World Unity/Volume 2/Issue 1/Text

World Unity Volume 2, Issue 1

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[Page i]

CONTENTS

A Statement of Purpose

Mind in Evolution. Charles Hubbard Judd

Democracy in Rebirth Editorial

The Significance of the Scientific Spirit for Eastern Civilizations John J. Coss

Universal Religious Peace Conference Dr. Henry A. Atkinson

The Interaction of Eu ope and Asia: V. Eastern Thoughts in Western Minds Alfred Herman Fried. Why So Many Crimes? William R. Shepherd John Mex

World Unity Forum

The Sixth Pan-American Conference. Dexter Perkins

The Sacred Scriptures of Hinduism Alfred W. Martin

The New Humanity: An Anthology. . Mary Siegrist

Outstanding Books of the Season John H. Randall, Jr.

Notes and Announcements [Page ii]

A STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE, as its title implies, will endeavor to interpret and record those significant changes in present-day thought which mark the trend toward world-wide understanding and a humanized civilization able to release the finer aspirations of mankind.

Its essential purpose is to make accessible to awakened minds the views and conclusions of creative workers on subjects of truly general interest and importance. The emergence of new and higher values in philosophy, science, religion, ethics and the arts from the alembic of universal unrest represents the focal point of vision for World Unity Magazine.

With political, economic or sectarian matters, or the promotion of any concrete program, or the upbuilding of any exclusive organization, the magazine has no concern.

To create a medium capable of responding faithfully, without prejudice of race, creed, class or nationality, to the uprush of the spirit of the age wherever or however manifested—this is the ideal to which World Unity Magazine is devoted; and faith in humanity arising at last to assert its organic oneness, the foundation on which it stands.

Because the attitude and aim of World Unity Magazine reflects the outlook of an increasing host left unsatisfied by the extremes of purposeless culture and self-centered propaganda, the editors are confident that a medium of this character has become inevitable at the present time. [Page 1]

WORLD UNITY

C. F. ANSLEY W. W. ATWOOD MARY AUSTIN

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

A. MENDELSOHN BARTHOLDY BARON BAUDRAN L. F. DE BEAUFORT GERRIT A. BENEKER PIERRE BOVET HARRY CHARLESWORTH NG POON CHEW RUDOLPH I. COFFEE BAYARD DODGE GEORGES DUHAMEL ANNA B. ECKSTEIN HAVELOCK ELLIS AUGUSTE FOREL C. F. GATES V. SCHULZE GÄVERNITZ HELLMUTH VON GERLACH HERBERT ADAMS GIBBONS KAHLIL GIBRAN CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN JOHN W. GRAHAM MARJA GRUNDMANN-KOSCIENSKA LUCIA AMES MEAD 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 GEORGE DE LUKÁCS LOUIS L. MANN SIR JAMES MARCHANT VICTOR MARGUERITTE R. H. MARKHAM ALFRED W. MARTIN F. S. MARVIN KIRTLEY F. MATHER FRED MERRIFIELD KARIN MICHAELIS HERBERT A. MILLER 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 2]

Mind in Evolution

THE inner experiences of human beings are profoundly different from the facts and forces which are dealt with by the physical sciences. The laws of human nature are expressions of a higher form of organization than appears elsewhere in the world. There is nothing more complex or more highly integrated than human thinking. There is nothing more original in the world than human combinations of ideas. In making these assertions there is no disposition to remove man in his physical or mental life from the world in which he lives or from the evolutionary series to which he belongs. Man is a product of the evolutionary process. He is, however, greatly superior, in the powers which he exhibits, to all other animals, just because the evolutionary process has resulted in the appearance in the human race of highly complex nervous structures and correspondingly complex methods of adaptation. In the case of man there has appeared as the essential fact in his bodily equipment a larger and more highly organized cerebrum than that possessed by any other animal. In this cerebrum sensory and motor impulses unite in associative combinations. In every normal human being there is an inner world of ideas and of recognitions of values, for which inner world of rational thought there is no counterpart in the world studied by the physicist or in life below the human level.

CHARLES HUBBARD JUDD [Page 3]

DEMOCRACY IN REBIRTH

If we follow the course of modern democracy from the heroic self-sacrifice of Valley Forge to the latest example of flagrant dishonesty among party politicians, we seem to traverse the complete life-cycle of a great political ideal from birth to death. There can be no significant future for a system once descended from the vision of the magnanimous to the prosperity of the shrewd. A sense of futility has seized upon liberal voters, as if the spur of their recorded conviction no longer had power to stimulate useful response from an organism in decay.

The special capacity which this system had of responding to moral pressure was vitalized by the passion for freedom. If democracy lies prostrate, it is because this passion no longer moves the hearts of men. The duration of the ideal of liberty marks the life-cycle of the democratic form in the West. The passion for liberty produced the energy needed to plan and develop the mechanism of representative government. Consciousness of the supreme value of freedom inspired its administrators and disciplined its citizens. The mechanism has been perfected—the moral force behind it has expired.

But what was this passion for liberty? In essence, a mode of separation from an older, more powerful social body, a form of division deliberately adopted to shut out certain abuses and disabilities connected with the order from which the democracy sprang. The task of the constitutionalists was not to arm their frontiers against an invading foe, but to prevent a detested system from evolving out of the very order they were trying to create. Hence the multiplication of governmental machinery, the philosophy of checks and balances, the division of powers [Page 4]and functions, the jealous safeguarding against undue authority in any branch of the complicated instrument. Monarchy, defeated in the field, triumphed in the fears of its foes.

Like an over-stimulated appetite, the passion for liberty, once the separation was complete, turned within. Nothing in that form of democracy exercises any pressure or inspiration to control the relations of the voters themselves. The instinct of division remained predominant, and lacking sufficient spiritual guidance and reinforcement from religion, the people of democracy became alien one to another in fulfilling the possibilities of their political form.

Since form and mechanism are always subordinate to spirit, the true course of democracy lies not in the record of constitutional amendments or party contests, but in the passion and conviction now animating magnanimous people—the true heirs of those who struggled for representative government in the previous age.

We must look to the voluntary, uninstitutionalized activities of living men and women, in other words, to discern the first, tentative expressions of what will one day become the new philosophy of government. What is the testimony? That not democracy but nationalism has run through its life-cycle and leaves the bulk of its unburied corpse to rot in the sun. The modern democrat has replaced liberty with the ideal of world unity, and behind the longest battleline the world has ever known he is struggling to promote the solidarity of mankind. Here is the rebirth of democracy: in the movement for a universal language; in the elimination of race prejudice; in the comparative study of religions; in adult education; in the further application of science to physical transport and mental communication; perhaps, above all, in the deep and widespread yearning for new sources of spiritual quickening. World democracy may be long in preparation, but that it will come is as certain as the invincible authority of spiritual law. [Page 5]

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT FOR EASTERN CIVILIZATIONS

by JOHN J. COSS Department of Philosophy, Director of Summer School, Columbia University

By the scientific spirit I mean the desire and ability to investigate the relations of phenomena within a single order with a view to their understanding and control. It is the technique of mechanism operating within a naturalistic world-order without dogmatism as to a more ultimate metaphysics.

Such a scientific spirit operates in any culture as only one of many factors. It is reinforced by certain characteristics of culture and retarded by others.

On this occasion I am chiefly interested in pointing out the significance of the scientific spirit in the civilization of Asia. I think, however, that we shall reach a fairer view of the place of science there, if we consider some of the complex factors which operate in the West and also pass these same factors in review for Eastern cultures. When this is done we can look in detail at the scientific spirit in operation, with its promises and its temporary defeats.

In the complex of influences which have been operating in the civilization which we call Western there are eleven to which I wish particularly to direct attention.

1. The climate of the temperate zone. 2. Varied and adequate natural resources. 3. A sparse population. 4. A great accumulation of capital at work. 5. A gathering together of population in urban communities. [Page 6]6. An easy dissemination of knowledge through well-developed communication and transportation. 7. The Christian tradition of theology and morals. 8. A dominant individual temper of aggression and independence. 9. The scientific attitude toward the solution of problems, physical and social. 10. The rise and spread of manufacture by machinery, a corollary of the preceding factor. 11. The length of time during which science and manufacture rose from minor to major influences.

A few moments may be given to each of these eleven factors.

1. The climate of Western civilization is, on the whole, temperate and varied. It gives tone to mind and body and puts a premium on enterprise, inventiveness, and thrift. 2. The natural resources of Western civilization, though not equally distributed within national boundaries, are adequate for industrial development, and, through providing transport facilities and trade, give to the West, by indirection, all the products of the world. 3. A population, which in general and by comparison is sparse, favored by climate and furnished with raw materials, assures to individuals a relatively high standard of living. 4. A vast capital busily at work renders possible undertakings of great magnitude. The per capita wealth of the United States is $2,800 as opposed to $720 for Japan and $57 for India. The estimate for China is $195. 5. Concentration of population in urban centers, joined with other factors, incites activity which provides leadership in a great variety of enterprises. 6. Communication is easy and general. It is based on universal education; that is to say, on reading and the ability to handle terms and ideas, on the press and the general spread of news, and on extensive travel. [Page 7]

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7. The Christian tradition emphasizes mutual regard and helpfulness, and when modified by the influence of science looks upon this world as at least one scene of transformation into a society of well-developed manhood.

8. Throughout the West there is a willingness to fight man or nature and an almost uniform insistence upon individual rights and equality. Science lends support, climate stimulates, religion, in part at least, justifies, and capital furnishes a tool for personal and group achievement.

9. The scientific attitude is present in the West wherever men turn to the careful consideration of their problems, and with it comes the confident belief that within the realm of nature there are to be found solutions. Men feel that human control can be established over physical and social phenomena just in so far as there is attained a naturalistic understanding of the measurable factors involved.

10. With the urgency of human needs and the stimulus of trade pressing them forward and the abundance of natural resources and capital making their task light, or at least possible, men gained control over manufacturing processes, material and human, and transformed production from handicrafts to a mechanized order.

11. Innovation in the West though instantaneous in reference to the time span of the world, came, on the whole, slowly enough to permit much absorption and adjustment. The world of Charlemagne was not presented with the achievements of Taylor and Ford.

Western civilization in which these eleven influences among many others have been operating has fairly clear boundaries. It includes Western Europe, the United States and Canada, and to a lesser degree, South America and a few Europeanized areas in other parts of the world. In addition, Japan during the past sixty years has shown many characteristics of Western civilization.

For our purposes let us call India, China, and Japan Eastern [Page 8]cultures, recognizing that Japan is not really to be included, and that Russia and Persia on many counts ought to be considered. Eastern culture in the factors which are of critical signifi- cance is less homogeneous than that to which we give the name "Western." In a sens more real than for the West it is true that there is no one culture in the East. There is Indian culture (or cultures), Chinese culture (or cultures), and Japanese culture. We are not surprised, therefore, when we try to detect the char- acteristics of the cultures of the East which are particularly use- ful in understanding them, to discover that we must treat India, China, and Japan separately. I shall begin with India.

In listing critical characteristics for India on the bases already used in the West, we find many points of significant difference.

1. The climate is chiefly tropical or semi-tropical for at least a large part of the year.

2. The resources of nature equal or surpass those of the West in many essentials, but to date, supplies of coal and iron are inferior.

3. The population is dense. Per arable square mile it is 834 times as dense as in the United States.

4. Capital is extremely limited so far as Indians are concerned. Large stores of gold, silver, and jewels are hoarded and completely idle.

5. Population is chiefly rural. There are some 33 cities over against 73 in the United States with a population of 100,000, although India's population is 319,000,000 as against 114,000,000 for the United States. These cities are, as with us, centers of enlightenment, agitation and reform.

6. Communication is difficult. About 9 per cent of the population can read. There are at least a dozen thor- oughly different languages and 203 languages more differ- ent than dialects. The ability to use terms and ideas, other than the most familiar and utilitarian, is limited, [Page 9]

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and the understanding of foreign concepts often practically impossible. Travel is restricted to short distances and within a fairly uniform culture area. The press is limited and concerned with propaganda even more than our own.

7. The religious traditions are Muhammedan and Hindu, in the ratio of one to three. Buddhism in the early centuries of our era and Hinduism since have minimized the values of this life and have intensified the resignation which poverty, disease and climate have themselves done much to generate. Although distinguished by the teaching of eventual moral retribution, much weakened in our eyes by the fact that no rebirth carries over the consciousness of earlier lives, the Hindu religion furnishes rather consolation and a feeling of precarious protection than an incentive to a reforming and prophetic life. The religious tradition perpetuates caste and its retarding social influences rather than proclaims the brotherhood of man.

8. In India the majority of the population is undernourished. It is accommodative rather than aggressive. It is long suffering and cajoling rather than compelling. Exception must be made of some Muhammedan and of the Sikh groups.

9. Nature is regarded not with a scientific spirit but with fear, and is peopled with forces to be controlled by what we call magic rather than compelled to obey the power that men gain through mechanical explanations.

10. Manufacture in the old sense of handicraft is threatened by imported and domestic goods of machine production. The process is alien and the social adjustments which lag notably in the West are still more backward in India.

11. Scientific control in all its modern complexity, and industrial mechanization as well have been brought into contact and often actually imposed with the [Page 10]greatest suddenness, over night as it were, upon social, economic, and psychological systems almost completely unable to understand and assimilate them into the fabric of their own existence.

By an analysis of Western and Indian cultures, I have tried to make clear the complexity of factors involved and the impossibility of considering in isolation the significance of science. When we think of India we feel that their acceptance of science is slow. We can, however, scarcely believe that our culture would be expressing itself in the use of scientific medicine, the scientific control of public health, the application of science to agriculture and industry, and the scientific interpretation of social and physical phenomena if we were eight per cent literate instead of 94, unacquainted with the feeling that we could rise up in our might and learn how things desired may be made things realized through the power of understanding, and bound by the whole weight of family, caste, community and religious traditions to follow in the ancient ways. If we were staggering under poverty, hookworm, widespread sexual infection, cholera, smallpox, and malaria, and obsessed by a notion that all our ills were due to the Republican party rather than to natural causes, I fancy we might regard as the most ludicrous kind of medicine-man him who came to us with the invitation to look about us, pry into the secrets of nature, follow after her causal sequences and having surprised her in her actions, force her to repeat them for us.

