier racked with war or disturbed by local outbreak-the establishment of the "pax Britannica"; the maintenance of justice also in a country once ruled by arbitrary methods The actual service, however, of British administration in rendering happier the lot of the hundreds of millions there should be determined obviously by the ideals of the joint advantage of Great Britain and i huge Oriental dependency. Success or failure in this regard is measurable on the basis of what has been done for [Page 253]the elevation of the social status, the betterment of economic conditions and the advancement of welfare in general.

According to the great Indian leader, well-nigh universally known as "Mahatma" or "Great Soul", Gandhi, the defects of British administration in his country may be summed up under a variety of heads. They comprise: the "exploitation of India's resources for the benefit of Great Britain"; an "ever-increasing military expenditure and a civil service the most expensive in the world; extravagant working of every department in utter disregard of India's poverty; disarmament and consequent emasculation of a whole nation", lest the lives of the handful of British residents be imperilled; "traffic in intoxicating liquors and drugs", especially opium, "for the purpose of sustaining a top-heavy administration; progressively repressive legislation in order to suppress an ever-growing agitation seeking to give expression to a nation's agony", and "degrading treatment of Indians living in the British Dominions", and particularly the Union of South Africa.

Whether justifiable or not, these grievances certainly have strengthened the reaction of India to the impact of the West. Two important political evidences of it, which indicate the rise of a unifying self-consciousness among the articulate elements of the Population, are the Indian National Congress, a body representative of the numerically preponderant Hindus, and the All-India Moslem League, voicing the sentiments of the powerful Mohammedan minority. Their program may be summarized in two words "swaraj" or self-government, and "swadeshi", or home manufacture. Fundamentally their objects are the same as those sought by Mahatma Gandhi, but the methods proposed for accomplishment differ. The radicals favor the gaining of independence by violent means to the extent of armed insurrection. The moderates look rather to cooperation with the British rulers in the gradual acquisition of self-government on the model of the Dominions and within the British Commonwealth of Nations. Gandhi and his followers, on the other hand, believe neither in violence nor cooperation, trusting to win the British over by appeals to conscience and to the spirit of fair play. [Page 254]That Great Britain should oppose the first of these procedures is natural enough, since it has no wish to lose India, the keystone to the structure of its far-flung domain overseas. Toward the second and third its attitude seems quite receptive, and conditioned by a belief that the people of India are not prepared as yet for self-government. Fitness in this respect presumably they can acquire only in slow and gradual fashion through experience. Whether the kind of government to be devised should have a European model or should proceed from the ideas and institutions peculiar to India or a blend of the two, and whether it should be granted by Great Britain or chosen upon the free initiative of the Indian people themselves,-these indeed are paramount questions. But whenever the people of India shall have reached the stage, either of sufficient experience in the arts of self-government on a Western plan or of ability to take matters into their own hands, it might well happen that they will prefer to be independent altogether of foreign rule, like the powerful nation which adjoins the eastern shores of Asia.

WESTERNIZED JAPAN

The Oriental land above all others into which Western ways have penetrated most deeply, of course, is Japan, even if the process of adoption and adaptation is by no means so complete as often supposed. Of the three basic elements in European civilization. the ancient Graeco-Roman, the medieval Christian and the modern scientific, mechanical and technical, the last of the three figures most prominently. The Graeco-Roman, with regard to law and government, has been taken over in greater or less degree. The Christian factor, moral and religious, plays but little part. What has interested the Japanese is the material West, political, military, scientific, mechanical, technical; in a measure also intellectual but not spiritual, Europe.

The Japanese have an intense and pervading consciousness of nationality, resting upon a thoroughly homogeneous people Their zealous and almost fanatical patriotism is dominated by an ardent loyalty to a sacrosanct monarch descended from the gods [Page 255]A spirit of self-sacrifice pervades it, which makes the worship of their country the only real religion that the Japanese may be said to possess. It is qualities like these among others which serve to make them unified in sentiment and aspiration.

The chief respect in which Japan has outstripped every other part of the Orient in assimilating the ways of the West has to do with things mechanical. Substantially all devices employed here for purposes of production, transportation and communication are in operation there. Factories and industrial plants, steamships and railways, electric lighting and traction, telegraphs and tele- phones, motion pictures, radio and aviation, all seem part and parcel of daily life to an extent unapproached elsewhere in Asia.

Japan also excels all other Oriental lands in attempting to solve some of the problems that have arisen out of the introduction of Western mechanical methods. Labor unions of a sort exist and agitators among them are not lacking. Discussions between rep- resentatives of labor and capital are becoming frequent. Legisla- tion aimed at securing industrial justice has made headway.

Accompanying the readiness with which the Japanese have taken over the mechanical agencies of the West should be mentioned the success which they have had in emulating Western business methods. Here, however, they and the Europeans alike find more than their match in the Chinese. While Englishmen, Frenchmen and Dutchmen retain the actual rule in many portions of the Orient, the Chinese have been ascending from the position of coolic laborers to that of merchants and landed proprietors. The business men indeed of that nationality possess and display a talent for effective competition with the European which makes them formidable rivals in numerous branches of trade.

So far as mere change in political externals is concerned, the replacement of a venerable Chinese Empire by a newly contrived Republic of China is not altogether surprising. In Japan it proved relatively casy to translate the compactly organized administra- tion of the country under its erstwhile feudal régime into a more or less parliamentary system of government, and to convert the forces of a militant folk into a Europeanized army id navy. It [Page 256]was even easier to accomplish the transformation that outwardly at least has occurred in China. Both sets of change, however, received their initial impulses from the West.

Unlike their Japanese neighbors, the Chinese are born democrats. For untold centuries the highest positions in the state were open through competitive examination to the humblest person. Natural ability and the attainment of a suitable education were the touchstones to official preferment. While by no means apathetic, indifferent or docile in temperament to the extent of suffering from above or without any sort of imposition, the Chinese as a people have little respect for warriors because of their fighting propensities alone. Their age-long tradition, which ranked the soldier as exercising one of the most ignoble of occupations, still holds good.

During the many centuries of virtual isolation from contact with the world at large the social organization in China was composed of a number of related, self-sufficient groupings, loosely held together, yet thoroughly coordinated in operation. Rulership lay in the family, village, secret society and gild. With the advent of the nineteenth century and the entry on a considerable scale of Western ways, chambers of commerce, agricultural associations, educational, journalistic and other vital interest groups arose to supplement them. In all such bodies "tse ke" or "standing", a combination of seniority in age, classical learning, experience, personal character and individual ability, were the qualities for leadership. Government in the technical sense the Chinese regarded as something that did not concern the ordinary citizen. Farming and business were his especial interests. Things political, therefore, should be managed by individuals, equipped and employed for the purpose.

CHINA AND THE WORLD POLITICAL SITUATION

Into this compact yet loose organization of life, Western ideas and institutions have been introduced, either directly by Europeans, indirectly by Chinese educated in Europe, the United sostiene or Japan, and indirectly again by the Japanese, themselves [Page 257]

WESTERN WAYS IN EASTERN LANDS

Europeanized to that extent. But since the contact of the Chinese people with the material achievements of Western civilization conduced necessarily to their enlightenment, the members of the literary bureaucracy, who administered the government in the name of the emperor, long opposed the entry of such practices as dangerous to the maintenance of their control, and remained stubbornly antagonistic to changes along Western lines until the early years of the twentieth century saw the end of their power.

