THE FORUM

FOR OCTOBER 1914

THE WAR

Charles Vale

In each of the nations now engaged in the European conflict, a large number of people of all classes—the vast majority of people of all classes—did not want war, and would have done all in their power to avert it: for they knew, more or less completely, the price of war; and they knew also, more or less completely, in spite of the inadequacy of all the churches through all the centuries, that war cannot possibly be reconciled with Christianity, with civilization, with humanity, decency, and the most rudimentary common sense. But when hostilities had actually been commenced, each of the nations was practically a unit with regard to the prosecution of the war to its final and terrible conclusion. With the exception of a few professional agitators or eccentric fanatics, who have gleaned scant sympathy for their antics, every citizen or subject of each country has placed implicit faith in the justice of the nation’s cause and has been prepared to give, ungrudgingly, the last full measure of devotion. Canada, Australia, South Africa, India, and all the great and small oversea commonwealths, colonies and dominions of Great Britain have come forward in the time of stress to offer new strength to the United Kingdom and new pledges of a United Empire. In the Fatherland, every man and woman has accepted the issue as inevitable, has held the cause of Kaiser and country as sacred and supreme, and has shrunk from no sacrifice to ensure the fulfilment of the long-cherished dream of victory, security and expansion. In France, where the ghosts of the dead that von Moltke required have not yet ceased to walk o’ nights, (they will

have new companionship now), there is no doubt in the mind of man, woman or child that la Patrie is waging a holy war for liberty and honor against the ruthless aggression of an arrogant and pitiless foe. In Russia, Austria, Servia, and whatever countries may have been dragged into the vortex week by week, there is a similar spirit, a similar belief in the justice of the national cause and the calculated injustice of the enemy’s plans. And in Belgium, always the victim of her unneighborly neighbors’ feuds, a people dedicated to peace has been flung into the hell of butchery and flames. Verily, Macbeth hath murther’d sleep!

In these United States, there has been little attempt to transcend race-limitations, so far as concerns the aliens within our borders, and those hyphenated-Americans who have rushed with virulence into a wordy warfare, intent, not on establishing the truth, but on giving publicity, ad nauseam, to their own special, and specially obnoxious, prejudices. The American nation, and every individual in it, has a clear right to hold and express a definite opinion: but it must be an opinion formed in conformity with the American character and the American freedom from entanglements of inherited and unreasoned bias. No other opinion is worth, here and now, a moment’s consideration; and no other opinion should dare to voice itself in this country, which has ties with almost all the peoples of the world—ties of blood and friendship, but not of bloodshed and hysteria.

America alone, of the great Powers of the world, is in a position to exercise free and calm reflection and to form a free and just judgment. The value of her decision has already been made manifest, through the efforts of every country involved in the war to influence American sentiment and gain American good will. A peculiar responsibility therefore rests upon us to avoid the banalities of the various special pleaders, and to form our judgment soberly and in good faith, nothing extenuating, and setting down naught in malice. And one of the first thoughts that should occur to us, one of the most significant and pregnant thoughts, is that which I have expressed in my first paragraph. Europe is a house divided against itself: but each nation in Europe has proclaimed the sanctity of its cause; each nation conceives that it has, or is entitled to have, the special protection

of Providence; each nation is sending its men to death and claiming patient sacrifice from its women.

What does this mean? Is there such little sense of logic in the world that it is impossible to distinguish right from wrong, so that nation may rise against nation, each convinced of its own probity, and each unable to attribute anything but evil motives to its adversaries? Can self-delusion be carried so far that black and white exchange values according to the chances of birth and environment? Have Christianity and civilization achieved this remarkable result, that the peoples of the world are like quarrelsome children in a disorderly nursery?

It is very clear that the world’s sense of logic must rank with the world’s sense of humor, when presumably learned professors, unchecked and unridiculed, take nationalism and egoism as the premises of their argument and from them deduce, with great skill, obvious nonsense. The lesson of incompetence and shallowness is driven home when baseless rumors from one half of Europe are countered with fantastic inventions fabricated by our alien patriots for the purpose of influencing public opinion. It is the old appeal of ignorance and stupidity to ignorance and stupidity, and the American public will not greatly appreciate the poor compliment that has been paid to it.

As an aid to impartiality and quiet thinking, let us first retrace the immediate and superficial causes of the war. Austria, dismayed and incensed by the murder of the heir to the throne at Serajevo on June 28, and considering the murder as the culmination of long-continued Servian scheming and enmity, delivered to Servia an ultimatum so framed that no nation, however small in territory or in courage, could possibly have accepted it without reservations. The Servian reply went to the extreme limits of concession, and an understanding should easily have been reached on that basis. Austria, however, was apparently resolved upon Servia’s abject submission, or upon war. She refused to accept the reply as in any way satisfactory, and opened hostilities.

It is clear, then, that Austria was primarily responsible for the actual commencement of the conflagration. Undoubtedly she had provocation, of the kind that stirs tremendously the sentiment

of the nation involved, but is less easily understood in its full intensity by those at a distance. But the point that should be particularly noticed is that a country which was temporarily excited beyond all self-control should have been able to take the initiative and plunge Europe into war. And it should be remembered that Austria’s resentment toward Servia was scarcely greater than the resentment of the Serbs toward the nation that had violated the Treaty of Berlin and permanently appropriated Bosnia-Herzegovina. Yet, in rebuttal, Austria might well assert that she had a vested interest in the provinces to which, in a score or so of years, she had given prosperity unsurpassed in southeastern Europe, in place of the anarchy and ruin entailed by four centuries of misrule, and civil and religious faction-conflicts.

The first step taken, the next was assured. Austria knew perfectly well that Russia, the protagonist in that drama of Pan-Slavism of which several scenes have already been presented, would take immediate steps in accordance with her rôle, and repeat her lines so sonorously that they would echo throughout the continent. But the Dual Monarchy, wounded and embittered, did not care: she could see before her, at the worst, no harsher fate than she would have to face, without external war, in a few years, or perhaps months. Only war, it seemed, could save the dynasty from destruction and the aggregation of races from dissolution. Relying upon the immediate help of Germany, and the ultimate assistance of Italy (her traditional foe, but technical ally), she refused to draw back or to temporise.

In discussing the attitude of Germany, and the action of the Kaiser, it is necessary to make full allowance for the strength and sincerity of the German foreboding, for many a year, that the clash between Slav and Teuton was bound to come sooner or later. The Russian forces were being massed ostensibly to prevent Austria from coercing Servia. As Austria had provoked the outbreak of hostilities, should she have been left to take the consequences? Would Russia, after eliminating Franz Josef’s heterogeneous empire, have resisted the temptation to claim France’s help in the congenial task of humbling Germany? The situation was not without its subtleties, after Austria had made the first decisive move. But under what circumstances did

Austria make that move? Was she encouraged by the assurance of German coöperation?

The point to be particularly noted is that Germany, as the ally of Austria, was entitled to full warning of any step that would make war inevitable. Did Austria give that warning? If not, why not? Is the Kaiser a weakling, to be ordered hither and thither at the whim of Franz Josef? The assumption will find few supporters. Yet it is quite clear that the Kaiser either knew and approved of the substance and purpose of Austria’s ultimatum, or—mirabile dictu—was willing to forgive the incredible slight of being totally ignored, and commit his country and his army to the support of an act of aggression with regard to which he had not even been consulted.

Carefully leaving the horns of this dilemma for the self-impalement of any too-ardent enthusiast who may wish to run without reading, we pass on to France, compelled, by the terms of her understanding with Russia, to take her place in the firing line. Without entering into the ultra-refinements of politics and discussing the question whether France, or any other country, would have paid for present neutrality and the violation of solemn engagements by subsequently being devoured in detail, or reduced to vassalage, by a victory-swollen Germany, we may point out that an alliance entered into primarily to safeguard the peace of Europe and the balance of power has been the means of dragging France into a war with which she had no direct concern. Such is the irony of protective diplomacy!

Great Britain has rested her case on the publication, without comment, of the whole of the diplomatic exchanges that preceded her own intervention after the violation of the neutrality of Belgium. Her claim that she exerted her influence until the final moment in the interests of peace is sustained beyond cavil: but the point to be remembered particularly is whether a more decisive and uncompromising attitude at an earlier stage would not have been preferable. Germany would then have had no doubt as to Great Britain’s final alignment, and with a kindly word from Italy that neutrality was the best that could be expected from her, a reconsideration of the whole position might

have been forced before the final, fatal moments had passed, and were irrevocable.

It is unnecessary to prolong this cursory review of immediate causes and conditions, nor does it greatly matter how the positions of the different countries have been stated. The mood of a moment may add or subtract a little coloring, without changing the fundamental facts. But is it possible for any man, however impartial he may desire to be, to state those facts now, accurately, clearly, and in such relation and sequence that only one inevitable conclusion can be drawn?

It may be possible, though it would be difficult: but it would not be worth while. For the war has not been due to, and does not depend upon, recent events; and however those events may be viewed or summarized, the only fact of importance is the one already emphasized: that every nation which has been drawn into the conflict counts its cause just and its conscience clear.

In the face of such unanimity of national feeling, it is absurd to discuss superficial conditions only, or to assume that they are of any real importance. For, apart from neutral America, and the few hundreds of really educated and intelligent men and women in each country who constitute the brains and conserve the manners of their nation, it is impossible to find any just basis for criticism and judgment. The average national is concerned with presenting an ex parte statement (in which, perhaps, he believes implicitly) rather than with discovering the actual truth, whosoever may be vindicated or discredited. The average national may therefore be disregarded, and the supreme appeal be made, not to the common folly of the nations, but to the common sense of those who have risen beyond national limitations and national littlenesses.

