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[Page 79]

WORLD UNITY

A Monthly Magazine for those who seek the world outlook

JOHN HERMAN RANDALL, Editor HORACE HOLLEY, Managing Editor

CONTENTS

DECEMBER, 1930

A Center of International Culture — Frontispiece The Acid Test of National Sanity — Editorial The International Note in Novels — A. Evelyn Newman The Coming World Order — Archie M. Palmer Europe in the Coming World Order — F. S. Marvin 'Round the World Log of a Sociologist — Herbert A. Miller II. Religion in Asia The Treaties of Locarno — Dexter Perkins Individuality Through Social Unity — John Herman Randall, Jr. Elements of a World Culture — R. G. Tugwell II. Economics (concluded) Leaves of the Greater Bible — William Norman Guthrie IV. Chinese and Shinto Prayers V. Zoroastrian Prayers Changing Conceptions in Hinduism — Albert J. Saunders II. The Approach to God Round Table

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 and in all other countries (postage included). THE WORLD UNITY PUBLISHING CORPORATION and its editors welcome correspondence on articles related to the aims and purposes of the magazine. Printed in U. S. A. Contents copyrighted 1930 by WORLD UNITY PUBLISHING CORPORATION. [Page 80]

THE ROERICH MUSEUM, NEW YORK

A Center of International Culture [Page 81]

THE ACID TEST OF NATIONAL SANITY

OLLOWING close upon what has been described as "the feeblest Assembly" of the League, since its inception, has come the Imperial Conference in London. World-wide interest had been manifested in this Conference. Would it result in strengthening or loosening the ties binding the Dominions to the Mother Country? Would it bring economic agreements that would help or hinder the economic recovery in the Empire itself, and elsewhere throughout the world? Through the persistent refusal of Phillip Snowden, Chancellor of the Exchequer, to accede to the demand of the Dominions for preferential tariffs, the Conference has failed to lighten the economic gloom. J. L. Garvin, Editor of the Observer, writes: "the failure of the Conference will strengthen every psychological influence toward disintegration of the Empire." In November the Round Table Conference on India has been meeting, the final results of which will either hasten or delay the process of disintegration.

During this same month of November the representatives of the United States and the League of Nations have come together at Geneva for the meeting of the Preparatory Commission on Disarmament. In the present mood of Europe and the rest of the world the fear has been openly and widely expressed that little, if any, practical good can come of this meeting, and this, in spite of the following facts:

The same world that is everywhere suffering from economic depression and mounting unemployment is now spending approximately $4,300,000,000 a year on land, sea and air armaments. Of this amount, Europe is spending 60%, regardless of the fact that almost every nation shows an annual deficit in its budget; the [Page 82]United States spends another 20% of the total, and other nations the remainder. The three-Power naval agreement entered into by America, Britain and Japan may prove to be meaningless unless France and Italy can come to an understanding with regard to their fleets.

According to the records, the Standing Army in France totals 607,000; in Russia, 565,000; Italy, 365,000; Britain, 345,000; in Poland, 255,000; Japan, 200,000; in Roumania, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia and the United States about 130,000 each. But this is only half of the story. Apart from America, Britain and Germany all the principal powers have huge numbers of conscripts and trained reserves to the extent that all the nations combined could throw upwards of 30,000,000 drilled soldiers into the field soon after mobilization.

It is this titanic problem that the Preparatory Commission has been trying to solve. And while the technical side of it does not offer any insurmountable problem, the psychological factors in the present hectic state of the world are paralyzing the will to peace. It is chiefly because of fear that the Powers do not want to disarm. And yet it takes no prophet to foresee that if the deadlock cannot be broken, and some definite steps taken toward disarmament, there lies only world catastrophe ahead.

The United States is the only great, comparatively uninvolved, Power represented at this Conference. What an opportunity for her to take the initiative, and by some honest and dramatic proposal, pave the way for a beginning at least in world disarmament! Some nation must lead the way. Who can do this better than the United States, thereby bringing our practices into harmony with our professions? As we go to press, word comes that the League rejected the American demand for a real arms cut, when sixteen states voted for the British resolution for limitation on military budgets only. As Phillip Simms, Foreign Editor of the Scripps-Howard papers, has said, "we are living in a world that is stark mad." Perhaps the acid test of man's sanity lies just now in the disarmament problem.

J. H. R. [Page 83]

THE INTERNATIONAL NOTE IN THE NOVELS OF THE PRE-WAR YEARS

by A. EVELYN NEWMAN Professor of English Literature, State Teachers College, eley, Colorado

THE opening of the twentieth century reveals new forces in the world of thought. It was in the year 1900 that Freud published some of the most original of his research studies of the subconscious world; while at about this same period Bergson was stating his philosophy of the liberation of mind from matter and of the expansion of the resources of human thought in search of spiritual truth-his philosophy of continuity in change; "The past never ceases completely to be present, the future is contained in the present; there is no complete death nor birth; there is a constant becoming." In each case the thinker was to have an influence bounded by no racial or linguistic limitations; each was to be a world force. Geniuses of a like worldwide influence and fame were at the same time passing away: Zola died in 1902, Ibsen in 1906, Tolstoi in 1910. Whitman, who in his measure is another such force, died in 1892. Nietzsche died in 1900. The survey, upon which we are about to enter, of some international or super-national aspects of the recent literature of war, seems to require, by way of introduction, that we should first take a backward glance at the work done in earlier years.

Tolstoi had been wielding an incontestable influence since the publication of War and Peace (1868). During the latter half of the nineteenth century his writings-novels, plays and pamphlets-had attacked the whole basis of society in its social and military systems. Anti-militarism was uncompromisingly expressed in War and Peace, which was followed by a criticism of the social life of upper Russian society in Anna Karenina in 1877-78. [Page 84]After the publication of this book, Tolstoi gave himself to the service of the Russian peasants and to the study and translation of the Gospels. His Confession (1882) and What I Believe (1884) were printed in Geneva in 1888 and were translated in other countries during the early years of the present century. His years of study and translations of the Gospels, during which he actually endeavored to live according to the Sermon on the Mount, were reflected in his Resurrection (published 1899) which is in the main a criticism of the criminal system and other social evils in Russia, and in its larger sense has universal application to Christ's teachings.

In England, Edward Carpenter, who at an advanced age has only just passed away in 1929, and in America, Walt Whitman, were crying out a doctrine which in its inculcating of human brotherhood might be said to resemble Tolstoi's. Whitman died in 1892, but his poetry of democracy and brotherhood of man had received hearing abroad before his death. Carpenter visited him in 1877 and published his own poem Towards Democracy in 1883. In his book Days with Walt Whitman (1877) he declares that "universality was the very key and center of Whitman's utterance. He swam in the ocean of humanity as in a sea."

Nietzsche, too, proclaimed the unity of mankind. His far-reaching conception of progress seems to foreshadow the philosophy of Bergson, for Bergson would write: "I see in the whole evolution of life. . . an effort. . . to arrive . . . at something which is only realized in man and which, moreover, even in man is realized only imperfectly." And Nietzsche wrote: "What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; what can be loved in man is that he is a transit and not an exit." He has been rightly blamed for so exalting the idea of the state as to justify the militarism which brought on the World War; yet his philosophy, not wholly self-consistent, has other aspects, and he could denounce national hatreds in such words as these: "Is there a single idea behind this bovine nationalism? . . The economic unity of Europe must come ... The unmistakable signs that Europe wishes to be one are now overlooked [Page 85]or arbitrarily and falsely misinterpreted. With all the more profound and large-minded men of this century, the real general tendency of the mysterious labor of their souls was to prepare the way for that new synthesis. . . . Only in their simulations or in their weaker moments did they belong to the fatherlands..."¹

There was an English writer of the same period who with grim realism and bitter satire laid bare the social hypocrisy of his age, and denounced the insularity of outlook of his countrymen. That was Samuel Butler, who, dying in 1902, left his Way of All Flesh as a legacy to the rising generation.

That same year in Paris, Emile Zola died. Of Italian father and French mother, he combined much passion and clarity in his' intellectual make-up, together with an immense enthusiasm and physical energy. The novel of Naturalism is generally regarded as his creation in its developed form. True, the Goncourt brothers were his colleagues and sharers in that work, and Balzac was in a sense the master of them all. But Zola by his long series of the Rougon-Macquart cycle planned in 1868, when he was but twenty-eight, and carried on in an interminable succession up almost to the day of his death, held the leadership of naturalism in Europe. Russia and Germany as well as England fell under his sway.

One of this cycle and the most important precursor of the war novels of our own day is Zola's La Débâcle (1892), a tale of the war of 1870-71. The book is divided into three parts: the first gives the defeats on the Rhine and the retreat towards Sedan; the second describes the Battle of Sedan; the third gives the Siege of Paris, the Commune, and the final awful slaughter and conflagration in Paris. Zola spent months of study and investigation along the road to Sedan and on the battlefield. He talked with officers and soldiers of the war, studied newspaper files and government records. He tried to make a vast picture of the whole of the French people in the war. The realism of his battle and hospital scenes

¹Citation from M. A. Mügge's Friederich Nietzsche (pages 84, 85). Published by T. C. & E. C. Jack. [Page 86]brought home the truth of war as it had seldom been given in literature. He was attacked by the army and its supporters, by good patriots in Germany as well as in France, "for befouling the protection of home and fatherland." Zola portrays the mistakes of staff officers, their dissipation and carelessness, the sufferings of the wounded, and the friendship among the soldiers in much the same way as writers of the World War were going to do at a later date.

The lack of love interest is replaced by that of friendship represented by the strong bond between Jean, the workingman corporal-symbol of France of the republic-and Maurice, the young law student, the cynical pleasure-lover of the Empire type. Their self-sacrificing devotion for each other makes the main character interest. The irony of Jean's mortally wounding Maurice by a bayonet thrust, in the closing days of fighting in Paris, is symbolic of war's destruction of all that life holds dear. The seeming lack of confidence on the part of men for their officers in high command, the inadequate preparation or supplies for the sick and wounded, the blood lust and revenge that take thousands of lives needlessly at the end in the Paris fighting: all this will later be found in trebled intensity in descriptions of the battles, soldiers, hospitals, of Germany, France, and England in the World War. Paris described by Zola during the Siege resembles the scenes described by Oskar Maria Graf, Bernard Kellermann, and Ernst Toller, of Berlin and Munich in the post-war days of the German Revolution. The same ruthless killing of compatriots, of workers, by the army of the power in control is described.

No other novelists of Zola's time had done anything to approximate to the work of La Débâcle as a criticism of war. In England, in 1897, was published Olive Shreiner's Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland. It described the cruelties of trooper fighting against the blacks in South Africa. Baroness Bertha von Suttner had sent out a powerful warning voice in her novel Die Waffen Nieder (1892), published in the same year as La Débâcle. It was, however, more a portrayal of woman's anxiety and suffering for loved ones in war and an appeal to reason and spirit. [Page 87]

INTERNATIONAL NOTE IN NOVELS OF PRE-WAR YEARS

About seven years before the publication of her book, Bernard Shaw, in Cashel Byron's Profession (1885-86)—one of the novels of his "nonage"—criticized military life as a profession. His hero had fallen in love with the wealthy and intelligent Lydia Carew. The lady loved him in return but was horrified on hearing that he was a prize-fighter. Said Cashel Byron in defense: "Look at your relation the General, what is he but a fighting man? Isn't it his pride and boast that as long as he is paid so much a day, he'll ask no questions whether a war is fair or unfair, but just walk out and put thousands of men in the best way to kill and be killed—keeping well behind them himself all the time, mind you? Last year he was up to his chin in the blood of a lot of poor blacks that were no more a match for his armed men than a featherweight would be for me."¹

Shaw's plays—Man of Destiny and Caesar and Cleopatra (1895-98, 1901) give out satirical wisdom and wit upon army life.

Two other novels written about the time of La Débácle—and containing some criticism of war are Dingley, L'Illustre Ecrivain by the Tharaud brothers and Peter Moor Fahrt Nach Sudwest by Gustave Frenssen (1906). The original version of Dingley appeared in 1902 in Charles Péguy's Cahiers de la Quinzaine. The Tharaud brothers (born 1874, 1877) were of that younger group who met with the Goncourt brothers and Zola in their literary soirées. Dingley has for its setting the Boer War. Kipling is represented in the character of Dingley, and the writers give some suggestive treatment of the spirit of Chauvinism in time of war.

The great writer was seeking a suitable theme for a novel:

"Quand la guerre du Transvaal fut déclarée, il était à Londres. De toutes ces impressions l'écrivain avait composé la première partie de son roman. L'oeuvre était bien venue; les gaies histoires d'embauchage de soldats se mêlaient aux scènes sinistres du War Office. . . . Il était consciencieux et aimait le document pris sur le vif. . . il décida de partir pour le sud de l'Afrique.²

¹ Cashel Byron's Profession. (Constable & Co., Ltd., London, 1924.) ² From edition published by Cahiers de la Quinzaine, 13 Cahier de la III Serie. [Page 88]There was great enthusiasm upon his departure:

"Shakespeare n'avait jam is connu une seconde cette ivresse. Jeanne (his wife) sentit la ma l'injustice de la guerre: Dingle This book revised received on mari trembler. Elle oublia is interesting to note that these adventures of a black French Colon. grand!"

court prize for 1906. It ters in depicting the a post-war book, La Randonnée de Samba Diouf give no interpretation of Samba's feelings or of those of the hundreds of thousands of his dark brothers caught up in a white man's war of which they understand little.

The writers cannot see their own national situation so clearly as that of another country.

Gustave Frenssen's book treats of the German campaign in Southwest Africa. Frenssen was born in 1865 in a small village of Northern Germany. He was a Lutheran pastor until his writ- ings roused accusations from his superiors in the church, because of his ultra-liberal views. He then resigned and has since given all his time to writing. Like Zola, Frenssen made every effort to know his material before writing of the South African trouble. He questioned numbers of returned German soldiers, studied maps. interviewed officers of the high command, tried in every way possible to portray the situations fairly and accurately. The story gives the horrors of fighting in a tropical country, especially the agonies of thirst and suffering from "rapacious flies that hung on fingers and settled in mouth and eye-corners."