For many years indeed the Chinese themselves looked upon all peculiarly Western mechanical devices and appliances with fear, anger or indifference. The behavior of Europeans at times tended to instill a sense of fear-an impression that these remote foreigners were unutterably fierce and cruel; that what they could not secure by persuasion, they would exact at the cannon's mouth; that they understood nought but the making of money; that from them nothing moral or intellectual could be gained. When the Westerners might respond that their sole motive in coming to China was to communicate the beneficence of their civilization, the Chinese might well have doubted-wise folk as they are the consistence of trying to "inculcate the principles of heaven with the artillery of hell"! These circumstances, added to the innate, traditional disdain and contempt of the Chinese for foreigners, arising out of their centuries of seclusion, would go far to explain the readiness with which they applied to the intruders from the West such epithets as "foreign devils" and "fiery dogs".

As in social dealings, so industry in China had been looked upon as something that pertained to the local needs and interests of village, community and town. It was managed by gilds whose members, employers and employees alike, had a sense of mutual obligation. What they believed helpful to the craft redounded presumably to the welfare of all.

Upon certain phases and localities of this industrial system the West has come to lay a heavy hand. Factories have brought with them, only in worse form if any, the evils that attended the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in Europe. The employers, [Page 258]both European and Chinese, treat the workers with scant consideration for the instincts of humanity. Women and children in particular are made to labor under conditions alike destructive to health and degrading to morals. That their situation may be worse in distinctively Chinese industrial plants is hardly an excuse for the European factory-owners. How evil that situation is a recent description of a plant in Shanghai affords ample illustration:

"In the silk filatures women worked, standing, for twelve and thirteen hours a day, laying their babies on heaps of waste behind them. Children of six and seven worked similar hours, stirring the cocoons in boiling water, which scalded their hands. . . They got their meal when the machinery was stopped, once a day for fifteen minutes, to stoke up. In the cotton mills there were two twelve-hour shifts for seven days a week, with a half day’s break every ten days when the machinery was stopped; but then the other shift worked fourteen or sixteen hours. There were no meal-hours—they ate with one hand and worked with the other. The average wage was 16s. to 18s. ($4 to $4.50) a month. Even the reactionary Peking government had proposed the prohibition of boy labour under ten and girl labour under twelve and the limitation of hours for young persons to eight, with no night labour; the Shanghai Municipal Council (controlled wholly by Europeans) responded. . . with a report which proposed ten as the age limit for boys and girls alike, and that twelve-hour shifts, day and night, should be allowed for young persons."

Repulsive though the account is, what it describes cannot be regarded as typical of industrial conditions in China at large. The factory system has not spread at all far from a few of the larger cities where the material influence of the West is more or less potent. Even if such a trend of industry be plain, it has not really touched the vast country of China. In any discussion of the phenomenon, accordingly, there lurks a risk that the entry of European mechanical devices for mass production may be charged with consequences quite out of proportion to what actually has occurred.

Not the industrial circumstances, bad as they are in limited areas, but the political situation of China is what enlists the concern of the world today. The largest of single countries with the largest of populations has become dominated in many respects essential to the growth and prosperity of a nation by foreign powers and the instrumentalities for controlling public affairs [Page 259]

WESTERN WAYS IN EASTERN LANDS

which they have introduced. The historical record of their encroachments upon Chinese territory, of their demands for economic privilege, of their management of financial matters, of the limitations they have imposed upon customs-duties, of their insistence upon rights of extraterritoriality—to say nought of the opium traffic—needs no elaboration here. For many years they have been fastening their grip in all ways short of abolute dominion. Repeatedly buffeting Chinese pride and self-respect, their persistent pressure for advantage has contributed to render peace, contentment and prosperity more or less of an illusion, just as it has aroused among the people an outburst of the self-consciousness called "nationalism". Given the age-long traditions and customs of the Chinese, this is clearly a reaction on their part to the political and economic impact of the West.

Much as the Chinese who have personal dealings with Europeans and Americans resent their common attitude of social exclusiveness toward Orientals, their basic antagonism of course is due to the maintenance of tariff control and the privileges of extraterritoriality. Although Western nations determine as they see fit the duties to be imposed upon imports from China into their own lands, they have allowed China itself to levy only a ridiculously low rate on goods entered from abroad, going so far even as to supervise the process of collection. Except in the case of Germans, Russians and certain Europeans whose countries are not classed among the great powers, foreigners are amenable to the jurisdiction of officials and courts of their own nationalities alone. Attempts by the Chinese to oppose this order of things are menaced by foreign warships that patrol the coasts and by foreign gunboats that police the rivers.

When Westerners more or less sympathetic to the aspirations of patriotic Chinese who seek to be masters in their own house inquire whether, in case these embodiments of external force were withdrawn and extraterritoriality abandoned, would individuals and corporations of Western origin receive under Chinese law and in Chinese courts the same guarantees of person and property, the same assurances of justice as they have under [Page 260]the present system, the answer they receive is, that aliens should be prepared to run the same risks as the Chinese themselves. If they are unwilling to do so, then they should stay out of the country.

The political situation as between China and the West in general thus resembles the one existing between India and Great Britain in particular. Shall European states undertake to prepare the Chinese people for self-government in the Western sense of the term, and thereby obstruct the process now in operation of transforming from within an ancient people numbering 400,000,000 and more into a modern nation free, self-respecting, progressive and prosperous, with the possibility that such interference may bring chaos instead to rule supreme? Or shall one of the world's oldest seats of civilization be left to work out its own destinies in its own way? Thereon the entire future of humanity may depend. [Page 261]

IV—JANE ADDAMS

by ROBERT MORSS LOVETT The New Republic

JANE ADDAMS may not have discovered the principles of internationalism through her experience at Hull House, but it is easily within the bounds of truth to say that she could not have lived there without practising them. There were by count, a few years ago, a hundred different languages and dialects spoken in Chicago, and most of them have been heard within the last thirty years in the streets that border the famous settlement. The population maps of the district which hang in the octagon room of Hull House record the ebb and flow of racial tides. The maps of the early nineties are beautifully variegated; the last of the series shows almost uniform dark blue and black, representing Italian and Greek residents. Altogether, they remind us that Miss Addams has seen nearly all the migrant races of the world pass by her doorstep, and has lived as a neighbor among them. One of the chief functions of Huil House has been to welcome the stranger, to smooth the path of the immigrant, to help adjust the foreign-born generations to American life. Moreover, the political relations of European peoples to each other, the problems of oppressed nationalities, even intranational party disputes, have always been a part of the intellectual background of the settlement. Hull House naturally came to represent an aspect of this country as an asylum for European races, impartial, sympathetic, understanding, the America to which Europe instinctively turned for help, for mediation and arbitration during the first r's of the War. Doubtless the trust and affection with which Miss [Page 262]Addams had inspired so many Europeans, many of them, it is true, of humble birth, and the recognition of her knowledge of psychological and social conditions in Europe were reflected in the invitation extended to her to become president of the International Congress of Women, which was summoned to meet at The Hague, April 28th to May 1st, 1915. She was our leading internationalist. In her contributions to Women at The Hague, and a later volume, Peace and Bread (Macmillan Company) Miss Addams has given an account of the uncertainties attending this first concerted attempt to let reason and pity into the stupid, cruel chaos of the world at war. The Dutch steamer Noordam, on which were the American delegates, was unwarrantably detained at Dover by the British authorities, and released only just in time to permit the delegates to reach The Hague for the opening of the Conference. Miss Addams delivered the presidential address, in which she expressed in clear, unsensational terms the relation of women to peace. She asked of the 1500 women assembled:

"By what profound and spiritual forces were they impelled at this moment when the spirit of Internationalism is apparently broken down, to believe that the solidarity of women would hold fast and that through it as through a precious instrument they would be able to declare the reality of those basic human experiences, ever perpetuating and cherishing the race, and courageously to set them over against the superficial and hot impulses which have so often led to warfare? Those great underlying forces, in response to which so many women have come here, belong to the human race as a whole and constitute a spiritual internationalism which surrounds and completes our national life even as our national life itself surrounds and completes our family life; they do not conflict with patriotism on one side any more than family devotion conflicts with it upon the other."