In the first place, that much-quoted and entirely despicable confession of faith, “My country, right or wrong, first, last and all the time,” may well be relegated,—first, last and for whatever time may remain before a kindly Providence blots out this incredible little world of seething passions and ceaseless pain and cruelty,—to the limbo of antique curiosities. Nothing can be sillier, and more contemptible, than such pseudo-patriotism, based on utter selfishness, utter ignorance, and abysmal stupidity.

The country which commits a crime, or makes a grave mistake, is in the position of an individual who commits a crime or makes a grave mistake; and no fanfare of trumpets or hypnotism of marching automata, helmeted and plumed, should confuse the issue and vitiate judgment. Mere nationalism, unregulated by intelligence, is simply one of the most irritating and blatant forms of egoism. Nationality itself depends upon so many complex conditions that the ordinary semi-intelligent man can scarcely unravel the niceties of history and discover to whom his heartfelt allegiance is really due. He therefore accepts the untutored sentiment of his immediate environment. He is essentially provincial, not patriotic. Alsace and Lorraine, with their various vicissitudes, may profitably be studied by the curious, in this connection.

Until provincialism, of the type which has been so prominent in recent controversies, can be eliminated or controlled, the settlement of the more tragic issues of the time must be undertaken boldly by those who have indubitably grown up, forsaking leading strings and the nursery, the toys of childhood and the irresponsibility of childhood. All the Governments of Europe, in which a few brilliant men are undoubtedly enrolled, have failed now, as they have failed repeatedly before, to perform their elementary duties and save their countries from the horrors of unnecessary war. Generation after generation, the peoples of Europe have been carefully led by their Governments into successive orgies of slaughter, in which the allies of one campaign have been the enemies of the next. The whole course of European history during the last hundred years (we need not go further back: we are not responsible for the dead centuries) has been indeed a subject for Olympian laughter. What has been achieved by the unending succession of wars, with all their attendant miseries and deadly consequences? Merely the necessity for increased armaments, constant watchfulness, perpetual strain—and more war. Could there be a clearer proof of the futility of war?

The Governments of Europe have failed because each, in greater or less degree, has embodied the provincialism of its own section of the armed and suspicious world. There have been a few notable exceptions to the general rule of conventional mediocrity:

but where have we found the statesman who could break away altogether from the old stupid methods, and by the sheer force of character and principle inaugurate a new era of civilized diplomacy, as Bismarck inaugurated a new era of veneered barbarism? In America, we are beginning to see the value and the fruits of government based on fairness to all nations and justice to all individuals: but neither here, nor in Europe, has the significance of the new statesmanship yet been fully recognized. Europe, indeed, still regards us with more than a little suspicion, contempt, and imperfectly concealed condescension: it has heard and seen Roosevelt, unfortunately, and the lingering impressions of crudity have not been weakened. Will it listen to us now, and realize that the New World has in verity something to offer to the Old in its time of special tribulation? For Wilson, not Roosevelt, stands for the spirit of America, the voice of America, and her chosen contribution to the civilization of the Twentieth Century.

It seems strange, perhaps, to talk of civilization in these dark days, when primitive passions and primitive methods have flung an ineradicable stain of blood across a whole continent. Yet only the coward will bend to temporary defeat, or ridicule, or pessimism. It is the task of the strong to turn disaster into triumph, and to frame a new international polity built on sure foundations. The diplomacy based on national antipathies must be made impossible by the new understanding of the criminal folly of provincialism, the new comprehension of nation by nation. For the true causes of the present war cannot be discovered in mere incidents of July and August. They go further back, and are rooted in ignorance, misconception, prejudice, selfishness.

I do not wish to accuse or exonerate any of the countries that have turned Europe into a stage for the rehearsal of Christianity’s masterpiece, the rollicking farce Hell on Earth. There have been enough already to inflame racial resentments and flood the press with taunts and recriminations. Ours is a bigger and worthier task: to assuage, not to incense; to re-create order from chaos; to prepare the way for peace, and for what must follow peace.

Recrimination is so useless now. We have to face the future: we cannot undo the past. We have learnt our lesson, surely, once for all: shall the spectre of militarism again loom devilishly through such a nightmare as Europe has endured for the last decade? Animosities and jealousies may die out: France has forgotten Fashoda, England has forgiven Russia for the blunder of the Dogger Bank. But the expectation of war, the preparation for war, the whole habit and incidence of militarism, must lead sooner or later to the clash. If the guns were not ready, if the nations had to be drilled and armed before they could be hurled at each others’ throats, there would be time for reflection, for the subsidence of passions, for the revival of dignity and decency. Militarism damns both the menacer and the menaced. All the nations have suffered from that curse, Germany, perhaps, the worst of all. The world has not yet forgotten Bismarck’s gospel of blood and iron, so relentlessly preached and practised. The inevitable results of the blood-and-iron doctrine, modernized as the dogma of the “mailed fist,” can be seen to-day in the cataclysm that has swept Europe. The pity of it, and the shame of it, that all the skill of all the statesmen of the great Powers could produce no better result than a continent divided into two armed camps, waiting for the slaughter that was bound to come!

As for Russia, and the assumed Slavonic menace, one must tread somewhat diffidently where George Bernard Shaw has rushed in with characteristic Shavian impetuosity. The world owes to Mr. Shaw the discovery of a new nationality—himself; and it is impossible for any citizen of the world to ignore the obligation. But even if Russia achieves her never-forgotten dream of Constantinople and a purified St. Sophia, Europe and civilization will not necessarily stand aghast, trembling at each rumor of Cossack brutalities. Tennyson, who foresaw the aërial navies “grappling in the central blue,” indeed proclaimed, in one of the most execrable of his sonnets, that—

“… The heart of Poland hath not ceased

To quiver, though her sacred blood doth drown

The fields, and out of every smouldering town

Cries to Thee, lest brute power be increased

Till that o’ergrown barbarian in the East

Transgress his ample bounds to some new crown:

Cries to Thee, ‘Lord, how long shall these things be,

How long this icy-hearted Muscovite

Oppress the region?’…”

(I quote from memory, deprecating caustic correction). But, in spite of anti-Semitic atrocities (are the hands of other nations so clean now? They were foul once), and in spite of the blunders of a rigid bureaucracy, the Russian nation is not necessarily a menace to civilization: it has within it the elements of a wonderful idealism, and whether autocracy may remain, or may not remain, as the outward and visible form of government, the spirit of democracy is leavening the people, and “Holy Russia” has in truth already been sanctified by the blood of her innumerable martyrs—sometimes, perhaps, misguided and mistaken; but offering to the world an example of idealism and self-sacrifice that should surely dispel the nightmare of Russian brutishness.

I may record here, quite irrelevantly, my own fervent wish (irrevocably established at the immature age of twelve years) that Poland, with few of her limbs amputated, should be replaced upon the map as an independent, and again powerful, nation. It was one of my earliest dreams that I should be awakened at the dawn of a wintry day, and urged by a delegation of Polish magnates to accept the one throne of Europe that had been, and still should be, open to conspicuous (and electoral) merit. That wish has not yet been gratified, and candor compels me to attribute it to the delightful influence of the elder Dumas, from whom I derived also my most enduring impressions of St. Bartholomew, Catherine de Medici, Mazarin, Louis XIII, Richelieu, Buckingham, Louis XIV, Louise de la Vallière, d’Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, Porthos, and other immortals. India, I confess, held me equally spellbound: for many months I hesitated between the succession to Aurungzebe (why should I now spell the name differently?) and the crown of Stanislaus. That hesitation has been fatal: I am still throneless.

Others may be throneless (the Mills of God grind steadily) before final peace comes to the different warring nations. They have sowed in their various ways, and will reap the ripened

harvests. But how long shall the childish quarrel of country with country be permitted and encouraged by those who should have learnt a little wisdom, in this twentieth century of perpetual miracles? Let us have done, once for all, with petty jealousies and absurd misunderstandings. Let us blot out, without regret and without the least compassion, the evil records and results of insincerity and manufactured hatred. Let us extinguish, finally and irresuscitably, those fires of malice and flagrant nonsense that have been fed assiduously by the fools and knaves of the world.

Nowhere will you find a decent man, emancipated from the leading-strings of prejudice and unafraid of the bludgeonings of militarist authority, who does not condemn the present war, and all wars, as useless, damnable, anachronistic and inexcusable. We have learnt so much, in these later years; we have adventured in strange ways, and silently borne strange reproaches. We have come very near to God, and talked with Him by wireless, remedying the inconsistencies of the prophets and filling in the gaps left blank by the poets. And shall we still be bound by the gibes and gyves of the mediævalists? The Middle Ages served their purpose: but why extend them to the confusion of modern chronology? We have seen God, as no generation before has seen Him. Let us then live, and not die, until the grave be digged, and the night overshadow us at last.

SEEN THROUGH MOHAMMEDAN SPECTACLES

Achmed Abdullah

Although my father was a Muslim of the old Central-Asian school, a Hegirist, of mixed Arab and Moghul blood, he had sent me to England and the Continent for my school and university education. But boys are much more broad-minded than grown-up men, and so my schoolmates and I never worried about the fact that we had different customs, religion, civilization, and atavistic tendencies.

It was only after my return to the borderland of Afghanistan and India, and after I had assumed once more native garb and speech, that I began to feel myself an alien among those Europeans and Anglo-Indians with whom I was brought into contact.