There is the same recital of lack of provision, of poor food. of little and dirty water, of untended sick and wounded, of dysentery and death. The same story of killing prisoners is heard:—

"Peter spoke in a loud voice: 'There is a remarkably large number of dead and few wounded'; but Hansen said: 'Don't be stupid. They don't take prisoners. We don't either' " (p. 87).

The description of the march in the path of the flight of the blacks is vivid:

"Goods, horses, dogs, goats, wounded and old, women and children, babies helplessly languishing by mothers whose breasts" [Page 89]hung down long and flabby. Others were still living, with eyes and noses full of flies" (p. 192).

The new element of interest in the novel is the questioning of the right of the white man to be fighting the blacks in their own country. German officers and settlers argue in defense of their position. Peter, the young boy caught up for the campaign from the naval base at Kiel, recounts the opposing viewpoints:

"How should it be otherwise? They were r achmen and proprietors (the natives) and we were there to make them landless working men. They acted in just the same way that North Germany did in 1813. This is their struggle for independence. But the cruelty?' said someone else, and the first speaker replied indifferently. 'Do you suppose that if our whole people should rise in revolt against foreign oppression it would take place with- out cruelty? And are we not cruel toward them?'" (P. 78.)

"Why were the Germans here at all?

"The missionaries said: 'You are our dear brothers in the Lord, and we want to bring you the benefits-Faith, Love and Hope.'

"And here were soldiers, farmers and traders and they said: 'We want to take your cattle and your land gradually away from you and make you slaves without legal rights'" (p. 79).

The chaplain's sermon before the final attack upon the blacks is given without comment from the author:

A people savage by nature had rebelled against the authori- ties God had set over them and besides had stained themselves with revolting murders. Then the authorities had given the sword. .. Might every man use it honourably like a good soldier.""

Says Peter the soldier boy:

"We listened with great seriousness and then took off our hats for prayer."

Just one closing illustration of the book's pregnant detached criticism upon existing methods of great civilized countries:

"Later in his search for water he (an African settler and soldier) found a native with a German gun but no more cartridges. I can still hear the shrill voices of the German and the native. [Page 90]Apparently the guardsman at last learned enough, for he said: The missionary said to me 'Beloved, don't forget that the blacks are our brothers. Now I will give my brother his reward. He pushed the black man off and said: 'Run away!' The man sprang up, tried to get across the clearing before the ball hit him and he pitched full length and lay still."

"The lieutenant said in his thoughtful, scholarly way: 'Safe is safe. He can't raise a gun against us any more nor beget any more children to fight against us'. . . . But the missionary was right when he said all men are our brothers.""

""Then we have killed our brother?'" (said Peter).

"He (the lieutenant) looked up and said in a hoarse voice: 'For a long time we must be hard and kill, but at the same time as individual men we must strive toward high thought and noble deeds so that we may contribute our part to mankind, our future brothers.""

Frenssen's philosophy may be found in a post-war novel. but he clearly foreshadows in Peter Moore's questioning of himself and others concerning the ethics of war, the perplexed wonderment that grew into acute agony and the vast and hopeless weariness and disgust of many soldiers between 1914-18. To think was, indeed, a calamity for them, and this calamity is given expression frequently in the war novel.

Before the publication of Frenssen's novel of protest, the case of Alfred Dreyfus had stirred all France and made a division of literary forces that holds in the main even today. Alfred Dreyfus was a native of Mulhouse, Alsace, a young member of the general staff of the French army. His own family and that of his wife were of wealthy Jewish origin. During the summer of 1894 some French military documents fell into the hands of the German staff. Young Captain Dreyfus was condemned as the guilty purveyor of these secrets, without satisfactory hearing and just trial. He was degraded and banished to Devil's Island in French Guiana, where he was deprived of receiving letters even from his family. It was not until he had been imprisoned for several years that a subordinate member of the French general staff, Picquart by name. [Page 91]found papers that seemed to indicate the injustice done to Dreyfus. Soon Zola, Anatole France, Jean Jaurès, Charles Péguy and the group of the Cahiers de la Quinzaine became earnest Dreyfusards against the anti-Jewish, Catholic and National group who stood for the army. Zola’s famous letter “J’accuse” published in l’Aurore, a small newspaper under the Revisionists’ or Dreyfusards’ direction, made the final blow for justice. Dreyfus was brought back from banishment in the spring of 1899 and finally pardoned in September of that year. Zola’s last novel, Vérité, gives L’Affaire Dreyfus in disguise. There is a wise teacher, a scientific man who has tolerance and greatness of spirit, as the hero, but the book has no merit as literature. Like Tolstoi, Zola had given up art for his thesis of ethics. When he died he was planning a work on justice, in which he meant to portray his ideal of world peace as achieved through a world democracy.

Anatole France had also placed his pen in the service of Dreyfus and justice. His last two volumes of L’Histoire Contemporaine L’Anneau d’Améthyste and Monsieur Bergeret à Paris were pervaded with his philosophic attacks upon the anti-Dreyfusards.

Galsworthy’s indignation at the hypocrisy and smug self-satisfaction of the British people of the middle class was being expressed at about the same time in the Island Pharisees (1904), but we must look at the Country House first published in 1907 for satire of a militarized religion resembling the satire of Anatole France on that point. There is in this book a description of the Sabbath at Worsted Skeynes, of the morning service at which Squire Pendyce reads the Scripture lesson:

“And I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth,” and later of the rector’s sermon commenting on “the beautiful lesson’ and assuring the congregation that:

“God demanded sacrifices of men. Patriotism demanded sacrifices of men. . . . It demanded of them their first duty as men and Christians, the duty of being fruitful and multiplying, ...the duty of multiplying in order that they and their children might be equipped to smite the enemies of their Queen and [Page 92]country and uphold the name of England in whatever quarrel, against all who rashly sought to drag her flag in the dust" (pp. 59-60).

There seems to be among the writers of the time with which we are dealing a well-nigh universal depression. In the midst of this, H. G. Wells alone keeps his buoyancy. He had been making us gifts of what Miss West so delightfully dubs "complete meccano sets for the mind" from his War of the Worlds (1898) (the Martians attacked the world with heat rays for weapons but are killed off by the diseased germs of mankind) through a long series, among them Food for the Gods (1904), A Modern Utopia (1904) and War in the Air (1908). War in the Air has the most foreboding prophecy in its tale of a German attack about the middle of the century, by airships upon New York. New York is thus destroyed by bombs from the air. Japan and China enter the war on the side of America, and there is a final collapse of the structure of human society, with a few survivors reverting to primitiveness among the ruins.

In Germany Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1902) and in England John Galsworthy's Man of Property (1906) have much of the prevailing mood of discouragement over the condition of society. The Buddenbrooks saga describes the years from 1835-1885. The six old Forsyte brothers represent the England of the nineteenth century also. Their God is property as the Buddenbrooks' God is business. There is no special mention of the war of 1870-71. The lust of possession is much more dominant in Soames Forsyte than in Thomas Buddenbrooks who dies in a pitifully futile manner. But in both books, property, business, the material side, triumph over art, the creative love of beauty, the spiritual values. The Man of Property as does Buddenbrooks ends in dissolution, and though the spirit's forces are strengthened in succeeding books of the Forsyte Saga, the devastations of life are as grimly set forth as in Thomas Mann's later work Der Zauberberg.

French literature of the same years reveals to us the genius of Anatole France, whose craving for social justice drove him to

The Country House, Heinemann, Ltd. London. 1907 (pp. 58, 59, 60). [Page 93]expression even more bitter than that of his German and British contemporaries. He had hoped that the military and civil life of his country would be purified by the discoveries and changes made because of the Dreyfus affair. His hopes proved unfounded. He saw his country and all Europe blindly moving toward catastrophe.

He wrote with iconoclastic despair. In his L'Ile des Pingouins (1909) the Penguin folk are only mankind struggling through long stages to end in a destruction like that depicted by Wells in the War in the Air (1908). Commercialism, greed and competition destroy all. Sur la Pierre Blanche (1905) points in its last chapter to a cheerless way out, as France sees the future. He dreams again of a Utopia, but one less attractive than that of William Morris, of Bellamy, of Wells or even of Samuel Butler's Erewhon, in many respects. In his dream, he hears that the old world order entirely collapsed at the end of the twentieth century. After fifty years of struggle the Federation of Europe was formed "in the year 2270 of the Christian Era." Paris and all great world cities exist chiefly as museum of the past. The last war was the result of competitive exploitation in Asia and Africa carried on by England, France, Germany, Russia and America. In the end, all countries lose their colonies, all monarchies fall, a committee of fourteen organize the Federation of Europe. This Federation rests on total suppression of private ownership of roads, canals, mines, natural resources. It is protected against foreign invasion by a combination of electric currents known as the Y-rays. One man by touching a single button on a transmitter can destroy an army of five hundred thousand.

(To be continued) [Page 94]

THE COMING WORLD ORDER

by ARCHIE M. PALMER Associate Secretary, Association of American Colleges

THE transitional area through which mankind has been passing since the World War marks a turning-point in human evolution. It discloses the danger of attempting a return to the conditions of pre-war struggle or even maintaining the present loosely conceived "internationalism." At the same time it presents as a new possibility, a civilization embodying the most creative elements of the human mind. This "coming world order" is already implied in the present international situation. The need is now to develop an enlightened consciousness through the substitution of a picture of a desirable, attainable and dynamic future for the picture of the past which now unconsciously conditions the average mind.

As a stimulus to its readers in the envisagement of this new conception, WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE has organized a symposium on "The Coming World Order." Through contributions from authorities in the various social fields who share this general view, it is proposed to present the factors contributing to the attainment of an enduring society.

The relative merits of existing competitive societies, such as communism and capitalism, will not be entered into, since the ultimate objective of the inquiry involves transformation of present conditions and ideals.

For the state of fatigue miscalled "peace," because it temporarily upholds tolerance between socially incompatible aims, an endeavor will be made to formulate and define as an end and goal, an organic social structure offering a new and higher field of action and achievement. [Page 95]

EUROPE IN THE COMING WORLD ORDER

by F. S. MARVIN Author: Organizer of Courses in Unity History School, England

"THE EUROPEAN SYSTEM, JUDGING IT ESPECIALLY FROM THE MOVEMENTS OF THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS, IS MOST STRONGLY MARKED BY TWO PARALLEL AND CONNECTED FEATURES. THE UNION OF THESE FEATURES IS WHAT EUROPE STANDS FOR: HISTORIC, SELF-CONSCIOUS NATIONAL UNITS AND A COMMON ORGANIZATION IN WHICH THEY ALL FIND THEIR SPIRITUAL HOME."

M. BRIAND’s note to the Powers on a possible "United States of Europe" has set us all in the Old World thinking about ourselves with fresh interest. It has reminded us that at least in the mind of one great man, we Europeans should be regarded as a unity, and that this unity might in his view be made closer still for the general good. A Frenchman has taken the lead in the matter in 1930, and it would be impossible on historical grounds for any other than a Frenchman to have done it. Those who approach these questions of the future from the historical point of view (as they must be approached) would be rewarded by turning back a hundred years to the ideas and scheme of another Frenchman, Auguste Comte; who drew up in 1830 a plan for a "Western Republic" which was to set the pace for the world.

Comte’s ideas are so precise and dogmatic that most readers of today are inclined to dismiss them with a smile. Yet, if we strip off the pontifical cloak and treat many of the details as the mere suggestions which they obviously are, there is a wealth of truth and humanity in the scheme which it would be well for [Page 96]the world even now to assimilate if it could. At any rate, for this study it will be useful to take Comte's work as the starting point. His scheme was first sketched in the "Positive Philosophy" in 1830 and then elaborated with certain modifications in the "Positive Polity" of 1854. The fourth (and last) volume of this latter book gives most of the details.

The five leading nations of the West were to constitute the "Western Republic." These were—in this order—France, Italy, Spain, England, and Germany. Reasons are given both for the choice and for the order, and though, as we shall see, additions and changes of emphasis are constantly being made, yet these five nations and languages still stand out as the chief constituents of Europe. For each of these languages a compelling raison d'être can be given, of a more universal and human character than can be pleaded for any other tongues; for each of these nations there is a richness of historic background in the modern world to which no other can lay claim. The last chapter of the "Positive Polity" is full of interesting details, but only one or two points can be mentioned here. In what sense can any primacy be accorded to France? What is the special position of England and on what grounds in this classification is she put before Germany?

It will be understood at once that there is here no question of hegemony in any dictatorial sense. That at least is extinct in the world by now, nor did it exist in the mind of the framer of the "Western Republic." If we say that France has any primacy in Europe, or Europe any primacy in the world at large, one is simply observing and interpreting known contemporary facts. Who else except M. Briand, speaking as the Foreign Minister of France, could have put forward, or obtained any attention for, a proposal to federate the States of Europe? To acknowledge the inevitability of the man and the nation is not to assert any predominance of character or power: the superior power, as compared at least with Great Britain, could certainly be disproved. But it is to see that among nations, as among individuals, antecedents and mutual relations generally indicate some one person as spokesman or chairman or typical man. [Page 97]

EUROPE IN THE COMING WORLD ORDER

In precisely the same way after the War, though America was far stronger than any other of the Associated Powers, and Russia or China far more populous, yet it fell to the nations of the West, to France and England in the foremost line, to constitute the League of Nations. It is in this sense, that of mental standpoint and of social position determined by history, and not by the weight of men or metal, that the leadership of the future will be exercised.