Miss Addams amplifies this thought in one of her papers in Women at The Hague. Woman is not against war because she is a woman. Doubtless the majority of women as of men believe that war is inevitable and righteous. And yet "as an artist in an artillery corps commanded to fire upon a beautiful building like the duomo of Florence would be deterred by a compunction unknown to the man who had never given himself to creating beauty and did not know the intimate cost of it, so women, who have brought men into the world and nurtured them until they reach [Page 263]the age for fighting, must experience a peculiar revulsion when they see them destroyed, irrespective of the country in which these men may have been born."

It is interesting in the light of later events to read the resolutions of the Conference and see how they anticipate, sometimes in the words themselves, the wise terms of peace formulated by Mr. Wilson in his fourteen points and disgracefully abandoned after Germany had surrendered under their guarantees. We find there the basic thought that since the mass of people in each of the countries believe themselves to be fighting not as aggressors but in self-defense, there can be no irreconcilable differences among them.

After the Conference adjourned, its leading members visited the courts and chancelleries of both warring and neutral countries to explore the possibilities of peace, and everywhere were received with frankness and cordiality. The conflict had not stiffened into the long trial of endurance behind the trenches, and the leaders were not hardened to the formula of la victoire intégrale or the knock-out blow. And everywhere there was springing in the hearts of the people the desire for peace. It was this state of affairs which gave promise to the further enterprise to which the Hague Congress committed itself, a conference of neutrals which should offer continuous mediation to the belligerents. The European neutral countries were eager for such a conference but President Wilson declined to move in the matter, although he received ten thousand requests by telegram from women's organizations throughout the country. In this impasse, Mr. Henry Ford came forward with his offer to convey several hundred Americans to Europe, to give a kind of popular authority on the part of the United States, to the movement.

Contrary to general belief, Miss Addams was not a member of the company which sailed on the Oscar II as Mr. Ford's guests. She was at the time lying desperately ill in a hospital at Chicago. She was, however, committed officially to the conference and would be the last person to disclaim her responsibility. It is true, she felt distrust of the publicity involved in the charter of a [Page 264]special vessel, and pointed out that it would be possible for the members of the conference to get to Stockholm by themselves. Mr. Ford, however, was used to performing miracles with publicity. He preferred derision to no "story" at all. Accordingly the Oscar II, with the miracle worker's promise "to have the boys out of the trenches by Christmas", carried sixty-four newspaper men, all prepared to exploit the greatest of all the Ford jokes. The joke was taken seriously and hopefully in Europe. Although Mr. Ford abandoned the enterprise, the Conference of Neutrals was held in Stockholm and drew up two addresses, one to the governments of the neutral nations, and one to the governments of the belligerent nations, which again directly foreshadowed the fourteen points. The Conference was reorganized as an International Commission which continued to hold sessions until the United States entered the War.

It is difficult to account for the animus which pursued these early efforts for peace. Granting that the Congress and the Conference did nothing directly effective toward securing it, granting that their careful exploration of the bases of a durable peace which took form in the fourteen points was rendered abortive by the treachery of Versailles, nevertheless it cannot be pretended for a moment that these efforts prolonged the war. The Ford Peace Ship may have been a gesture so futile as to be ridiculous---still, it was a movement of generous faith at a time when more responsible politicians were afraid to act. No one suffered by it except the participants. In any case, the peacemakers of Versailles have no licence to cast their stones at the peacemakers of The Hague and Stockholm.

During the period of participation of the United States in the War, Miss Addams was connected with the Food Administration, a service which led her thought along the lines of the later chapters in Peace and Bread. After the armistice, in the spring of 1919, she with Dr. Alice Hamilton visited Germany to take account of the conditions of actual starvation, resulting from the inhuman maintenance of the food blockade by the Allies. Their report marked the beginning of the vast relief work which spread over [Page 265]Europe, in which the Friends, both English and American, bore an honorable part. Another very distinguished service rendered by Miss Addams was her participation in the investigation of the Irish situation by an American Committee, when the British government was trying to stamp out the republic by methods too well known to need recapitulation here. The Committee was refused passports to enter Ireland, and sat in Washington where many witnesses at first hand of the atrocities committed by British agents were heard. The investigation was necessarily one-sided, but the report was a picture of conditions in Ireland which in essentials cannot be contradicted. It is difficult to say whether or to what extent it influenced the British government in its proffer of negotiation for peace, but the mere fact that an American committee of which Jane Addams was a member, was patiently and critically listening to the story of Ireland's suffering convinced public opinion in England of the necessity of a settlement.

During these later years Miss Addams has lent her influence and support to all movements and institutions directed toward the reconstruction of a world shaken to pieces by the War, and badly patched together at Versailles. She has supported movements in the United States favorable to the League of Nations, the World Court, disarmament, and education for peace. In so doing she has encountered the same distrust and prejudice on the part of the common mind which manifested itself toward efforts for peace during the war—a feeling skilfully kept alive by agents of so-called patriotic societies and of the military departments of the government. There was a peculiarly disgraceful outbreak of it when in 1924 the Woman's International League for Peace and Freedom, an outgrowth of The Hague Congress, met at Washington. The distinguished visitors from Europe, used to the public courtesies which civilized people extend toward each other, were surprised at being received with howls of fanatical nationalism from the press and patrioteers. It seemed to them that the United States was a country which had deliberately made up its will for war, to which any discussion of means of accord among nations was treason. The situation was one which it was particularly [Page 266]difficult to explain to Europeans. Miss Addams in her president's address was obliged to apologize for her country:

"May I assure you," she said, "that Americans are not by training and nature less tolerant than the people in those other countries who treated us with such fine and unvarying courtesy? But I beg you not to take this situation too seriously. The American delegation does not, for it knows only too well how easily newspaper attacks are manufactured, and how ephemeral is the consequence of such attacks."

She proceeded to illustrate this point by referring to her visit to London in 1915, when the whole city was placarded with posters: "To the Tower with Ramsay Macdonald", put up by Horatio Bottomley, who was in the Tower himself while Macdonald was Prime Minister. This incident illustrates Miss Addams' humor and tact—genuine, deep-seated humor, and tact which comes from good feeling,—indispensable qualities in an internationalist, and neither taught by courses in diplomacy.

Miss Addams had ample scope to exercise both during the meetings of the League at Washington and its journey to Chicago. In Washington, ladies representing ancestors who fought in the Glorious War of 1812, gentlemen representing the U. S. Army, attended the meetings to show the traditional American disrespect for foreign nations. On the journey westward, by special train bearing the name Pax, visits to cities en route were cancelled, halls for meetings were denied, receptions were called off. Yet Miss Addams carried off the situation, minimizing the unpleasant incidents, giving a dignity to her country which it did not deserve. Above all, she urged the delegates not to be deterred by the clamor into holding "a sort of dress parade congress", but to speak from their hearts, from the depths of their own experience, sure that they would meet a response in churches, colleges, cities, and farms from a people who were demanding in their hearts that war should cease. This illustrates another quality of Jane Addams, which some internationalists find it hardest to maintain—genuine respect for, and belief in, her own country. [Page 267]

THE NEW HUMANITY

"Without edifices or rules or trustees or any argument, The institution of the dear love of comrades."