If the climate were blazing in heat and saturated in moisture and we had enough to eat for the morrow, we might well think any additional exertion in the use of new tools and the belief in new processes an undertaking much too great and too uncertain.

In the West there went on together a slow advance in many lines. Scientific knowledge, education, the growth of trade, manufacture and capital, the change in the attitude toward change itself all these and many more of the tangled threads of the culture pattern were intertwined. Not so in India. Science and its application in the mechanization of economic processes came [Page 11]

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II

out of a clear sky and found a people unprepared for their acceptance. But in spite of the fact that India presents the picture of a bewildered child, or really of a child unaware of the wonders of the world, science is with her and is significant for her.

Whether they will or no, India and China will use manufactured goods. They are cheaper. They will also work in factories because they can furnish a labor supply more cheaply than other parts of the world and because they have raw materials and have, or will have, means of internal transportation. Applied science has at least so much significance.

The tools of industry and transportation and communication Indians are trained to use as men drive automobiles and yet do not understand the mechanisms. More than that, many Indians are competent mechanics. Some few practical schools in engineering on its lower levels are giving instruction under British and Indian control. The Principal of the Engineering School of the Hindu University at Benares told me that he found the pupils apt in learning but slow in change of attitude. (This, to be sure, is not failure to master science, but the natural holdover of the sum of all previous living.) Some development is being undertaken in chemical engineering for small soap and oil factories to be owned and operated by Indians, but the expansion of such industry beyond local needs requires capital and a distributing system as yet unbuilt.

Railroads employ some Indians in mechanical departments; yet in all the country there is but one Indian in a major position, and he is not a Hindu but a Parsi and was educated in England. He is in charge of maintenance of a 10,000-mile system.

In the army Indians learn the mechanism of the guns, and learn too, to use the Western medicine, sometimes on top of their own.

One feels, however, that all this is a surface change, as one feels that the science departments well maintained in Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Lahore, and Benares, and doubt-less in a few other schools, teach minds but not personalities. The University graduates too often find life by class room knowledge too [Page 12]difficult and follow the ancient folkways of the village or local community.

In agriculture a few-at most a half dozen-competent attempts have been made at the scientific study of local problems in Indian Schools and experimental stations. In engineering as in agriculture, England has been a poor educator. Malice is charged against her, and she is taxed with keeping India out of industry to keep Sheffield and Birmingham in. It seems to me more likely that she thought only of the training of civil servant India assistants and regarded a kind of modified Oxford as the best school. Be that as it may, she has too much education at the top, too much learning of ideas, often lip learning, and too little learning of things.

In spite of all the superficiality of scientific penetration, for the village and community science has stupendous significance, though insignificant influence at the moment. To have more effect it must remake a culture. The staggering fact has to be faced that there is set up and now functioning an entire organization for caring for the wants of the community. Doctor and priest, lawyer and banker, farmer and trader-all are there and have been there forever, as it seems, unchanged. Yet each person, operating often shrewdly, often effectively, sometimes benevolently, carries on his work by a series of basic categories at variance with our own and, in our belief, subject to change or radical dismissal if science be applied. The question is: How is science to come in without the critical dislocation of the social structure?

It is not surprising to find that education is the answer given here on the Hill. But again think of the social taboos. The girls need no education, for they are the servants of men and find in their devotion their joy and their salvation. In the villages they may not be teachers, for unmarried girls are not expected to be at large. Village schools then are to be taught by men of very meagre mentality, ill trained themselves. To these schools come some high-caste boys. The low-caste boys are not wanted, are discouraged, often practically prevented from coming; and when they come, language, Indian and clipped English, are badly [Page 13]

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taught also a little figuring. Hygiene, conduct, community knowledge—these are matters of the priest and the elders, and they change not.

Mission schools are better, often excellent, but they do not multiply like the loaves and fishes and there is no multitude sitting by, for it is to low-caste folk that the missions minister chiefly; and though many students may be place takers, they are handicapped in the whole social structure, for they do not fit into the smooth grooves of caste.

This is discouraging. But it is not shocking. When we turn to the customs of the community and look for the crises of science we wonder at the low death rate. Child marriage, in the sense of girls not yet mature living with mature men, is a state common in many, though not all parts of India, defended by perhaps most Indians but attacked by some. Physiologically the results are extremely bad. Add to this the taboos attending childbirth which leave the mother, practically always in her early teens at the first birth, with the minimum of help instead of the greatest care, and you have such a picture as makes medical science seem amongst the greatest boons that man possesses. Slowly Western medicine is getting a hold, but it is still only a tiny light in a very dark night indeed.

Marriage is complicated by caste lines and life made hard for women and often whole families by sacred limitations of the eligible bridegrooms. Physical unfitness is often no bar, but caste membership is. We, in the West, are not free from caste lines nor are we scrupulous about physical fitness, but religion and science have both so entered into our scheme of life and commerce so broken lines that the Western practice seems much more dictated by what we perhaps arrogantly call common sense than by formulae sanctified only by conditions long outgrown but preserved at fearful cost into the present.

I wonder if we realize how complicated a bundle of influences have been operating in the West to win for women the status which is now enjoyed. Early tribal custom began with some equality, work in the fields and actual control of the household [Page 14]aided in independence, religion and hot-headed youth played their part, worldly possessions and pioneer hardships were not without influence; and now science comes as the great confirmer and tells us that in intelligence at least there is little to choose between the sexes, and custom sanctions all occupations as possible for women. But the Indian girl, Hindu or Muhammedan, if she be of high caste and not a low-caste peasant working in the fields or factories, stays within her four walls and is the slave of man save where her age and wit make him a grumbling tool for her intrigue. The scientific attitude would help in India in the status of women, but chiefly by its action in the general objectivizing of men's thought.

Public health in India is in a precarious status most of the time. In the countryside, water is constantly taken from contaminated sources, usually from the tank beside the village-scene of washing, cattle drinking, and the lowest point in a small drainage basin. The sacred rivers of the Jumna and Ganges are polluted by seepage from the cities on their banks and from the half-charred bodies which are cast into their waters whenever an epidemic brings to their shores more bodies than the limited wood supply will wholly consume. Infected children are carried through the streets to the gods of healing. At the great gatherings once a year and the congregations of one to three million every seven years, there is so great a danger that British authorities have imposed a minimum of sanitation in the camp areas.

The people of India are not unlike other people in gathering in crowds at great festival time, nor unlike others in their insistence that pilgrimages be made, nor are they unlike others in the ceremonial observance of critical events in the lives of children and adults. Life is richer for such communal celebrations. But ceremony and a belief in their efficacy in the natural order are tied closely together. In spite of many evidences that magic has not vanished from religion in the West, we have come, by and large, to regard our ceremonials as important but not causal in character. We receive a permit for marriage from a civil office, though we add a marriage ceremony in a church. We offer prayers for [Page 15]

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IS the sick and we call a doctor. In India all too often the prescription for holiness (and health) is made on what seem to us irrelevant bases. A pilgrimage to the point where two sacred rivers join, and bathing in their waters when planets stand in happy conjunction, take on so great significance that the temper of man's mind is inclined toward the efficacy of ceremony, and analysis and science are irrelevant as well as unknown.

In such a cultural situation one feels that ritual and ceremony, helpful as symbols and supplements, take on a sinister aspect, since they form so large a part of the common life that they tend to set the whole attitude. Doubtless in the East as in the West the ceremonial will continue, but alongside of them will grow the incorporation of science into the order of life. We keep Santa Claus, but we have Christmas saving funds in addition; so in their fashion will India as western science grows in significance.

In the handicaps under which science suffers in India there should be included as operative, for the present at least, a far greater delight in competence in debate than in discussion based on a thorough examination of the subject matter. This trait is perhaps most obvious in the Bengali but it is widely manifest. That this dialectic rather than scientific procedure should be common is not strange. Talk has been a safety valve for long, talk about matters of speculation has been a bountiful source of self-expression when the humdrum affairs of every day are settled by custom. Talk, furthermore, involves small physical exertion and victory is public. But when matters social, economic, mechanical, and medicinal are involved, talk is annoying to the man who knows that experiment and not expostulation is effective in human control.

As one looks over the Indian scene one is likely to be profoundly pessimistic—the crowding is so great, the poverty so general, the vitality so low, the hold of custom uncritically accepted so strong, the weight of religion and ceremony so heavy, that fundamental and catastrophic change seems the only remedy and that appears impossible. It is impossible. And yet, by slow degrees, painfully, and to the accompaniment of changes in [Page 16]practically all of the factors significant for the general cultural status, the control of science in fundamentals will grow in India, as it has grown in the West, in spite of continuing belief in magic, in spite of inquisition and ostracism, in spite of recurring waves of obscurantism. A cultural heritage once regarded as a picture of reality will gradually pass into the veneration of mythology.

The reason for my faith is the smallness of the world, the inescapable contact of the West and the actual benefits which science bestows. The social dislocations which science carries in its train through uncontrolled conditions of work and housing will bring misery and sorrow to India as they have brought them to us. But even here a science which is truly comprehensive seems likelier to achieve a beneficent social order than does the uncritical continuance in the ignorance of the past or the wistful allegiance to a vision of a simple and idyllic self-contained communal life—a vision of a past that never was and of a future that is destined never to appear.

When we turn to China in our consideration of the significance of science for Eastern Civilizations, we find a culture different from the West, and almost equally different from India. Let us again summarize the culture elements which we considered for the West and for India.

1. China has a varied climate ranging from semi-tropical to the cold temperate type. Its range is as wide or wider than that of the United States.

2. Though the natural resources of China are not known, enough evidence is at hand to indicate that they are thoroughly adequate for an industrialized civilization.

3. The population of China is dense. Per arable square mile there are 861 people as against 667 in India and 76 in the United States.

4. The actual capital of China is low. $195. is the best estimate available. Her people do not hoard and are active in business enterprise. [Page 17]

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5. China has quite a few great cities. We find 18 of 100,000 inhabitants or more.

6. China is badly divided by language differences. There are 8 or 10 major languages and many minor ones. There is, however, one system of characters, difficult though its reading be to master. This system of characters recent reforms have strikingly adapted to wider understanding. Still the press is small and poor and the dissemination of news slow and meagre and travel limited. Education, though slight in its extent with a literate population of only 5 per cent, has, nevertheless, great honor and high and low are eager to enjoy its benefits.

7. The religious tradition is threefold: Confucian, Buddhistic, and Taoistic. All are but slowly falling into disuse. The magic of Taoism and the devotion to ancestors and the family line characteristic of Confucianism are powerful influences today. The culture carries a sturdy morality in its Confucian traditions, and caste lines as supported by religion are practically non-existent. A small but influential group in the fervor of scientific zeal attacks all religion with a kind of philistine inability to distinguish between its magical and its more legitimately sustaining elements.

8. The individual temper is peaceful and accommodating, more resigned than our own but more persistent than the Indian. The status of women is one of increasing equality and has never shown the depression still characteristic of India.

9. China has an ancient tradition of empirically applied science in irrigation and agriculture. Magic is common in attempts to control nature. The culture is characterized, as in India, by a dead weight of secular and, to some extent, religious preoccupation with a world-order governed by animistic and moral forces rather than by naturalistic causal connections. [Page 18]10. The Chinese handicrafts are well established and still flourishing, but machine production is on the increase. As in India, it is an alien and unassimilated element. Railroad construction is at a minimum and when under Chinese control railroads are poorly run. Locomotives and machines generally are not elements of significance in the Chinese consciousness, though water communication by sail and steam are well developed and in Chinese hands.

11. China has been taken by surprise in a prescientific social and economic organization functioning well within its limits by the introduction of western science and its applications in medicine and industry. In spite of this fact, China seems to assimilate more quickly than India. Much that has been said of India could be repeated for China so far as public health and the practice of medicine are concerned. Much too in regard to mechanized industry. Several points of difference are, however, of very great significance.

A considerable number of Chinese are thoroughly trained in western science, are freed from any counteracting traditions, and are intent upon the improvement of their own country. There is much agitation and emotion about foreign oppression, but there is, as there does not seem to be in India, the clear recognition that the salvation of China in this age rests with work upon China and not upon any international political readjustment. Change in the interest of science is, furthermore, being imposed by Chinese for Chinese and there is only a small resisting movement based on the dislike of change because it comes from without. Things foreign in origin do not by transfer suffer because their foreign originators are foul breakers of taboos of diet and offenders against the sacred cow. The foreigner may be hated, but his works many Chinese have made really their own.

Education in China is, as in India, too bookish and too preoccupied with language study, inevitable under the circumstances; and, as in India, there is too much higher education in propor- [Page 19]

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tion to the amount of lower, though in China higher education is not so good as in India. But education, save for the interruptions which it suffers from civil war, is advancing rapidly, and the missionary teachers have, by good fortune and often by design, brought their students to that degree of competence which enables them to carry on when the foreign leaders retire.

Science will do much for China when it penetrates the social fabric sufficiently to change ideas regarding the exclusive loyalty to the family and the village. Such a change will come, I think, by indirection, and as a part of the general critical analysis of their own social situation, and it will not be a rapid change. Science alone will not bring this change, but the scientific attitude will cooperate with other factors.

China at the moment presents a scene of disorder which is both perplexing as to its meaning and temporarily depressing in its influence on reform. Nationalists are enraged at foreign influence, ill organized labor groups are directing their energies toward the improvement of their status at the expense of any other group which opposes them; progressives are in arms against conservatives and reactionaries, and radicals enliven the picture generally. In all of the confusion one doubt of a serious character recurs with insistence. One wonders how far individuals more self-seeking than patriotic are using the occasion for their own advantage rather than for the stabilizing of their country and the establishment of that peace, order and responsibility which will make possible the adjustment of foreign difficulties and promote the steady investigation of China's internal needs and encourage concerted effort at the improvement of her own status in education, public health and industrial development.

Many of the non-military nationalist leaders are western and Japanese-trained and yet able to adapt their new knowedge to an old order. Some, to be sure, are badly in need of curbing their own rather feverish enthusiasm for western education, economics and scientific method.