The position of England will be noticed again later, but Comte’s remarks on the relative civilizations of England and Germany are interesting enough to be quoted here. In his first sketch of the order of Western nations he had placed England below Germany, lowest, that is, of the leading five. He had been moved to this decision by "the all-pervading deterioration due to national isolation." But on reflection other considerations had prevailed to raise England to a higher place—though at the best only one above Germany. These considerations were, (1) That England’s domination was external to the West and only affected backward populations, while Germans were oppressing other Western nations more advanced than herself; (2) That England was pre-eminent as an industrial society while the Germans were the least removed from a military state; (3) Most weighty reason of all—the special contribution of England to the progress of the West. She alone among the rest will bring the "staid and regular movement which is unattainable elsewhere. . . . The British aristocracy alone seems capable of transforming itself so as to be competent to direct the national reorganization and preserve it from the stormy irregularities which will occur in the remainder of the West.

Of the other two nations comprised in this nucleus of a Western Republic, Italy was placed next to France for European influence, partly as the scene of the Roman Empire and the Roman Church which built up the West, partly on account of its language, "which will become the common language of all nations by virtue of its superiority in poetry and music." The greatest poem of the future, a modern Divina Commedia will portray, in [Page 98]Italian, the journey of Humanity from the primitive state to the final haven of harmony and peace.

Such is the outline and sorc of the salient features of Comte's scheme of a Western Republic which was to give the lead to the world a hundred years ago. It is elaborated with a wealth of administrative, educational and religious detail. The five great nations were not to remain as independent sovereign states. All of them-France in the first place were to fall into what we now call "regional" units and it was in his view one of the great merits of Italy that she was thus divided, that she had not at that time attained the strong unitary state which we now know so well. National unity, like that of mankind as a whole, was spiritual, and large political aggregates were to be broken up. It remains for us now to see how the intervening century has dealt with this forecast. What has it added? What stands good? How shall we now read the situation, with these old idealist notions enlarged, amended or discarded?

We will take the most obvious points first and see what light they shed.

To begin with, it is clear that anyone sketching at the present day a federated republic of Europe, though he might retain the humanitarian ideal of Comte and still accord prestige and pre-eminence to the five great nations and their languages, would at once admit to a fellowship among the leading civilizing agents a number of other and smaller nations. Many indeed would be found to say that it is in these smaller nations rather than in the larger that the greatest advances in civilization have taken place. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Switzerland cannot be regarded as mere offshoots or appendages of any of the greater five. They have all of them developed, with intense patriotism and growing thoroughness and intelligence, plans of national amelioration and education which place them, judged by the average welfare of their citizens, above their greater neighbors who still provide the bulk of the literature, science and wealth of the continent. The individual thrives better in these smaller units, while in the great ones there are heavier masses of uniformity and [Page 99]discontent. The same tendency to evolution in the smaller nations has been markedly accelerated by the World War. Czechoslovakia, largely through the ability and persistent devotion of its noble President, takes rank with the first of civilized nations. Poland and Jugoslavia, with greater internal difficulties, are active on the same lines. Greece and the string of little states that the War detached from the old Russian Empire have had special entanglements with their Eastern neighbors, but must undoubtedly be added to the roll of Western republics. The area of effective nationhood has thus been much enlarged since Comte's survey of 1830, though the enlargement does not run counter to his ideal but rather fulfils it.

This growth of vigorous and educating nationalities in the last century is a feature which cannot escape the notice of any student of European history. Most of them indeed concentrate too exclusively upon it, rather omitting the other side of the picture—the concurrent growth of the League of Nations within which these young and pushing nations can find both their scope and their defence. The real key to the whole situation which is unfolding itself before us today lies in the connection between the two movements. Some critics, generally the alarmists, dwell on the menace of the eager and competitive states. Others, the optimists, see in the League the guarantee of union and the safeguard of peace. The more comprehensive and philosophic vision tries to embrace both aspects together, stereoscopically, in the belief that they are essentially connected. That they are so connected politically is obvious. The integrity and independence of Belgium was a primary and persistent subject of dispute in the World War and the first article of its settlement. The new states, Poland, Jugoslavia and the rest, exist under the aegis of the Treaty of Versailles and the League. No one doubts that any attempt to extinguish even one of the smallest of the new units, thus created by the War and defended by the League, would produce an instant reaction of all the leagued Powers against the aggressor. But there is something more, and deeper, than the mere political guarantee. The smaller political entities thus developing their power and [Page 100]their soul as part of a greater whole and in an atmosphere of companionship and security, become more and more international in spirit. This is most marked in the older of the small states, Sweden, Switzerland, Holland for example; which were comparatively unthreatened in the War and able to devote themselves generously to the relief of distress on both sides in the conflict. There is a special brand of impartial good will towards mankind generated in such countries and noticeable by all who visit them.

One may well ask whether any movement of the same sort is to be traced in the larger political units themselves. Comte, as we saw, anticipated and advocated the political disintegration of all of them. The answer to this question must be more various and less confident. The two greatest contrary instances are of course Italy and Germany. But there are special reasons for each of these. Both of them were late in attaining the political expression of their nationhood; they already in fact contain a more highly developed regionalism than the earlier unified countries like France and England which are now trying deliberately to cultivate their local patriotisms. Germany and Italy had to come rather drastically together in order to raise their populations to the general level of the West. And in each case also the War provided an aftermath of difficulties and dangers which called for strong political union to overcome. Germany needed the force of its agrarian north and its Catholic south to hold in the revolutionary and communist tendencies of its industrial centers. Italy was violently divided by socialist agitation and papalist discord and had for years been weakly governed in a nominally liberal sense. This is the historical justification of Fascism, however much we may deplore some of its manifestations and fear its sequel.

Leaving Germany and Italy, as we must for the moment, in this somewhat uncertain light, there can be little doubt in the case of the other Western Powers that, while preserving their national or political unity, regional diversity and local patriotism will flourish apace. They are in fact already apparent in all parts of Spain, France and Great Britain, more so than before the War, [Page 101]

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much more so than a hundred years ago. Catalonia might any day secure her autonomy if satisfactory terms could be arranged to preserve the remainder of Spain from unfair loss or political danger. Alsace has already certain local privileges and will gain more. In another sense (for all such cases must by their very nature differ) Provence is displaying a new vitality and a local pride which fortifies the "region" while it enriches the whole of France. Mistral was the new founder of this old local patriotism, which is so well exhibited in the Provençal museum at Arles.

Great Britain—for in this case the larger term is more expressive of the facts than the older and dearer "England"—has since the War thrown off two other governments of varied degrees of independence—the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. In the larger island Wales has attained ecclesiastical and educational independence. And both Wales and Scotland enjoy an increasing number of special Acts of Parliament which encourage the supporters of Home Rule for Scotland and make some bold prophets say that Ireland is showing the way, and that the Irish invasion of Scotland will one day return the service which the Scottish settlers in the north of Ireland paid in the past.

But the position of Great Britain in the European system is so strange and may prove so important that we must return to it anon. On the general question of the continental states—excluding, as it will have been observed, Russia—we have, however, already reached enough clear impressions to be summed up at once.

The European system, judging it especially from the movements of the last hundred years, is most strongly marked by two parallel and connected features. Firstly, the national units it contains have strengthened themselves in every possible way, becoming politically independent states in many cases, everywhere developing their national consciousness. This is the fruit of history and grows from common work, triumph and sufferings in the past. It is nearly always attached to a particular part of the earth's surface and almost invariably expressed and cemented by a common language. That is the one strong feature. The other, which has been concurrent with it throughout, is a common [Page 102]organization of the whole, which, in the different circumstances of each case, has been the backbone of the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church and now the League of Nations. The union of these two features is what Europe stands for: historic, self-conscious, national units and a common organization in which they all find their spiritual home.

It was refreshing to find, as this was being written, that one of the two most famous living European philosophers was addressing the International Congress at Oxford in terms closely identical: "It is evident," said Signor Benedetto Croce on the 3rd of September, 1930, "that the historic sense coincides with the European sense in so far as Europe concentrates in itself the richest and noblest human history. Europe has produced the liberal ideal and has taken up the mission of civilization throughout the world, and there is in Europe no history of individual peoples or states that can be understood separately, apart from the general life of the organism of which they are members. The War itself, instead of accentuating differences, has made more prominent that common humanity of Europe, with its common virtues, common defects and common problems." He goes on to lament and to denounce the wave of anti-historical feeling which he discovers rampant in certain quarters, and, no doubt, though he does not say so outright, he is thinking of the violent breach with Liberty—which is to him the same thing as a breach with history—which Fascism involves in Italy or Bolshevism in Russia. This depresses him, but it would not be difficult to put up a defence for Mussolini which would even strengthen Signor Croce's general thesis. Is not the peace with the Vatican a return towards the historic position of the Papacy in Italy which Croce's Liberal friends, with the narrower minds of revolutionists, have fought for generations to frustrate? However that may be, it is good to hear the leading philosophic voice of Italy proclaim the historic unity of Europe, based on its interconnected self-conscious members. For this is not only what Europe stands for, but it is also what the rest of the world most needs.

For There are many and serious forces working in another [Page 103]direction, often in the guise of a passionate humanitarianism. It is essential to take account of these, before we complete our picture of Europe by a word on the two great outstanding units—West and East—the British Commonwealth and Russia. The note of Europe being historic diversity, within a framework of cultural and partly political unity, it will be noted at once that all the specially mode mechanical and scientific influences tend rather to roll us all out flat, to realize for Europe and the world at large the ideal of which the "100 per cent American" is the watchword across the Atlantic. And in these days America is very strong, and international finance and industry are strong and the universal cinema. Many critics of whom the penetrating, though pessimistic, M. Romier in France is a leading example, have described the future as a long-drawn struggle between these forces, the historic and national diversity of the Old World and the levelling uniformity of the New. Our survey would lead to a somewhat brighter, but by no means confident or definite, forecast. If the past has shown us continual diversity and individuality of nations, as well as persons, emerging, in spite of the levelling actions of conquering armies and standardizing empires, is it not likely that the human spirit, with its increasing richness of content and attachment to its traditions and environment, will survive even this latest and most threatening Leveller? There are many, one learns, even in the "100 per cent" Republic who would welcome the preservation of the varied national types which it contains and are working rather to develop than to suppress them. It is not for anyone, and least of all an inveterate European, to dogmatize, but it would seem as undesirable as it is impracticable to turn Italians, Arabs, Chinese and Hindus into one indistinguishable robot—a New World man. There, as in the Old World, the influences of work and social and physical surroundings will gradually mould out of the old types others, fresh but still diverse; and the more of the old good that may survive in the new, the better for the future.

It is especially on th most enlightening fo lines that the example of Europe is rest of the world. She has become most [Page 104]inclined to peace, most active in social improvement, just in proportion to the degree in which her natural local units have gained freedom of development and have been encouraged to proceed. Respect for neighbors there must be, and some larger containing and restraining forces. But no friend of humanity would prefer the repressive hand of the old empires to the less imperative League of Nations for performing this function. In the latter case the smaller nations are compelling themselves. The body which may check them is one of which they are themselves members. In the former they were always chafing under an alien rule which would make them "100 per cent" Prussians or 75 per cent" Russians or "50 per cent" Austrians.

Russia has so far been left out of this picture; in the first place, for the reason that she has left herself out. After a debate for centuries as to the European or Asiatic destiny of Russia, whether she is really more Western or Eastern, the present rulers of Russia have definitely adopted an Eastern direction. They have extended their influence in central Asia and northern China and have lost all that fringe of lands and peoples which linked them up with the West. To the League of Nations which embraces all the Western nations, Soviet Russia has always proclaimed her settled aversion on principle. The principle avowed is one quite unknown to the League, viz., that it is a League of "capitalist" powers, whereas the League is quite indifferent to the economic organization of the states which join it. The real reason of Russia's abstention is however perfectly well recognized on both sides. The League is non-revolutionary and Soviet Russia has so far been animated in her foreign relations by the policy of introducing a communist system similar to her own. So soon and so far as this revolutionizing passion abates, will Russia incline towards reunion with the West. She cannot be said at present to belong to the Europe of which this article is speaking, the Europe which stands for some definite ideal in the eyes of the world. China, for instance, whether she loves the rest of us or not, would never make the mistake of confusing us with the agents of Moscow.

In that part of the world Europe, even perhaps more strongly than [Page 105]

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the United States, stands for the retention of legally acquired property, the sanctity of persons and the primacy of ordered progress; Russia for very much the contrary.

But it is worth notice, as bearing on the general thesis of this chapter, that Soviet Russia, where she seems to be doing best, is following the lines of contemporary European policy. In the little Republics to the East of the Black Sea and especially in the Abkasian Republic, more freedom has been given to the inhabitants to use their own language and live in their own traditions than they enjoyed before in the later Tsarist régime.

On the other side of Europe, semi-detached also, the British Commonwealth begins. As Russia found her expansion eastward, in northern Asia and the mountains and plains deserts of the center, so England has spread first to the West and then by southern routes further East and to the South and everywhere. This colonial and imperial expansion gave England also for many years a doubtful position. Was she mainly Oceanic or European in her attachments? And for some time the answer inclined to the former. Recent events—the War and its circumstances and sequel—have had the opposite effect on England from that on Russia. England has entered more closely into the European fellowship as Russia has gone out. There is no immediate causal connection between the two, but so it is; and as England has identified herself more and more with the League, so she has become more and more the protagonist of the settled order in the eyes of revolutionary Russia.

Russia is mistaken in this view, but her error is very natural, seeing that she meets the British on every front, not only on the West but in the South, side by side with Turkey and Persia, and, above all, in India and the East, where unquestionably Great Britain is the foremost representative of Western civilization.

But in Europe it is equally clear that France is the chief defender of the settled order and of progress on historic lines. Count Hermann Keyserling sees this, though he admits it in rather ungracious terms in his "Spectrum Europas," a book worth reading on this subject, if only because he takes on the whole a hopeful [Page 106]and humanitarian view. He finds for France at the present day the function of a "brake" on reckless and disordered movements within her own borders and among her neighbors. That is the same point, though Keyserling's image—he is full of images—gives only the negative aspect of a necessary and essential European task. France is the central and typical European nation, born of an amalgam of Gaul, Teuton and Roman, the keystone of Julius Caesar's empire, the leader of medieval thought, the historic defender of the Papacy, the nursery of revolutions in the revolutionary age and now the real protagonist of conservative progress.