Edited by MARY SIEGRIST Author of "You that Come After", etc.

EARTH and sky must often seem strangely alien to the poet. These are foreign faces that he passes. And yet-they are the faces of his brothers. In him is the nostalgia of other worlds. He can know no port of rest. His quest is for an exiled but still remembered beauty. In a world of fleeting shadow-shapes he wanders orphan, "lonely as a cloud before the moon was made," seeking the one Reality. Paradoxically, he is in a sense at home in all countries, among all peoples, all races, all creeds. "He confides himself childlike to the genius of his age. He perceives that the Eternal is stirring at their heart." These suns and stars he has watched within himself, this inner firmament must exist within all seekers. He is conscious of sharing a common reservoir of thought; he sees that all men are children of the Ancestral life-spark. In him nature remembers and sings "what was so fugitive."

If he stands, as it were, naked before the Divine Archer, it may be he will have sight of the bright oriflame of the Blessed Arrows. How then shall he know barrier of race, caste or creed? His country is bounded by the mother-skies, his race is Man-of whatever pigment; his banner, Love the Conqueror. He feels that an air of immortality bathes all men; that they are of the nature of infinity. In his search for the Open Secret, he must pass, whether he will or not, through the shining Stations Seven. Thus in the midst of the crowd he will learn something of the meaning of the "flight of the solitary to the Solitary". Even the beginning of this journey will reveal that "the search alone is sacred." [Page 268]

FOR YOU, O DEMOCRACY

Come, I will make the continent indissoluble. I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon, I will make divine magnetic lands, With the love of comrades, With the life-long love of comrades.

-WALT WHITMAN

JANUS

Another Gate of the eternity of Gates Swings wide-swings wide, And all the peoples of the earth pass through; There is a singing sound of temple bells That comes from far away, What waits within?

There is a Green Hill in whose brooding Mother's heart Dwells Love dwells Love, Rivers of waters from between her breasts Rise in clear silence and flow straightly down Unto these Plains of men within the Gate.

What are these Rivers whose bright waters shall make glad All souls-all souls? Peace! For the healing of the Nations, Peace! Light! Now the Son of Morning has stepped down And Wisdom walks abroad upon the Land.

O my proud Brothers! There shall come to us at last One way-One Way, A Pentecost of Tongues shall flame and sing And understanding have his will of us; No man shall be coerced Where Light abounds. [Page 269]

THE NEW HUMANITY

Hearken! What is this sound of sweetly, wildly swinging bells? The Gate-The Gate! Wider than all wide oceans it is set: Henceforth no presumptuous hand of man Shall dare to close it up- The Gate is wide. Come in ye peoples of this green and blessed Unity! Hands joined hands joined! The Tree of Life spreads wide upon the earth, Yet are its roots One Root. Ay now we know The skies are all one sky, The seas one Sea, All Love is One Unto Eternity. -BARBARA YOUNG

Say not the struggle nought availeth, The labor and the wounds are vain, The enemy faints not, nor faileth, And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars; It may be, in yon smoke concealed, Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers, And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, Seem here no painful inch to gain, Far back, through creeks and inlets making, Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only, When the daylight comes, comes in the light, In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly, But westward, look, the land is bright! -ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH [Page 270]

LOVE UNALTERABLE

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark, That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is a star to every wandering bark, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom:-- If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

-SHAKESPEARE [Page 271]

MEN, MACHINES AND MYSTICS

"As a man thinketh, so is he" by KIRTLEY F. MATHER Department of Geology, Harvard University

HUXLEY Once stated that "the world is absolutely governed by ideas." In this scientific age there is a tendency to believe that on the contrary the world is governed by the law of gravity, the law of self-preservation, the laws of assimilation, of electro-chemical energy. Was Huxley right or wrong? Are ideas the governing factors, or are they themselves determined by forces such as these, over which man has no control?

Impressed by the inflexibility of natural law in the orderly universe made known by natural science, it is extremely easy for one to assume that the world is operating quite mechanically, and philosophies of mechanistic materialism seem convincing. The stars are ordered in their courses by forces over which they themselves have no control. Apparently the chemical elements have no choice in the matter, but must always unite in the same way when placed in the same environment, in accordance with external compulsion.

The history of plants and animals reveals a similar external determinism. Consider, for example, the habits of the Alaskan salmon. Born in the fresh waters of the rivers and lakes of Alaska, it descends the stream shortly after birth and spends a little more than three years of its life in the ocean. In the fourth year of its existence it returns to the water of the land, there to spawn and die: complicated and ofttimes inconvenient arrangement for the poor fish, something which appears to be determined for it by internal and external conditions over which the individual has no control. Instinct plays so large a part in the lives [Page 272]of most animals that individual conduct on all occasions seems accurately predictable in advance for them.

Human conduct is so profoundly influenced by heredity and environment that sometimes we wonder if these external conditions do not absolutely determine our actions. Do we ever "make up our own minds" or are our minds "made up" for us by forces over which we individually have no control? Are not men mere machines, cogs in the world mechanism, doomed to grind on automatically, caught in a treadmill? Was Huxley wrong, after all?

Obviously there are many real differences between organisms and machines. Machines cannot repair their own damaged parts; they cannot reproduce themselves; they cannot grow. Organisms within limits, do all of those things. A wound is healed by healthy tissue, but if an arm is amputated it does not grow again. Within limits, an organism, small or large, simple or complex, is obviously different from the machine; and of course, man is an organism, one of the most complicated of the living structures which populate the earth. But that is not the real issue. Every action of an organism is in accordance with laws which not only set the limits within which the action may take place, but also determine the nature of the organic response. The real question then becomes: Are not organisms mere automatons, differing from other machines only in degree and not in kind? Doubtless organisms are more complex; doubtless they are more efficient along certain lines; certainly they are able to do things which ordinary machines cannot possibly do; but are they possessed of any freedom, any volition of their own?

In the consideration of geologic life development, emphasis is usually placed upon the progressive attainment of more and more complex body forms and structures during the recorded history of the earth. From lowly, simple, one-celled or few-celled organisms there gradually developed the higher types of creatures with their complicated and inter-related organs and tissues. Thus the modern assemblage of varied creatures, ingeniously adapted to diversified environments, was brought into existence. Organic structures [Page 273]wholly unknown in the earlier geologic periods were present in the later; modes of action not possible during earlier times were made possible as evolution went on. New abilities emerge during the process of life development. Combinations of cells can do what individual cells could not do.

It is also significant that the individual cells have changed as time advanced. Consider the large and varied group of one-celled animals called protozoa, creatures of microscopic or very small size whose bodies consist of a single cell of jelly-like protoplasm. It happens that one branch of the protozoans, known as the foraminifera, is especially well known to geologists because of the use to which fossil foraminifera have been put in connection with the search for petroleum in the Gulf Coastal Region of Texas and Mexico. Although these creatures never rose above the plane of one-celled existence, they display conspicuous changes in form and habit from period to period. The tiny houses, or "tests", which surrounded their bodies are preserved in many of the rocky strata formed from the mud and sand washed into the sea where they lived. These fossil foraminifera show unmistakable evolution when arranged in the order of the successive strata in which they are found.