My own feeling about China is one of confidence. No doubt her process of transformation will be attended by great suffering [Page 20]and unrest, and no doubt great areas will be backward practically to the point of stagnation, but she will make use of the good of the West while she pays the penalty of contact with new evils. No one need despair of China, China will take care of herself, and in my own opinion Japan will be more significant than other cultures with scientific backgrounds.

In understanding the significance of the scientific attitude for Japan I should like to tell you what befell me when I landed in Japan after the water journey from Korea. The town of Shimonoseki is the port of entry. The boat docked at the main wharf. Nearby was a ferry slip and soon after I landed a boat came in. Its passengers rushed for the railroad station adjoining the slip. or went off to the streets of the town or to the government-run hotel at the exit of the station. I made my way into the ferry down an excellent ramp and into a large and well-equipped room. The porters brought on mail and express with electric trucks; the men, women and children came aboard. The whistle blew and we put off. At the other side of the narrow entrance to the Inland Sea is Moji. There I disembarked at the slip which adjoined the station, to make my way to a train for Nagasaki that left at 11 p.m. I saw a well-dressed man nearby and asked him the way to the train. He replied that he would take me to the proper track, and as we chatted and walked along he introduced himself as an ex-naval officer. The train was found and my berth, ordered from Korea, located. It was a pullman berth like our own and I was soon in bed. The train pulled out and I heard the comforting click click of a heavy car on heavy rails. I pulled up the window shade and looked out to see a great factory building of cement, substantial and well designed. I pulled down the shade, turned over and sighed to myself, "Thank God I am in a civilized country."

Now I admit without argument that the feeling was provincial, but it was equally indicative of the reality of the scientific penetration of Japan.

Let us briefly consider for Japan the list of characteristics which has done service for the West, for India and for China. [Page 21]

SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT FOR EASTERN CIVILIZATIONS

1. The climate of Japan is temperate in its largest area, yet the range is greater than Florida to Maine. The Japanese seem happier and more successful in the temperate area.

2. The natural resources are rather seriously limited in iron. Coal of fair quality is to be had. Oil is insignificant. Water-power is abundant and well used. Each tiniest village is lighted by electricity. In arable land the country is poor in proportion to population. Earthquakes and tidal waves are natural handicaps which possess considerable significance in the national economy.

3. The population is dense. There are 2,549 persons per arable square mile as opposed to 861 for China, 667 for India, and 76 for the United States.

4. Capital is in fairly satisfactory condition. It is busily at work. The per capita wealth is $720 as against $2,800 for the United States.

5. Urban communities are numerous and increasing. Great metropolitan centers of between a million and a half and two million are the Kobe-Osaka and Tokio-Yokohama areas.

6. One language rules, with very minor exceptions, and in Japan there is a literacy of 85 per cent against 94 per cent for the United States. The attendance at school of children of school age, whether boys or girls, is 98.5 per cent. The press is universally present. Travel is encouraged, easy and usual. The educational system is complete through the University and advanced research. One walks into the Faculty Club at the Imperial University at Tokio and dines with a group of scholars as one might at our own Faculty Club.

7. The religious tradition is a combination of Buddhism introduced from China and still active, and Shintoism, which is a devotion to home and State, rich in legend and austere in its housing and ceremonial. Christianity has a genuine hold upon Japan and is [Page 22]favored by the government and cherished for its ethics by many who are not believers in its theology or members of its churches. Christianity in Japan is in Japanese control. Buddhism continues its ritual and shows a mixture of superstition and subtle wisdom. My impression is that it is not permitted to interfere in matters regarded by national leaders as essential. Though religion had frowned on meat eating, Japan has so responded to an Imperial statement that meat made men strong, that herds are in danger of over-slaughter, and large amounts of meat are imported from Australia.

8. The temper of the Japanese is a matter of discussion. One thing seems certain. They are aggressive and tender, courageous and timid. To me it seems that they have two outstanding characteristics. They are possessed of the desire to do all things perfectly—they love perfection. They are also possessed of a devastating pride. Any failure or any slight causes them most acute suffering and may cause anger. They do not seem to be good colonizers or pioneers.

9. Science is at work in every phase of life to which it applies. There is, for instance, one physician for every 1,148 persons; in the United States one for every 1,300. Japan has 42,158 physicians, and of these 12 are foreign. Japan is not so active in her study of the human as of the physical needs. Neither are we in the West, but I believe that the social sciences are farther along in the West and particularly in the United States than they are in Japan.

10. Machine production is remaking and has largely remade Japanese trade. Yet for all that, skilled handicrafts are meeting with great financial success, and many of the manufacturers require uncommon manual dexterity in the workers associated with the machines.

11. The most amazing thing in Japanese culture is the concentration of power and foresight, and the [Page 23]

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devotion and ability that made possible the reconstruction in fifty years of the economic basis of a large part of society, and the appearance of a radically altered attitude toward all problems in which science can serve. I am sure that the assimilation of and the accommodation to the new order are imperfect in Japan, but the achievement and, on the whole, the balance preserved call out unbounded admiration.

One of the most significant statements that can be made about Japan is that her density of population per arable square mile is 2,549 as against 861 for China, 667 for India, and 76 for the United States. With this population Japan imports foodstuffs valued at $150,000,000, and of these one-seventh come from Korea and Formosa, both Japanese dependencies and developments. Of rice Japan raised 5.7 units for each I unit imported. One can understand, in some degree, how such a population is supported when one realizes that out of a school population of 4,500,000, 711,648, or 1 in 6, boys and girls between 11 and 17 are in secondary agricultural schools. New education in technique is thus supplementing old empirical achievement.

In keeping the soil fruitful Japan is a model to the world. She used in 1925 fertilizer to a value of $300,000,000, and of this $150,000,000 (one-half) represented outlay for artificial fertilizer of which half only was imported.

These figures and the Japanese accomplishment in maintaining her population may give some support to those who claim that Japan does not seek to solve her problems in military fashion. They may also support those who claim that one of the root problems of civilization is the decrease of density in the population of Japan.

In Japan we have a civilization in which the significance of science is pretty completely realized intellectually. In Japan and in the West it is not comprehended emotionally. We scarcely love its care, but we use it. We rarely glow at the thought of it, and yet only when the scientific approach is as spontaneous as a [Page 24]social greeting can we be said really to have taken science into our daily lives.

Japan, as the Western world, is restless; perhaps it is more restless and more intense than is the West. The sciences of the people's mind, of character, and of social control, the Japanese need as we do, perhaps more. We and they are faced with the problem of the physician curing himself. We have created science; can we go farther and so balance and direct its application that it may be a part of a civilization at once exact and predictable and satisfying and beautiful?

We began with a consideration of the West, and we end by a return to it. In the West science arose, it grew and it cooperated with many other factors in the years that marked its maturing. Even in the West it is not yet of age. In India it is a sickly and tender infant, in China it is a sturdy child, in Japan it is able to hold its own with any comer. We of the West and of Japan can help the peoples of the East as teachers, but we shall help them most only when we ourselves shall have attained greater maturity in our ability to consider all things in a spirit which is at. once so objective, so specific, and so comprehensive as to be truly scientific. [Page 25]

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.

UNIVERSAL RELIGIOUS PEACE CONFERENCE

Excerpts from a Prospectus Issued by The Church Peace Union, 70 Fifth Avenue, New York

DR. HENRY A. ATKINSON General Secretary

PRELIMINARY ANNOUNCEMENT

Announcement of a world-wide religious peace conference, in which men and women from all countries and all religious faiths will participate because of their ability, knowledge and interest in those questions which affect human brotherhood and international accord between the nations, and who believe that religion offers a means of establishing permanent peace on earth and goodwill among men.

PREAMBLE

The conditions which today face humanity and threaten the progress of the world demand that all men of goodwill from every religion associate themselves in promoting peace among the nations.

Every religiously-minded person is confident of that invisible, superhuman, spiritual power which is available for lifting the life of humanity to divine levels. There is needed now more urgently than ever before, the help of devout men of faith who are concerned for the brotherly cooperation of the world. [Page 26]Individuals selected from the historic religions in all nations are being invited to come together for the purpose of formulating and carrying out constructive plans for the banishing of war from the world. This conference will not be composed of officially appointed delegates.

Its findings will commit no religious body.

It will be a conference of individuals associated with and holding the views of different religions.

In the proposed meeting no one will be encouraged to boast of the past or of any superiority except in his ability to serve humanity and to rid the earth of the age-long curse of war. There will be no attempt to compare religions nor to judge nor adjust according to any scale the religious faith of an individual or people. It will not be the purpose of this Conference to attempt to establish a formal league of religions as such, nor will it interest itself in the internal activities of the various faiths. Neither will there be discussed questions relating to doctrine, formulas and forms of faith, nor will any effort be made to expose or to espouse any political or social system nor give force to any criticism of such national and community arrangements as are now recognized and held sacred in the various parts of the world. The sole purpose of the Conference will be to consider how the forces of religion in all nations can be mobilized in a concerted action against war and that spirit and those things that make for war.

Surely men and women of all religions can now share with one another this high concern and it is of the utmost importance that, in humility of spirit and with high hopes, the leaders should come together and in a brotherly spirit contribute all that is possible from their respective communities to this lofty aim of peace on earth, goodwill toward men.

BACKGROUND AND HISTORY

The Church Peace Union was founded in 1914 by Mr. Andrew Carnegie. A Board of 29 Trustees was appointed representative of the principal religious faiths of America. The idea in the mind of the founder was that the combined religious life of America [Page 27]should be brought to bear upon this important question of securing permanent peace on earth. No limit was to be placed upon the scope of the program nor the breadth of its appeal. It has always been the cherished ambition of those charged with the responsibility for administering the affairs of The Church Peace Union that its work should expand until it would embrace the total religious life of humanity. In 1924 the question of holding a Universal Religious Peace Conference was discussed in the Annual Meeting of the Board of Trustees and at that time a Committee to deal with the matter was appointed. The General Secretary, acting for this Committee, has conferred with leaders of various faiths in many nations and now the Committee is of the opinion that the time has come to make formal announcement and send out a call for a meeting composed of a few representatives selected from the various religions throughout the world, to devise plans and create the simple machinery necessary for holding such a Conference.

PURPOSE OF THE CONFERENCE

To bring together adherents of the world’s living religions to discuss questions relating to international justice and goodwill. To make known the content of each religion relating to these questions. To compare the ideals of human brotherhood and world peace as inculcated by the various religions and, if possible, secure agreement on the following:

(a) The emphasis on human brotherhood as essential to all religions.

(b) World peace can be established only through the recognition of Universal Brotherhood.

(c) The religions of the world can cooperate by each working in its own sphere for the attainment of these ideals.

(d) Adoption of general plans looking toward this end. [Page 28]

THE INTERACTION OF EUROPE AND ASIA

by WILLIAM R. SHEPHERD Department of History, Columbia University

V. Eastern Thoughts in Western Minds

ONE of the great consequences of the opening up of the earth through the sea routes—a process of mutual revelation which has continued until our own time and promises to be superseded by aviation to accomplish the same result—has been to enable the western world to become acquainted with large numbers of the human race whose existence had either been unknown before the fifteenth century or only slightly known. Great areas of civilization thus have been presented to the gaze of the West and have offered to the West an enormous amount of hitherto unsuspected information. Through the several processes of commerce, exploration, political endeavor, war, missionary service, Europeans and those who have descended from them have been brought into an intimacy of knowledge as related to other lands and folk and especially those of Asia, which supplied them with a veritable treasure house of knowledge.

Dependent virtually until the nineteenth century upon works written by Europeans as sources of knowledge, the latter part of that century and our present century has seen that treasure house enlarged by additions coming from the pens of Orientals themselves writing in European tongues. Those who began it really were East Indians, then came the Japanese, and only during the last fifteen years have Chinese scholars been communicating their thoughts to paper in European tongues.

I should be disposed to say that the greatest single stimulus imparted to Western minds during the past five centuries and [Page 29]

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with particular reference to the realms of literature and art, has proceeded from the Orient, which has given to the West a knowledge of the intellectual life of remote antiquity, an insight into the social thoughts and aspirations, the poetical dreams, the philosophical truths and astronomical reckonings of peoples whose contemporaries in Europe 2500 to 4000 years ago, were possessed of nothing more than bones, cooking pots, stone implements, bronze vessels and ornaments, and drawings on the bones of animals or on the walls of caves.

Our sublimest concepts about whatever imparts meaning and truth to life were long since thought of by the poets and thinkers of antiquity in the Orient, notably in India, Persia and China, and revelations of them have been brought to the peoples of the West mainly since the close of the eighteenth century.

Said a famous Oriental, Benjamin Disraeli: "Unhappy Asia! Do you call it unhappy Asia, this land of divine deeds and divine thoughts? Its slumber is more vital than the waking life of the rest of the globe. Theirs the dream of genius, more genius than the vigilance of ordinary men. Unhappy do you call it? It is the unhappiness of Europe over which I mourn!"

New branches of knowledge thus have been conveyed to the Western world through a great variety of processes that have been put largely into operation during the past two hundred years. Beginning with the possession of India by the British, this opportunity for the enlargement of Western information about the East has been successively broadened through intimacy of contact with the Near East including Persia, and with the Far East, of Japan and of China.

There has poured into the European mind a veritable ocean of poems, epics, stories, the works of philosophers and lecturers and religious writers. Mainly I would be disposed to say that the stream has emanated from India and Persia; to a less degree from China and from Japan.

Very broadly stated, knowledge of the Orient may be said [Page 30]to have stimulated the thought of Europe in three general respects: first, it gave an impulse to the formation of a secular viewpoint, appreciative of worldly things and human relationships. In the second place, knowledge of the Orient may be said to have aroused curiosity and interest which conduced to philosophic and scientific inquiry. Third, it awakened credulity and imagination which assured wider fields of expression in literature and art.

For a long time after the European was brought into intimate contact with the Asiatic, the effects on the whole were debasing, because the impulses were those suggested by commerce, and the desires awakened mainly those of material greed. On the other hand, association with the civilized folk of the Orient had certain enlightening consequences for the European intellect. Sheer comparison of European with Asiatic ways of thinking led inevitably to a certain liberation of the Western mind, to an appreciable broadening of the Western outlook.