Obviously one cannot say all that for England; at many periods England has played avowedly a secondary rôle. Yet, through another line of historic evolution, she has acquired a position unique and important at the moment and perhaps in the future still more decisive for the welfare of mankind.

England, an island, socially of Europe but not in it, attained from early times a marked degree of national cohesion and self-government. In this respect she has been for many years the model of rising nations everywhere and is now only one of a multitude of constitutional states. But in another respect she is unique. She threw off, by her colonizing aptitude, a series of settlements all over the world, in which gradually the self-governing features of the mother-land have been reproduced, without (except in the case of the United States) breaking the sentimental and formal political tie of belonging to one community of nations. She is thus now in Europe, so far as Europe is leagued as nations, and at the same time has a smaller league of nations of her own. It is a position of extraordinary interest and complexity which, if it continues to develop on its present lines, should have on the rest of the world an even greater effect than the spread of the parliamentary system had in the past France, the only other European power with an empire at all comparable in size with the British, does not compare with hers in the self-government and free attachment of her dominions. She either treats them, like Algeria and Tunis, as parts of France for political purposes, or governs them autocratically like her possessions in the East. [Page 107]

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England, therefore, has attained, not of set purpose or by the working out of an ideal of human unity, the position of the greatest linking nation in the world. She has come to it through her geography, through her national energy, but above all through her slowly acquired habit of compromise by small adjustment and keeping things together as a going concern.

We saw above that English policy had been divided for many years between interest in European affairs and interest in her development overseas and, though the die has now been cast on the most important issues in both spheres, sympathies in England are divided still.

A vigorous campaign is now in progress at all the parliamentary elections for returning men ready to put closer fiscal union within the Empire as the first item in their program. They are at the moment the most active force, while all the Liberals, about half the Labor party and a certain section of the Conservatives would turn with more hope to Europe and Geneva and try to secure a general lowering of tariffs by international agreement.

Which line of action will prove more practicable time will show, and the question does not concern us directly here. But it is of moment to notice that English sentiment and policy are thus distracted, owing to the very fact that she belongs to two worlds at least and desires above all things to keep in touch with both. Her critics, of course, would use another phrase, but here, as we are following out the links in world affairs, it is the connecting quality of England which most attracts us. With one foot in Europe, the home of historic nations bound together by common ideals, and the other foot in a world of new and ambitious peoples with more vigor perhaps but less achievement in the past, England, if she can keep her footing, has a great part to play.

The first contribution to a symposium on "The Coming World Order" edited by Archie M. Palmer. [Page 108]

RELIGION IN ASIA

'Round the World Log of a Sociologist-II by HERBERT A. MILLER Department of Sociology, Ohio State University

WHILE the nurses outside my hospital window were singing and the church bells were ringing vigorously on Palm Sunday, I looked out on the beautiful villages dotting the Lebanon mountains and realized that the intense religious feeling in them did not give them unity but hostility to one another. Unhappily they have fought each other with sectarian bitterness for centuries. Here within a radius of two miles of where I am writing there are probably more indigenous religions than in any other similar area in the world. There are Muslims of two sects, Druses, Bahá’ís, Jews, Protestants, Greek Orthodox, Gregorians, Roman Catholics, Greek Catholics, Armenian Catholics, Maronites and several lesser sects.

This condition suggests two interesting facts, namely, that all the important religions are of Asiatic origin, and that the most characteristic phenomenon about Asia is the prevalence of religion. Although modernism and doubt are creeping in, religion is still unconcealed and unashamed in Asia and must be taken into account in explaining social and political movements.

During this last year I have met the three greatest spiritual leaders of our time, and they will, I think, measure up well with the religious leaders of all time-Kagawa, Tagore, and Gandhi. I have also talked with Shoghi Effendi, head of the Bahá’í movement.

I have been the length of the Buddhist world, from Honolulu to Burma. I have caught something of the spirit of the Hindu [Page 109]religion, and have seen a hundred and twenty-five thousand Muslims praying together. I have lived with Christian missionaries in many countries, but the large majority of the people with whom I have talked have been non-Christians.

Time is the first factor in explaining Asia's development of religion. Organized social experience has existed longer here than anywhere else; and many cultures have grown old and died before any were born in the West. There have been centuries enough to develop persons of unusual insight, who, by reflecting on human experience and the relation of the individual to the universe, have been able to utter the prophetic wisdom that has diverted the course of religious expression from mere superstition to codified systems. Other factors in the explanation are population, climate and geography—too vast a field for this discussion.

In Japan, Shintoism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Christianity are fusing to form something new. Kagawa is the fruit of them all. He has a remarkable insight into the central spirit of Christianity and is trying to bring it to bear on an ultra-modern interpretation of contemporary problems. All that is intrinsic in Russian communism and the capitalistic system he thinks can be remoulded by the spirit of love as found in Christianity. He is not a prophet of despair and repression, but of the spiritualization of the evolving social system. He is an internationalist in the midst of rampant nationalism.

China is an anomaly in the religious world. Its prophet Confucius was a moral philosopher and not a mystic, but his teachings have been so persistent that they have the power of a religion without theology. While there are some lesser sects that are native to China, it was the alien religion of Buddha that penetrated the whole life of China and Korea, but after a thousand years of free sway it has left scarcely a trace of real influence. Superstitions gather around Buddhist symbols. There are priests and temples everywhere, but there are few worshippers, and Confucius and modernism go on as serenely as though the Buddhist missionaries had never come.

A synonym for India might be "area of religious [Page 110]experimentation," both individual and social, but under the limitations set by the Vedas written thousands of years before the Christian era. It is at the antipodes from China. It was mystical in origin and continues mystical in practice. The encrusted and stereotyped social system never offered an obstacle to individual variation through direct communion with God. Always the keynote has been repression and self-control. The noblest souls in Indian thought are those who have renounced the world. Buddha was a true Indian who chose Benares as the place to begin his preaching because it had been a Hindu religious center for thousands of years. This spirit enables the Indians to endure the hundreds of thousands of disgusting "holy men" who torture their bodies and live as parasites.

Rabindranath Tagore is the son of a man of wealth and learning who was one of the founders of a reform sect. He spent long periods in solitude and reflection in true Hindu fashion. His son dedicated his ashram (place of retirement) to a modern educational institution that strikes at caste, sect, nationalism, and the limitations of women. Religion is emphasized but with great care that it shall not be divisive. His intellect, philosophical principles, and sincerity have carried his influence to the uttermost parts of the world.

Tagore resents the British government in India as much as Gandhi, but his methods for getting rid of it would be different He is, nevertheless, next to Gandhi the most esteemed man in India, for he is spiritually consistent with Indian tradition. He has given his whole wealth to his school, and like multitudes of Indian reformers having defied the hidebound ritual is still honored rather than crucified.

Gandhi belongs in a class by himself. Even within his lifetime he is accepted as one of the saints of the ages. Although he has borrowed widely from many religions he represents a summation of Indian religion. His influence has become so widely extended because the people are familiar with his type of religious expression and admire it. Gandhi is a racial and spiritual brother of Buddha. His consistent saintly character, and practical wisdom. [Page 111]give him a power over more people than any other man has ever wielded in his lifetime.

In his own conduct he does everything that he asks of others. He lives as the poorest of India must live. His energy is marvelous. He reads widely and writes prodigiously. While he was on his march for two months before his arrest, he kept informed of what was going on all over India, made several speeches each day to enormous mass meetings; gave interviews to the papers; advised the women in detail how to picket liquor shops; gave recipes for making salt, and exact direction for making spindles; he commiserated the wounded and wrote to the bereaved; and all this time, preserved his gentleness of spirit and preached the ideal so insistently that everyone knows that it is the development of character that he really wants and nothing short of it will be worth having.

The independence of India is an objective because he thinks that striving for it is the only way by which to become worthy of possessing it. He has no interest in independence for its own sake. I have read most of his speeches and all of his writings since the march began and my respect for him increases with my understanding. While one might disagree with him intellectually, one cannot know him and deny that morally he has conquered sin.

What is now going on in India is one of the greatest religious experiences of human history, and it will have long and wide-reaching results.

Christianity is also of Asiatic origin, but its vogue is mainly outside of Asia; when it comes back it is so involved with western civilization that its influence cannot be measured. It will never become a dominant religion here because the field has already been preempted.

I have just read the remarkable historic novel "The Splendor of God" portraying the life of Adoniram Judson in his pioneer missionary work in Burma. He was a very unusual and heroic character whose trials and faith were like those of Job, but to me he carries little conviction. In spite of the implications of the book he did not make Burma either Baptist or Christian. His wretched [Page 112]city of Rangoon is now cleaned up, and the jungle where he lived near the great golden pagoda has tarvia roads and a beautiful park, but the pagoda is still the most interesting thing in Rangoon and crowds as great as ever worship there.

Burma, Siam, and Ceylon are the strongholds of Buddhism. While there is some tendency to reform that will prolong its life, it seems to be accepted by those who know best that it is moribund. It was a noble offshoot of Hinduism.

Judaism touches only the sixteen million Jews who mostly live outside of Asia. Its present political complications in Palestine make it one of the most potent of the many forces that are awakening Islam.

Islam, Muhammadanism, (or Muslimism as it is variously called) is still a religion with which the world will have to reckon. It had its militant period of expansion hundreds of years ago and almost conquered Europe. In modern times it has been symbolized to the outside world by the "unspeakable Turk;" it has been so interpreted by Christian missionaries that its inner qualities and great potentiality have been despised. It is now being revitalized by the encroachments of modernism and by complicated political entanglements.

Geographically it covers a wider area than any other religion except Christianity. It extends not only over all of northern Africa whence it is penetrating southward, and the Near East, but also embraces sixty-seven millions in India, forty millions in Java, about half of the Philippines, many millions in western China, some even in Peking.

Due to their geographical isolation with its consequent lack of contact with modern movements, the Muslims taken as a group are the most backward economically and have a higher proportion of illiterates than any other conscious group in the world. This condition may not last long when the awakening which has begun gains momentum. Except for its common religious zeal, Islam is altogether inorganic. Because they originated at a point where three continents and four races meet the Muslims have no race consciousness. In fact, there is no word in the Arabic lan- [Page 113]

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guage yet which can be used to designate race. In Islam, black, white, yellow and brown are all brothers under Allah actually and not ideally as with Christians.

A Christian platitude with regard to Muslims is that a thing cannot rise higher than its source, meaning that as a source Muhammad is not so high as Jesus. But in this case the real source is the belief that there is "no God but Allah." Muhammad is merely his prophet. Given a conception of God there is no limit to the attributes that may accrue to Him. I have asked many Muslim scholars, whom I thought might be emancipated, if Islam could be modernised and maintain itself. They all insist that it is perfectly possible.

It is a mistake to measure the qualities of Islam by a study of the Koran alone. In fifteen hundred years there has been constant accretion and evolution.

We have been explaining certain backward customs as due to the religion itself but many of them preceded its origin. For example, Muhammad actually improved the condition of women. Now the emancipation and education of women is going on rapidly in the Muslim world though there have not yet emerged many women who are outstanding as leaders. I anticipate that it will not be long before they will.

The development of nationalism in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and Arabia on the one hand and the pan-Arabic movement on the other, though pulling in opposite directions, are both stimulating the awakening of Islam.

Although the Muslim is rarely converted to another religion and rarely gives up his own, he has formed several sharply differentiated sects. The Druses in Syria are one example. The most important probably is the Bahá’í Movement which originated in Persia from Islamic inspiration and furnishes the one case where a Muslim influence has penetrated the West.

The Bahá’í Movement is only ninety-six years from its mystical origin, but it has several million adherents scattered all over the world.

Shoghi Effendi is the fourth in the line of leaders though he claims none of the spiritual authority of his [Page 114]predecessors. The Bahá’ís retain only a few modified forms that show Muslim origin and their thinking is more closely related to that of advanced Christians than to Muslims. Their largest membership is still in Persia.

The Bahá’í Movement is based on revelation. Its prophet, Bahá’u’lláh, will probably gain increasing authority as a personality with divine attributes but the intrinsic quality and breadth of his principles will make both an intellectual and a moral appeal. Although these principles were formulated before the modern period had clarified its mind, they are in conflict with nothing that a modern liberal now believes. This intellectual appeal may hinder the spread of Bahá’ísm as a religion, but real adherents pursue the program with spiritual zeal.

The central drive of the Bahá’í Movement is for human unity. It would secure this through unprejudiced search for truth, making religion conform to scientific discovery and insisting that fundamentally all religions are alike. For the coming of universal peace, there is foresight and great wisdom as to details. Among other things there should be a universal language; so the Bahá’ís take a great interest in Esperanto though they do not insist on it as the ultimate language. No other religious movement has put so much emphasis on the emancipation and education of women. Everyone should work whether rich or poor and poverty should be abolished.

The Bahá’í is the first religious movement that does not insist on the alienation of the convert from his own traditional religion. Instead, he approves of his becoming a better Muslim, Jew, or Christian. In actual fact, however, the Bahá’ís do form a distinctive sect and, though they firmly believe in progressive revelation, the emphasis on the authority of Bahá’u’lláh may make further revelation difficult. In the meantime the world has considerable distance to go before it can catch up with his program.

Since all existing governments are liable to corruption and tend to use any means whatever for the continuance of their own sovereignty, thus making for separation rather than unity, a Bahá’í may not take part in politics though he may hold [Page 115]administrative positions. Like all new religions it has suffered such persecutions as could have been survived only through absolute devotion and zeal. The martyrdoms in Persia have amounted to many thousands and still continue, but they have only increased the followers. Bahá’u’lláh was himself imprisoned for more than forty years by the Persians and the Turks. What will be the course of the Bahá’í Movement no one can prophesy, but I think it is no exaggeration to claim that the program is the finest fruit of the religious contributions of Asia.