For the first time in my life I felt the ghastly meaning of the words “Racial Prejudice,” that cowardly, wretched caste-mark of the European and the American the world over, that terrible blight which modern Christianity has forced on the world. And it chilled me to the bone and I wondered….

In Europe I had known many Asiatics who visited the universities there. And we were the equals of the Europeans, the Christians, in intellect and culture, and decidedly their superiors, being Muslim, in cleanliness and courage. We were not only familiar with the European classics which were the basis of their culture, but we were also thoroughly versed in the literature and history of India and Central Asia, things of which they knew less than an average Egyptian donkey-boy. We were polyglots: we had mastered half a dozen European languages, while even a smattering of Arabic or Turki or Chinese was a rare exception amongst them. We all of us knew at least three Asian languages to perfection. And finally we had a practical knowledge of English, French and German political ideals and systems, while to them the name of even such great Asian reformers as Asoka and Akbar and Aurangzeb were absolutely unknown.

In physical strength, virility, power of endurance and recuperation

we were immeasurably their superiors. And we were not picked men, but plain, average Asian gentlemen.

And yet, when I returned to my own land, there was that superior smile, that nasty, patronizing attitude, that insufferable “Holier than Thou” atmosphere about all of them whom I happened to meet.

They made me feel that I was of the East and they of the West; and they tried to make me feel—with no success—that they were the salt of the earth, while the men of my faith and race were but the lowly dung.

Not even the bridge of personal friendship seemed able to span this gulf, this abyss which I could feel more than I could define it; and so I folded my tent and travelled; I studied India from South to North, I visited Siberia, Egypt, Malta, Algeria, Turkey, Tunis, and the Haussa country, wandering in all the lands where East and West rub elbows, and I investigated calmly, I compared without too much bias.

Finally I bent my steps Northward, to see with my own eyes and according to the limits of my own understanding the working of Christian civilization, and to study the dominant Western Faith in the lands where it rules supreme.

I was looking for a bridge with which to span the chasm, and I failed miserably. Christian hypocrisy, Christian intolerance, savage Christian ignorance frustrated me right and left.

But I learned one thing, perhaps two.

They spoke to me of Europe which they knew, and they spoke of India which they did not know. They were what the world calls educated, well-read people: and indeed they had read many books by eminent Christian travellers, savants, and historians about the great Peninsula. But the mirror of their souls reflected only distorted pictures. They had no conception of the vastness of my land, they had never heard of the great Asian conquerors and statesmen, they were entirely ignorant of our wonderful literature.

But still they spoke of India … fluently, patronizingly.

They spoke of plague and cholera and famine and wretched sanitation and cruelties unspeakable. But they did not understand me when I told them that the teeming millions of Hindu

peasantry somehow manage to enjoy their careless lives to the full, and are really much more satisfied than the European peasants or the small American farmers.

I did not argue: I simply stated facts. But I discovered that it is a titanic, heart-breaking task to prove the absurdity of anything which the Christians have made up their minds to accept as true. I found arrayed against me an iron phalanx of preconceived opinions and misconstrued lessons of history. I began to understand that even amongst educated people there can exist opinion without thought, and that my two arch-foes were the Pharisee intolerance which is the caste-mark and the blighting curse of the Christian the world over, and the other Aryan vice: an unconscious generalization of those ideas which have been adopted for the sake of convenience and self-flattery, and in strict and delightfully naïve disregard of truth. The whole I found to be spiced with religious hypocrisy; and is there a lower form of hypocrisy than that which makes a man pretend for his own material or spiritual purposes that a thing is good which in his inmost heart he knows to be bad? The sincerity of such people is on a par with that of him who, being debarred by a doctor from constant drinking, proclaims that he is a reformed character and prates to his friends about the delights of temperance.

I learned that to fathom the murky depths of stupidity and intolerance of the Christians of to-day, we should have a latter-day Moses Maimonides amongst us, to write another Moreh Nebukim, another Guide for the Perplexed.

And then I made up my mind to attack that structure of ignorance and misunderstanding, that jumble of generalization and hyperdeduction, that idiotic racial self-confidence and national self-consciousness which breeds Pharisee intolerance, which destroys individual inquiry and unprejudiced opinion, and which sounds the death-knell of procreativeness.

The Hindu peasants say that it is a mistake to judge the quality of a whole field of rice by testing one grain only. But the Europeans, the Americans, who judge us have never even tested a solitary grain and only know about its quality from hearsay.

Not that they are afraid to voice what they miscall their opinions. Only instead of having the courage of their own convictions, they have the courage of somebody else’s convictions, not knowing that the most obtuse ignorance is superior to dangerous, second-hand knowledge.

They are eternally quoting the words of some writer whom they think infallible. And there was chiefly one clever little jingle which was on the lips of everybody with whom I tried to discuss the relations between Orient and Occident. They used it as the final proof to settle the argument and to preclude all further appeal to the tribunal of common sense and common verity, and it ran as follows:

“East is East, and West is West,

And never the twain shall meet.”

I admire Kipling, chiefly because he is one of the few Europeans who have studied the East with both intelligence and sympathy. From my Oriental point of view I class his books with those of Max Müller, Sir Alfred Lyall, Captain Sir Richard Burton, Pierre Loti, John Campbell Oman, Victoria de Bunsen, Colonel Malleson, W. D. Whitney, William Crooke, and two or three other Pandits.

But I became sick to death of that smooth little jingle about the East and the West. I found it everywhere, until it haunted me in my dreams.

I would buy the gaudy Sunday edition of an American newspaper and I would read the gruesome story of how a high-caste Mandchoo had beaten and tortured his beautiful French wife … and, by the Prophet, the picturesque account would wind up with an appeal to the intelligent American reader not to wonder at the blue-beard Mandarin’s cruelty, because the poet states that East is East and West is West.

In the morning I would see in the Petit Journal how the unspeakable Turk had invaded a peaceful Armenian settlement, had shot the males, outraged the females, and roasted the babes over an open fire, and how I should also suppress my natural indignation at such atrocities, because the East is naturally the East.

And at night, before smoking the farewell cigarette of the dying day, I would discover in The Graphic harrowing accounts of child-marriages in Hindustan, and would be instructed that the reason for such a barbarous custom was contained in the poet’s statement that “never the twain shall meet.”

Do you wonder that every night, in my dreams, I strangled Mr. Kipling slowly and deliciously with a thin silken cord? But of course you do not wonder; for I am an Afghan … and … well …

“East is East and West is West.”

II

Assumed racial superiority is a foregone conclusion in the minds of the so-called Aryans of Europe and of America.

I was in Paris when the world rang with the war-glories of Nippon, and afterwards, when for a while it seemed as if the bloodless Young Turk revolution would meet with success.

There we had at last two specific instances of Oriental nations working out their own salvation against tremendous odds: Japan threatened by the Russian Goliath, and Turkey a prey to the wrangling and the selfish machinations of all Europe, of all lying Christendom.

But the effect on the conceit of the Aryans was less than nothing. The people of Europe and of America are blind to the Writing on the Wall. They have sealed their ears against the murmuring voices of Awakening Asia.

Are they afraid to listen?

Now and then, when not engaged in discussing the latest tango or divorce case, they do read and talk about the awakening of China, the commercial conquests and aggressive policy of Japan, and the smouldering fires of United Islam, but without experiencing the least abating influence on their artificially nurtured racial and religious conceit. Peacefully and stupidly the Christians, the “white races,” continue to misread the lessons of history and the signs of the times.

They are afraid to see the brutal, naked truth.

Once I watched an ostrich bury his head in the sand….

They have established the amusing dogma that the so-called White and Christian countries are the superior countries, just because they are White and Christian.

I have established a slightly different dogma, and, being a charitable and entirely guileless Oriental, I will make a present of it to my Aryan friends:

You Westerns feel so sure of your superiority over us Easterns that you refuse even to attempt a fair or correct interpretation of past and present historical events. You deliberately stuff the minds of your growing generations with a series of ostensible events and shallow generalities, because you wish to convince them for the rest of their lives how immeasurably superior you are to us, how there towers a range of differences between the two civilizations, how East is only East, and the West such a glorious, wonderful, unique West.

In Tancred, that brilliant Oriental, the Earl of Beaconsfield, in devoting a few lines to a great Bishop of the Church of England, really pictures the typical Christian such as he stinks in our nostrils from Morocco to Kharbin. For the noble Jewish Peer characterizes the Right Reverend Gentleman as a man who combined great talents for action with very limited powers of thought, who was bustling, energetic, versatile, gifted with an indomitable perseverance and stimulated by an ambition that knew no repose, with a capacity for mastering details and an inordinate passion for affairs, who could permit nothing to be done without his interference, and who consequently was perpetually involved in transactions which were either failures or blunders.

In material progress you have led the world for the last two or three centuries. By the True Prophet … all of three hundred years!

And like all parvenus, you are so astonished at your success, so pleased with yourselves, that you imagine your present hegemony in the race for material progress to be a guarantee for the future. But there is not even the shadow of an excuse for such an assumption, unless it be the fact that the Christian mind is diseased with racial and religious megalomania. There is not a single historical parallel which justifies your pleasant

superstition that your present leadership, which after all is of very recent birth, will show greater stability than any of those many alien, ancient civilizations which long ago came from the womb of eternity, to go back whence they sprang.

Nations as well as men are judged by two factors: by their virtues, and by their vices.

As to virtues, what have you Christians done for the general uplift of the world which could not be matched by a random look into the pages of Oriental history? And as to vices, is there any degeneracy rampant amongst us which is not equalled by the degeneracy of the Western lands?