THE EAST ENLIGHTENS THE WEST

When Europeans became acquainted with the exemplars of Oriental faiths they could not help but be deeply impressed with the astonishing points of similarity and differences between these organized religions of the East and the great organized religions of the West. Wrote Thomas á Kempis many centuries ago: "There are many of us who have lost our faith by sounding things that are too deep." When therefore Christians became acquainted with Buddhism, for example, they found in it an extraordinary similarity to the Christian faith itself; with a Reedeemer, with priests and monks and nuns and penance and a great variety of rituals and observances which seemingly would make out of Buddhism another kind of Christianity with another name. If that were the case, how was it possible to explain how this particular religion of the Orient had many more adherents than had Christianity, and it was only, in point of fact, a few centuries earlier.

Another enlightening consequence of this religious and [Page 31]

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moral contact with the Orient was to stimulate the Christian missionary sense, to make the words of the Founder of Christianity assume a meaning hitherto unsuspected,—"Go ye forth to the world and preach the gospel to all creatures." It is from the sixteenth century that we notice missionary enterprise primarily awakened. It is true that St. Francis of Assisi and other missionaries of the Middle Ages made heroic efforts to deal with the Muhammedans in Northern Africa, but their efforts were fruitless.

A further result of this enlightening contact of the West with the East has been a sort of religious reaction upon the West itself in the form of the introduction of Oriental faiths other than Christianity. This has been conspicuously true of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They were Buddhism, Hinduism, Muhammedanism, Zoroastrianism, and the faith and teachings of Bahá’u’lláh. All are starting to percolate through the Western religious consciousness.

It is my idea, furthermore, that we derive from the East one of our most remarkable social sanctions, quasi-religious, quasi-nonreligious, summed up in the word 'taboo,' the word itself being derived from ancient Indian religious faith and practices, referring to things so sacred that they must be untouched and unmentioned. Europeans, however, did not learn about taboo in India, because the idea of taboo had long since spread into Polynesia and it was from the islands of Polynesia that the Europeans picked up the word taboo and brought it home with them and applied it to the extent of stating that certain things, certain words, certain deeds, are prohibited, are therefore taboo in accordance with social usage.

Incidentally I could remark that the study of geography in the most obvious fashion has undergone an enormous enlargement because of the acquaintance of Europeans with new lands and peoples, not only in Asia itself but elsewhere in the world outside of Europe.

I could point out how medieval conceptions based upon the writings of the church fathers, based upon popular superstitions and upon the traditions handed down through classical antiquity [Page 32]have been dispersed, scattered to the four winds, as knowledge became more and more diffused.

Attention could be called to the extraordinary discoveries of archaeology, made possible because of the interest Europe has in the Near East particularly. Such a thing, for example, as the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in the valley of the Nile at the end of the eighteenth century, carefully brought to the British Museum although originally in the possession of the French. Subsequently deciphered, its three inscriptions laid the foundations for the vast and vital study known as Egyptology. In the same fashion, the finding by a British Indian officer in Persia of an inscription containing three different kinds of writings, led to the deciphering of the cuneiform characters and the foundation of the science of Assyriology.

BEGINNINGS OF WORLD HISTORY

The study and writing of history has undergone an enormous broadening because of new sources of information supplied by lands and peoples hitherto unknown to the European consciousness; not only in the writings of Europeans themselves, but in the writings of Asiatics whose works have been translated. And out of this new broadening of the vision of history it has become possible to write such a thing as a universal history, a world history, permeating which is the idea of development as distinct from the idea of miraculous causation which had been the rule of thought prior to this broadening out of the European over the world.

Another branch of European science, of the European intellect and domain of thought, that has widened enormously, has been philosophy, both political philosophy and social philosophy and all which borders upon metaphysics.

Not only has the question as to the origin of law, the right to govern, the relations of man been considered, but attempts have been made repeatedly by philosophers, political and social and otherwise, to draw their usual contrasts between the life of the Orientals and other nonEuropeans, and the Europeans [Page 33]

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themselves, pointing out how desirable it would be were certain of the ideas and practices of non-Europeans, and notably of Orientals, taken over into European life thereby causing European life to undergo improvements.

In Medieval Europe and in early modern times, when this world of the East and the world of the far West had been opened up to the European vision, it had been quite easy to determine what constituted the right to govern, quite easy to ascertain the origin of law and the reason for law, because those who governed in a subordinate capacity, did so by virtue of a command from a superior. The superior derived his right to rule from the grace of God. Now when the Europeans fared forth into Asia, Africa, Polynesia and the wilds of the New World, they found to their astonishment, races civilized and uncivilized, vast numbers of people, millions who knew nothing about the Christian God, who knew nothing about the grace of the Christian God. They obeyed their rulers just the same; so there must be something wrong about this original conception that the Christian God was solely responsible for the right to govern and the origin of law.

It is not surprising, therefore, that as the eighteenth century drew on apace, many European philosophers should have written essays of one sort or another, like Montaigne's, for example, called the "Persian Letters," wherein he put supposedly into the mouths of Oriental visitors a number of utterances suggestive of criticism of European morals and European ways of thinking, pointing out through these learned pseudo Turks, Indians, Persians and what not, how detestable were many European practices, how utterly at variance they were with every decent consideration of humanity, and pointing out respects in which Europeans ought to mend their ways.

But among all the Eastern folk whose presumed characteristics laid deepest hold on the European intellect and cast a spell upon it, the Chinese occupied the foreground, certainly, in the eighteenth century. This was due to the very elaborate and illuminating reports sent home by French and Italian Jesuits. The [Page 34]so-called Edifying and Curious Letters relative to the Orient began to be published in 1717 in France, in many volumes, and they constituted the source of knowledge, or the alleged source of knowledge, which prompted French philosophers and English philosophers to write about the mysterious folk of the East. In fact, a veritable craze for things Chinese settled down upon the intellect of Western Europe and bore the French name of Chinoiserie, which sprang out of these Edifying and Curious Letters of the Jesuits.

It was primarily, of course, from India, and notably after the British occupation in the second half of the eighteenth century, that the Western world was brought into an intimacy of knowledge with some of the greatest works on both religion and philosophy of all times, like the Rig-Veda, the Upanishads and the like.

It was contact with India that may be said to have brought into existence a whole series of comparative sciences, like comparative philology, comparative religion, comparative jurisprudence.

Europeans broadened out through contacts with the Orient. They came at last to learn that the use of the Latin language as a medium of intercourse was inadequate, and it was association with the outside world that led to the abandonment of Latin and its replacement by the vernacular.

It was to a large degree due to such associations with the East that the economic thought of Europe underwent certain very marked changes. There existed a certain economic theory called mercantilism, based upon the assumption that the wealth of a nation depends upon the maintenance of a balance of trade which shall be favorable in all respects, all favorableness of balance being determined by an excess of exports over imports; that excess of exports over imports being measured by the relative amount of silver and gold that may be brought in.

Of course, as you know, the great source of silver and gold supply was the New World: but it also happened that from the sixteenth century onward and well up to the second half of the [Page 35]

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nineteenth century, the sole commodity which Asiatic countries were willing to accept in exchange for their goods to be exported to Europe, was bullion. So relations with the Orient compelled European economists and men of affairs to depart from their favorite theory. They ultimately had to export silver and gold to obtain Oriental goods.

As the eighteenth century drew on, a new concept came to the fore, represented particularly by French and to some extent by Scotch philosophers. It took on two names: it was called economics and also physiocracy, its followers later being called physiocrats, or believers in the rule of Nature with reference to economic exchange.

These French philosophers, under the influence of Francois Quesnay, proclaimed that the economic relations of mankind should be determined by normal and natural laws, aside from the doctrine of metals. Those natural and normal laws, according to the two doctrines they laid down, state that if we let things go on of their own accord and keep hands off, in other words, let the individual determine what is best, a normal person, through laws of supply and demand, does what is economically good for himself and for the nation.

The eminent leader of the physiocrats was a man by the name of Cantillon, who had read the extensive works of the Jesuit fathers describing China, and he found China the only land on earth that apparently exemplified in all respects these two doctrines, so much so that at the time he was known as the Confucius of the West. He favored a mode of popular education that had a tremendous vogue for a while in England and later spread to America, the so-called Lancasterian system. Andrew Bell, an English clergyman who lived for a long time at Madras, saw the Indians there had practised for ages an arrangement whereby older pupils were called to serve as monitors and to teach the younger children the elements of primary education. That, thought Dr. Bell, was a capital thing to be applied to the teaching of the children of the poor, and accordingly he brought home the idea. It was much improved by the Quakers. [Page 36]The stimulus provided by contact with the Orient has led in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the publication of many articles descriptive and illustrative of Asiatic conditions, and led to the formation of numerous learned societies, the like of which had not been known before, and many devoted specifically to the study of the Orient, and to the dispatching not only of national but of international scientific expeditions.

During the Middle Ages, moreover, and late into early modern times, before this world lying outside of Europe had been revealed to the West, natural science had been a species of mummy, wrapped by the grave-clothes of ancient and medieval superstition and guess-work. What in the Middle Ages was supposed to be physics was in reality magic: that which was presumed to be chemistry was in reality alchemy: and so all the way along the line: astronomy in its turn was astrology. It was not until the world beyond had been opened up to the European consciousness, notably the world of civilized Asia, that astronomy became astronomy, and chemistry chemistry, and physics physics.

From Asia and from the New World also came numerous sources of information for the creation of new branches of science. It was the garden established in Europe by travellers in the sixteenth century, in which were planted all sorts of curious growths from Asia and from the New World, which led to the establishment of botanic gardens. It was because Europeans brought home with them so many specimens of the life and art and work and thought of the Oriental and other nonEuropeans that museums sprang up in Western Europe. Astronomy, botany, zoology, medicine, all took on a new lease of life.

I might make a passing allusion to medicine itself, and what it owes to the Orient. European practitioners were notably barbers, whose "barbarous" practices are still emphasized by the survival of the red and white poles, indicative of the fact that barbers were surgeons and let out your blood. European travellers noticed that Indian physicians did not practice blood-letting; [Page 37]they used instead drugs, so also did the Chinese. When these European travellers brought back elaborate accounts of Indian medical practices, the doctors of Western Europe took a leaf out of the Oriental notebook, and gradually blood-letting ceased and its place was taken by drugs, such drugs, for example, as opium and its derivatives, ginger, nux vomica, rhubarb and quite a number of others.

It is from the Orient, moreover, that the Europeans learned in the early part of the eighteenth century how to combat one of the most fearful scourges with which the white man was afflicted, namely, smallpox. They had long since developed in the Near East a method of dealing with smallpox by inoculating the person affected with it by a virus taken from a person who had smallpox. That knowledge of inoculation was introduced into Western Europe by an English lady, Mary Wortley Montagu. She was the wife of the British ambassador at Constantinople. Then came the famous Dr. Jenner, the Englishman who in 1776 devised and made known inoculation by means of cowpox.

It is also true that from the Orient we obtained the knowledge of how to fix broken limbs. The East Indians long since had used plaster casts for that purpose. That also was brought to Europe.

WESTERN ART AND LITERATURE FERTILIZED

In the realm of thought that we call imaginative literature we know there are three great forms of expression,-poetry, the drama and romance. Each of them we know also amplifies emotional powers that in their creative possibilities transcend the powers of reason. Within this huge field therefore is shown the influence upon the West of what Europeans had seen and heard and done on the seas and over seas, the world over, and notably in the Orient: of what they had read also, of strange lands and stranger peoples; and it was bound to be more extensive, more elaborate, more diversified, than was the case with other domains of thought, simply because it was the realm of the imagination. [Page 38]In a mental field so vast and so varied only a few examples of such forms of expression can be given here, as related more particularly to the Orient and to English literature.

Ranging through this realm we find certain general indications of how contact with the great world outside has worked back upon the poetic, dramatic and romantic consciousness of the West. Concentrating our attention therefore mainly on Asia as an exotic source of inspiration, we may say the effects produced upon the European mind during the last two or three hundred years in particular, are visible under five main heads, viz., Nature, Asiatics as a people, the European himself, the European's homeland, and the European type of civilization.

In the works of the poets, dramatists and romancers of the Western world are pictured, for instance, the stupendous magnificence of the creations of God, nature and man, hitherto unknown and so inco.parably superior in their actuality to the mystic speculations of the Middle Ages and the philosophic notions of the ancients; the concept of a boundless universe, a heaven and an earth of untold magnitude and splendor, the mighty potentialities of a vast new world in the East, the limitless space of the starry firmament, the marvels of the immense expanse of the ocean, its storms and sunshine, its fierce gales and gentle zephyrs. The appeal of the Asiatic regions, the soft beauty of the tropics, the alluring charms of the temperate climate, all beckoned onward to haunts across the seas.

The works of these writers of the West accordingly tell us of the potent fascination of the Orient, its gorgeous opulence, its teeming millions of fantastic folk, its profound wisdom of the ages.

Reverting to the European himself, his homeland and his mission to mankind suggested by comparison with conditions in civilized Asia and the regions elsewhere inhabited originally by primitive peoples, these writers of the West have told us about the European himself, what his country means, what his duty is to the rest of mankind.

All of this, you see, has served to awaken the Westerner to [Page 39]

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a consciousness of himself, as he could not have been until he had contrasted and compared himself with the rest of mankind, and notably with civilized mankind found elsewhere.

In imaginative literature and in its related fields of expression,—art and music,—Western thought has been contactually influenced by Asia. As acquaintance with the Orient has widened and deepened, these early sources of knowledge and inspiration supplied by the writings of Europeans with regard to what had been seen and heard there, and in some degree also by translations of Oriental works into Western languages, have become vastly increased in number and diversity, in scope and content, as we march onward into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To them have been added since 1850 the writings of Asiatics in European languages, especially of Japanese and East Indians in English. What these Eastern authors have published serves to show quite definitely to the Western mind what they regard as the effects upon Orientals of Western ways and thoughts.

It is the operation of all of these factors,—Western writings about the East, translations of Oriental works into European tongues, and the writings of Asiatics in European languages, which have determined during modern times the form and the nature of concepts about Eastern lands and people which have taken root in the popular consciousness of the West. Of these notions, the earlier forms, which have determined the common processes of Western thinking about the Orient and about Orientals, have come from the writings of missionaries. The later, more accurate and still less prevalent ideas owe their origin to the works of historians, philosophers, publicists, geographers and journalists, both European and Asiatic.