There are many lesser religions in Asia, but they are either related to the others or of relatively slight importance.

One learns from Asia that cultures and religions are very persistent, and that they change from within rather than by conversions from without.

In America there still seems to be a fear that the domination by the Vatican is imminent and that the whole world will become Roman Catholic. Asia proves that whatever happens to the West there is no possible danger that any one religion will dominate the world until all religion has become so purified that there will be no danger from it.

The world's theological and ecclesiastical cards are now on the table. Isolation has been broken down and each player must depend more and more on his merit. As the influence of Asia begins to reassert itself as it soon will, out of its long search in religious experience to find salvation, it will bring forth a fund of findings of incalculable value. [Page 116]

THE QUEST OF WORLD PEACE

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

THE TREATIES OF LOCARNO

IN PREVIOUS articles published in this magazine I discussed at some length the two conflicting theories which have held the center of the stage in the quest for world peace: the theory assuming that peace can be assured through the taking of international pledges for abstinence from war and the pacific settlement of international disputes, and the theory that, in addi- tion to such pledges, it is necessary to set up some kind of coercive machinery for the punishment of the wrong-doer. The first of these theories is embodied in the Kellogg-Briand pact; the second found expression in the Covenant of the League of Nations.

But the provisions of the Covenant which looked to the enforcing of peace were, as I explained in the June number of WORLD UNITY, soon whittled away by interpretation to such a degree as to destroy the confidence which had been felt in them, and while it is not at all impossible that they may, even so, play an important rôle in the future, they have, in the opinion of leading European statesmen, needed to be supplemented by other agreements. From 1922 to 1925, therefore, various efforts were made to carry further the theory of peace based upon guarantees of action against the aggressor. There was, first, the draft treaties of mutual assistance; there was, second, the Geneva protocol; and there was, third (when these first two proposals proved to be abortive) the very notable treaties that are known as the treaties of Locarno. It is these treaties which I propose to analyze in this article. [Page 117]

THE TREATIES OF LOCARNO

The treaties of Locarno, unlike the Geneva protocol, are treaties of a strictly limited scope. They have to do with Europe alone; they are an attempt to provide by a series of purely European agreements for the preservation of peace in that particular part of the world. They are the outcome, in large part, of the desire of France to secure for herself a greater measure of security than was assured by the Covenant; they are the outcome, also, of the generous and far-sighted policy of the German Reich under the leadership of Gustav Stresemann, of a policy which aimed at peace and reconciliation, and the substitution of other means for the pacific settlement of international disputes than those of war. The most important and far-reaching of these treaties has to do with the region of the Rhineland, and is a treaty of security and mutual guarantee. Its signatories are Germany, France, Belgium, Great Britain and Italy. By its terms these powers guarantee the present boundaries in the west between France and Belgium, on the one hand, and Germany on the other. They guarantee, also, the inviolability of the demilitarized zone in the German territory west of the Rhine. If the treaty is violated, one of two courses will be followed. The question may be submitted to the Council of the League. If the Council decides that it is necessary to proceed against the alleged violator, the signatories pledge themselves to take up arms against this power, and in defense of the state which is attacked. But there is an alternative. In case of a flagrant violation of the pact, the signatories may take up arms without waiting for a decision of the Council, though they bind themselves to act in accordance with the recommendation of this body when it has once issued its opinion. In both of these cases, it will be seen, the principle is the same. If Germany should attack France or Belgium, Great Britain and Italy will come to the aid of these powers. If France or Belgium should attack Germany, Great Britain and Italy would come to the aid of the Reich.

This is, of course, as my readers will readily discern, a new kind of military agreement bearing no real relationship to the old type of alliance. It is a pact for the punishment of an aggressor nation in certain specified circumstances; it is the application, in [Page 118]its most clear-cut form, of the conception of an international police power. If it is logical to provide for the punishment of a nation which wantonly breaks the peace of the world, then this particular agreement deserves the warmest commendation. To those who disbelieve entirely in the use of force, however, it will not be a very appealing document.

For the benefit of this second class of persons, however, it ought to be said that the treaty of security and mutual assistance is accompanied by other pacts which set up an elaborate machinery for the pacific settlement of international disputes. I shall not analyze this machinery in its details. It is important, however, to note, indeed to stress, its existence. Far from dwelling on the probability of war, the treaties of Locarno, it should be clearly understood, lay the major emphasis on the pacific settlement of international questions. The four arbitration treaties signed between Germany and France, between Germany and Belgium, between Germany and Poland, and between Germany and Czechoslovakia, treaties which accompany the treaty of security, afford ample testimony to this effect. No friend of world peace can fail to regard them with admiration.

There are, however, two other pacts, in addition to the ones just mentioned which must be included in any consideration of the Locarno agreements. The guarantees of security which were applied to the region of the Rhineland might, in strict theory, have been equally well applied to the eastern frontier of Germany. But in practice it did not prove to be possible to do this. Public opinion in Germany would not have permitted it In order, therefore, to carry out the same general principle, France signed with Poland and Czechoslovakia special treaties which pledge the first-named state to come to the aid of either of the others in case of attack by Germany. Thus, the principle of sanctions is applied once again, but in a unilateral fashion. Nothing is said about the possibility of an attack upon Germany by either the government at Warsaw or the government at Prague.

The treaties of Locarno, as judged by their immediate fruits, must be pronounced a very decided success. They were based upon [Page 119]

THE TREATIES OF LOCARNO

the assumption of German entry into the League of Nations. They were followed by this entry. They certainly produced, at any rate for the period of three or four years immediately following, the most excellent relations between two great secular enemies, France and Germany. They will, if observed, contribute very materially to the stability of post-war Europe.

On the other hand, the fact that they have been negotiated is clear evidence of the little faith which European statesmen, apostles of the theory of peace by guarantees, have come to place in the coercive machinery of the League of Nations. That machinery has not been scrapped; but it has very certainly been relegated to a secondary place. Universal military action against an aggressor state, a contingency most certainly envisaged by the Covenant, is not very likely to come true as a matter of fact in the future. The friends of peace by agreement, the foes of sanctions or disciplinary measures, may console themselves with this fact. In the conflict between the theory of force by agreement, and the theory of force by guarantees, however, in Europe, at any rate, it has, speaking broadly, been the latter theory that has prevailed. The treaties of Locarno are the evidence of this fact; and their very existence is important testimony to the wide acceptance by practical statesmen, and by those practical statesmen nearest to the scene of the great armed struggles of the past, of the idea that sanctions must be devised to maintain the peace of the world. To all but the most doctrinaire theorist, there is in this circumstance something very well worth pondering. What is more, the acceptance of these pacts by a defeated nation, by a nation which cannot be supposed to have any overwhelming attachment to the status quo created by the war, is of high significance. Its importance cannot and should not be minimized.

In America, however, the idea of sanctions has as yet taken very little root in the popular consciousness. To agree to undertake armed action for the preservation of peace in other regions of the world seems to many Americans not only unwise in theory, but even more undesirable in practice. The friends of the Covenant of the League of Nations in the United States have never, I believe, [Page 120]assessed at its real value the strength of this feeling. We have a long tradition of non-interference in the politics of the Old World. Whether or not that tradition is any longer applicable, whether, indeed, the famous warning of Washington and Jefferson against entanglements does actually apply to common action in the nature of the exercise of an international police power, may be doubtful, or even more than doubtful. But it is not easy to argue a long-standing and widely accepted thesis away. Add to this the widely prevalent notion amongst certain sections of our population that the peace treaties are so vicious as to make any guarantee of them a wholly unsound policy, and one finds another reason for the failure of American public opinion to accept the theory of peace based upon sanctions.

Despite much partisan and personal,ealousy which was observable in the struggle over the Covenant in 1919 and 1920 it is, I think, certain that there was much public sentiment which looked with suspicion upon its coercive features. The situation is not so mightily different at the present day.

In the course of time, however, there will, I think, be something of a change in the point of view. There is, after all, a middle ground between the theory of peace by agreement, and the theory of peace by guarantees. It may not be possible to establish as a general principle the duty of the nations to act by force of arms against an aggressor. But where the aggression is clear, the idea of an impartial neutrality is increasingly repugnant to the conscience and judgment of many thoughtful observers of international affairs. An intermediate policy, in this as in other matters, might have much to commend it. But this question I shall postpone to my next article, together with some examination of the special contribution of the United States to the realization of the theory of peace by agreement, as it has been expressed in the Kellogg-Briand pact. [Page 121]

INDIVIDUALITY THROUGH SOCIAL UNITY

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

WHAT shall be the attitude of intelligent men towards the new type of civilization which the machine and its attendant scientific method and technics are carrying everywhere today? The mass will of course be swept along unthinkingly by the forces of industrial society. Most of the intellectual class, aware of the gulf that divides it from the time-honored culture of the past, view it with suspicion and fear. Many are attempting to take a definite stand for the old familiar values. Such bold reaction has been met by an enthusiastic championing of the new industrial culture, a championing in America largely unconscious of alternatives, in Germany and Russia a deliberate choice. One thing at least is clear: an intelligent man must realize that a major cultural change is taking place, and must take some attitude, formulate some philosophy of life for our new world. What in this new culture is inevitable, to be accepted as we must accept birth and death, and what is transitory, capable of guidance and remaking? What limits does technology set for us, what past ideals have been made impossible? What opportunities does it offer, what new powers does it give into our hands, and to what ends?

In Individualism Old and New¹ John Dewey attempts to answer such questions. Brushing aside the uncritical advocates both of the old and of the present culture, he offers a philosophy for the new world, based on a careful analysis of what has already taken place, inspired by the vision of an integrated, unified social life, informed throughout by the cautious and experimental temper of science.

¹ John Dewey, Individualism Old and New. Minton Balch. 171 pp. $1.00. [Page 122]there has been written another book better expressing the analysis of present forces and the program for the future for which World Unity Magazine stands, the present writer has yet to discover it. In his plea for a new social integration, for a philosophy that shall be in consonance with the forces of the new world without being subservient to them, Mr. Dewey does not indeed emphasize, as he has so often done in the past, the necessity for a world integration of nations. He has his eyes on America, and he has in mind something even greater than the building of a new world order. the creation of a new civilization. He sketches a philosophy that would change the aspiration for world unity from a sentimental longing to a reasoned and informed program of inquiry and action.

Mr. Dewey starts from the fact that America, where machine technics have been carried farthest, and where the money culture at present associated with them has the strongest hold, has as yet developed no philosophy of life expressing its industrial energies. Where we might expect a hard and strenuous philosophy of economic determinism, a materialistic scheme of value, a respect for intelligent and ruthless self-interest, we find instead a passionate idealization of attitudes and ideals belonging to an earlier age. Sentimental acclaim for unselfishness, for service, for the old-fashioned home and the old-time religion, greets the bewildered European looking for some conscious expression of the facts of American life. "It is evident enough that the rapid industrialization of our civilization took us unawares. Being mentally and morally unprepared, our older creeds have become ingrowing; the more we depart from them in fact, the more loudly we proclaim them."

But where most Americans cling to this sentimentalized creed of the past, candid critics analyze American culture in quite different terms. Impersonality, externality and superficiality of soul. quantification of life, mechanization, standardization, worship of technic-these are the qualities found. They are unquestionably there. But how permanent are they? How far are they the inevitable accompaniments of an industrial and scientific culture? Mr. Dewey here parts company with those who see in them the ines- [Page 123]

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capable future, an "Americanism" truly to be dreaded. Far from being the permanent fruits of the machine age, they are in reality a heritage from the past, as incompatible with a developed industrialism as is our romantic creed. They spring, not from machinery and science, but from the ancient and inherited money culture, the economic organization of life in terms of profit, which has throttled and stifled the liberating possibilities of technology. Collectively our society is possessed of material and intellectual power over nature undreamt-of in the past. So far this collective enrichment has failed to elevate the life of individuals. Industrialism has destroyed the aristocratic culture of the past; but the equally ancient money economy has hitherto prevented it from developing a new democratic culture of its own. "The development of the American type, in the sense of the critics, is an expression of the fact that we have retained this tradition and the economic system of private gain on which it is based, while at the same time we have made an independent development of industry and technology that is nothing short of revolutionary."

Traditionally America has stood for the ideal of individualism: equality and freedom expressed not merely externally and politically but through personal participation in the development of a shared culture. The older pioneer foundations of individualism have given way, however, to a condition of what Mr. Dewey calls "corporateness." Combinations and associations rule our lives, and of these the business corporation may serve as a symbol. Not only in business life, in agriculture, in craftsmanship, in our amusements and sports, in crime, have we become a corporate nation; a corporate mentality has developed new ideals. Thrift has given place to "Buy now" campaigns, and the economy of high wages to increase consumption power is extolled—clear responses to the economic interdependence of our corporate order. The very standardization we deplore is an outward sign of an inner movement toward social integration.

The immediate effect has been to submerge the individual. "The significant thing is that the loyalties which once held individuals, which gave them support, direction, and unity of [Page 124]outlook on life, have well-nigh disappeared. In consequence, individuals are confused and bewildered. It would be difficult to find in history an epoch as lacking in solid and assured objects of belief and approved ends of action as the present. Stability of individuality is dependent upon stable objects to which allegiance firmly attaches itself." This is true even of those who seem to be in control, the captains of industry who are no longer captains of their own souls. They serve a corporate function, but unconsciously; they aim at private profit, and this cash nexus is the only corporate bond they feel. The masses are filled with the fear of insecurity. Unrest, impatience, hypocritical professions of a service that is not there, are all symptoms of the lack of a sure social direction. Political life has no aims. The liberal has lost his clear-cut philosophy, and become vaguely "forward-looking." Only the national state, patriotism, seems to provide a support. The decline in religion as a directive force is the inevitable reflection of this lack of social unity; for religion is the expression of a collective unity demanding outlet. Our passion for making laws and disobeying them shows that the old integration, the stable principles of living, have slipped. Moral codes are shaken, perhaps most notably family life and sex morale. Everywhere individuals are loosened from the ties that once gave order to their lives.