History has an unpleasant knack of repeating itself; and the helot of to-day has the disagreeable habit of being the master of to-morrow, regardless of race and color and creed. I would like to return to earth about three hundred years from to-day, just to observe how my descendants, who will have intermarried with Chinese and Japanese, will succeed in ruling their colonies in Europe and in America. And I do hope that the Chinese blood of my descendants will not be too preponderant: otherwise, taking a leaf out of European and American colonization, and thus forcing their own food-laws on the subject races, they might force their White and Christian subjects to eat roast puppy-dog.

Human nature is the same the world over, and there never was an originally superior race or people. Some nations have founded powerful civilizations which lasted for a shorter or a longer period, but it was never the racial force which caused it, but rather the irresistible swing of circumstances.

It was Kismet.

III

“But we are Aryans, don’t you understand?… Aryans, the salt of the earth….”

“Aryans” … I know the word, I find myself on familiar ground.

My teachers at the universities of Oxford, Paris, and Berlin had taught me that the Aryans were a Central-Asian race, a

“white” race, who conquered Europe and India, and who were of such superior intellectual and physical fibre that they made themselves masters wherever they went. And when I inquired about those Aryans who invaded India, I was told that right there they showed their wonderful metal: for brought face to face with teeming millions of dark aborigines, they established a caste-system of which the higher strata represent to this day the descendants of the white-skinned and therefore high-minded invaders, while the sweeper, the menial, the village laborer is the scion of the dark-skinned, conquered Dravidians.

To an Oriental this is of course a ridiculous and lying assumption. For even the purest of Aryan tribes in Hindustan, for instance the Rajpoots, have intermarried extensively with at least two other races. This superstition is not a new invention. It is as old as the beginning of things, and that much-praised work, the Veda, is only a chronicle of the ancient conceit of the Aryans, a conceit to which the lying and barbarous intolerance of modern Christianity has given a sharp and poisonous edge.

Yet even the Veda speaks of intermarriages between the Aryans and the original lords of the soil of India.

The caste system was not a bright invention to put a lasting stamp of inferiority on the conquered aborigines, but it is the outcome of a slow evolutionary process, due to the machinations of Brahmin priests who wished to preserve the profits arising from their sacerdotal profession within a restricted circle of families. These Brahmins had increased their ranks and influence by drawing recruits from the devil-worshipping priests of the aboriginal jungle tribes. Thus, how can there ever have been a question of preserving or establishing a permanency of racial superiority through the medium of caste, since at the very beginning of the system the race had lost its purity?

No. Your wonderful Aryan kinsmen in India were absorbed by the “inferior” races whom they conquered, just as the Normans were absorbed by the Saxon Englishmen, the Alexandrian Greeks by the Egyptians, the Mongols of the Golden Horde by the Chinese, just as the strong always absorb the weak, and just as, a few hundred years hence, we shall absorb you.

To-day Christian England is ruling India, and the English Raj is just, fair-minded, tolerant, and equitable. This is true, and it is also true that the last Moghuls disgraced the throne of Delhi and shattered Hindustan. But what can you prove by it?

Others have ruled India successfully before Asia had ever heard of England.

Akbar, the Moghul Emperor, enforced tolerance and justice in those barbaric days when the life of a Jew in Europe was at the kind mercy of an ignorant and brutal Christian rabble. He, the Muslim, built and endowed Hindu temples and charitable institutions while his European contemporaries were periodically burning down the synagogues and were trying to extend the sway of the gentle Christ with the effective help of murder and torture. He, and before him his father’s successor on the throne of Delhi, Shir Shah, the Afghan usurper, attempted to found an Indian empire “broad-based upon the people’s will,” long before the days of Voltaire, Robespierre, Rousseau, and Beaumarchais. He settled land revenue on an equitable basis while the peasants of Europe were groaning under the heavy and humiliating burden of serfdom.

You say that his successors did not live up to the high standard established by this greatest of Moghul princes?

But we find fitting parallels in the history of Christian Europe. For were not the successors of Theodosius as degenerate as those of Akbar? Did not, in Macaulay’s words, the imbecility and disputes of Charlemagne’s descendants bring contempt on themselves and destruction to their subjects?

Or take the civilization of ancient Rome.

It was partially saved from ruin by the Asians, the Syro-Christians, who brought the word of the great Jewish Rabbi across the Adriatic. Judaism is an Oriental creed, and what is your famed European Christianity if not “Judaism for the Masses”?

The Asian genius of Christ and his Hebrew apostles saved the Aryan genius from stagnation and stupidity, and brought the first faint glimmer of light into the barbaric darkness of Northern Europe.

The Asian Christians succeeded in Aryan Rome, and just as long as the Asians ruled, the traditional cupidity and cruelty of Aryan Rome were softened by the broadly tolerant humanity of Asia. But as soon as the Syro-Christians were in the minority and the Christians of European stock in the majority, persecution and intolerance commenced, and the word of the great Oriental Prophet Jesus Christ was sadly mutilated and misunderstood by that superior race, the “Whites.”

But even then you could not rid yourselves of our subtle Asian influence. I know your gifts of energy and your spirit of progress; but we men of Asia have a power of resistance and a capacity for rapid recuperation which you can never fathom.

Could you break the spirit or the virility of the Jew? You have tortured him, you have exiled him, and you have burnt him on the stake for the greater glory of God … and he rules you to-day.

Again, look at the history of your Europeanized Christian Church, and observe what happened:

The Asian spirit flourished again in Protestantism and the Reformation. Many of your Protestant reformers were semi-Jewish, semi-Oriental in spirit. Anti-Trinitarianism was preached in Siena, and God ceased to be a mathematical problem. The Decalogue and the Apocalypse were studied. Chairs of Hebrew philosophy and philology were founded at French and German universities; and the Calvinists and the Presbyterians were altogether of the old Testament, of Asia, in spirit and sentiment.

Your famous Reformation was only a return to the Ebionism of the Asian Evangelists. One of the greatest events in your history, it was a most complete and vindicating triumph for the spirit of that Asia which you attempt to despise and patronize in your ignorance and intolerance.

Must we sit at your feet? Shall the pupil teach the master?

We taught you to read, to write, and to think. We gave you your religion and your few ideals. We have done more for you than you can ever do for us. We freed you from your ancient bondage of superstitions and idolatry. We gave you the

first sparks of science and literature. We paved the way for your material progress.

Without our help you would still be tattooed and inarticulate barbarians.

But you have been getting out of hand, and are sinking back into the old slough of ignorance and crass intolerance.

And so perhaps some day, after we Mohammedans have finished converting Asia and Africa to the Faith of Islam (and we are doing steady work in that direction), we may send another Tamerlane into Europe, reinforced by an army of a few million Asians who laugh in the face of death, and finish the job.

IV

You speak of Oriental mystery, of Oriental romance.

Are we Asians then like Molière’s bourgeois who spoke prose all his life without knowing it? Is there really a veil of mystery about us?

No, no. The Most High God did not take the trouble to create two different types of human beings, one to work on the banks of the Seine, and the other to sing His praises on the shore of the Ganges. There is no veil, no mystery, no romance … except the veil of Christian ignorance, the romance of Christian imagination, the mystery of Christian want of desire to know.

There is perhaps a latent search after knowledge and truth in your hearts’ souls. But your inborn selfishness forces you to believe that a healthy portion of ignorance is the best medicine against the ravages of the dangerous malady which is called Tolerance. Just a little effort would teach you that there is no mystery about us, no abyss which separates you from us. But your ignorance is your bliss and provides you with a sort of righteous bias. It also sheds a holy and therefore eminently Christian halo around your attitude of meddlesome interference in the affairs of Asia and North Africa. Of course you only interfere because of your laudable intention to show us the true path to civilization and salvation. And if accidentally you increase

your own power and wealth, if you impoverish the native whom you attempt to “save,” if you incite strife where no strife existed before you imported soldiers and bibles and missionaries and whisky and some special brands of “white” diseases … well … Allah is Great….

The mystery which is supposed to shroud the Orient is a lying invention of Christendom destined to give a semblance of justice to your selfish, harmful meddlings in the affairs, religions, politics and customs of other countries.

If you wish to conquer with the right of fire and the might of sword, go ahead and do so, or at least say so. It would be a motive which we Muslim, being warriors, could understand and appreciate. But do not clothe your greed for riches and dominion in the hypocritical, nasal, sing-song of a heaven-decreed Mission to enlighten the poor native, a Pharisee call of duty to spread the word of your Saviour, your lying intention to uplift the ignorant Pagan.

Drop your mask of consummate beatitude in the contemplation of the spiritual joys, the Christian and therefore very sanitary plumbing you are endeavoring to confer upon us. Stop being liars and hypocrites: and you will cease being what you are to-day:

The most hated and the most despised men in the length and breadth of Asia and North Africa.

And I am not exaggerating. I am really putting it mildly so as not to hurt your feelings.

Let me point out just one instance: the Young Turk Revolution.

You, the apostles of freedom and constitutional government and half a dozen assorted fetishes, what was your attitude then?

You allowed Austria, your trusted steward of other people’s property since the Berlin Congress of Thieves, to steal this property, the fertile provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. You looked on calmly while the Bulgar mountebank annexed Turkish territory in time of peace. You passed resolutions, full of blatant Christian hypocrisy and Christian lies; but you never raised a finger in our behalf, in behalf of that justice and humanity which you proudly claim as your caste-right. The whole

affair was a piece of brigandage, carried on under the much-patched cloak of that whining cant which has made modern Christianity an ugly by-word in Asia and North Africa.