Some of the greatest poems of modern times were directly inspired by contacts of Europeans with Asia. The Lusiad, written by a soldier in the Portuguese army in India, whom we know by the name of Camoens (of which poem we have, among others, Mickle’s translation), gave literary form to the Portuguese language and saved it from destruction during the time when Portugal was under Spanish rule. [Page 40]John Milton reveals the same deep impress, and Dante's Divine Comedy, dealing with the same sublime theme. A comparison of them show's how vastly different were the conceptions of the two poets, in the light of the environment in which each lived. Quite recently there was a splendid treatise published by Putnams, "Islam and the Divine Comedy," showing that Dante borrowed his ideas from an Arab manuscript. Dante could know only the heritage of the Middle Ages, at any rate, and whatever had been translated from classical antiquity; but Milton's vision ranged far beyond, into realms of thought and imagery altogether inconceivable by men of medieval times, for Milton lived in an age which had learned of centuries unconceived by earlier generations.

Thus comparing Milton's conception of the universe with Dante's, one realizes how much greater was Milton's world. The English poet with mind aglow with discoveries saw with a new light.

Turning now to the realm of painting and sculpture and music: Up to the close of the eighteenth century the painters of Europe gave scant heed to possible sources of inspiration from the Orient and other regions outside of their continent. In this respect they were quite unlike their contemporaries, leaders among historians, scientists and men of letters. In general they ignored the East Indian, the Chinese, for example, the appearance, customs, the manners, the environment of these curious and picturesque folk who might easily have provided artistic interest and suggestion. Indeed there were substantially but two respects in which the great masters of the brush of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of Europe paid any attention whatever to exotic scenes and characters. They depicted upon their canvases certain types drawn or supposed to be drawn from the Near East, such as Moors, but which in reality are merely Europeans painted black. Study their features and you will see they are not African types at all. And then they introduced from time to time what purported to be camels. In portraiture also they depicted occasionally dress and adornment which had an Eastern origin. [Page 41]

EASTERN THOUGHTS IN WESTERN MINDS

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on the other hand, European painters have sought for subjects in Muhammedan countries, in the Near East, and to a far less extent, in India, Japan and China.

It was a little more than fifty odd years ago that the mere sight of the first Japanese prints to reach Europe determined Whistler's sense of composition.

One form of Western art to draw immense inspiration from the East primarily, is the realm of decorative design, and the illustration of books, maps, wood cuts, engravings, and plants and animals of the newly discovered parts of the Orient, and many things never discovered outside of the imagination of the artists themselves.

The results of this imported Oriental culture inspired in the West a spirit of refined admiration, which created the desire to collect beautiful specimens of Asiatic and particularly Chinese handicraft. This was the great outstanding feature of the cult of the Chinese which had such a vogue in Western Europe, especially in France and England during the eighteenth century.

Another respect in which the East has influenced us is by the imitation by Europeans of Oriental artistic designs and eventually the production in Europe of the articles themselves, for which the requisite raw materials are found there.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, industrial design received a great impetus out of contact with the East. Motifs of ornament, derived from India, Japan and China had a great vogue.

The Empire style of French furniture was obviously influenced by Egyptian design. Napoleon's army had been in Egypt. Textiles from India, inlaying and enamelling derived from China and Japan, raised a keen desire in the Western world to imitate them. Eastern products served thus as sources of inspiration for Western industrial design, and there has come an enlargement of our conceptions of decorative art with new and beautiful forms, systematized upon interpretation of Oriental originals.

It is Eastern artists who have been able to preserve the utmost [Page 42]gorgeousness in decoration without making it obtrusive. It is Eastern artists who have known how to harmonize decoration with the class of product to which it is applied, and in which it is incorporated. The reasonableness and the refinement displayed by Arabs, Persians, East Indians, Chinese, Japanese and Javanese, in the handling of their material pressed into the service of industrial art, tended happily to correct the vigorous industrial artists of Europe in such matters as the abuse of painting by the making of textiles in England during the nineteenth century. Those were the days of the Newfoundland dog on carpets and rugs! The Asiatic crafts showed instead that beauty in a motif might be effected without involving any misapplication of it whatever to the fine arts. The influence of an exhibition of East Indian products at the Crystal Palace Exposition in London about the middle of the nineteenth century, was extraordinary. It awakened immediately the idea of rivalling the shawls of Cashmere and led the Paisley, Norwalk and Glasgow trade to the manufacture of the Paisley shawl.

The exposition of Oriental handicraft, despite this immediate impetus, had very little effect on the working classes of England, where intelligence was lower; but it had a very marked effect indeed upon the working classes of France. There it led to the recreation of technical processes, of damascening and enamelling, inlaying metal; so much so that the workmen of Paris can equal and even excel the best specimens turned out by the Oriental artificers of our day.

Finally, since about the middle of the nineteenth century European composers have sought to translate into music the results of the great work of research carried on by the European scientists, which has revealed Arabic, Assyrian, Egyptian, Persian, East Indian, Japanese and Chinese life and thought.

The record of the impact of the Orient upon the Western mind could be vastly extended-it represents one of the vital factors in the history of man. [Page 43]

VII-ALFRED HERMANN FRIED

by JOHN MEZ Department of Economics, University of Arizona

ON A beautiful autumn Sunday of the year 1880 a young Austrian, Alfred Hermann Fried, walked into the Art Museum of Vienna to see an exhibit of war paintings by the famous Russian Werestschagin. So profound was the impression created by these realistic pictures upon the young man's mind that his entire future life and fame was determined on that day: anxious to know what war looks like, he had entered the Museum; he left it with a holy determination to combat war. Thus he became one of the foremost leaders in the movement for world unity, and thirty years later he was honored before the whole world as recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. What impressed him most in those pictures was not so much the cruelty of war, but rather the degradation and indignity of the methods of war. One of the paintings "The Battle of Plevna" showed the Russian Czar Alexander II, surrounded by his generals, watching the battle through an opera glass from under a tree on a hilltop at a safe distance from the fighting. This fact, more than anything else, made it clear to Fried that war was not the serious matter of life and death to those conducting it, as he had thought, but rather a sport for the entertainment and diversion of those in power who used their helpless subjects like pawns on a chess board, something of the nature of popular games, or horse races. Here for the first time awakened that world conscience in Fried which he tried to inculcate into the heart of mankind throughout his life. [Page 44]Another picture that had left an indelible imprint on his mind was as he told me many years later—a group of three drawings, entitled "All is quiet before Plevna," the first of which shows a Russian soldier, clad in a white sheep-skin coat, standing on outpost in a snowstorm with his bayonet on his left arm; the second drawing shows that same soldier asleep, still standing in the snow which now is knee-deep; the third picture shows only a white mantle of snow with a slight elevation over the frozen soldier's body, and a bayonet point sticking out of the snow.

The second event of importance in shaping Fried's life work occurred ten years later, when, on November 4, 1890, he sat in the Berlin Café Kaiserhof and read in the newspaper that a certain lady in Vienna, Baroness Bertha von Suttner, had founded a peace society and was planning to go to Rome to attend a World Peace Congress. Up to that day he had imagined that he was about the only pacifist in the world, but here he found to his surprise that there were others who shared his views, that there was such a thing as an organized peace movement; he immediately wrote to the Baroness an enthusiastic letter which marked the beginning of a life-long friendship and cooperation between the two. They met at Rome and made plans for the publication of a peace magazine, the first number of which appeared in 1892 under the title "Die Waffen Nieder!" ("Lay down your arms!") For nearly four decades this pacifist monthly has carried on to this day under the title "Die Friedenswarte" (Chronicle of Peace); for a quarter of a century it was edited by Fried until his death in 1921; today it is the official organ of the German peace movement. Moreover, Fried organized, with the cooperation of Bertha von Suttner, the first peace society in Berlin, an undertaking of immense difficulty in pre-war Germany. The peace movement however had been carried by him into the heart of Prussia to stay. Today it is a powerful force in democratic Germany.

Fried was born in Vienna on November 11, 1864. After graduating from school, his love for books impelled him to become an apprentice in the book trade. At the age of 24, he [Page 45]

ALFRED HERMANN FRIED

became an independent publisher; soon thereafter he decided to devote himself entirely to the propagation of the peace ideal which he considered the greatest problem confronting the present generation. It was a bitter struggle into which he entered, an up-stream fight with setbacks and disappointments; almost hopeless was the cause which he had set out to defend, hardly anybody in Europe was willing to give any financial support to this movement. But Fried withstood all temptations to accept a more gainful occupation; he even prided himself in the conviction that he was probably the only professional pacifist in Europe who gave all of his time to the propagation of the peace movement. It required an endless amount of faith to do this in an utterly unfavorable and unappreciative environment.

Fried did not see his main task as lying in personal cooperation with the peace societies, the main emphasis of his efforts he placed on his literary and scientific work. This grew to tremendous proportions: first he translated five books of the Russian sociologist Jean Jacques Novicow. "I am proud," he said, "to have made accessible to the German public the works of this great thinker of our movement." He also translated Bloch's famous "Future of War" and some of the writings of Andrew Carnegie, Baron Estournelle de Constant and others. His outstanding literary contribution was his Handbook of the Peace Movement. This was the first comprehensive statement of the nature, aims and history of the peace movement. Fried published 75 books and pamphlets and several thousand articles in periodicals and newspapers, dealing with such topics as the Hague Conferences, arbitration, disarmament, internationalism, Franco-German understanding, etc. One of his books, "The Reconstruction of Europe" was translated into English by Lewis S. Gannett Macmillan Company, New York, 1915). Two of his pamphlets A brief outline of nature and aims of pacifism" and "A dozen truths about pacifism," translated by the present writer, were published in 1915 as special bulletins by the American Association for International Conciliation in New York.

Fried was a member of the Carnegie Endowment, of the [Page 46]International Peace Bureau in Berne, and of the German and Austrian Peace Societies which he had helped to found.

In 1911 Fried received one half of the Nobel Peace Prize. On August 27, 1913, the honorary doctor's degree was bestowed upon him by the University of Leyden in Holland. On that occasion Professor J. M. van Eysinga addressed him with these words: "In full recognition of your stupendous and inspiring literary work the Senate of the University of Leyden bestows on you the title of "doctor honoris causa," and that all the more readily in order to express its appreciation of the scientific importance of your work. Please accept, esteemed Mr. Fried, together with this diploma the assurance that this institution, devoted as it is to pure science, duly appreciates the scientific contribution of your labors."

Fried was never quite popular, perhaps not even an exceptionally great man. He was a rather quiet and unassuming personality. He loved to live in a big city with its libraries, its newspapers and interesting political events. He liked nothing better than to be buried in his study amidst piles of books, magazines and a mass of correspondence with all parts of the world.

The first climax and success of his peace work seemed to have been reached in 1899, when the First Conference convened at The Hague. Here, for the first time the nucleus of world organization appeared to materialize when the representatives of so many national governments met to discuss disarmament and the establishment of a Permanent Court of Arbitration. With even greater optimism he looked forward to the Second Hague Conference of 1907 which he attended like the first one, but the ultimate failure of the latter brought about a change in the immediate goal for which the peace movement was to strive according to Fried's conviction: in the first period of his life he had advocated arbitration and disarmament, now he had come to realize that international organization or a League of Nations must be attained first, if international law and cooperation are ever to supplant military force in the relations between nations. He came to see that "peace" would be the automatic result of world [Page 47]

ALFRED HERMANN FRIED

organization; in no other way could the ultimate ideal of world unity be arrived at. Without such an overarching organized union or federation of nations there would be no genuine peace, at best a condition of "no-war," the militaristic "armed peace" which is really a truce or latent war. Once the organized peace would embrace all nations of the world, armaments and warfare would automatically disappear, just as fighting has ceased within the nations wherever individual States united under a central government.

Fried was thus one of the first advocates of a "United States of Europe" and of a "League of Nations." In his book "Pan America" he points out that one of the most promising forms of relationships between nations is embodied in that type of voluntary association and cooperation which is represented in a century’s growth of the Pan-American Union.

It was during the World War that Fried’s life attained its greatest height. To him the outbreak of the war was the most terrible catastrophe that could happen. All the hopeful beginnings of international cooperation in Europe seemed to be wiped out; European civilization would be set back by a century. The peace movement, barely a quarter century old, would be broken up. Fried defended his pacifist conviction with undaunted courage against a world of enemies. Persecuted and oppressed by the military governments of Austria and Germany with their censorship and war-time propaganda, he withdrew into neutral Switzerland in order to publish his monthly peace periodical unmolested. Deprived of his home, his library, his friends, he lived the life of an exiled man without a country, ceaselessly defending the cause of peace in a world gone mad. "The concept of peace is not dead," he shouted into the ears of the warring nations, "for the goal of every war is peace." It was then that his tragic life rose to magnificent greatness, when he championed the cause for which he lived with almost heroic idealism. Embittered by the false pretenses under which the war was waged on all sides, in utter despair over the future which could be nothing but ruin, ashamed of the gullibility of the civilized nations of [Page 48]Europe whom he had considered so enlightened and advanced, he persisted in his almost hopeless defense of a nearly lost cause. The tragedy of his pathetic situation reached its culmination when he learned that his entire fortune, including the proceeds of the Nobel Peace Prize, had been confiscated by the Austrian government. In the innermost depths of his heart he was stirred up for his fellow-beings, as he watched the senseless and inevitable ruin and suicide of Europe. When the Peace Treaty of Versailles failed to embody the fourteen points of Woodrow Wilson, when it turned out to be not a "peace among equals," when some of its provisions were clearly seen to contain the seed of new wars, he summoned his last energies to launch a powerful protest against such iniquity and injustice. His heart was broken under all this strain, he returned as a sick man; homeless and deserted he died in a hospital in Vienna in May, 1921.

Fried did not live to see the triumph of the peace movement, but at least he saw the beginnings of a League of Nations of which he had been one of the first advocates. There has been no other person who like Fried literally used up all of his energies and resources in the struggle for world unity, and that at a time when it was hopelessly discouraging to fight for such a distant goal.