Such changes revealed by the geologic record, imply not only the progressive development of more and more complex body forms, but also the modification of the single cells with which cach individual begins his history. Evolution is not simply the piling up of cell upon cell, the organization of many units into a body. Geologic life development involves also the modification of the single cells with which each individual begins his life history. Somehow, out of the continuity of the process real differences in cell structure have emerged. Obviously this has been accomplished in accordance with law, but the laws which govern vital activities are thus decidedly in contrast with the laws which govern the transformations of inanimate matter. The crystal and the cell are both structures formed in obedience to law, but the laws which determine crystal structure are not in the same category as those which determine cell development. [Page 274]In attempting to discover these laws, the geologist is impressed with the fact that environment has exerted a profoundly important directing impulse upon the development of life. The evolution of the horse family is a classic illustration, easily understood and rather completely known. The ancestral horses were small, five-toed, herbivorous vertebrates, with a back arched like that of a dog or cat. Evolution to the modern one-toed horse was at least in part a response to the changing environment of western North America from a region of humid forests, with soft, boggy turf, to treeless, wind-swept, hard-turfed prairies. This change is celebrated in one of the best known verses from the paleontologist's anthology, which depicts the exploits of the "Dawn Horse", Eohippus:

Little Eohippus was no bigger than a fox, And on four toes he scampered over Tertiary rocks; "But", said little Eohippus, "I am going to be a horse, And on my middle finger nails, I'll run my earthly course."

The facts indicate that in the evolution of the horse successive generations stood more and more on tip-toe. They specialized in ability to make a quick start and to keep long-sustained, swift flight in order to escape the sabre-toothed cats and other carnivora. As the heel was thus lifted higher and higher from the ground, the lateral toes were of less and less use. In time they dwindled in size until today only tiny splints of the second and fourth toes remain and the third toe bears all the weight. The modern horse walks upon the tip of its middle finger nail".

But the poet was obviously in error. No matter how interesting the quatrain may be, little Eohippus had no vision of his splendid equine descendant, the modern horse. Evolution toward that goal, which seems to have gone forward directly and surely, was in fact a response to the changing environment, over which no member of the horse family had the slightest control.

But environment was not the only factor in that history. The three-toed horse could not arise except as the offspring of a four-toed or a five-toed horse. The single hoof of the genus equus, [Page 275]the modern horse, could evolve only as the lateral toes of the three-toed horse decreased in size. Heredity has in the past been just as essential as environment. It is useless to waste time considering which is more important, heredity or environment; neither could have accomplished anything alone.

As for horses, so for men. Heredity and environment set the limits within which our lives are spent. Psychologists and sociologists are increasingly successful in discovering how the two factors correlate to determine the capacity of the individual. Doubtless, aptitudes are determined for each individual by heredity and environment. But when we press the idea further, we are likely to get into danger. Any truth pushed to its ultimate extreme becomes dangerous and generally foolish. Thus, in our modern penology we have discovered that certain individuals are criminal by nature. They do things of an anti-social character wholly without volition on their own part. We send them to the psychopathic hospital and then we isolate them where they belong: not in a prison to be punished but in institutions where, if they cannot be cured, they may at least be protected and removed from contact with the rest of the world.

Excusing the lunatic for his misdeeds sometimes has led the normal individual to the idea that he also should be excused from all responsibility for what he does. "I couldn't help it; it was my heredity and environment which determined this course of action for me; so don't blame me." It is generally a cowardly plea. There are some who should not be blamed for what they do; for them, poor souls, heredity and environment have set limits which closely cramp and narrowly confine, but for most of us there is plenty of unoccupied territory. Heredity and environment are far kinder to the average human being than most of us are willing to admit. Rare indeed is the man whose attainments equal his possibilities, who actually makes the most of his life.

Within the limits thus determined for him, each individual seems to choose where and how he shall live. Or does heredity select from among the offerings made by environment? An enticing theory, is it not? Environment puts the circle round about our [Page 276]lives; heredity determines the choice of the particular quadrant of the circle in which we shall live.

That there has been choice cannot be denied by the believer in evolution. The record of the rocks indicates that the forward steps in life development have at each stage en taken by only a very few individuals among the many for whom the opportunity was available. Back in the Devonian period, for example, long before the Appalachian Mountains were crumpled upward along the eastern border of this continent, there were living a host of so-called "lung fishes". At that time in the region now occupied by the northeastern States, there was a semi-tropical environment with profound variation from an excessively dry to an excessively wet season each year. The compulsion of seasonal dryness seems to have exerted an awakening influence upon those lung-fishes, and from them, at that time and in that place, evolved the amphibians, the first air-breathing vertebrates. But perhaps no more than one or two in each generation of those Devonian lung-fishes took the opportunity to develop the organs and structures which eventually permitted those first venturesome amphibians to walk out on the land. Many were called, but few were chosen. The gains in the history of life have been made by risk-taking minorities in spite of the overburden of conservative majorities. In the human heritage there is no taint; nature's derelicts have ruthlessly been weeded out; of our heredity we may well be proud.

But in the last analysis it is environment which has determined heredity. If all living species of animals and plants have arisen through modification from one, single-celled, primordial plant-animal, as we evolutionists believe, then the differences in heredity are either purely imaginary or are themselves a response to varying conditions of environment. The only other alternative, which might as a wild but possible working hypothesis be considered, is the thought that in the beginning of life there were many primordial one-celled organisms, each of which was then fore-ordained and predestined to be the ancestor of a line of offspring reaching to each existing or extinct species. That to the evolutionist is unthinkable, because of the obvious close relations of living [Page 277]creatures. The "tree of life" is rather a great shrub with a single central root or stem, from which the branches divide and subdivide again. The creatures of today are the tips of these many branches. We may trace back each tip into its twig, the twigs into the branches, the branches into the limbs and the limbs into the central stalk. Evolution began when the first living cell became two separate individuals, the second generation of living creatures upon the face of the earth. The differences in the heredity of those two individuals must have been determined by the surroundings of their parent cell at the moment of division. Environment can not at the same time offer opportunities for choice, and determine which opportunity shall be chosen. We escape from the vicious circle of such reasoning only by assuming that each organism does in some way, of its own free will and accord, choose from certain limited potentialities of existence those which shall for it be realized as actualities. And therein is the real difference between organisms and machines.

The geologic record shows unmistakably that the number of choices available for living creatures has steadily increased throughout the ages. For example, the limits within which vertebrate life can exist have notably expanded. At first, back in the early part of the Paleozoic era, the vertebrates could live only in an aquatic environment, for they were all fishes and must breathe by means of gills. Then, a little later, some of the vertebrates acquired a mode of respiration which made them free to live also on the dry land. Later still the vertebrates conquered the air. Birds are obviously at home in a greater variety of environments than are fishes.

Thus the limits circumscribed about each individual have expanded as a result of evolutionary progress. Thus, living creatures, the offspring of the earth, have gradually been subduing the earth. Vital energy has discovered how to manifest itself in new and previcusly untried environments, has developed the ability to express itself in a greater and greater variety of ways.

The real measure of the progress of life from stage to stage is the diversity of opportunities for self-expression which are [Page 278]available at each stage. On such a basis man may be compared with other organisms. The so-called lower animals have ordinarily specialized in adaptation to some particular environment: horses to prairies, alligators to swamps, horned toads to deserts. But man has specialized in adaptability to all environments. Man alone, among highly specialized animals, can live where he pleases: in the tropics or at the poles, beneath the sea or high in the air, deep down in the ground or on the mountain summit. Man is a specialist in adaptability, not in adaptation.

Man has succeeded in developing adaptability because he began early, when the body was still quite generalized, at the time when the ancestors of man were as unlike us as Eohippus was unlike the modern species of horse. Man has retained even to the present day many features of the generalized body of primitive mammals. He has thirty-two teeth; progress in the development of vertebrate jaws is marked in other forms of life by reduction in the number of teeth, but man has retained almost, although not quite, the maximum number which mammals can have. Man has five fingers and five toes: the horse has far exceeded him in the development of appendages for locomotion, by reducing the digits to one. The horse is a specialist in locomotion and can easily outdistance man when man plays fair and races on foot. Instead of specializing in some one activity, the ancestors of man retained the more generalized body structure and made possible the adaptability which modern man displays.