You united in your endeavors to establish an independent and constitutionally governed Roumania, a free Servia, a modern Greece and Bulgaria, and, more recently, an autonomous Macedonia, under the pretext that Turkey, being controlled with an iron rod by a despotic Sultan and an intolerably exalted Sheykh-ul-Islam, was not fit to govern Christian races.

But you obstruct Mohammedan Turkey’s efforts to introduce and enforce the very principles of liberty and popular government which in former years you had been advocating as a sine qua non in the administration of your precious Christian protégés.

An ounce of baptismal water makes such a difference, does it not?

I believe that I am the mouthpiece of a great majority of my fellow-Muslim and my fellow-Asians when I state that the Jesuit policy of Europe during the political travail of Young Turkey, when the Osmanli attempted to crystallize his newly found liberty, will do more to fan the red embers of fighting Pan-Islam into living, leaping flames than any other political event since the Berlin treaty.

We have suffered long enough a series of deliberate moral insults and material injuries at the hands of selfish, canting, lying Christianity, and we are still capable of tremendous energies when Islam is in danger.

And who can deny that Islam is in danger?

Your attitude during the Balkan troubles proved to us that the liberty which you deem necessary to the Christian Balkans is a negligible quantity when applied to the followers of the Prophet Mohammed who inhabit the same peninsula.

And I could mention a dozen instances to prove that you yourselves are forcing on the world the coming struggle between Asia, all Asia, against Europe and America, against Christendom, in other words.

You are heaping up material for a Jehad, a Pan-Islam, a Pan-Asia Holy War, a gigantic Day of Reckoning, an invasion

of a new Attila and Tamerlane … who will use rifles and bullets, instead of lances and spears.

You are deaf to the voice of reason and fairness, and so you must be taught with the whirling swish of the sword when it is red.

V

You claim that altruism and the virtues are the monopoly of your creed and your race.

But in reality the teachings of Jesus are not a particle more apt to lead his followers in the golden path than are the sayings of the Lord Buddha, the laws of Moses, the wisdom of Confucius, or the words of the Koran. True tolerance, true altruism teaches us that what is right in Peking may be wrong on the shores of Lake Tchaad, and what is wrong in a Damascus bazaar may be right at a Kansas ice-cream social.

Such true tolerance is far broader than the limits of professing Christianity, than the limits of any established, cut-and-dried creed. It is as broad as the Seven Holy Rivers of Hindustan and as vast as Time. The creed of mutual sympathy is a very old creed: even amongst the troglodytes chosen spirits must have known it, the red-haired barbarians of Gaul must have heard of it, and amongst the lizard-eating Arabs of pre-Islamic days it must have found adherents. It is a human truth, a human principle which is the common property of mankind East and West; but Christian hegemony in worldly affairs has killed it, has blighted it with the curse of the cross.

Intrinsic unselfishness and abstract goodness is older than the Gospel, the Koran, the Veda, or any other religious book. Being at the very core of that civilization from which all changes spring, it is in itself eternally unchangeable, be it clothed in the words of the Sermon on the Mount, the Prophet Mohammed’s three great principles of Compassion, Charity, and Resignation, or the famed edict of the Emperor Asoka, who many centuries before the days of Jesus declared to the world that “a man must not do reverence to his own sect by disparaging that of another man.”

THE SHROUD

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Death, I say, my heart is bowed

Unto thine,—O mother!

This red gown will make a shroud

Good as any other!

(I, that would not wait to wear

My own bridal things,

In a dress dark as my hair

Made my answerings.

I, to-night, that till he came

Could not, could not wait,

In a gown as bright as flame

Held for them the gate.)

Death, I say, my heart is bowed

Unto thine,—O mother!

This red gown will make a shroud

Good as any other!

NEW LOYALTIES FOR OLD CONSOLATIONS

H. A. Overstreet

To most persons the conception of a godless world is the conception of a world with the bottom dropped out. It is a world from which all the high values, all the splendid consolations have disappeared. This is true even for many who feel that they cannot, in reason, any longer believe in a personal God. For all their honest disbelief, the world has turned grey for them. It has lost its old wonder and joy. It has become a dead world.

It is interesting to ask ourselves whether all this need be true; whether the high values and the finer consolations may not be just as real when the belief in a personal God has vanished. With the vanishing of that belief, of course, the whole attitude toward the universe is altered. Hopes and comforts that were deeply and warmly of the older order of beliefs have no place in the new order; while loyalties and aspirations that were the breath of its life are become meaningless and without force. But may not new loyalties and aspirations, hopes and comforts find their place strongly and inspiringly in the later order of belief?

It will be interesting, as an answer to this question, to ask how differently a society would behave all of whose members, disbelieving utterly in the reality of a personal God, had no other thought of the divine life than that it was their own larger and more ideal existence.

I remember at the time of the San Francisco earthquake passing one of the cathedrals of the city and finding its broad stone steps, covering a goodly portion of a city square, black with kneeling worshippers. There could be no question of their reason for being there. They were setting themselves right with their God, hoping that in the fervor of their devotion he would have mercy upon them and save them from destruction. So on shipboard in times of great danger one will find the passengers gathered in the cabin praying to God for deliverance,—always, to be

sure, with the proviso, “Yet if it be thy will that we perish, thy will be done!”

These are dramatic but typical instances of what occurs constantly in homes and churches where people pray to a personal deity. Could such an attitude of prayer have any meaning for a man who disbelieved in a personal deity? Obviously not. Would he cease to pray? It all depends upon what one is to mean by prayer.

Prayer of the kind indicated is an effort to secure assistance in circumstances where the normal human means fail. Normally, for example, if a man would have bread, he sets about to plant the proper seed, or grind the flour, or mix the dough. He finds out, in short, the laws that govern the production or manufacture of breadstuffs; and he does not expect to secure his desired result until he has accommodated himself in all the requisite ways to these laws and conditions. If a man would save himself from a burning house, he looks for a fire-escape, or a rope, or calls for a ladder; again accommodating his action to the fundamental conditions of the situation. But if the heavens are long without rain and the seed dry up, or the fire burns away the means of escape, the man, at the end of his human resources, calls to another power for help.

Such a call for help is based upon two assumptions, which in some respects scarcely support each other. They are the assumption, first, that there is a power able to control to his beneficent purposes forces that are humanly uncontrollable; but, second, that this power will not act unless attracted by very special and fervent appeal. The latter fact, that special appeal is needed, may be due to the God’s impotence, his inability to be in all places at once: he does the best he can, hurrying hither and thither from one distressing circumstance to another. Or it may be due to his demand that his creatures shall continually turn their minds to him, an attitude which he succeeds in securing in them for the most part only when they are hard pressed with danger.

Stated thus baldly, it would be difficult even on the naïve planes of religious thought to find persons who would acknowledge either that their God was a jealous god, refusing help until all the requisite ceremonies of abasement and supplication had

been fulfilled, or that he was a finite God, half distracted by the imploring voices calling to him from all quarters of his universe. And yet, in prayer as it is ordinarily practised, both of these views are more or less unconsciously mingled. What prevents the emergence of their absurdity into clear consciousness is the relatively healthy thought underlying all prayer that if a man would secure something for himself he must himself spend some effort in the process. Ex nihilo nihil. In situations that pass beyond all his power of practical human control, there is nothing for him to do but to give his mere effort of adoration and hope.

On the higher levels of religious experience, this semi-magical conception of prayer grows increasingly in ill-repute. The thought is more and more in evidence that if God wished to prevent certain distresses, he would do so of his own beneficent accord. A request for specific aid, in short, would insinuate in him, either a failure to know in all circumstances what was best to be done, or an inability to keep wholly abreast of the tasks which he ought to perform. To save the majesty of God, prayer must become simply a turning of the mind to him, not for specific help, but for that general uplift of spirit which comes from the contemplation of his supreme perfection.

Here obviously is the germ of a higher and radically different conception of prayer. In the more naïve conception, help was to come from the “power not ourselves”; in the maturer conception, help is to come through the stimulation in ourselves of our own highest powers—a stimulation effected by the turning of our minds and spirits to the highest conceivable Reality.

The efficacy of prayer, in short, in this conception of it, will lie not in what it brings to us from without, but what it effects within,—what powers, efforts, aspirations it develops in us. Let us return to the kneeling worshippers. As they bowed their heads in fervent supplication, other men and women were distributing bread and clothing to destitute families, or were building shelters, or were clearing the streets of débris, or were patrolling with gun on shoulder against criminal disorder. Is it correct to say, as the older religions have always said, that the latter were engaged wholly in earthly affairs, while the former were entering the higher life of God and the spirit? Or is it truer to hold that

the digging away of débris was a far more effective and powerful prayer to God than supplication to him for help?

The kneeling worshippers were indeed turning their minds to their highest conceivable Reality. It was a Reality that they hoped would do things for them. But the diggers of débris, or the distributers of bread and clothing, were likewise, unconsciously no doubt, but in actual effect, turning their minds to their highest Reality. Face to face with the destruction of those things that give order and beauty and power to life, they were thinking (in their unconscious selves) of what a city for men and women and children ought to be and could be. It ought not to be a tumbled mass of bricks and burning wood; it ought not to be filled with starving people; it ought not to be given over to looters and murderers; it ought to be a city clean, ordered, happy. With their smoke-blinded eyes, they may not have seen far beyond the immediate demands of their ideal; but ideal it nevertheless was to which they lifted their souls in service. With all its vague inadequacy, it was for them then and there their highest Reality, their God—the ideal life in their members—to which they felt that they must devote themselves with full power of brain and muscle. They asked nothing of this their God; rather it was their God that asked everything of them, that stimulated them to the full, devoted summoning of all their essential powers.