The full tragedy of his career stands revealed in his war diary, in the early parts of which he exclaimed: "We who work for peace can at least truthfully say that we have not willed this misery." The last volume ends with this impressive paragraph: "The notes in my war diary are now coming to an end, but I do not wish to close them without once more hurling a curse against those who, in the summer of 1914, frivolously and recklessly, without reasoning and without conscience, have started this war. Let them forever be outcasts of mankind, let their memory be cursed and despised as long as human beings will study the history of their kind. They, the murderers of twenty millions, the destroyers of our beautiful world, they who have retarded by a century the evolution of our race and the progress of civilization, who have crippled us in body and soul, who have cheated [Page 49]

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our present generation of their life and robbed them of their right to happiness, stand condemned for all time to come. Against you all who have promoted this war, who have determined and willed it and brought it about, you who might have prevented it and have failed to prevent it, and you who through your lies have enticed the people to enthusiasm, you who have acceded to all actions and crimes in the hope of sharing the profits of victory, against all of you I hurl my curse which may pursue you throughout your life and throughout history. [Page 50]

WORLD UNITY FORUM

Certain questions confronting thoughtful people today are not merely important—they are unescapable. If they are not solved rationally, they will solve themselves by the very pressure of events, good or ill. Perhaps the outstanding need of the times is something in the nature of an international forum in which minds of different countries, races and religions can meet on common ground for an exchange of views promoted for the sake of truth and the enrichment of experience. While civilization is gathering its forces together to produce new institutions based on mutual confidence and goodwill, every effort, however slight and unassuming, put forth as an appeal to the international mind, will have value at least for the individuals concerned. In this department the readers of World Unity Magazine are invited to express their opinions on matters which reflect the restless, experimental nature of the age.

WHY SO MANY CRIMES?

The moral environment of the growing child is not his parents' conventional beliefs, nor their words, but the essence of the intention behind each word and act. The child cannot register the meaning of considered act and speech—but the child responds with extreme sensitiveness to what his parents are.

So the grownup child, the dwarfed and stunted soul, the feeble mind—his sources of moral discipline are neither schools nor churches, but the collective reality of the world in which he lives.

These are the criminals, whose savagery fills the headlines of papers in all civilized lands. These are the criminals—but what is the real origin of crime?

Have not these children witnessed wholesale murder licensed and sanctioned by the pillars of society—have they not seen through ecclesiastical conventions to the ambitions and divisions behind the moral screen? Before they gave rein to their impulses, were these not apparently justified by the hidden intentions of those they were expected to admire? The increase in crime is one of the spiritual problems of the age: is there any remedy short of subordinating governments and all other bodies to the moral law? [Page 51]

UNITY AND DISUNITY IN INTERNATIONAL POLITICS

Edited by DEXTER PERKINS Department of History and Government, University of Rochester

The Sixth Pan-American Conference

IN THE field of international politics one of the most interesting movements is that of Pan-Americanism. Ever since the liberation of the Spanish-American republics from the dominion of Spain there have been those who dreamed of some kind of close association uniting the states of the New World. With many this dream has been rather Latin-Americanism than Pan-Americanism; that is, it has not included the United States within its view. But none the less the larger movement, which includes this country, has found a place in practical politics. First becoming important with the attempt of James G. Blaine, in 1881, to summon a Pan-American conference at Washington, it resulted in the formation of the Bureau of American Republics in 1889, which was metamorphosed into the Pan-American Union in 1910. This body, as is well known, has its seat in Washington, in a noble building devoted to the purpose. Its President is the American Secretary of State, and its governing Board consists of the diplomatic representatives of the Latin-American states in Washington. It has a permanent Secretary, Dr. Leo S. Rowe, who is an American.

Under the auspices of the Union have taken place a number of Pan-American conferences. The fifth was at Santiago in 1923. The sixth, the subject of this discussion, met at Havana and adjourned February 20 last.

What was the atmosphere of this international conference? [Page 52]

What were its practical achievements? What did it do to advance the ideal of world unity?

At the outset it must be said that there was, under the surface, a considerable amount of hostility to the United States, and jealousy of its predominant position in the New World This showed itself in a variety of ways. In the first place, there was no small amount of discussion as to revising the character of the Pan-American Union. The Mexican government, for example, proposed that the presiding officer of the Union should be chosen in rotation, instead of being elected as he is today, with the election always going to the American Secretary of State This proposal was ably opposed by Mr. Hughes, the head of the American delegation, who pointed out the desirability of continuity in the administration of the affairs of the Union. The proposal was finally defeated by an almost unanimous vote. A second Mexican proposal was to the effect that the representatives of the Latin-American states on the Governing Board should be special delegates, and not the regularly accredited ministers of the various states at Washington. This proposal was adopted but Mr. Hughes promptly brought forward an amendment to the effect that any state might be free to continue the old system of representation, and the passage of this amendment took the teeth out of the Mexican project. Finally, the Argentine representative wished to secure some recognition of the principle of economic freedom, (more concretely, lower tariff duties), as the price of a treaty regularizing and defining the organization of the Union. His proposal, like those of Mexico, was, of course, directed against the United States. It was not adopted, however, and at the last the minister was not supported by his own government.

More important than any of these things was the discussion with regard to intervention. One of the tasks of the conference was the codification of American concepts of international law, and the drawing up of conventions dealing with this question. A report from a committee of jurists appointed to deal with this problem laid down the principle that intervention in the affairs [Page 53]

THE SIXTH PAN-AMERICAN CONFERENCE

of independent states was illegal. The raising of this question particularly affected the United States in view of the recent action of this country in Nicaragua. The matter was discussed at some length in the committee on international law. Mr. Hughes steadfastly proposed any such proposal. He declared that it was obviously not true that intervention was, by existing international law, illegal, and deprecated any attempt to frame new rules of law, as contrary to the purpose of the conference. He defended the action of the United States in Nicaragua on the ground of the necessity of protecting American rights, and of internal disorder, and called attention in a public address to the withdrawal of this country from Cuba, from Santo Domingo, and, once before, from Nicaragua itself. His viewpoint was not unsupported. In particular, the Peruvian and the Cuban delegations took the view that the laying down of so sweeping a general principle was impracticable. The conference took no action on this matter.

The question of intervention, however, is inevitably closely related to the question of the pacific settlement of inter-American disputes. Any progress that is made in setting up machinery for the settlement of such disputes will obviously contribute to make interventions somewhat less likely. Many persons hoped that some concrete achievement along this line might be made at Havana. The problem was hardly discussed until late in the conference. A resolution was then adopted endorsing the principle of the settlement by arbitration of all juridical questions. A conference is to meet at Washington to translate this resolution into a practical program. There is little possibility, however, of immediate action.

Viewing the conference from the standpoint of the United States alone, it is clear that the opposition to this country, though a real factor, was not strong enough to accomplish any concrete result. It is also clear that Latin-America is by no means of one mind with regard to the North American republics. Some states are much more kindly disposed than others. The division is partly economic. Brazil for example, which has an enormous [Page 54]market in the United States, is, of the three great states of South America, the ABC powers, the most amicably inclined.

The Pan-American conference did little of importance to solve the political problems of American international relationships. In this respect it was, however, no more conspicuously unsuccessful than had been its predecessors.

But, while any political integration of the American republics lags, and while divergences of policy constantly crop up, and fear of the political influence of the United States is very real, economic forces lead toward an increasing development of the conception of Pan-Americanism. On this side the conference drew up a number of conventions of some importance, one regulating commercial aviation, and one dealing with the protection of property, (that is, patents and copyrights). It also encouraged the movement for a Pan-American highway, and took steps to advance the cause of sanitation by international agreement.

In the intellectual sphere, too, some progress was recorded. Provision was made for an inter-American institute for the promotion of closer cultural relations. This measure reflects a constantly growing intercourse between the United States and Latin-America on the intellectual side.

It is probable that these aspects of Pan-Americanism will be more fruitful for a long time to come than any attempts at political combination, even combination of the loosest sort. At the same time, it is to be remembered that, in the intellectual and economic, as in the political, sphere, Pan-Americanism has rivals in Pan-Hispanism, the movement for the closer association of the Spanish-speaking peoples on both sides of the Atlantic, and Pan-Latinism, which aims to tie the Latin republics of the New World to France. The existence of the Pan-American Union gives to Pan-Americanism a favored instrument from the standpoint of closer associations.

The Pan-American conference is an interesting expression of the spirit of international cooperation. Despite political jealousies, the evidence of the ineluctable necessity of closer comradeship amongst the nations of today brings forth its fruits. [Page 55]

THE WISDOM OF THE AGES

Edited by ALFRED W. MARTIN Society for Ethical Culture, New York

THE LAWS OF MANU

THUS far in our survey of the Hindu Bible we have included the lyrical, ceremonial and philosophical books; we come now to that body of legalistic literature dating from about 200 B. C. and known as the "Laws of Manu," oldest of the collection of law-books called Dharma-shastras. This Manu, or Manava Dharma-shastra, is the most important legalistic document in all Sanskrit literature and is symbolic of what might be called the religion of codification which arose within Hinduism at the close of the Upanishad era. In Volume XXV of the "Sacred Books of the East," we have a translation of the entire work. Here it is written: "This Shastra was composed to settle caste duties clearly." (I. 102.) Here, for the first time in Hindu literature, it is argued that the priestly caste takes precedence over the other three. Here, too, for the first time, appears the word jati, meaning "birth," "family," "caste"; supplementing the word varna which, in the Brahmanas, meant "color," then "class" and finally "caste." Here, again, we are told of the divine creation of the four castes from the mouth, arms, thighs, and feet, respectively, of the Primal Being (X. 45). The reason given for their creation is "to secure the world's prosperity" (I. 31), "to protect the universe" (I. 87). Here and in detail the duties of each of the four castes are enumerated; those of the Brahmans or priestly caste (I. 99. 100); of the military caste, from [Page 56]which the king was selected (VII. 1 foll.); of the merchant-farmer caste (I. co foll.); and of the Sudra or servitor caste (II. 39, IV. 79) created by the self-existent One to be slaves of the Brahmans.

Manu, or Manus, as he is called in Vedic mythology, was the "heros eponymos" of the human race, at once divine and human. As a divine being he was evoked at the Vedic sacrifices as "the lord of created beings," and later, in the Upanishads, he was identified with Brahma, the Supreme Soul. Again, as a human being, progenitor of the human family, he is called in the Rig-Veda "father Manu" and named with other sages of a remote antiquity, while one of the latest of the Upanishads reports that "in the morning they brought to Manu water for washing just as they are wont to bring water for washing the hands." As "the father of mankind," Manu was looked on as the founder of social and moral order, as a Rishi or poet-priest, to whom sacred texts were revealed; as the inventor of sacrificial rites, as the author of legal maxims.

Not to follow the myth of Manu into its intricacies, let it suffice to note that to him is ascribed the authorship of the ethical-legal work that bears his name, though the higher criticism applied to the document points, as in the case of the Upanishads, to a composite source.

The book divides itself into five easily differentiated sections dealing respectively with the laws relating to (a) the function of each of the four castes; (b) the supremacy of the priestly caste; (c) the perpetuation of the priestly caste; (d) the conduct of men and women in ordinary life; (e) the rules regulating a Hindu's holy life in each of its four stages-disciple, householder, hermit, wandering ascetic. To this fifth section the last half of the "Laws of Manu" is devoted. As we have already seen, Hindu life was interwoven with religious beliefs and practices and religious institutions controlled its development to an extent unparalleled elsewhere. In other words, Hindu life from birth to death and even after death was and is regarded as sacramental, at each stage governed by definitely prescribed laws. In the first stage, [Page 57]that of disciplehood, the law requires him "to study the Veda under a teacher and to live in obedience to his behest," and when at last he is a master of the Veda he is what is called twice-born and receives investiture with the sacred cord, the symbol of his preparedness to pass into the second stage of his sacramental life. With the following final admonition he passes from the first into the second:

"Tell the truth; do your duty, do not neglect study of the Veda. After having given to your teacher your gift of love, see to it that the thread of your race be not cut off! Do not neglect truth, duty, health, property, and the study of the Veda! Honor your mother as a god! Honor your father as a god! Honor your teacher as a god! Honor your guest as a god! Live an irreproachable life; honor your superior; give alms in true spirit! When in doubt follow the judgment of Brahmans of tried authority."

As householder, the outstanding duties of the erstwhile disciple are worship and sacrifices to the gods and the begetting of sons to the end that the cult of the fathers may be carried on in unbroken line. The young Brahman thus disciplined and pledged to safe continuation of his race through pious sons is eventually prepared for entrance on the third stage of his sacramental life, that of forest-dweller, or hermit, maintaining only intermittent relationship with his family. Felly, all worldly interests are abandoned. Every fetter of passion and desire is broken. He subsists as he may, a wandering ascetic. He has but one concern, realization that he is the Brahma, and with that the world of illusion disappears. Salvation is attained.

Such, in brief, is the theory of religious law, and though practice often fell short of this mechanical and exacting plan, life was none the less looked upon as a religious pilgrimage with cessation of rebirth and union with Brahma as the ultimate goal.

Six of the twelve books composing the "laws of Manu" set forth the rules governing each of these four stages in the life of the Brahmanical Hindu. The following extracts will indicate the general character of Manu’s prescriptions and ordinances. [Page 58]

Discipleship

"The teacher, the father, the mother, and an elder brother must not be treated with disrespect though one be grievously offended by them."

"That trouble and the pain which the parents undergo on the birth of their children can not be compensated even in a hundred years. Let therefore the student always do what is agreeable to these two and always what may please his teacher for when these three are pleased he obtains all the rewards which austerities yield."

Householder

"In connecting himself with a wife, let the householder carefully avoid the following families be they ever so great or rich, namely, one who neglects the sacred rites; one in which no male children are born; one in which the Veda is not studied; one the members of which are subject to hemorrhoids, phthisis, epilepsy or leprosy. Let him not marry a maiden with reddish hair, nor one who is sickly, nor one who is garrulous, nor one named after a constellation, nor one bearing the name of a low caste. Let him wed a female free from bodily defects and who has an agreeable name. Let him, untired, perform daily the rites prescribed for him in the Veda. Whether he be rich or even in distress, let him not seek wealth by forbidden occupations. Let him not out of desire for enjoyment attach himself to any sensual pleasures. Let him avoid all means of acquiring wealth which impede the study of the Veda. Let him bring his dress, speech and thoughts into conformity with his age, occupation, learning and race."