Our material culture is thus becoming corporate and collective; but our beliefs and ideals are still saturated with the individualism of the prescientific, preindustrial age. That was the reigning philosophy when industrialism made its appearance; it has lingered in our ideas the while it has vanished in our actions. In America this older individualism was the expression of pioneer conditions, indigenous and of the soil rather than a conscious program of action. In Europe it was a justification of the need of freedom for technology to develop unrestricted by traditional rules. But though conservatives attribute to this rugged individualism the whole of our technological gains, though in point of fact this philosophy did accompany the building up of the industrial machine, it was not economic individualism that produced [Page 125]

INDIVIDUALITY THROUGH SOCIAL UNITY

it. Our industrial technics were actually the inevitable working out of certain methods and processes in the business of living, of impersonal science and a collective technology as a social possession. And now that the machine has forced a collective social life upon us, the economic individualism which accompanied the growth of industrialism has become an anachronism, the chief obstacle to the development of a true individuality under modern corporate conditions. Far from guaranteeing true individuality within a collective whole, economic individualism is at present the cause of the uniformity and standardization we mistakenly attribute to the machine itself.

How is this true individuality to be attained today? Many think that collective action will secure it by restricting the power of the few, and thus extending to all the supposed benefits of the older individualism. They would guarantee individual initiative by suppressing the intricate organization of modern life. They feel that corporateness is the enemy of individuality; they do not seek to realize individuality through integrated groups. In reality "the tragedy of 'the lost individual' is due to the fact that while individuals are now caught up into a vast complex of associations, there is no harmonious and coherent reflection of the import of these connections into the imaginative and emotional outlook in life. The individual cannot remain intellectually a vacuum. If his ideas and beliefs are not the spontaneous function of a communal life in which he shares, a seeming consensus will be secured as a substitute by artificial and mechanical means. In the place of mentality that is congruous with the new social corporateness that is coming into being, there is a desperate effort to fill the void by external agencies which obtain a factitious agreement." The "joining" habit of the average American is another illustration. "We should not be averse to solitude if we had, when we were alone, the companionship of communal thought built into our mental habits. Our sociability is largely an effort to find substitutes for that normal consciousness of connection and union that proceeds from being a sustained and sustaining member of a social whole. Our passion for philanthropy is another substitute for a [Page 126]genuinely integrated social unity. In sum, instead of seeking to realize individuality through conscious and intelligent participation in group enterprises, we persist in idealizing the old individualism of isolated activities, an individualism now shrunk to the pursuit of private gain in a corporate world. "Hence the irony of the gospel of 'individualism' in business conjoined with suppression of individuality in thought and speech," of economic individualism stifling the creative individuality of the mind and throwing men back on a standardized conformity as their only support.

To this attenuated anu anachronistic individualism of the past, Mr. Dewey opposes the ideal of a society of cooperative groups in which men shall employ science and technology with understanding of their possibilities, of the genuine values which they can produce. Society must be intelligently remade to serve the growth of a new type of individual. "The problem is essentially that of creation of a new individualism as significant for modern conditions as the old individualism at its best was for its day and place. Such an individualism will involve an extension of political control in the social interest. A political life really answering the needs of our collective economy Mr. Dewey thinks not far distant; "the reactionary tendencies which have controlled American politics are coming to a term. We are in for some kind of socialism, call it by whatever name we please, and no matter what it will be called when it is realized. Economic determinism is now a fact, not a theory. But there is a difference between a blind, chaotic and unplanned determinism, issuing from business conducted for pecuniary profit, and the determination of a socially planned and ordered development. It is the difference and the choice between a socialism that is public and one that is capitalistic."

Such an individualism will further involve a genuine educational process. Schools must be freed from domination by the money-motif, and youth must be taught the realities of our social life. The far more potent educative force of work itself, of a man's calling, must give men a share, imaginative, intellectual, and [Page 127]

INDIVIDUALITY THROUGH SOCIAL UNITY

emotional, in directing the activities in which they physically participate. "We must wrest our general culture from an industrialized civilization; and this fact signifies that industry itself must become a primary educative and cultural force for those engaged in it. There can be no stable and balanced development of mind and character apart from the assumption of responsibility. In an industrialized society that responsibility must for the most part be associated with industry."

But the possibility of developing a conscious ideal of self-realization through participation in shared social enterprises is dependent upon an intellectual acceptance of the forces of the new world, science and technology. They are inevitable conditions of our living, forced upon us by the sheer determinism of events. It is vain to deplore them petulantly, to seek to escape them. Such flight can only mean abandoning them to blind and selfish gain-seeking. It is as futile to fret against the machine and science as against birth and death and the necessity of satisfying bodily needs. We might prefer an immortal existence in an incorporeal heaven; but if we bend our efforts to such an impossible spirituality, we lose the chance of a richly human life. If we exhaust ourselves in struggling against our social destiny, we miss the opportunity of an intelligent use of our enormous power over nature. How pathetic is the spectacle of a nation abandoned to uniformity and standardization by a "civilized minority" themselves uttering uniform and standardized cries of derision!

"Individuals will find themselves only as their ideas and ideals are brought into harmony with the realities of the age in which they act. Ideals express possibilities; but they are genuine ideals only in so far as they are possibilities of what is now moving. Machinery means an undreamed-of reservoir of power. If we have harnessed this power to the dollar rather than to the liberation and enrichment of human life, it is because we have been content to stay within the bounds of traditional aims and values although we are in possession of a revolutionary transforming instrument. We need a new synthesis. "But this new synthesis can be humanistic only as the new conditions are themselves taken [Page 128]into account and are converted into the instrumentalities of a free and humane life. Discrimination is required in order to detect the beliefs and institutions that dominate merely because of custom and inertia, and in order to discover the moving realities of the present." Intelligence must find those technological tendencies that are unavoidable, and set them over against the inherited business individualism that has kept us from making the most of their opportunities. "A stable recovery of individuality waits upon an elimination of the older economic and political individualism, an elimination which will liberate imagination and endeavor for the task of making corporate society contribute to the free culture of its members."

This necessary acceptance of the industrial age, Mr. Dewey points out, must be intellectual; it must be a facing facts for what they are. It must not be an acceptance of the present by the will and emotions. "So far are the two from being identical that acceptance in the first sense is the precondition of all intelligent refusal of acceptance in the second sense. The cultural consequences that our industrial system now produces have no finality about them. When they are observed and related discriminatingly to their causes, they become conditions for planning, desiring, choosing. It is indeed foolish to assume that an industrial civilization will somehow automatically from its own inner impetus produce a new culture. But it is a lazy abdication of responsibility which assumes that a genuine culture can be achieved except first by an active and alert intellectual recognition of the realities of an industrial age, and then by planning to use them in behalf of a significantly human life." We must accept the materials destiny has given into our hands, and make the best of them.

In thus making the best of our new world, and not resting content with the hodge-podge of old and new we now have, science and technology, far from being enemies, are our most potent instruments. "A humanism that flees from science as an enemy denies the means by which a liberal humanism might become a reality. The world has not suffered from absence of ideals and spiritual aims anywhere nearly as much as it has suffered from [Page 129]

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absence of means for realizing the ends which it has prized in a literary and sentimental way. Contempt for nature is understandable, even though it seems both intellectually petty and morally ungracious to feel contempt for the matrix of our being and the inescapable condition of our lives. But that men should fear and dislike science, the method of approach to nature, I do not find understandable."

What, then, shall be our attitude toward industrialism?

"True integration is to be found in relevancy to the present, in active response to conditions as they present themselves, in the effort to make them over according to some consciously chosen possibility. By accepting the corporate and industrial world in which we live, and by thus fulfilling the precondition for interaction with it, we, who are also parts of the moving present, create ourselves as we create an unknown future."

We are living in a world unified by the machine, permeated by the intellectual triumph of the scientific method. Ignorantly we disregard this material integration, this intellectual unification. We cling pathetically to the sentimentalized ideals of a bygone age, and the chaotic political and economic individualism that served us once. The best of us, perhaps, shrink in fear and distrust from a dubious future. Ours is a lost cause, we cry, there is no place for us in the world that is to be. There is no place—unless we make one. And in that making, in the intelligence it demands, in the cooperative endeavor, in the courage and faith and persistence, lo, shall we not find that we have a new cause, the building of a new society and a new civilization? Let us cease, then, to be dumb driven brutes, or sniveling and petulant children; let us be men. We are indeed wandering today in the desert, and we hanker for the flesh-pots of Egypt. But ahead hovers the vision of the promised land. Before us lie the materials for a unified, functionally integrated society. The old pioneering individualism may be gone; is it not we to whom it is given, if we but will, to be the true pioneers? [Page 130]

ELEMENTS OF A WORLD CULTURE

II. Economics

by R. G. TUGWELL Department of Economics, Columbia University (Concluded)

IV

THE program for youth, and the rationale for the experimental economist, are given textual definition in the sentence: "We do need to work for the removal of external conditions which, by suppressing and distorting human nature, give to vice the powers that virtue should possess." This, it will be seen, is a downright challenge to those who say that heredity is everything; and that native intelligence surmounts any and all disadvantage. It also asks for an economics devoted to the definition and criticism of public policy. For once it is admitted that the material goods of life are really a springboard to Utopia, the economist is given his great chance. His ways are humble ones. He works in a muck of factories, machines, and measuring devices, difficult to glorify; and yet how necessary to the lifting of the race by its bootstraps! There are, of course, differences of opinion here too. For there is a new orthodoxy which threatens to arise: the cult of science. Science is not native to the social studies; it comes to them from the physical disciplines, accoutered with rigid rule and precept. There has been a tendency to borrow overmuch; and whereas economics, fifty years ago, was literature, today there is an impressive attempt to make it statistics, on the sole argument that only in this way can it be truly scientific. If you ask why it should then be judged—and only then—to have a sufficient justification, I cannot give [Page 131]you an answer. You can justly say that being scientific helps us, in itself, to solve no problems of policy, to "remove no external conditions," which is partly true. It is good, of course, that areas of controversy should be narrowed, and that consequences—if they are to be a test of goodness-should become objective. But it is also true that we must act; that, in many instances, common sense is guide enough to go on with; and that we cannot wait, always, for a strictly measured procedure. Besides which, it remains true that hypothesis and the manipulation of social materials, together with some judgment of results, is possible even if quantitative data should remain imperfect. Statistics are not needed to know that there are unemployed on the streets of New York, that child labor is increasing, or even that men of forty are being cast off by industry. And it is possible to do whatever we determine wise in these circumstances without any great parade of science. Measuring tools are always helpful; and this is only an objection to deification, not a disparagement of usefulness.

But granting that neither the old nor the new orthodoxy is allowed to dominate our thought, and that the economist accepts rather than evades his responsibilities for industrial policy, what shall he advise; what shall he define as the problems first to be attacked while we wait for prosperity and education to create a new morality in which consent to justice will flow from awakened perception? How remove external conditions which distort minds and starve bodies? We must remind ourselves that men perpetually remake their institutions, and that we, for our part, need join no further in the making of those which we perceive to be harmful. We can refrain from giving consent to injustice. Not a small number of wrongs are created by law and enforced with its prestige. If we happened to be farmers or urban workers our understanding of this might be more intimate. Just as consumers, to a less degree, we can appreciate its force. For whether it is a fictitious equality of bargaining power we think of, or the disproportionate burdens of taxation which are borne by some, or the charges we are forced to pay for common utilities, [Page 132]there is a legal sanction involved which might, if we cared to do it, be revised. We can at least remove the burdens we have legislated into existence and restore the freedoms we have taken away by statute. We can withdraw our support from parties and from statesmen who use fine words but find no practical use for their knowledge.

This is, of course, the merest beginning. In a sense it is merely negative reconstruction. But, further than this, we can begin to plan. If what we want is a broad and common access to goods; freedom to find a satisfying job and certainty in keeping it; security against the hazards of infancy, industrial depression, disease, accident, and old age; and an international peace organized into the institutions of the world—we must begin to plan, and keep on planning. This must become a kind of common procedure, recognized as a necessary preliminary to social action, broad as philosophy in its scope, meticulous and accurate in its detail. We must know not only what we want but also how to get it; what kind of institutions, industrial, sexual, esthetic, religious and governmental, we need for the completion of our purpose. A plan is not necessarily rigid and fixed; it can function in practical fashion, as something to work toward for the moment. We must not fall into the error of protecting it as sacred; we Americans have an object-lesson of this kind in the Constitution. We want no more constitutions. We must hold it experimentally, as an instrument useful for the present, but not necessarily for the future. This sacred place we can well reserve for those other aims, the broader and more general ones; certainty in work, access to goods, freedom from oppression, security against hazard. About these we cannot compromise; but then we shall not need to. What of them we cannot gain by plan and reason we shall have pointed toward; the career of the race comes to no climax in us. Time is not lacking, and peace may sometimes be a greater gain than a little more of something else. It was Francis Walker, the American economist, who said: "Happy is tha people, and proud may they be, who can enlarge their franchises and perfect their political forms without bloodshed or threat of [Page 133]

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violence, the long debate of reason resulting in the glad consent of all."

V

The function of the plan in a liberal state is to make good those resources of expertness which are so largely wasted now. It is the modern way of attaining our oldest and deepest aspirations. In any democracy there are problems of delegation and discipline which are easy to neglect; energy runs off more easily into the various efforts of propaganda and persuasion; too often the prerequisite basis in fact and program is insecurely established. This failure to enlist the aid of expertness, to secure like-mindedness within the group, and to chart prognostications is evident throughout the democratic world. It is true of all our functioning bodies from the family to the trade union, and from the township to the Federal government. It is not to be accounted for by citing any decay of purposes. It is rather seen as a failure to appreciate the effects of modern complexity. For the family or for the state, in any past time, policies could be more easily determined. The limits to action were more closely drawn; choices could move only within a narrow range. There has been a widening, in modern times, not only of physical possibilities, but also of areas of consent. We can choose more things and more activities; we can succumb to more temptations. But the individuals and the groups upon whom these burdens fall have failed to organize their functions to meet the new conditions. We attempt to proceed as simply, as much from moment to moment, as our ancestors did who had far fewer of these perplexities.