When a child lies sick unto death, what is the effective form of prayer? If the divine life, as we have held, is our own ideal life, prayer to such God is the tireless, unflinching effort to bring some measure of that ideal life to realization. The death of a little child of causes that might be controlled is hardly in keeping with the ideal of life. Hence devotion to the ideal calls for every straining of effort,—the loving care, the ceaseless watching, the sacrifice of pleasure and comforts to purchase the best knowledge and skill to save the little life. This is the essential prayer; not the bowing in helpless misery and supplication before a God who needs to be called from some far forgetfulness to his proper tasks.

During recent winter storms, when New York was filled with hundreds of thousands of unemployed, several hundred of these unfortunate men, as reported by The New York Times, marched

through the snow-filled streets to one of the large evangelical churches where the weekly prayer meeting was being held. As they filed in, consternation spread among the worshippers. Their minister, however, stopped the oncoming crowd and asked them what they wanted. “We want shelter for the night in your church,” they said. The minister, looking at his cushioned pews, replied that he could not permit it. “But cannot we sleep in the basement?” they asked. No, the minister said, they could not, and he advised them to leave the church quietly, at the same time whispering to one of his congregation to call up the police. The police came in due order and rough-handled the men; and the prayers to God were resumed. Meanwhile, at another place in the city, a great body of men and women were gathered, drawn together at the instance of the American Association for Labor Legislation, to consider ways and means for relieving the distressing conditions of unemployment. At the latter meeting men spoke of municipal employment bureaus, of scientific plans for unemployment insurance; they brought forth facts and figures to prove the possibility of regulating business in such a way as to prevent the alternation of slack and rush seasons. They did not mention God. And yet one wonders whether their earnest and forceful deliberations were not a far more fervent prayer to God, a far more devoted yielding of themselves to the power of their ideal selves than the windy prayer of that minister (or of his people) who trusted his God so poorly that he called in the city’s police to help Him out of an ugly scrape.

Once the divine life is believed to be not a beneficent Person other than ourselves to whom we may call for help, but the finer life that lives potentially in ourselves, prayer ceases to be a semi-magic formula applicable to an order of existence beyond our own. Prayer is then nothing more or less than the turning of mind and spirit to the service of the ideal that lives in us. And it is most effectually realized not by departing from human activity, by yielding oneself to a power not oneself; but rather by a vigorous turning to the problems and difficulties of our life and enlisting every last shred of effort to set them right.

It follows then that there is prayer wherever there is service, service of any kind that makes for life-betterment. The chemist

who learns a new control has received an answer to his year-long prayer; the physician who finds the saving serum has prayed long and fervently and has been heard of his God. The business man who finds a way of juster coöperation with his men need never have named the word God or joined in holy adoration. But he has prayed—to his ideal of human brotherhood; and has prayed so vigorously that his God has heard and answered.

But in each case the God that has heard and answered has been the deeper possibilities of these men’s own life—their ideal life—which they, by their loyal devotion, have wrought out of mere possibility into some manner of actuality.

II

This in part is what prayer must mean when the old devotion to the personal God has vanished. The last shred of its supernatural, semi-magical connotation will have disappeared. If things worth while are to be done; if life values are to be accomplished and preserved, it must be by a knowledge and control of the conditions of their accomplishment. The devotion to the ideal in us presupposes therefore the most strenuous and persistent effort to learn these modes of control, to understand the deep and intricate ways of life, and to bend every power—of mind and body, of science and art—to bring life into harmony with their fundamental demands.

The situation may be illustrated by the contrast between the older and the newer ways of offering thanks to God for great benefits received. In the older days a man would pray, “O God, if thou wilt save the life of my child, there shall be so many candles burning before thine altar”; or “There shall be a new chapel added to thy house of prayer.” The burning candles and the new chapel may have served human purposes,—certainly the candle-makers had their small benefit of it; but the essential thought was not service to mankind, but tribute to God. When, however, the personal God has vanished and there is no divine life but our own deeper and more ideal existence, how shall a man give thanks for deliverance? Any man who has helped

wife and nurse and doctors to fight with all the power that human knowledge and skill can command for the life of his child, knows that out of the deep thanksgiving of his heart the thing that he would most wish to do thereafter would be to bend every effort to make such saving knowledge and skill accessible to fathers and mothers of other children, or to extend that knowledge and develop that skill to the saving of lives from still deeper distresses. He will build a hospital or endow a chair in medical research, or he will send his small contribution to some agency that makes for the amelioration of life conditions. And he will do this not as a tribute to a God who delights in adoration, but in simple devotion to the ideal of a more adequate human life.

Or, indeed, he might found a church or endow a minister. For are we to suppose that church and minister are to disappear when God the Perfect Person no longer lives to hear the old supplications? But it will be a very different church from the churches with which we are familiar. The church of to-day still lingers in its animistic and magical memories. The church services are supposed to have vital efficacy for the saving of men’s souls, not simply in the ordinary way of stimulating them by precept and example to better living, but by performing for them and with them certain rites pleasing to God. There is still in the minds of most churchmen something efficacious about the very attendance upon divine worship. It is an act which God enjoins and which he rewards when it is faithfully performed. It is like the pagan custom of bringing gifts to the altar: the god demands the gifts and rewards the bringer of gifts for his lowly obedience. It is true that the more enlightened churches are rapidly outgrowing this belief in the ceremonial efficacy of church service; but it would not be difficult to show that it still persists in so great measure as very definitely to color the word “religious” with the meaning “that which pertains to divine ceremonial.” The sharp line of demarcation between “religious” and “secular” is but the expression of this animistic and supernatural survival in religion.

But even churches that have largely outgrown belief in the saving efficacy of supernatural ceremonial, who believe that attendance

upon church service is wholly for the sake of inspiration to better living, seek to secure that inspiration by pointing the worshipper to the perfect God, or to his beloved Son. One may doubtless get inspiration from the tireless work of a Burbank, or a Curie, or a Florence Nightingale. If the church, however, uses such sources of inspiration, it is only by the way. Its fundamental source is the Perfect Person, the Eternal God. The church has the special function of calling men from their secular activities, of pointing upward to that great Guide and Friend and Provider in whose name and through whose power they are to live.

The new type of church will indeed call men to the remembrance of the divine life—it will point upward—but it will be their own divine life to which it will call them. It will find their divine life in their own ideals and in their loyal service of these ideals. Hence its primary interest will be not in what some perfect God wants of men, but what the God in themselves wants of them,—what types of things they long for, what powers of mind and body they are willing to devote to securing them. It will make far more difference to the new church whether its communicant is fighting child labor with all his power of mind and soul than whether he is a regular attendant upon weekly prayers. Indeed, it will know no true and rounded prayer save actual service. Hence its body of communicants will be first and foremost men and women engaged in human service. The condition for admission to the new church will be not a profession of faith but an exhibition of deed. Does a man care enough for anything worth while to put strenuous effort into its accomplishment; does he care for it not for his own sake primarily but for the sake of enhancing the life of his fellows and his world—it may be to discover a cancer cure, or to invent a dishwasher, or to make a better school—such a man or woman is welcomed into the new church. However circumscribed his ideal may be, inasmuch as it is an ideal of service it is the divine in him that is coming to life. He is already a worshipper.

By this token, there will be no place in the new church for the man who is anxious about his soul or who thinks much of what will happen to him after death. He belongs properly in

the congregation of self-seekers; not in the church of the divine life.

The new church, in short, will be primarily a clearing-house of service, to which men will go not to save their souls but to save their world. It will be a spiritual centre, so to speak, of all service-activities; a place for comparing notes, for learning of each other, for the heartening of one another in their worthful tasks. The leader of such a church will be a man not only deeply interested in and in touch with the agencies and activities of human betterment, but versed likewise in the fundamental sciences that make for a finer direction and control of life. His theology will be not an occult research of supernatural relationships and powers, but physics and chemistry, biology and sociology, ethics and philosophy—all the fundamental approaches, in short, to the problem of human self-realization.

III

Yet splendid as such religious life may be conceded to be, it will apparently lack one of the primary consolations of the older belief, the assurance, namely, that the fundamental government of the world is just and good. “God’s in his heaven; all’s right with the world.” If, as we have been urging, God is not in his heaven, it may indeed, for all we know to the contrary, be all wrong with the world. A few years ago we were very much perturbed by certain conclusions reached by the accredited masters of science. The universe was running down, they said, and would end a lifeless, frozen mass. The thought of an ever-living God was then a comfort against such ominous prophecy. If God lives, it follows that all things of value will live, that the world cannot go to ultimate ruin.

That old prophecy, however, of a frozen and lifeless world no longer has honor in our land. Recent discoveries of new types of energy, a more penetrating analysis both of the mathematics and mechanics of the situation, show the prophecy to have been made on wholly insufficient and insecure grounds. The old dogmatic materialism has had to give way to a critical and open-minded

evolutionism which tends more and more to regard the cosmic process as one of expanding power, in which the values for which we deeply care—conscious life, purposive direction, science, art, morality—appear to have a place of growing security and effectiveness. And yet the evolutionism of the day, unlike the older religious thought, finds no cosmic certainty upon which it may utterly bank. The universe, with all the high values that have been achieved, may indeed go to ruin. There is no absolute guarantee for the future. All that modern evolutionism can say to us is that looking over such history of the world as is accessible, and analyzing the processes there found, it seems highly probable that the line of the future will be a line of advance, an advance from relative disorganization to organization, from a large degree of mechanical indifference to increasing organic solidarity and integration, from antagonisms and conflicts to mutuality and coöperation. But it is only probable. There is no God who holds the destiny in his hands and makes it certain of accomplishment.