Forest-hermit

"When a householder sees his skin wrinkled and his hair white and the sons of his sons, then he may resort to the forest and reside there, duly controlling his senses." [Page 59]

The Wandering Ascetic

"Having studied the Vedas in accordance with the rule, having begat sons according to the sacred law, and having offered sacrifices according to his ability, he may direct his mind to the attainment of final liberation.

"Let him always wander alone, fully understanding that the solitary man who neither forsakes nor is forsaken gains his end.

"He shall neither possess a fire nor a dwelling, he may go to a village for his food, he shall be indifferent to everything material, but firm of purpose, meditating and concentrating his mind on Brahma.

"Potsherd instead of an alms-bowl, the roots of trees for a dwelling, cores, worn-out garments, life in solitude, are the marks of one who has attained liberation.

"Let him not desire to die; let him not desire to live; let him wait for his appointed time as a servant waits for the payment of his wages."

Turning from these six books of the "Laws of Manu" to the remaining six, we find certain practices forbidden which in the Rig-Veda were permitted. For instance the drinking of intoxicants is here set down as "a mortal sin" whereas in the Rig-Veda soma-juice was freely imbibed by all the gods and by humans as well. (R. V. X. 167.) Similarly gambling, though not condemned in the Rig-Veda, is here strictly forbidden. Among the duties of a king is punishment of gamblers and those who bet.

"Gambling and betting let the king exclude from his realm; those two vices cause the distraction of the kingdom. Gambling and betting amount to open theft. The king shall always exert himself in suppressing both of them."

"Let the king corporally punish all those who either gamble or bet or afford an opportunity for them."

"Gamblers, dancers and singers, cruel men, men belonging to a heretical sect, those following forbidden occupations, and [Page 60]sellers of spirituous liquor, let the king instantly banish from his town."

According to the "Laws of Manu," a unique value attaches to recitation of certain passages from the Rig-Veda as a means of self-purifying from one or another form of evil (R. V. I. 97, 1-8; VII. 80, 1-3; X. 185. 1-3). According to these laws muttering for three days the first four verses of the fifty-eighth hymn in the tenth book of the Rig-Veda "purifies one who has accepted unacceptable presents, also one who has eaten forbidden food" (Carnivora). Again, recitation of other verses from that same book of the Rig-Veda "helps free the violator of a Guru's (teacher's) bed."

Interspersed amid all the rules and regulations comprising the twelve books, we meet with genuine ethical maxims of a very high order, such as the following:

"A wise man should strive to restrain his passions which run wild among alluring sensual objects like 'a charioteer's horses.'"

"Neither study of the Vedas nor sacrifices nor austerities can ever procure the attainment of reward to a man whose heart is contaminated by sensuality."

"He forsooth whose speech and thoughts are pure and ever perfectly guarded gains the whole reward which is conferred by the Vedanta."

"He who possesses humility will receive learning even from a man of lower caste."

"Coveting the property of others, thinking in one's heart of thoughts undesirable, and adherence to false doctrines are the three kinds of sinful mental action."

"Abusing others, speaking untruths, detracting from the merits of others, and talking idly are the four kinds of evil verbal action."

"Taking what has not been given, injuring creatures without the sanction of the law, holding criminal intercourse with another man's wife are declared to be the three kinds of wicked bodily action." [Page 61]

I 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.

NA fourth dimensional world of deepening consciousness, we are finding it more and more necessary to follow Plato’s dictum that we should live "musically." The increasing rate of vibration of life is felt by every one of us. To be in harmony with its quick beat, to look toward anything like totality of consciousness, we must make use of the fast flying wings of the imagination. In this leap into the unknown, this effort to join the dimly perceived worlds within and without converging upon our one world, we are rediscovering the principle of unity. This is the basic perception of the poet.

How can we deepen the realization of unity? By deepening the mood of poetry, it would seem; by creative listening; by destruction of the dungeon-moods. Poetry, as Arthur Symons reminds us, "begins where prose ends and it is at its chief peril if it begins sooner. The region will then be always the beyond, the ultimate, and with the least possible chance of any confusion of territory." Into this region will travel those in search of the deeper voices; and they will bring back what they hear. "Instead of poetry being an artificial decoration of life, it is the organic expression of life’s deepest meaning. It is the expression of the unfamiliar beauty of the world. It is the 'voice mysterious which whosoever hears, must think on what will be and what has been.'" Of "what will be" an Eastern seer has said: "We are brothers and sisters by nature. A time must come when the harmony of Oneness will pervade the whole world." [Page 62]

Dedication

(To those who believe that Peace is the corrupter of nations)

Peace? When have we prayed for peace? Over us burns a star Bright, beautiful, red for strife! Yours are only the drum and the fife And the golden braid and the surface of life Ours is the white-hot war.

Peace? When have we prayed for peace? Ours are the weapons of men. Time changes the face of the world Your swords are rust! Your flags are furled And ours are the unseen legions hurled Up to the heights again.

Peace? When have we prayed for peace? Is there no wrong to right? Wrong crying to God on high Here where the weak and the helpless die And the homeless hordes of the city go by, The ranks are rallied tonight.

Peace? When have we prayed for peace? Are ye so dazed with words? Earth, heaven, shall pass away Ere for your passionless peace we pray. Are ye deaf to the trumpets that call us today, Blind to the blazing swords?

ALFRED NOYES [Page 63]

THE DAY OF GOD

My stars unleash their forces like falcons from the hill To sweep through myriad courses, returning as I will Each with its time, its tether, its flight above, below, Perfecting all together an aim they none can know. From heaven unto heaven I guide their tireless way On silent wings and even that falter not nor stray Nor cross My firm decision nor pass My bound and goal, Their leagues within My vision, their hours in My control.

On them I laid a duty of seasons without flaw; Their gardens sow My beauty, their deserts reap My law. Each drop and grain I make them, of sands and waters spilt, And what is there to shake them, the worlds that I have built?

Ye race I raised of darkness more splendid than the sun, All restlessness, all starkness, all perfect, all undone, How have you thought to leave Me who lands and waters give? How have you thought to grieve Me, the Life of all that live?

From error to worse error, wherever you have gone I darkened in that terror to brighten in that dawn, I cried in wind and ocean when you were as the beast, I fired each mad emotion whereby your souls increased. Nearer than pain or pleasure, you did not see My face: Dearer than golden treasure, you trod upon My grace; You held My pure creation an emptiness, a pit, To damn with your damnation, you weakest things of it!

Life within life I made you, an angel in a beast, Hell within heaven laid you, starvation at a feast That you for purer water should thirst, and stronger wine, Spent wolves grown sick of slaughter and craving to be Mine In peace your own creation, for God your own desire, When depth of desolation compelled you to aspire.

My love is your true history and not these broken days Your memory makes a mystery to startle and amaze: My love that like a garden shall flower in its own rain The fervent rose of pardon from darkened earth of pain. [Page 64]My stars unleash their forces like falcons from the hill But you run longer courses through My more secret will; To you I gave My beauty, in you I breathed My breath: My love is all your duty, bright angels without death! As rivers from the mountain wind surely to the sea, Your lives, a scattered fountain, return at last to Me. The Hands of Glory plan it, the Heart of Peace restores For hates that were as granite the victory of your wars. I make your fields be holy whatever blood is shed, The mighty and the lowly shall lie upon one bed, For they who would not centre as angels to their trust On humbled bellies enter My heaven for a crust. Already, see, what glory shines bright against your brows! The fond, incredulous story you whispered house to house Of Love they cast in prison for murderers to deny, Now Sun of Truth arisen, it flames from sky to sky! For souls that would not falter in dread and drouth and dearth I raise My fallen altar and reign throughout the earth. From every radiant spirit the meek, unhonored guest I summon to inherit new kingdoms of the blest. I close the former pages, I fold the ancient scroll; I yield My promised ages that ripen fruits of soul To shine like stars eternal above the nights that damn O peoples made supernal for Glory that I Am.

HORACE HOLLEY [Page 65]

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

Outstanding Books of the Season

THE "rising tide" of books which this department would like to recommend to its readers has nearly submerged us. From those on our table we shall therefore select for brief description the most noteworthy, in the hope that in the near future we shall be able to deal more adequately with some of them.

Paul Radin, Primitive Man as Philosopher, with foreword by John Dewey. D. Appleton and Co. xviii, 402 pp. $3.

Elliott Smith, B. Malinowski, H. J. Spinden, A. Goldenweiser, Culture: The Diffusion Controversy. W. W. Norton and Co. 106 pp. $1.

Mary White Ovington, Portraits in Color. The Viking Press. viii, 241 pp. $2.

A. P. Brigham, The United States of America. Oxford University Press, American Branch. x, 308 pp. $3.

These volumes in the fields of anthropology, biography, and human geography all touch on the vexed question of racial achievement. Dr. Radin draws upon his unusual first-hand knowledge of American Indian life to point out, with an extensive anthology of primitive literature, the essentially similar distribution of temperament and ability among "primitive" and "civilized" peoples. The traditional assumption of some fundamentally different "primitive mentality" among less civilized groups breaks down on closer acquaintance, and in its place we find a degree of realistic facing of facts, an appreciation of the value of individualism within social groupings and customs, and [Page 66]an active intellectual class interested in the reflective interpretation of its experience, in no wise different from what we find in the more developed civilizations. No one can read Dr. Radin’s quotations from primitive literature without realizing that it is to wider experience and broader contacts, not to any particular difference in natural ability, that the great European and Oriental civilizations owe their intellectual achievements.

The symposium on the diffusion controversy reinforces the same point. Professor Elliot Smith maintains, with dubious logic, that all civilization, including that of ancient America, was spread by actual contact with the Egyptians, who alone possessed the ability to originate the forms of civilized life. The three other contributors, while recognizing the importance of cultural contact, show the impossibility of denying inventive power to all primitive peoples, wherever found. Miss Ovington, a devoted worker in behalf of the negro race, gives twenty brief sketches of outstanding American negroes. Such a record of individual achievement and of disinterested devotion to their own people can hardly fail, together with volumes like Alain Locke’s The New Negro, to dispel the fog of prejudice with clear facts.

Professor Brigham’s volume, originally prepared to interpret the geographical conditions of American life to a London audience, can be read with profit by Americans. As in every such study, one is impressed by the natural wealth of the American continent; a searching of heart inclines one to attribute American economic success rather to the lavish gifts of nature than to any unique American enterprise or ability. Professor Brigham’s handling of the racial composition of the American people is a welcome antidote to the usual alarmist propaganda.

Harry A. Overstreet, About Ourselves, Psychology for Normal People. W. W. Norton and Co. 300 pp. $3.

Daniel B. Leary, That Mind of Yours. J. B. Lippincott Co. 226 pp. $1.75.

Two very popularly written accounts of the present status of psychological and psychiatric knowledge about human personality. Such popularizations of the scattered and frag- [Page 67]

Outstanding Books of the Season

mentary results of laboratory experiment inevitably grow dogmatic where our exact information is slightest; but a properly warned and critical layman can extract much useful information from both books. Professor Overstreet in particular does much to counteract the unfortunate propaganda based on pseudo-scientific psychology, so rife today; his volume is worth reading for its revelation of the author's genial personality and high moral ideals.

Curtis W. Reese, ed., Humanist Sermons. Open Court Pub. Co. xviii, 262 pp. $2.50. A. G. Widgery, Contemporary Thought of Great Britain. Alfred A. Knopf. 254 PP. $2.50. L. P. Jacks, Constructive Citizenship. Doubleday, Doran and Co. 300 pp. $2. Charles L. Sherman, The Moral Self. Ginn and Co. x, 365 pp. $2.60.

The volume edited by Mr. Reese contains eighteen sermons by as many American preachers, all symptomatic of the present-day tendency in liberal religion to adjust the traditional Christian values to a naturalistic world view. Mr. Reese quite properly points out that in the light of the philosophic naturalism that has today superseded the 19th century attitudes, such religious "humanism" may not properly be identified with the older doctrines of Materialism, Positivism, or Rationalism, which play no part in contemporary thinking. Nor, although most of his contributors express doubts as to a personal, transcendent Deity, can their attitude be called atheism. Stated positively, Mr. Reese's humanism represents "the firm conviction that human life is of supreme worth;" "the effort to understand human experience by means of human inquiry;" and "to enrich human experience to the utmost capacity of man and the utmost limits of the environing conditions." The humanist belongs, for Mr. Reese, with the realist, the pragmatist, the behaviorist, not with the intellectualist, the idealist, or the absolutist. It must be confessed that although these sermons are sincere attempts to make an adjustment to the new philosophical currents, and are inspired by a fine religious idealism, they contain much groping and intellectual confusion. [Page 68]Mr. Widgery, writing in a series of surveys of the contemporary intellectual situation in various countries, attempts to evaluate modern British thought from the standpoint of theistic idealism. Naturally he finds the present course of thought far from hopeful, in view of the decline of British idealism and the lack of concern which British thinkers manifest in theism.

Mr. Jacks, the amiable editor of the Hibbert Journal, writes pleasantly and wisely of some of the problems of citizenship in the England of Baldwin. He hardly touches on basic and disturbing questions. Professor Sherman presents a textbook for elementary courses in ethics, drawing on historical and psychological material.

R. F. Alfred Hoernle, Idealism as a Philosophy. G. H. Doran and Co. 330 pp. $2.50. George Santayana, The Realm of Essence. C. Scribners Sons. xxiv, 183 pp. $3.50. Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Matter. Harcourt, Brace and Co. viii, 408 pp. $6. Bertrand Russell, Philosophy. W. W. Norton and Co. vi, 307 pp. $3. Joseph K. Hart, Inside Experience, with introduction by John Dewey, Longmans, Green and Co. xxvi, 287 pp. $2.50.

These are the outstanding philosophical works published since the summer. In an early issue they will be made the basis of a survey of the contemporary philosophical scene.

Henry N. Brailsford, Olives of Endless Age. Harper and Brothers. 431 pp. $3.50. J. M. Kenworthy, Peace or War? Boni and Liveright. xvii, 338 pp. $2.50. Herbert W. Fisher, Alias Uncle Shylock. Albert and Charles Boni. 214 pp. $2.50. Guido de Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism. Oxford University Press. xi, 476 pp. $5.50. John W. Burgess, The Sanctity of Law. Ginn and Co. vi, 325 pp. $3. Manley O. Hudson, Current International Co-Operation. Calcutta University Press. 149 PP. Nathaniel Peffer, The White Man's Dilemma. The John Day Co. ix, 312 pp. $2.50. F. S. Marvin, India and the West, A Study in Co-Operation. Longmans, Green and Co. viii, 182 pp. 7/6.