The idea of the plan offers itself as a possible instrument. The limits to action have not all of them been removed, or, at least, they have not if we admit that there are purposes worth achieving. The definition of purpose, indeed, involves the charting of a path to its attainment. And the more there are of irrelevant temptations along the way, the greater the necessity for charted courses. We cannot do everything we unreflectively might like to do; we cannot have everything we might unthinkingly [Page 134]like to appropriate. But the casual tasting of confections can wean us from the nourishing milk of discipline. Too many of us have become tasters, dilettantes at the table of life. We are by way of attenuating our strongest appetites for virtue through a simple lack of foresight which looks beyond the personal pleasures of a present instant. If we would learn to recover these, and turn them to cultural uces, we must chart out smoother, straighter roads running from where we are to where we want to go. The car of progress needs a mechanism; but it also needs a highway. We, as individuals and as groups, are the mechanisms; the plan can be the highway.

How largely the economist figures in this, it is not for any economist to decide. His rôle is an expert one. What tasks are to be delegated to him he has long been prepared to do. But there have been few calls upon his gifts and knowledge. And this may account, in part, for the survival of orthodoxy, thus completing a vicious circle. For orthodoxy imposes itself on education; and those who are educated in convention return to it persistently. That the economist, as expert in business and industrial affairs, must be asked to play a certain part no one is likely to deny. The immediacy of pressure in these areas is all too evident. There may be difficulty now in winning his allegiance away from business; for it is mostly here that his talents, up to now, have found appreciation. But he, no more than others, is immune to enthusiasm for social gains. And this can easily outweigh what business has to offer in the way of pay—once the balance of prestige has swung to the agencies of public planning. He has no less of the craftsman's pride, either, than others have. And the tasks he does will be well done.

The planning of groups, small and large, and the reconciliation of interests which might follow the objectification and really reflective consideration of details is, so far as I can see, not only the single ready means we possess for the rejuvenation and efficient functioning of groups, but it possesses the only hope I can discern for that national unity which is necessary if we Americans are to substantiate our pretensions to leadership in [Page 135]

ECONOMICS

the world. Our superior prosperity and our vaster educational efforts have already caused some marvel among the peoples of the world. These have not been slow, however, to point out certain deficiencies in our national character, ones, too, which it is difficult to deny. If these are to be remedied, and if we are really to do that remarkable something for racial progress which our go fortune makes it possible for us to do, great efforts are necessary. Shall we undertake them? Or shall we waste our heritage and our cumulated strength in the individual dissipation of our social resources?

It is, I know, difficult to cultivate the arts of patience, especially for youths who see so clearly the failures we have made. Pasteur once said to the youths of France: "Live in the serene peace of laboratories and libraries, say to yourselves first: 'What have I done for my instruction?' And, as you advance: 'What have I done for my country?' Until the time comes when you may have the immense happiness of thinking that you have contributed in some way to the good of humanity." Youth turns so easily, once it is won from self-service and career-making, to over-precipitate action. The particular deficiency of youth has always been a disregard of the constructive necessities which arise after the overturn they contemplate so casually. We must not ask of any injustice. There are plenty of tasks to do, plenty of wrongs to right, while planning for the future carries on. It is by a double development of precise planning, varied by the immediate and practical relief of oppression, that we can at once convince youth of our good intention, and our foresightedness; winning him thus to reflection and to action. If we ask him for contemporary submission, we can hardly persuade him of our long-run wisdom. But there is no need. The more he does for revolution, the more he will swell the tide of salutary change. And if, meantime, as enthusiasm leaks away in senile acquiescence, our own faith can carry us over some of the groundwork of reconstruction, that progress for which we have so often wrung figurative hands can perhaps be partially insured. [Page 136]LEAVES OF THE GREATER BIBLE Compiled and Edited by WILLIAM NORMAN GUTHRIE Rector, St. Mark's in-the-Bouweris, New York

I

Woe's me, who am but a little child, On whom hath devolved the unsettled kingdom, Lonely am I and full of distress.

Oh! my great Father, All thy life long, thou wast a true son. Thou didst think of the great man my Grandfather, Seeing him as though he ascended and descended in the King's court,

Now, I, the little child, Will be as reverent as thou, day and night.

O! ye great kings, As your successor, I will strive never to forget you!

I take counsel at the beginning of my reign, How I may follow the good example of my sainted father. Ah! far-reaching were his plans! [Page 137]Ah! I am not yet able to carry them out. However I do endeavor to reach after them, But in their execution I will yet be often led astray. For I am but a little child, Unequal to the many difficulties of the Kingdom, So, having taken his place, I will look for him to go up and come down in the King's court. To ascend and descend in the King's house. Admirable art thou, O great Father, Deign thou to preserve and enlighten me, thy son.

Let me be reverent! Let me be reverent! The way of Heaven. is evident, And its appointment is preserved only by our great effort. Let me not say that Heaven is too high aloft above me. It ascends and descends about our doings; It keeps its eye and inspects us, day by day, wheresoever we be. I am a little child, without the intelligence Needed to give reverent attention to my duties! But by progress step by step from day to day, from moon to moon, I shall learn to hold fast the gleams of knowledge I may get Till I arrive at the needed full illumination of the mind. O assist me to bear the burden of mine office And teach me how to show forth true virtue in my life!

PRAYER (Shinto)

From a distance I reverently worship with awe before Amé no Mi-hashira (Heaven-pillar) and Kuni no Mi-hashira (Country- pillar), also called Shinatsu-hiko no kami and Shinatsu-himé [Page 138]no kami, to whom is consecrated the palace built with stout pillars at Tatsuta no Tachinu in the department of Héguri in the province of Yamato.

I say with awe, deign to bless me by correcting the unwitting faults which, seen and heard by you, I have committed, by blowing off and clearing away the calamities which evil gods might inflict, by causing me to live long like the hard and lasting rock. and by repeating to the gods of heavenly origin and to the gods of earthly origin the petitions which I present every day, along with your breath, that they may hear with the sharp-earedness of the forth-galloping colt.

PRAYER (Shinto)

Reverently adoring the great god of the two palaces of Isé, in the first place, the eight hundred myriads of celestial gods, the eight hundred myriads of terrestrial gods, all the fifteen hundred myriads of gods to whom are consecrated the great and small temples in all provinces, all islands and all places of the Great Land of Eight Islands, the fifteen hundreds of myriads of gods whom they cause to serve them, and the gods of branch palaces and branch temples, and Sohodo no kami, whom I have invited to the shrine set up on this divine shelf, and to whom I offer praises day by day, I pray with awe that they will deign to correct the unwitting faults, which, heard and seen by them, I have committed, and blessing and favoring me according to the powers which they severally wield, cause me to follow the divine example, and to perform good works in the Way.

THE PROPHET ZARATHUSTRA’S PRAYER

Come, O thou who knowest all, unto what is best in me; Up! arise for me, O Lord Omnipotent, [Page 139]And through a mind well-disposed toward thee send unto me power, Ay, help and grace, that in my choice of right I may have a larger view, Revealing unto me, O All-wise, what is thine unchanging char- acter! With the blessings, O Lord, of thy Kingdom, That are ever the recompense of the man of good will, Come forth, now, O thou Spirit of Goodness, and fill me with the light of thy Holy Law! O may I be such an one as to urge the world forward unto its perfection, As a lord of Truth, bringing blessed help and guidance by the Holy Law; Since there my thoughts will even abide Where wisdom dwelleth graciously. Him, therefore, in our hymns of praise strive I to worship, Whom with discerning eye, I now see clearly! For whom have I but Thee? Thy fire, and thy will? Yea, O God of Truth, Zarathustra cleaveth unto thy spirit. And by prayer every holy man Bindeth it close unto himself. May the holy Law have us for body strong with life; And be there clear discernment of thy will in this thy sun-bright land, Yea, and grant unto us for our sufficient recompense Manifold occasions for deeds of thy good Mind.

CONFESSION OF DEVOTION (from the Zend Avesta)

We worship the pure, The Lord of purity. We worship the universe of the true spirit, Visible and invisible, And all that sustaineth The wellbeing of the good creation! [Page 140]We praise all good thoughts, All good words, All good deeds, Which are and will be, And we keep pure all that is good, O Thou true happy Being!

We strive to think, To speak, to do, Of all utterances, such only As may promote and bless with progress, The two lives- That of the body and that of the mind.

We beseech the spirit of earth, By means of these best tasks and service To grant us beautiful and fertile fields, For believer and for unbeliever, For rich and for poor!

We worship the Wise One Who formed and who furthered the Spirit of earth.

We worship Him with our bodies and with our souls.

We worship Him As being forever united To the spirits of pure men and women.

We worship the promotion and progress of all good, Of all that is exceeding beautiful,- Shining, immortal, bright,- Of everything that is good and holy! [Page 141]

II-The Approach to God

by ALBERT J. SAUNDERS American College, Madura, India

NA previous study we considered the changing views in the long history of Hinduism in respect of the nature and character of God; in this article we shall continue the general thesis of the changing conception in Hinduism, and deal with some of the changes which have been experienced in the past and are taking place now in modern Hindu thought in regard to the means of approach to God. Hinduism is preeminently a God-conscious religion; its doctrine of transmigration and incarnations makes decidedly possible and even easy the belief in God-manifestations; but where Hinduism fails is in God-realisation. How to approach God and express the realisation of God in life and action is what we shall investigate in this present study from the standpoint of Hindu history and teaching.

Brahmanic Speculation

Those "forest dwellers," keen philosophers and deep thinkers, who produced that wonderful body of Upanishad writings, thought and taught that they had discovered the only true method of approach to God; it was "jnana-marga," the way of knowledge. The well-known doctrine of the Upanishads is Salvation by knowledge. "He who knows Brahma is Brahma." As the Katha Upanishad says: "When a man discerns THAT, he is freed from the jaws of death." And again "As pure water poured into pure water becomes one with it, so, if a sage has understanding,

Kala Upanishad by R. L. Pelly, pp. 41, 45- [Page 142]his soul becomes (one with the supreme soul), Gautama-enlightened." "In this way and not otherwise a man free from desires becomes qualified to hear, contemplate and acquire knowledge of the inner self. By the knowledge of the inner self, ignorance, which is the seed of bondage, and the cause of KARMA, performed for the realisation of desires, is entirely removed. The Srutis say: "There is no grief or delusion to one who sees this unity." "He who knows the Atman overcomes grief." "When He, that is both high and low, is seen, the knot of the heart is cut, all doubts are resolved, and all Karma is consumed.""³

The knowers of Brahman became Brahman, and entered into the Brahman abode. "Having without doubt well ascertained the significance of the knowledge of Vedanta the seekers, their minds purified by dint of renunciation, attain the worlds of the Brahman, and when their body falls, their Atman being one with the highest immortal Brahman are absolved all round." And again: "He who knows that highest Brahman becomes even Brahman; and in his line, none who knows not the Brahman will be born. He crosses grief and virtue and vice and being freed from the knot of the heart, becomes immortal." In the Upanishads we find the highest peak of Brahmanic thought and philosophic speculation in reference to God and the means of approach to God. God is the supreme Brahman, and knowledge is the means of approach to Him. Out of this seed-plot have come all the subsequent movements in Hindu religious thought.

The sixth century B.C. was important for a significant intellectual movement which spread over North India, similar to the movements at the same time in China and in Greece. Speculative thought was exceedingly active, ethical standards were changing; there was a tendency towards a religion of conscience rather than the older and more formal faith in sacrifice and magic. People wanted release from the present troubles that afflicted the world, but not through a cycle of rebirths; they wanted a more direct method of escape. The two great religious movements in

Katha Upanishad, by R. L. Pelly, pp-41, 45- Kenopanishad with Sri Sankara’s Commentary, by V. C. Seshacharri, n. 28. Same as 3, pp. 150 and 153. [Page 143]

THE APPROACH TO GOD

India which characterised that age were Jainism and Buddhism. These movements were really attempts to reform the existing religious ideas and practices of the Hindus on ethical lines. Both systems rejected God, but they placed the responsibility of man's salvation on himself, on his own ethical living; and they both practiced the Yoga-marga, or ascetic way of salvation.

Mahavira, the founder of Jainism, took the great renunciation when he was thirty years of age. His parents had died and although he was married he determined to become a religious ascetic. "I shall for twelve years neglect my body," he vowed. He cast aside his fine clothes, gave away all his property and wealth, plucked out his hair by the handfuls, and took the vow of absolute holiness. These ascetic practices of Mahavira were very real and severe. He discarded absolutely all clothes. He wandered about receiving injuries from men and beasts, and undergoing all kinds of strange, self-imposed bodily sufferings.

Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, had a similar experience and passed through a like crisis when he was twenty-nine years of age. Sir Edwin Arnold in his "Light of Asia" says:

"While life is good to give, I give and go, To seek deliverance and the unknown Light." "Unto this I came And not for thrones: the Kingdom that I crave Is more than many realms-and all things pass To change and death."

A story says that as he was considering renouncing the world messengers came saying that his wife had a little son. "Call his name Rahula, a bond," commanded Gautama, "for here is another bond which I must break." One writer has put it this way in the words of Gautama himself: "In the prime of my youth, O disciples, a black-haired boy passing into manhood, against the will of my sorrowing parents, I shore off hair and beard, and putting on the yellow robe went out from home, vowed henceforth to the wandering life." Six years did Gautama spend in this way, living at times on one sesamum seed, or one grain of rice a day, until he found enlightenment under the sacred Botree. [Page 144]This is the Yoga, or ascetic way of salvation, which is practised by thousands of wandering mendicants all over India to this day.