In view of this uncertainty as to the world’s government and outcome, it may be asked whether the new type of religion will not be weaker in moral and spiritual vigor than the old. Do not vigor and initiative spring from hope and sure confidence in the fundamental rightness of the world? In answer to this one has but to ask the question: in what type of situation does the human character grow strong and heroic,—that in which there is no doubt of the happy outcome, in which the individual plays his part, assured that nothing can happen wrongly; or that in which the outcome is uncertain, in which the individual realizes that he must fight his way, knowing not whether victory or defeat will greet him, but assured only that whatever happens, he must fight and fight to the end? Is it unfair to say that the old religion with its confident, childlike resting on God (“He loves the burthen”) developed a type of character that was not, in the mass, conspicuously heroic? “God knows best”; “It will all come out right”; “Thy will be done”—these are not expressions of fighting men; they are expressions of men who resign themselves to the ruling of powers greater than themselves. A civilization characterized by such an attitude will not be one strenuously

alive to eliminate the sorry evils of life. But the men who believe that the issue of the universe is in doubt, that there is no powerful God to lead the hosts to victory, will, if they have the stuff of men in them, strike out their manliest to help whatever good there is in the world to win its way against the forces of evil. A civilization of such men will be a tough-fibred civilization, strenuous to fight, grimly ready, like the Old Guard, to die but never surrender.

There is, in short, something subtly weakening about the optimism of the traditional religions. Like the historic soothing syrup, with its unadvertised opiate, it soothes the distress not by curing the disease but by temporarily paralyzing the function. “To trust God nor be afraid” means in most cases—not all—to settle back from a too anxious concern about the evils of the world. “God will take care of his own!” How different is this from the attitude: “The task is ours and the whole world’s and we must see it through!”

IV

But from another point of view there was an element of power in the older religion which seems at first blush to be utterly lacking in the type of new religion we are describing. A prominent world-evangelist of the Young Men’s Christian Association was recently lecturing to the college students of New York City on the ethical and religious life. It was significant to note that most of his talk to students concerned itself with temptations and that the invariable outcome of each talk was that the one infallible means of meeting temptation was to realize God’s presence in one’s life, to companion with God, to feel him near and watchful, ever sympathetic, ever ready with divine help. Students do indeed get power from that kind of belief. They feel themselves before an all-seeing eye, a hand is on their shoulder, a voice is in their ear; and when the difficult moment comes they are not alone. How utterly uncompanioned, how lonely, on the other hand, must be the student who knows no beneficent, all-seeing, and all-caring Father. When his difficult moment comes he stands in desolate isolation. Victory or defeat then must hang

upon his own puny strength and wavering determination. It is a favorite argument with Roman Catholics that the belief in God is the one surest guard against the sexual irregularity of young men. Remove God, the one strong bulwark, from their lives, and the flood of their passions will sweep them to their destruction.

Such considerations as these must indeed give one pause; yet I feel assured that they need not hold us long. How does a man get strength for right living? He begins—in his childhood as in the childhood of the race—by getting it through fear. The child is told, upon pain of punishment, not to do certain things. There will come a time when it will know why it ought not to do these things; but in its first months and, in a degree, through its early years, it refrains from doing them simply by reason of the pressure of the superior power of its parents. Later it refrains through unconscious imitation and affection. It lives in the light and love of its parents; and it consciously and unconsciously shapes its life after the pattern of their lives. When difficulties press, the child flees to the mother or the father for comfort and advice. Those are delicious days, of warm trust and joy and loving security. The child nestles up against the stronger power of those it loves. But the child grows to manhood and womanhood. Whence then does it get its strength for right living? The fear of the infant days, the imitation and affection of childhood and youth are now transformed into a new attitude,—an understanding of the reason in the right and the unreason in the wrong. There are many factors and influences that now take the place of parent power and affection: the love and admiration of one’s group, the customs of one’s people, the stimulus of great persons. But the essential power now is the power of insight—of so understanding the forces and principles of life that one’s whole self is surrendered in deep reverence and service to the things that ought to be. Assuredly, no character is mature until it has reached this last stage. There is indeed something beautiful about the boy who in the midst of temptation goes to his father and talks it all out with him; who clings to the father’s hand to lead him safely through the dangerous ways. But the

boy is only on the way to moral and spiritual maturity; he is not yet morally and spiritually mature.

The doctrine that the great evangelist and the evangelical churches in general preach is a doctrine admirably adapted to a condition of moral and spiritual immaturity; it is a doctrine, in short, for little boys and girls; it is not a doctrine for morally and spiritually mature men and women. I doubt even, in fact, whether it is a doctrine for college youths and maidens; for I note in my own relations with college men and women that there is among them the growing consciousness of right for right’s sake, a growing cleanness and earnestness of life; and this is so, I take it, not because they believe such conduct and attitude to be commanded or because they are aware of a heavenly Father who watches, but because their eyes have been opened to see the truth and the truth has made them free.

I believe that the problem of how to teach a young man to meet temptation is a deeply serious problem. But I believe small good will come of falling back upon the old easy expedient of half-frightening, half-cajoling the young man into submission by reminding him of the all-watching eye and the all-considering heart of the great Father. That way is so easy that it is really unfair to the victims. It is like hypnotizing a man into morality. The way of the new religion is the harder but more lasting, more self-respecting way of developing the whole moral self of the boy and the youth and the man,—beginning far back in childhood and unremittingly, understandingly continuing the training, until when the child becomes the youth and the youth the man, righteousness is the firm, sweet habit of his life. We human beings have an inveterate love of shirking our tasks. We neglect the essential moral culture of the infant and the child; we let the moments and the days slip by in the life of the youth without putting any hard thought upon his training in self-control, in courage, in moral insight; and then suddenly, when signs of danger begin to show in the young man, we grow panic-stricken and implore him to call on God to save him. The fact is that the task was ours and we shirked it. Ours was the responsibility; and we had no right to put it off on a miracle-working Deity.

“When half-gods go,” says Emerson, “the gods arrive.”

When once we give up this easy way of moral and religious hypnosis; when once we believe that God, the watchful policeman of the universe, no longer exists, we shall solemnly and seriously take up the task we have so long cast upon a deity’s shoulders—our task of shaping and directing and making strong the moral possibilities of the children we bring into the world. From the old consolation, in short, of divine protection, we shall awake to a new loyalty to our fundamental moral obligations.

It is significant in this connection to note that the farther we go back in the history of religion, the more the moral reference of situations is secondary and the supernatural reference primary. The ten commandments, for example, were first of all a divine behest, and only secondarily a series of laws founded on the essential requirements of human well-being. But as we come nearer to our own day, the moral quality of situations tends more and more to usurp the primacy of the old supernatural reference. The limit of such evolution is the disappearance altogether of the supernatural, the evaluation, ultimately, of all situations and activities in terms of their inherent good or bad for the life of humanity and the world.

*   *   *   *   *

The old loyalty, in short, was the loyalty of loving children; the new loyalty is the loyalty of strong-charactered men and women. Has the time come for moral and spiritual maturity? To some of us there is no longer an alternative. “When I was a child I spake as a child; I understood as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” In the light of spiritual maturity, the god of magic, the god of miraculous power, the god of loving protection, the god of all-seeing care—the Parent God—must give way to the God that is the very inner ideal life of ourselves, our own deep and abiding possibilities of being; the God in us that stimulates us to what is highest in value and power.

THE PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

August 18, 1914

My Fellow Countrymen:

I suppose that every thoughtful man in America has asked himself during the last troubled weeks what influence the European war may exert upon the United States; and I take the liberty of addressing a few words to you in order to point out that it is entirely within our own choice what its effects upon us will be, and to urge very earnestly upon you the sort of speech and conduct which will best safeguard the nation against distress and disaster.

The effect of the war upon the United States will depend upon what American citizens say and do. Every man who really loves America will act and speak in the true spirit of neutrality, which is the spirit of impartiality and fairness and friendliness to all concerned.

The spirit of the nation in this critical matter will be determined largely by what individuals and society and those gathered in public meetings do and say; upon what newspapers and magazines contain; upon what our ministers utter in their pulpits, and men proclaim as their opinions on the streets.

The people of the United States are drawn from many nations and chiefly from the nations now at war. It is natural and inevitable that there should be the utmost variety of sympathy with regard to the issues and circumstances of the conflict. Some will wish one nation, others another, to succeed in the momentous struggle.

It will be easy to excite passion and difficult to allay it. Those responsible for exciting it will assume a heavy responsibility; responsibility for no less a thing than that the people of the United States, whose love of their country, and whose loyalty to its government should unite them as Americans, all bound in honor and affection to think first of her and her interests, may be divided into camps of hostile opinions, hot against each other, involved in the war itself in impulse and opinion, if not in action.

Such diversions among us would be fatal to our peace of mind

and might seriously stand in the way of the proper performance of our duty as the one great nation at peace, the one people holding itself ready to play a part of impartial mediation and speak the counsels of peace and accommodation, not as a partisan, but as a friend.

I venture, therefore, my fellow countrymen, to speak a solemn word of warning to you against that deepest, most subtle, most essential breach of neutrality which may spring out of partisanship, out of passionately taking sides.