Mr. Brailsford's fine-spirited and trenchant plea for world unity deserves and will receive full discussion later. Lieutenant Commander Kenworthy, Labour Member of Parliament, gives [Page 69]

OUTSTANDING BOOKS OF THE SEASON

a thoughtful and very realistic analysis of the present international situation. He points out the continuance, on an enlarged scale, of the same economic and nationalistic forces that produced the Great War; he examines carefully the increasing friction, aggravated by recent naval rivalries, between Britain and the United States. He sees clearly the present drift to war; but like the rest of us he finds no easy answer to the question of what is to be done about it. Mr. Fisher, in a journalistic and popular style, portrays graphically what he calls the tragi-comedy of fear and avarice, the underlying causes of modern war. For him, the League of Nations is impotent to prevent another war so long as it is bound to maintain the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. Unless, for the sake of preserving peace, it can wipe out those iniquitous fruits of victory, there will be war. "There can be no evasion; there can be no substitute. It is either restitution or the pendulum of war." We must return to the Fourteen Points and the guarantee of an equal chance to all nations to compete for prosperity.

In these days of declining faith in liberalism as a political philosophy, it is well to have Professor de Ruggiero's careful account of its rise amidst 18th century conditions, its relations with 19th century industrialism and nationalism, and its transformation into a program of democratic social control in pre-war Europe. Although an Italian, and profoundly distressed by present conditions in his own country, Professor de Ruggiero never grows passionate, never loses his faith in rational argument. He takes a broadly European point of view, tracing the spread of the principles of the French Revolution and the methods of British constitutionalism to the major European countries. He brings into relief the economic and political realities that have continually modified the faith of the liberal. That faith he expresses as "the profound conviction that reasonableness in the long run always defeats its enemies; that the conflict of opinions and tendencies, the most ratic survive; that fictions and falsehoods deserve to live; and that the experie the conflict of error and evil is as [Page 70]necessary for peoples as individuals: a labour which no one can save them by presenting them with a truth or a good which they cannot understand or value." Such liberalism is primarily a method and a spirit. If the liberal parties have everywhere suffered a serious reverse, it is because, as in Italy, the pre-war facade of liberalism concealed a population that had failed in any effective way to assimilate such a spirit. The crisis in liberalism is not irreparable; indeed, even in the most opposed movements, Socialism, Catholicism, and Nationalism, the liberal leaven is today at work. A revived liberalism will endeavor to harmonize its two opposed but complementary elements, individual liberty and State organization; democratic in its respect for human liberty, it will be authoritarian in the importance it will attach to the necessity for skilful and practised government.

John W. Burgess, veteran political scientist, traces the gradual triumph of law over force, from the Roman Empire to the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations. Organized international law might prevail under the League, were it not for the Treaty; with the help of the United States the Treaty might be corrected. Professor Hudson, in his lectures delivered at the University of Calcutta, takes a hopeful view of present-day international law and the prospects for its development under the World Court. His little book is a useful survey of the existing situation, in the light of the changes since 1918; he does not touch on the difficulties that a guest at an Indian University would politely refrain from mentioning.

These difficulties are forcefully presented by Nathaniel Peffer in his statement of the problem of imperialism. Dispassionately, without moral indignation, in the attempt to appeal to realpolitiker and hardened men of affairs, Mr. Peffer bids the Western nations choose between immediate relinquishing of control over the aroused nationalities of the East, or the vigorous application of a policy of force and repression. "Our best hope lies in making the decision while it is still ours to make: either consciously, on full deliberation and knowing why, rigorously to suppress the rebellious subject nationalities, now when the [Page 71]

OUTSTANDING BOOKS OF THE SEASON

initiative is ours and there is more likelihood that we can; or at once to get about the business of liquidation and cut them loose, now when there is more likelihood that the surgery will not be fatal to ourselves." The latter course is not one likely to be followed; the former course would be a Pyrrhic victory that could not last. Mr. Peffer relentlessly challenges all half-way measures; he has no faith in understanding or goodwill in either West or East. His facts are hard to meet. Mr. Marvin, the British Liberal at his best, in his study of the relations between Britain and India, hardly faces them. Were all Englishmen as sympathetic as Mr. Marvin, India might advance to the Dominion status and League membership he hopes to see her achieve, with England playing the part of wise educator. In an ideal world such things might happen. As our world actually is, the Hindu nationalist will see in Mr. Marvin's book, unfairly, only another example of the sanctimonious justification of "the white man's burden." [Page 72]

NOTES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS

The Significance of the Scientific Spirit for Eastern Civilizations, by Prof. John J. Coss, makes a much more forceful impression as it is considered gainst the background of general considerations presented by Prof. Shepherd's series. To complete the picture, however, we must realize that the East is by no means devoid of science. On the contrary, long before the West applied itself to science in its relation to the external universe, the East had developed the greatest of all sciences, psychology, the science of the soul. Here, in fact, is the real cleavage between the two hemispheres, or rather, the distinction between their special contributions to the future world civilization and the balanced humanity to come. The East has paid a tragic price for the preoccupation of its greatest spirits with the processes of subjective experience. Like a mystic who neglects his material success and physical health for the sake of the inner vision, so the Orient has never applied its energy of will to the aspects of life considered most important in Europe and America. On the other hand, the helplessness of the Orient in the face of problems like plague and famine is no more pitiable than the helplessness of the Occident in relation to its inner life. Their poverty and degradation are material; our poverty and degradation are spiritual.

Too much emphasis has been laid upon the superiority of the West in material matters, and its overwhelming influence where matters of political or economic mechanisms are in question. The East has penetrated the West, psychologically, just as much as the West has penetrated and dominated the East politically and economically. While the East has been taking our medicines and wearing our clothes, we have been taking their doctrines and assuming their ideas. Beginning with Ralph Waldo Emerson, the thought of the West has been predominantly Oriental in all its basic attitudes. Not by 'New Thought' alone, but by many other influences, the Western search for a soul has been fed upon Eastern sources. So much is this the case that Prof. S. L. Joshi, lecturing at the Institute of World Unity in the summer of 1927, declared that modern Western science is almost entirely Buddhistic in its outlook.

On the other hand, no psychology however perceptive, acute and subtle, will enable individuals and groups to attain reality without those elements of emotion, spontaneity and social solidarity evolved by the West. The supreme opportunity of mankind at present consists in an exchange of values, voluntarily and as between equals, between the Orient and the Occident. These values will be exchanged, whether we will or no, but if they are exchanged on a basis of hostility or misunderstanding, the East will receive the curse of militarism and [Page 73]

NOTES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS

the West the curse of pantheism. It should be a matter of extreme interest to WORLD UNITY readers to study the elements of the science of psychology manifested in the excerpts from Oriental Scriptures quoted in Alfred W. Martin's series Wisdom of the Ages.

WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE gives full-hearted endorsement to the call issued by the Church Peace Union for a Universal Religious Peace Conference, quoted, in part, in the department The World We Live In.

If anything short of worldwide chaos and a reign of terror can unite the religions, it is just such emphasis on what religion must do in distinction to what religion is. A work like Christianity, by Guignebert, makes it absolutely clear that every religious doctrine comes into being as the result of clash among the adherents themselves. Dogma is thus connected with the spirit of division, and efforts to unify the religions by comparison of dogmas only releases this essentially antagonistic spirit. The individual evolves beyond his own negative fears and hates by replacing them with positive motives. Evil cannot be overcome by concentrating upon it-evil can only be replaced by a more powerful good. Similarly, the religious bodies of the world, conscious as they are of a tradition possessing two opposed factors the universality of their Prophet and the dogmas of their theologians are called upon to choose in which direction their collective consciousness is to turn. They cannot have both. The dire need of world peace should stimulate all religionists in the direction of those fundamental principles which unite, the principles of the Prophets themselves. If we cannot effect this spiritual transformation, we have no power to adapt to the conditions of the new age. [Page 74]

THE SEED OF THE DRAGON

The crowd thronging out from the Follies pauses to buy the "morning" edition at the subway station—some, perhaps, glance at China still in the headlines before they settle down to the sporting page.

But what sporting editor ever had such a story to exploit? Twelve million people on the verge of starvation. What a poem Nero could have written on that!

The great dragon, wounded, writhes across the world. Out of this bloody drenching what seeds are going to bloom in this, in other once far-off lands? Mountains and seas cannot now hold out what we choose to call political and economic forces—the visible side of the spiritual ties, woven in higher worlds, which make humanity one.

China’s agony will humanize the West, or the dragon’s seed will choke 'prosperity' and 'civilization' before this century ends.

World unity is the recognition of what will be in what is—world unity is the culture of the modern heart and mind. Outside this culture—barbarism.

Is not the one magazine serving this ideal worthy your consideration? Subscribe to World Unity Magazine and bring it to the attention of your friends.

WORLD UNITY PUBLISHING CORPORATION, 4 EAST 12TH STREET, NEW YORK.

Please enter my subscription to World Unity Magazine. I enclose $3.50. (In Canada, $4.00; other countries, $4.50. Indicate whether subscription is to begin with October, 1927, or current issue.) [Page 75]

BOOKS RECOMMENDED BY WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE

New Geography, Book II By W. W. Atwood

The American Rhythm Everyman's Genius By Mary Austin

The Fighting Instinct By Pierre Bovet

Principles and Problems of Right Thinking By Edwin Arthur Bartt

Treatment of Exempt Classes of Chinese in America By Ng Poon Chew

Israel's Contribution to America By Rudolph L. Coffee

The Heart of the World By Georges Duhamel

Staatenschutzvertrag zur Sicherung des Weltfriedens By Anna B. Eckstein

The New Spirit The Dance of Life By Havelock Ellis

Das Parlement By Hellmuth von Gerlach

Introduction to World Politics Europe Since 1918 By Herbert Adams Gibbons

His Religion and Hers By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

War from a Quaker Point of View The Divinity in Man By John W. Graham

The Racial Basis of Civilization By Frank H. Hankins

The Larger Bible By Will Hayes

Fundamental Ends of Life Social Law and the Spiritual World By Rufus M. Jones

A Religion of Truth, Justice and Peace By Isidor Singer

Proceedings of the Convention of World Federation of Education Associations Ed. by Augustus O. Thomas

The Voice of Peace Sparks from the Fire By Gilbert Thomas

For International Peace The Outlawry of War By David Starr Jordan

Oriental Interpretations of the Far Eastern Problem By P. W. Kno

Race Contacts and Inter- Racial Relations The New Negro By Alain Locke

The Master Problem The Future of Christianity By Sir James Marchant

The Fellowship of Faiths Comparative Religion By Alfred W. Martin

The Century of Hope By F. S. Marvin

Progress and History Evolution of World Peace Science and Civilization Ed. by F. S. Marvin

Swords and Plough- shares By Lucia Ames Mead

Races, Nations and Classes By Herbert A. Miller

My Brother's Face By Dhan Gopal Mukerji

Influencing Human Be- havior About Ourselves By Harry A. Overstreet

Humanity at the Cross- Roads By John Herman Randall

The Making of the Modern Mind By John Herman Randall, Jr.

The Messages of the Poets The Prophet of Nazareth By Nathaniel Schmidt

Demophon By Forrest Reid

The Moral Damage of War The World Rebuilt By Walter Walsh

Between the Old World and the New Towards New Horizons By M. P. Willcocks

Any of the above may be obtained from WORLD UNITY PUBLISHING CORPORATION 4 East 12th Street, New York City [Page 76]

THE STANDARD

ORGAN OF THE ETHICAL CULTURE SOCIETIES Published Nine Times a Year ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION, ONE DOLLAR.

Contributing Editors: FELIX ADLER HORACE J. BRIDGES PERCIVAL CHUBB JOHN L. ELLIOTT HENRY J. GOLDING JAMES GUTMANN ALFRED W. MARTIN DAVID S. MUZZEY HENRY NEUMANN GEORGE E. O'DELL NATHANIEL SCHMIDT

SINGLE COPIES, 20 CENTS

CONTENTS FOR APRIL

CECIL DELISLE BURNS (Glasgow University) The Fascist Doctrine

ALFRED W. MARTIN Visions and Tasks

HENRY NEUMANN Thomas Hardy's Reply to the Challenge of Life

MORITZ KIRSCHBERGER The Old Diplomacy

GEORGE E. O'DELL Modern Humanists

American Ethical Union, 2 West 64th St., New York City

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G. E. Stechert & Co., New York Akad. Verlagsgesellschaft, Leipsig Nicola Zanichelli, Bologna Renascença Portuguesa, Porto David Nutt, London Felix Alcan, Parie Ruis Hermanos, Madrid The Marusen Company, Tokyo

SCIENTIA

International Review of Scientific Synthesis Published Monthly (100 to 120 Pages Each Issue) Editor: EUGENIO RIGNANO

“SCIENTIA” THE ONLY scientific review whose contributors are truly international.

THE ONLY scientific review having a really worldwide circulation.

THE ONLY review of scientific synthesis and unification that deals with the fundamental questions of all sciences: the history of the sciences, mathematics, astronomy, geology, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology and sociology.

THE ONLY review, therefore, which, while of immediate interest to students of statistics. demography, ethnography, economics, law, the history of religions and sociology in general, by its numerous and important articles and reports relating to these sciences, enables the reader to know, in summarised and synthetic form, the chief problems of all other branches of knowledge.

THE ONLY review which among its contributors can boast of the most illustrious men of science in the whole world. A list of more than 350 of these is given in each number.

The articles are published in the language of their authors, and every number has a supplement containing the French translation of all articles not written in French. The review is thus completely accessible to those who know only the French language. Write for a free copy to the General Secretary of Scientia, at the following address, enclosing 12 cents in stamps of your country merely to cover packing and postage.

SUBSCRIPTION $10 per year, post free.

OFFICE: 12. Via A. De Togni, Milan (116), Italy General Secretary: DR. PAOLO BONETTI