At the same time, man has succeeded better than any other creature in remaking environments to suit his whims. The beavers build a dam to create the environment of the swamp in which they want to live. The tropical ants build mounds to serve as islands on flooded river flats. But man does more to the face of the earth than all the other animals combined. He drains marshes and irrigates deserts. He strips the trees from forested hillsides in the eastern states to develop farm lands and pasture fields; whereas on the treeless prairies of Kansas and Nebraska he plants trees for a wind-break at the far side of the wheat field, or a shelter and a shade for his farm-stead. As he thus succeeds in molding his [Page 279]

MEN, MACHINES AND MYSTICS

physical surroundings closer to his heart’s desire and at the same time in adapting himself to a wider range of living conditions, he frees himself from the control of environment; or, more accurately, he enlarges the limits within which environment confines him. He pushes back the horizon and discovers for himself new areas of self-expression. If this be true for mankind collectively, then necessarily it must be true for men individually.

With increasing opportunity for choice there comes increasing responsibility upon the chooser. Making all due allowances for heredity and environment, still it is true that each normal human being must stand on his own feet, must accept the consequences of his own decisions. When a man makes up his mind, he changes the course of history. Perhaps it is only so trivial a thing as the selection of mayonnaise rather than Russian dressing for his salad, but history is merely a summation of trivial events. Therefore, ideas govern the world.

Just what is involved when the organic prerogative of making a choice between two lines of conduct is exercised cannot now be told. That is to say, the laws by which the organic world is being governed are not yet understood. That there are such laws is an inescapable inference from all that we know about ourselves and the world in which we live. The mystery about them does not invalidate the fact of their existence.

In the attempt to penetrate this mystery, the psychologist does well to study the reactions of the so-called “lower animals” to stimuli of one sort and another, but it should always be remembered that new modes of action in obedience to new laws have emerged from the process of evolution. Just as the living cell is distinguished from the non-living crystal, so is the psychical distinguished from the merely physiological, the social from the solitary. It should not be assumed that human actions must in every particular follow the same principles as those of other organisms. Wherein man differs from other creatures is to be discovered by experiment, observation and experience, and in no other way; it is purely a question of observable fact.

Out of a world governed by the law of gravity and the laws [Page 280]of atomic structure is emerging a world in which mentality is a powerful directing force, a world in which purpose does make a difference, a world wherein "intelligence is practical and a source of power." The history of the past leads directly to the conclusion that it is perfectly reasonable to hope and strive for the realization of ideals that have never yet been realized. When new conditions arise, new laws become operative. The very fact that men attempt to determine their own conduct, to transform the world in which they live, to instill more satisfactory ideals in the minds of themselves and of their fellows, is fair ground for the expectation that these very things will be accomplished. Apparently, in the past, the things which organisms tried to do were the things which organisms sooner or later were able to do. A world evolving as our world seems to evolve is absolutely governed by ideas.

If men actually do make up their own minds, as they certainly seem to do, then thoughts are more significant than the mechanism by which they are expressed. Mysterious though it be, the imponderables are just as real as the ponderables. Our inability to explain all that we know is disappointing and perplexing; but most of us have found it rather necessary to accept the universe. The mystic takes the facts as he finds them. He believes that the spiritual is just as real as the material, the abstract as the concrete, the values as the things valued, the personality as the person. Explain it or not, the fact remains that man is something more than the mechanism perceptible to the five senses.

Prof. Mather’s article is the fourth in a series of six essays he has prepared for World Unity Magazine on Science and Religion. "The New World Revealed by Modern Science", "Science and Religion: Are They Friends or Enemies?" and "The Search for God in a Scientific World" were published in October, November and December. The fifth article in the series will appear in the February, 1928, issue. [Page 281]

THE RISING TIDE

Notes on current books possessing special significance in the light of the trend toward world unity.

Edited by JOHN HERMAN RANDALL, JR. Department of Philosophy, Columbia University

Nationalism and Economic World Unity

SINCE 1918 French opinion has been represented to the outside world as almost exclusively chauvinistic and nationalistic. In France, as in the other victorious nations, policies have been determined by conservatives with little imagination, with more of an eye to immediate security than to the broader vision of the new world. English readers have hardly been made aware of the existence of those Frenchmen who stand in the fine French tradition of enlightened internationalism based on clear thinking and an unclouded facing of facts. It is, therefore, particularly gratifying to be able to record that an admirable volume has been translated that is a worthy representative of what Anatole France called "the great, the true France-the France of Voltaire and Montesquieu".

M. François Delaisi, already favorably known in this country as the author of Oil, Its Influence on Politics, a realistic study of contemporary imperialism, wrote his Political Myths and Economic Realities* before the Pact of Locarno was signed. His analysis of the present world situation contains nothing that will be strikingly new to the informed. But in few other books has the contradiction between our actual economic interdependence and our inadequate political thought and ideals been so clearly and forcefully driven home.

Though M. Delaisi is an economist with a command of economic facts, his work is not so much an argument for changed

• François Delaisi, Political Myths and Economic Realities. The Viking Press. xvii, 446 pages.

[Page 282]economic institutions as a call for a new consciousness of interdependence. It is, in fact, an eloquent plea for a new faith, the faith in world unity, in what he calls economic monotheism.

“We are face to face,” he says, “with an economic and international problem which we presume to solve by political and national means. Therein lies the secret of all the impotent efforts in which the world has been floundering these last six years. The origin of the trouble lies in our misguided interpretation of the facts. The difficulties reside not in the things as they are but in our conception of them; they are not material but psychological. This is a new fact, which neither the nations nor their leaders appear to have perceived. That which requires changing is not the economic system of international exchange to which the modern world is indebted for its wonderful development—for left to itself, it would be restored by its own means. It is our mental outlook, the legacy of an earlier period, and ill-adapted to modern conditions, which is paralyzing our economic system.

“In the present world crisis, for which a solution has yet to be found, the gravest difficulties do not arise from the situation itself; they lie within ourselves. It is a well-known law that ideas usually travel less rapidly than events. Imagination is wanting in nations as in individuals. More often than not, a generation must pass away before the silent few are able to get a general impression of the group and its functions. And yet another must come and go for this view to be accepted by all. But by then it is too late; for conditions have changed once again. It follows that no political or social doctrine is generally accepted until the moment it has ceased to be true. Unconscious of the change, we continue to think of the present in terms of the past. Hence the difficulty that confronts us in taking our bearings.

“Finally with the discrepancy ever growing between reality, always on the move, and its static representation in our minds, extreme confusion is reached and the difficulties that face us are no longer capable of any solution. That is the moment—and it revives periodically—when human society is compelled to revise its principles. That we have arrived at one of these critical periods [Page 283]in history, is at least suggested by the inextricable confusion in which the world now finds itself. We shall have to confront all the facts with our preconceived conception of them; then only by a process of adjustment shall we be able to conjure the disparity between the facts as they are and the figment in our brain."

M. Delaisi, with a French penchant for sweeping generalizations, sees political history as the succession of a series of great myths or social faiths. The average man cannot possess an accurate picture of the society to which he belongs; yet he must have the conception of a larger social whole into which he fits, and with which his interests are vitally bound up. He must have a faith that unites him with his fellows, creates a willing obedience and the stability and security necessary for a civilized life. This conception of the necessity of a social myth M. Delaisi borrows from Georges Sorel, but it goes back at least to Plato and the myth of natural social classes on which the stability of the Republic was to be founded. Typical is the Papal myth of the Middle Ages, in which men believed in the great body of Christendom united in peace and brotherhood under the Pope and the spiritual ordering of society.