The Bhagavad-Gita

Another change was experienced somewhere about the beginning of the Christian era, and was embodied as an episode in the Mahabharata epic; it was called the Bhagavad-Gita, or the Lord's Song. It seeks to effect a synthesis, accepting the jnana and yoga means of salvation, but adding to them and emphasising the bhakti, or devotion way of redemption. Today the Gita is the Bible of modern Hinduism.

Arjuna asks in the Third Discourse: "Tell me surely the one thing whereby I shall win to bliss." Krishna replies: "In this world is a twofold foundation declared of old by Me, O sinless one, in the Knowledge-Rule, and the Work-Rule." But to this in the Eleventh Discourse the Lord says: "But through undivided devotion, Arjuna, I may be known and seen in verity." And in the Twelfth Discourse: "On Me then set thy mind, in Me let thine understanding dwell: so shalt thou assuredly abide afterward in Me." "For knowledge has more happiness than constant labour; meditation is more excellent than knowledge." Perhaps the most widely known and best beloved passage in the Gita to all Bhaktas is found in the Ninth Lesson:

"If one of earnest spirit set before Me with devotion a leaf, a flower, or water, I enjoy this offering of devotion. Whatever be thy work, thine eating, thy sacrifice, thy gift, thy mortification, make thou of it an offering to Me. Thus shalt thou be released from the bonds of Works, fair or foul of fruit; thy spirit inspired by casting-off of Works and following the Rule, thou shalt be delivered and come unto Me."

In the Gita we have a synthesis of all the means of approach to God-knowledge, asceticism, and devotion. Sri Krishna has become a personal God. Devout Indians could not continue satisfied with the negation and atheism of the Jains and with Buddhism; in the last part of the Gita we find a warm attachment to a per-

See Lionel D. Barnett's Bhagavad-Gita. [Page 145]sonal God, and that attitude provides the inspiration for the theistic movements of later times. "Have thy mind on Me, thy devotion toward Me; thy sacrifice to Me, do homage to Me. Thus guiding thyself, given over to Me, so to Me shalt thou come."

This idea of a warm attachment to a personal God, so prominent in the Bhakti movement, found clearest expression in the work of Manikkavasagar of Madura in Southern India. He wrote:

"Thrills and trembles my frame; Hands are lifted on high; Here at Thy fragrant feet, Sobbing and weeping I cry: Falsehood forsaking, I shout, 'Victory, victory, praise,' Lord of my life, these clasped hands Worship shall bring Thee always."

The whole Bhakti movement not unlike the Mystics of the West is a warm attachment expressed in deep meditation and acts of devotion to a personal and ever-present God, but it was self-centered and unsocial. The whole idea behind these methods of approach to God is "save yourself from this crooked and perverse generation." The recluse meditating on the name of God, the ascetic in his severe self-discipline, and the bhakta in his devotions, all have the very same characteristic-a pathetic attempt to save oneself-religious self-centerdness. Happily this phase of Hinduism is now passing away, as it had almost passed away in the West, and a great social awakening with a sense of social responsibility is taking hold upon the educated and thinking members of the Hindu community.

Modern Hinduism

Those with eyes that are not blind can see another change gradually taking place in this idea of approach to God in modern Hinduism. It is none other than the human, social expression of religion. A new and highly significant social consciousness is steadily rising in modern India due to contacts with the West, and I think due especially to the teaching and work of Christian [Page 146]missions. The great names and institutions trying to express Indian idealism today are without doubt Gandhi, Tagore, the Rama-Krishna Mission, and the Servants of India Society; they are shot through with the Christian social gospel. Professor Radhakrishnan of Calcutta believes that Hinduism must adapt itself to this new interpretation of true religion or it cannot survive. He says: "Leaders of Hindu thought and practice are convinced that the times require, not a surrender of the basic principles of Hinduism, but a restatement of them with special reference to the needs of a more complex and mobile social order."

As we have seen, former Hinduism sought release from a wicked and perishing world. That was the Middle Ages position also in Christianity; it persists to some extent among a few even to this day; but modern Christianity has taken a different point of view, a more practical and natural view. The world is not wholly evil; man is not altogether sinful; the aim of the Christian life is not to get out of this sinful world as quickly as possible. No, the Christian is to stay in the world, to live with people in a normal and natural way, and by his fine idealism, clean and upright life, his genuine, helpful character be a friend and companion of men, to lift the world up to a higher and nobler plane. As an American poet put it:

"Let me live in my house by the side of the road, And be a friend to man."

And as Rabindranath Tagore beautifully expresses the same thought:

"Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads. Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut. Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee. He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones. He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust. Put off thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil. . . . Meet him and stand by him in toil and in the sweat of thy brow."

See S. Radhakrishnan's The Hindu View of Life, p. 130. [Page 147]This of course is a commonplace with us today, but Hindu seers are just beginning to see it. We can find God in the needs of our fellow-men, and we may come to God in and through the service we render those who are in need. "Saved to serve" is a new idea in Indian religion. The Hindu doctrine of redemption speaks of deliverance from the past, but has little or no word of hope for the future. India does not need an opiate which will continue her in a state of sleep; she needs a tonic which will wake her up to action. The religion which India needs today is not one which will lull her to sleep, but one which will rouse her to life and action. Jesus calls men to action, to right the wrongs in the world, and that means social service.

Here is a man sitting by the road-side; he has no clothes on except a loin cloth, his hair is long, unkempt and matted; he is in deep meditation; he sits there for hours while the world rushes by, but he is indifferent to it all; he is a Yogin in meditation. He is following out Krishna's teaching in the Gita:

"Let him hold all these in constraint and sit under the Rule, given over to Me; for he who has his sense-instruments under his sway has wisdom abidingly set."

He is the highest type of the religious man; he is the Hindu holy man.

But I change the picture: Here is Jesus Christ Himself going along the dusty road; He hears a cry for help from a poor blind man; He stops and gives sight to that man, and sends him on his way seeing and rejoicing. To his disciples Jesus gave a parting message: "Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to the whole world." Mrs. Sinclair Stevenson in her study,—"The Rites of the Twice Born" (p. 426), illustrates the attitude of asceticism by the following story: Mrs. Stevenson says that she happened to be in an outcaste quarter of the town, during the awful influenza epidemic of 1918, when people were dying in large numbers. Some of them drew her attention to an unknown stranger, whose friends, seeing that he was stricken with the disease, and fearing infection, had got out at the station hard-by and had placed the dying man on the verandah of an empty house, [Page 148]then abandoning him there, they had themselves slipped away in the darkness. On a bridge above two sturdy, powerful ascetics were sitting, intoning sacred verses in the quiet starlight. Mrs. Stevenson asked them who they were. "We are holy men," they replied. So she suggested that they should leave off their chanting for a while and come and help her to carry the unknown sufferer to the hospital. "Never will I forget," says Mrs. Stevenson, "the astonishment and blazing anger with which they enunciated the foundation truth of the way of asceticism." 'We,' they cried, 'are holy men-sannyasis; we never do anything for any one else. There was nothing wrong in that attitude of the ascetics; it was the natural and inevitable result of Hindu teaching. They were not to be troubled with the affairs of men; meditation, inaction, Yoga is the natural attitude of the Hindu holy man. But from the Christian point of view such conduct is intolerable, unsocial, and has been harshly condemned in Jesus's story about the good Samaritan.

Happily that view of religion is passing away even in Hinduism, and a new day is dawning in which Indians will realise that the way of approach to God is by service to men. Mahatma Gandhi sees it now, and he is one of the greatest living prophets in his own country today. This is what he says:

"I regard untouchability as the greatest blot on Hinduism. . . . Hindus will certainly never deserve freedom, nor get it if they allow their noble religion to be disgraced by the retention of the taint of untouchability." [Page 149]

ROUND TABLE

"The International Note in the Novels of the Pre-War Years, by A. Evelyn Newman, is a chapter from Dr. Newman's thesis prepared for her degree at the University of Dublin. The volume, to be published shortly, will be entitled: "The International Note in Contemporary Literature," and represents the first scholarly research on the subject. From the point of view of World Unity, this work accomplishes for modern culture what other scholars have previously accomplished for politics, economics and religion—an analysis of available material in the light of the new world ideal. It is a distinct pleasure to the editors to receive a manuscript enriching the necessarily didactic quality of the magazine.

The symposium on "The Coming World Order" begun this month with F. S. Marvin's paper on Europe, and prefaced by Archie M. Palmer's statement, has developed an impressive number of contributors. Those who have already participated are: Graham 11. Stuart, Rufus M. Jones, C. F. Ansley, Taracknath Das, Abba Hillel Silver, Aurelia H. Reinhardt, Archie M. Palmer, Ramananda Chatterji, A. Eustace Haydon, Parker T. Moon, Mary Hull, Carl A. Ross, Brent Dow Allinson and John Herm... Randall. A supplementary list of authors will be published in a few months.

The valuable comment on current world affairs written by Dexter Perkins in his department "The Quest of World Peace" will be welcomed by the many readers who have missed this balanced and factual survey during recent months.

Acknowledgment is made to The Macmillan Company for permission to use as tailpieces three designs from "This Believing World" by Lewis Browne. [Page 150]"The International Journal of Ethics Seeks To Clarify Theory and Improve Practice." -T. V. SMITH, EDITOR

Social problems will be separately analyzed in special issues of The International Journal of Ethics during 1930.

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PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION AND 1931

This distinctive magazine reflecting the newer tendencies in education will enter upon 1931 with a fuller and richer offering than ever before.

Some Forthcoming Contributions

THE BANDWAGONS OF EDUCATION by Charles Merz

SOME ANOMALIES IN SCHOOL TEXTBOOKS by Henry Seidel Canby

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PROGRESSIVE SCHOOLS AND MUSEUMS by Marion E. Miller

WHAT SHOULD COLLEGE STUDENTS LEARN? by Goodwin Watson

ARE PRIVATE SCHOOLS JUSTIFIED IN A DEMOCRACY? by George Boyce

Contributors who will write are Dr. William H. Kilpatrick, Dr. George S. Counts, Stephen P. Duggan, Dr. Mandel Sherman, Dr. Robert Leigh, Rossa Cooley, Agnes Sailor, Dr. Gertrude Hildreth, and a host of others.

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Education brought back to the control of life

EVERY believer in human progress will appreciate these facts: (1) that the breakdown in the world's political structure in 1914 was caused by failure in the field of public education; and (2) that it is likewise through the result of inadequate education that people everywhere are suffering from the economic collapse of 1929.

Education must control life once more, as education controlled life in the creative ages of India, China, Come and Medieval Europe. An education that attempts to deal with individuals and not with society merely sharpens the sword of anarchy and pires the ground for public chaos.

Generations may be required for the complete regeneration of educational ideals and facilities organized around the new concept of world community. Meanwhile, every parent, every teacher and every matured, responsible student has the privilege of supplementing his or her present education with the knowledge of world affairs and world trends provided by World Unity Magazine.

World Unity is the product of international scholarship working in the fields of Science, Philosophy, Economics, Politics, Art and Religion-in other words, knowledge related directly to the problems of immediate social evolution. Over this bridge between helpless theory and brutal fact you can pass to new mental regions of understanding and assurance.

Write for free booklet, or sample copy at 25c, or yearly subscription at $3.50 (to Libraries, $2.50). Special Introductory Subscription, four months for $1.00. Also request information about the three volumes in the famous "World Unity Library."

WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE JOHN HERMAN RANDALL, Editor HORACE HOLLEY, Managing Editor 4 East 12th Street, New York [Page 154]

NAMES WHICH MEAN THE WORLD OUTLOOK

SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

AMERICA

Devere Allen C. F. Ansley W. W. Arwood Robert W. Bagnall Alice A. Bailey Gerrit A. Beneker Ernest M. Best Edwin Arthur Burtt Harry Charlesworth Rudolph 1. Coffee John J. Coss John Dewey Herbert Adams Gibbons James Gordon Gilkey Charlotte Perkins Gilman W. N. Guthrie Frank H. Hankins A. Eustace Haydon Carleton J. H. Hayes Hubert C. Herring Horace Holley Arthur E. Holt Hamilton Holt Manley O. Hudson Mary Hull Mordecai W. Johnson Chester Lloyd Jones Rufus M. Jones David Starr Jordan Vladimir Karapetoff Kenneth S. Latourette Harry Levi Alain Locke Robert Morss Lovett Louis L. Mann Alfred W. Martin Kirtley F. Mather Lucia Ames Mead Fred Merrifield Herbert A. Miller Parker T. Moon Harry Allen Overstreet Archie M. Palmer Dexter Perkins John Herman Randall John Herman Randall, Jr. M. D. Redlich Carl A. Ross Joseph S. Roucek Moises Saenz Nathaniel Schmidt William R. Shepherd Mary Siegrist Abba Hillel Silver Isidor Singer George M. Stratton Norman Thomas Augustus O. Thomas Isabella Van Meter Frank Lloyd Wright

EUROPE

Norman Angell A. Mendelsohn Bartholdy L. F. de Beaufort Pierre Bovet J. Tyssul Davis Georges Duhamel Anna B. Eckstein Havelock Ellis Auguste Forel V. Schultze Gävernitz Hellmuth von Gerlach John W. Graham Marja Grundmann-Koscienska Will Hayes Ernest Judet Hans Kohn Richard Lee Ernest Ludwig George de Lukács Sir James Marchant Victor Margueritte R. H. Markham F. S. Marvin Kan Michaelis Ida Müller Emanuel Radl Forrest Reid Paul Richard Charles Richet Th. Ruyssen Gilbert Thomas Rustum Vámbéry Walter Walsh Hans Wehberg M. P. Willcocks

THE ORIENT

Ramananda Chatterji Ng Poon Chew James H. Cousins Taraknath Das Bayard Dodge C. F. Gates Kahlil Gibran Yamato Ichihashi S. L. Joshi P. W. Kuo Dhan Gopal Mukerji Yone Noguchi S. G. Pandit Frank Rawlinson Stanley Rice Nicholas Roerich A. J. Saunders David G. Stead J. Vijaya-Tunga