Such a myth is beneficial so long as it provides institutions with a moral foundation understood by all, creates obedience by consent, and increases the power of the social group. But the social facts and needs change with economic development, while the myth remains rigid and fixed. For a time it persists, increasingly out of accord with facts; then comes reform, open questioning of the myth, breaking away, and finally the rise of a new social faith. M. Delaisi's analysis of the way in which one great social ideal and faith thus is forced to give way to another is extremely acute and suggestive. He sees seven such changes in our history.

"At every stage of civilization, social, religious or political creeds have thus spread across entire continents despite every conceivable obstacle. Among the Western peoples, the patriotism of the ancient city was followed by the imperial and Christian myths, by the feudal and the royal myths. The national myth is more all-embracing than its predecessors since it includes at the [Page 284]same time a material factor—the possession of the soil—and a sentimental factor—family solidarity: the soil and the blood tie. More comprehensive than all the others, its radiating capacity has been greater. Within a century, it has become a kind of universal religion to humanity."

This myth of nationality has served as the social bond since the French revolution. The author effectively presents the various means by which it has been created and fostered: the belief in racial unity, the creation of a national language, largely through conscription, the re-writing of history to provide a common tradition, the inculcation of belief in the national genius. His examples are largely French, and in endeavoring to find the economic realities out of which the myth first developed he emphasizes the passionate attachment of the French peasant to the soil, so potent in the creation of French nationalism during the Revolution. Nationality, he concludes, is primarily an agrarian myth, interpreting all social loyalty in terms of the easily understood relation of the peasant to his own sacred soil. It corresponded well to the conditions in which the national state was the economic unit.

"The conception of a human society split up into various sovereignties was in itself contradictory and fruitful of conflict. But it corresponded more or less adequately to an economic regime wherein each nation was self-supporting for its essential needs. And it could not be otherwise so long as the great majority of enterprises, untouched as yet by industrial specialization, were able to find on the national market at the same time their raw material, their outlets and their capital. Political sovereignty was well adapted to economic autonomy; and the national myth was the most perfect expression of the agrarian civilization."

How stand the facts today? Science and history together c easily riddle any conception of racial unity within the nation; the whole conception of independent and superior national genius, what M. Delaisi calls "intellectual imperialism", crumbles before analysis. "There are between nations no watertight compartments in matters of the mind. The sentry post at the frontier [Page 285]

NATIONALISM AND ECONOMIC WORLD UNITY

is unable to prevent the passage of an idea. The majority, handicapped by their ignorance of foreign tongues or by lack of leisure, may have to content themselves with the knowledge of the masterpieces of their own country; but even so, what they take to be the highest expression of the national genius is really only the echo of all the emotions and thoughts that sway the universe. It would be hard to find a scientist, a philosopher or an artist who would claim to be indebted only to the national heritage, regardless of foreign contribution."

As to the economic life, the agrarian world out of which the myth of nationality grew, that has been transformed by the industrial revolution. Rarely have the facts of present-day economic interdependence been so effectively marshalled as by M. Delaisi. He concludes his brilliant summary with these words: "Whether for clothes or food, for work or for pleasure, we all are dependent upon every country under the sun. We cannot make a gesture without displacing some object that has come from the most remote regions; and conversely, every important event on the surface of the globe finds its echo in our daily life. Modern man is truly a citizen of the world. But he is completely unaware of the fact, and herein lies the tragedy of our time and the cause of all the turmoil of the post-war age."

M. Delaisi is not a cosmopolitan; he does not underestimate the power and appeal of national cultures. "Faith in a national ideal is in itself a noble and beneficent sentiment; but transformed into exclusive admiration, it has become a powerful instrument of violence and destruction. The bright cloak of intellectual imperialism serves to cover the sordid calculations of economic imperialism." The last part of his volume is a clear account of just how this economic imperialism has worked and is working after the Treaty of Versailles. He has a program of his own, an economist's program, in which he looks to the divorce of economic organization from national lines and the development of a non-political and world-wide system of professional organizations. Nationalism is evil, he feels, primarily because of its entanglement with economic matters. In itself, it contains much of value that [Page 286]should remain in an internationalized world. Such myths never die completely. They are absorbed in the next myth. But it must lose its absolute character in the minds of mankind. "In reality, the national myth was propagated through the world in the course of the 19th century because it appeared as the most appropriate moral bond between new human groupings based on the emancipation of rural property. It is not an end but a means. As with all things human, it has no absolute quality. Born of certain needs, it must disappear or change with these needs. Utility is its only justification." "The separation of the temporal from the spiritual brought religious wars to an end. The separation of the economic from the political will put an end to business wars."

Yet, in the last analysis, any further growth of economic organization is dependent upon the emergence of a new social faith, a faith in world interdependence. "The world will recover its equilibrium when, in the mind of each producer, the idea of interdependence has acquired the same value as that of salvation for the Christian, equality for the democrat, and the fatherland for the citizen. But how are the masses to acquire this consciousness? That is the vital problem that must be faced by all who can look beyond the surface of events. Will a new myth arise? It may be." And M. Delaisi sketches this new faith, the faith in the Geon or world organism. "The Geon is there; he exists and lives within us. Each of us is only one of his cells, although we do not know it and do not wish to know. Each member claims to be independent of the others; and for the disturbance it provokes in the entire organism, the organism retaliates with a vengeance. By making us suffer, the unacknowledged God imposes himself upon our consciousness.

"The source of so much confusion lies within yourselves. Unwilling to recognize that interdependence which binds you to each other, you were wounding yourselves when you thought you were striking at your neighbors. Thus it will ever be so long as you do not fully recognize your economic solidarity. If reason and self-interest be not enough, the mere interplay of irresistible forces will compel you to see the light. Until then, you will not be left [Page 287]in peace. From strikes to bankruptcy, from unemployment to famine, from economic crises to social upheavals, from wars to revolutions, you will be scourged—until your discrowned nationalities bow down before the majesty of facts.

4. SCIENCE

FROM MYTH TO REASON, by WOODBRIGDE RILEY (Appleton) SCIENCE AND CIVILIZATION, ed. by F. S. MARVIN (Oxford) SCIENCE AND THE MODERN WORLD, by ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD (Macmillan) Three accounts of the growth of the scientific attitude.

THE NEW UNIVERSE, by BAKER BROWNELL (Van Nostrand) THE NATURE OF THE WORLD AND OF MAN, by members of the Faculty, U. of Chicago (Chicago U. P.) EXPLORING THE UNIVERSE, by HENSHAW WARD (Bobbs-Merrill) Three recent popular accounts of the new scientific universe.

EVOLUTION FOR JOHN DOE, by HENSHAW WARD (Bobbs-Merrill) The best popular account of this epoch-making idea.

THE STREAM OF LIFE, by JULIAN S. HUXLEY AND CALDWELL (Harper's) LOVE LIVE IN NATURE, by WILHELM BÖLSCHE (Boni) HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT, by GRANT CONKLIN (Princeton U. P.) THE DIRECTION OF HUMAN EVOLUTION, by GRANT CONKLIN (Princeton U. P.) THE RACIAL BASIS OF CIVILIZATION, by FRANK H. HANKINS (Knopf) What modern biology reveals of human life.

SCIENCE REMAKING THE WORLD, by E. E. SLOSSON (Garden City) SCIENCE, THE FALSE MESSIAH, by c. E. AYRES (Bobbs-Merrill) Two views of the effect of science on human life.

Prof. Randall's list will be followed in later issues by similar lists on the subjects of Religion, Education and Ideals of Life.)

NOTE—Books reviewed or advertised in this publication can be purchased by mail from World Unity Magazine for the publisher's list price plus postage. [Page 288]

NOTES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS

THE WORLD WE LIVE IN, a title borrowed without apology from the drama by Capek, brings to WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE a new department which has distinct possibilities of interest. It is only too apparent that the sense of moral solidarity produced by the physical neighborliness of the past is lacking in civilized lands today. The individual, especially the individual with talent and capacity for response, frequently feels himself thrust into a spiritual blind alley whence he is inclined to look back with unhappy envy to the intenser attachments and more instinctive groupings evolved naturally from a civilization determined by relation to the local soil. Le Deraciné has become more than a type—it is almost a normal condition.

But there are compensations and readjustments. Attachment to the group determined by common outlook, mutuality of interest or similarity of psychic mechanism offers the modern substitute for the local neighborhood of our fathers. Alliance with a voluntary movement founded for some specific service or activity is today's equivalent to the older birthright in tribe or clan. The very fact that this is a voluntary attachment, and one representing the fulfilment of an inner longing or conscious ideal, rather than a mere physical inheritance, gives the modern group-related individual a special significance. His neighborhood is marked by boundaries of mind, heart or spirit; his fellows are self-chosen, his freedom of association marks a new and higher privilege of the same nature as the self-expression of artists.

Many people have not yet discovered this privilege of voluntary association with others in a free social group. Their sense of moral isolation they regard as a personal weakness or misfortune, not realizing that the most robust and effective personalities are almost always those who have attained a creative social relationship, which serves to stimulate enthusiasm and concentrate their powers. Curiously enough, this self-condemnation is most intense in those most capable of moral rebirth and fulfilment by consecration to a worthy ideal.

This "world we live in" offers so rich a field of elective attachment that the fundamental moral problem of the unsatisfied individual today would seem to be no mere isolated resistance to negative impulses, but the determination of what modern movement corresponds to his or her inner nature and need. Perhaps by another generation we shall have wise counsellors able to assist individuals in the art of group-attachment—the art of successful living today. This new department, then, will be a kind of travelog, describing the spiritual countries accessible to minds in this generation. [Page 289]

NOTES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS

Two other departments now under consideration will, when all arrangements are completed, greatly extend the contact which WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE can make with seeking minds.

One of these proposed departments will be devoted to a summary of current international affairs, with interpretative comment by a student possessing recognized authority in this field. WORLD UNITY has no intention of attempting to duplicate the news gathering or news reporting facilities which the modern press and weekly magazines have so marvelously developed during the last decade. Our aim will rather be to deal with the more outstanding affairs arising from month to month throughout the world, endeavoring to show their underlying significance against the background of the trend toward unity. It is obviously in the area of interpretation that existing news organs are inadequate and unsatisfactory. The reader is overwhelmed with facts, but the universal viewpoint is lacking. WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE stands upon the only foundation of purpose broad enough to permit interpretation of current events without sectional bias or prejudice, and the editors feel that this department should become one of intense interest and real value to our readers.

The other proposed department will serve to bring the readers of WORLD UNITY into a more creative relationship with the development of the magazine. By means of carefully prepared questionnaires published from time to time, the editors will seek the views of readers on problems which represent fundamental issues confronting the world at this time. The responses will be carefully studied, and the results reported in these pages.

WORLD UNITY fully appreciates the fact that its readers represent a highly selective body of people which has come into being in response to an ideal excluding no one on account of race, nationality, creed or class, but automatically repels those of a partisan disposition. The commercial factor has been reduced to a minimum, for the subscription price of this publication is based upon manufacturing costs aimed at survival rather than profit. Every influential journal in the past has produced its constituency upon a moral rather than a commercial basis, and WORLD UNITY will endeavor to remain faithful to this principle. The comments and suggestions of readers are sincerely welcomed at all times, for the ideals and purposes of the magazine are obviously a mutual right and privilege.

The special attention of readers is called to the Reading Lists of Current Books on World Unity prepared by Prof. J. H. Randall, Jr. and published in current issues under a most useful subject classification. The complete List has been reprinted in pamphlet form at the nominal price of ten cents a copy. The value of this Reading List has already been appreciated by a number of study groups and university lecturers, who find it a unique approach to the collective expression of the "spirit of the new age". [Page 290]

PRICELESS KNOWLEDGE

- At the cost of mere paper and printing!

In its first three issues, WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE has given its readers intimate contact with the thoughts that are remaking the world. Study the following list of contents and decide for yourself whether you can afford not to be a reader of WORLD UNITY throughout the crucial year 1928.

CONTENTS OF OCTOBER ISSUE

The Ideal of World Unity, by John Herman Randall; David Starr Jordan, by Charles Henry Rieber; The Wisdom of the Ages, by Alfred W. Martin; The New World Revealed by Modern Science, by Kirtley F. Mather; The New Humanity, by Mary Siegrist; The Scientific and Religious Drive Towards Unity, by Herbert Adolphus Miller; The World Outlook, by Horace Holley; Current Books on World Unity, by J. H. Randall, Jr.

CONTENTS OF NOVEMBER ISSUB

The Ideal of World Unity, Part 2, by John Herman Randall; Léon Bourgeois, by Albert Léon Guérard; Science and Religion: Are They Friends or Enemies? by Kirtley F. Mather; Education and Internationalism, by Edwin L. Troxell; The Sacred Scriptures of Hinduism, by Alfred W. Martin; The Biological Sanctions of World Unity, by Ernest M. Best; Poems of Brotherhood, selected by Mary Siegrist; The Public and Its Problems, by J. H. Randall, Jr; Current Books on Philosophy.

CONTENTS OF DECEMBER ISSUE

The Search for God in a Scientific World, by Kirtley F. Mather; A Spiritual Basis for World Unity, by Dhan Gopal Mukerji; The Interaction of Europe and Asia, by William R. Shepherd; The Sacred Scriptures of Hinduism (continued), by Alfred W. Martin; The Biological Sanctions of World Unity, Part 2, by Ernest M. Best; Baroness Bertha von Suttner, by John Mez; Poems of Brotherhood, selected by Mary Siegrist; The Science of Man, by J. H. Randall, Jr.

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The Making of the Modern Mind

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Reading List of CURRENT BOOKS on WORLD UNITY

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WORLD UNITY PUBLISHING CORP. 4 East 12th Street New York [Page 292]

THE WORLD UNITY CONFERENCES

I

the World Unity Conferences a new and distinctive type of public meeting has been established, one which strongly appeals to all who desire to come into contact with the forces making for universal unity yet prefer not to identify themselves with any formal organization through membership or dues.

A World Unity Conference consists of several consecutive meetings at which responsible leaders in the fields of education, science, philosophy, ethics and religion interpret those fundamental principles of human association capable of overcoming traditional prejudice and promoting the ideals of brotherhood and world peace.

Conferences are held at frequent intervals in cities throughout the United States and Canada. These meetings are open to all, without dues, admission ticket or collection. The committee will be pleased to receive correspondence from organizations and individuals willing to cooperate in the extension of this independent platform dedicated to the promotion of harmony and understanding among religions, races, nations and classes.

Program of Meetings-January-May, 1928 Philadelphia, Pa.-January 22, 23, 24 Washington, D. C.-February 19, 20, 21 Detroit, Mich.-March 20, 21, 22 Cincinnati, Ohio-March 27, 28, 29 Cleveland, Ohio -April 23, 24, 25 Pittsburgh, Pa.-May 21, 22, 23

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