The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name during these days that are to try men’s souls. We must be impartial in thought as well as in action, must put a curb upon our sentiments as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another. My thought is of America. I am speaking, I feel sure, the earnest wish and purpose of every thoughtful American that this great country of ours, which is, of course, the first in our thoughts and in our hearts, should show herself in this time of peculiar trial a nation fit beyond others to exhibit the fine poise of undisturbed judgment, the dignity of self-control, the efficiency of dispassionate action; a nation that neither sits in judgment upon others nor is disturbed in her own counsels, and which keeps herself fit and free to do what is honest and disinterested and truly serviceable for the peace of the world.

Shall we not resolve to put upon ourselves the restraint which will bring to our people the happiness and the great lasting influence for peace we covet for them?

Woodrow Wilson

ATAVISM

Karl Remer

The city had withstood its besiegers for a long time. The guns on the mountain had poured down shot, the guns on the north and on the south had battered the old walls. The walls had crumbled and fallen. The walls were old and they had been considered picturesque for so long that it was as if they had forgotten the sturdy virtues of their youth.

Through the breaches came the soldiers. Tribesmen they seemed of the old days of the Grand Khan.

The soldiers were thinking. They were not accustomed to thought. Was it true, ran their thoughts, that their leader had promised that there would be no looting? He had promised, this they knew, that there would be no looting after he entered the city. What was the meaning of that “he”? Did it mean the army or did it mean the general? Did it mean the soldiers? There was the rumor that the general could not leave his present quarters for three days. Rain, or snow, or ice, or drought prevented. What was the meaning of that? Did it mean three days of fine, bloody looting?

The soldiers entered the city. Like the tribesmen of the Grand Khan they poured in. Through one gate, through two gates, through three gates they came. It was a sullen business and silently did they press forward. They had not made up their minds about those three days. They were not sure about the general. Perhaps he was playing one of his grim jokes. Was he, perhaps, already within the city? He had promised before many that there would be no looting. The foreigner, the Jesus-religion man in black clothes, had stood beside him. It was hard to tell, where foreigners were concerned, how much to believe. Foreigners were an unusual sort of people. Most of them did not look dangerous, but any one of them might have power. It was one of the inexplicable things about foreigners that one could never tell the amount of power a foreigner had by the amount he used. To have power and not use it, to have rice and not eat it—strange men these foreigners.

The soldiers poured into the city. Like the tribesmen of the Grand Khan they came; but not like the tribesmen of the Grand Khan. The loot and the fun were before them, yet they restrained themselves.

The soldiers were yellow and clad in yellow, and they poured through the gates as the yellow Yangtsze pours between its banks. Silver and silks were before them, but the hand was withheld from the knife and a sullen silence was around them.

Some one began it. There came a curse and an answer, a taunt and a gunshot. So it began.

Here was a shop boarded, bolted, and locked. A crowd of soldiers gathered before it. They demanded that the shop be opened. No reply came from within. The demand was repeated and emphasized with a blow of a rifle butt against the boards. Still there was no reply. More gun butts fell upon the boards and they began to creak and snap. A scared man within began to dicker for life, property, and family. He paid and paid high—for nothing. The shop was broken open. Stripped and wounded, the man was sent down the street. His goods became the playthings of the soldiers. His wife lay above, outraged and stabbed. His daughter was in the hands of other tormentors. At the command of the soldiers, his son began carrying his father’s goods and piling them as the soldiers directed. There was a look of death upon the boy’s face; he was sick and weary. The soldiers demanded more silver. The boy knew there was no more. He knew that his father had paid it all to save the family. He was so sadly sure he would not look. The soldiers cut him down and went their way.

There was a ricksha coolie who had sunk frightened against a wall in a side street. He had hidden his family, but he, himself, had come forth from hiding in the hope of much work and large pay. With quaking knees he had pulled loads of loot for the soldiers. At last the horror had overcome him and here he cowered against a wall. He was called but he could not move. He knew that he could not pass down the bloody streets again. The call was repeated and still he did not move. They shot him as he lay and took his ricksha from him. That street also, a little street and a quiet one, had its spreading mark of red.

A poor barber lay trembling upon his bamboo bed. He had no family and few friends. Why had he not run away? He lay thinking and thinking but he could think of no good reason. As he lay thus they came upon his shop. Down came the boards. He paid them all his savings, a pitifully small sum, and they demanded his wife and children. They killed him because he had neither the one nor the other. “For,” said they, “no honest man is without a family.”

There was a girl of eighteen whom the soldiers seized. Guile or temporary insanity prompted her to play her part as if with pleasure. She smiled on them and shrugged her shoulders most coquettishly. She bandied jokes with them and made advances. A petty officer accepted her advances and, later, had her beaten to death. The soldiers approved. “These people must be taught,” said they, “that modesty is a woman’s duty.”

For two days the riot continued. For two nights there was no sleep but the sleep of death. The moans of the women, the groans of the men, fire and fresh alarms made sleep a thing that seemed years away. The city was red and the blood flowed. Loot and the lives of men, silver and the bodies of women, these things did the victors take as is old custom in China. Then came the third day and the general.

The foreigner in black clothes, the man of the religion of Jesus, had lived through these two days and two nights. “One can never tell,” said the soldiers, “what power these foreigners have.” “That is the foreigner’s house,” said the soldiers, “let it alone.”

The foreigner had lived through the two days and the two nights, but he had not slept. He had been thinking of the promise of the general. “There will be no looting after I enter the city”—these were the general’s words and the man who had spoken them had not yet entered. As a joke the speech was not bad, but too much blood and no sleep spoils the taste for jokes.

The general entered with an important noise of trumpets. Where he rode the looting stopped. He seemed weary, however, and did not ride far. The smoke of the many fires may have hurt his eyes. The day may have been too hot. In any case the general seemed discreetly weary and discreetly blind.

The man of the religion of Jesus came to the general. His words were to the point. “Is this the way you keep promises?” he asked.

The general did not like directness and he did not care to argue. “There is no looting,” he said, and with a smile he pointed down the street.

“There is looting everywhere except before your eyes.”

“There is none,” said the general. It was characteristic of him to add, “What there is must be stopped.”

“By whom?” asked the foreigner.

“Take one hundred men,” said the general, “go up and down in the city. If you see looting or outrage, cut off the guilty man’s head. As for myself, I have seen none.”

The foreigner hesitated, but thoughts came to him of the last two days. If he did nothing, who would act? Opportunity seemed to him duty. So in despair and rage he agreed and at the head of his hundred he set out.

They came suddenly to a corner where a soldier was searching a dead man’s clothes. Here was guilt so plain no proof was needed. The man was quickly sentenced and in another moment his head was off. “Justice,” said the foreigner to himself, “must upon occasion be swift.”

They came upon a house where a widow and her young daughter lived. The house was small and until now it had been overlooked. A noise of scuffling caused the foreigner to look within. The younger woman lay bruised and naked upon the floor, the mother was still struggling with her assailant. Two heads fell and the foreigner smiled. “Payment,” said he to himself, “is a thing dear to the Lord. Here two have paid.”

The hundred and their leader came upon a half-crazed soldier who was trying to run up a narrow street with two mattresses which he had stolen. The mattresses brushed the sides of the buildings upon the narrow street so that, as the man’s load struck gate or door-post upon the one side or the other, the man reeled as a drunken man does. They caught him and made him kneel upon those very mattresses. The hundred went on and the man’s head was left resting softly upon the stolen goods. The mattresses

were becoming red. “The blood of justice is red also,” said the foreigner.

Thus did the man of the religion of Jesus and his hundred make progress through this city of great suffering.

They seized a soldier carrying a woman. She was groaning. He protested that he was carrying her to shelter. The man had earrings and a chain in his belt. The woman’s ears were bleeding. The good knife descended and again punishment found guilt.

They went on and as they went there came a great joy into the heart of the foreigner. “These people,” said he to himself, “are children and they need a lesson. By God’s help they shall have it. Many lessons are hard but many must be learned.”

They seized an old soldier who was picking up the trinkets that had been dropped before a jewelry shop. He swore that he had robbed no man, but the man in black decided against him and off came his head.

As the hundred passed on they sent fear before them and left a trail of red justice behind them. The joy burned brighter in the heart of the man in black. “Have I not talked to these people of the justice of God?” said he to himself. “Now they are seeing it. Now they will know it to be swift and terrible. A knife with a keen blade, a judge with a clean heart, these things this people needs.”

They came upon two soldiers who were quarrelling over the division of a sable coat. Each had an end and the altercation was proceeding over the outstretched garment. They protested that they had bought the coat not two hours before and that they had paid for it. One begged piteously for his life, but the man in black shook his head.

So the expedition of the hundred became a thing of blood and more blood. The heart of the man of the religion of Jesus was filled with a grim ecstasy. It seemed to dance within him. “Am I not,” he chanted to himself, “a messenger of the Lord to a sinful people? With what measure they have measured, have I measured unto them. As they have pitied others, so have I pitied them. Blood must flow, for blood alone can cleanse. Blood alone can cleanse.”

A young soldier was caught as he climbed the stairs of a

small house. He was brought into the street and told to kneel. “I have heard of your Jesus and his forgiveness,” he said; “now I know.” He knelt with a sort of dignity, the dignity that death brings to the brave, and his head fell.

His words struck through the blood fever to the heart of the man in black. For a second he closed his eyes and when he opened them again he saw with his old clearness. He knew that blood is blood and shame came over him.

He sent back his hundred, saying: “Go. I have done wrong.”

He came to his own house and to his own small room where a crucifix hung above the bed. He knelt and remained for a long time with his eyes fixed upon the figure. The words, “Father, forgive them,” came from his lips as from the lips of a stranger. For two days and for two nights he had not slept. He sank slowly to the floor and lay still before the quiet figure on the cross.

THE CHANGING TEMPER AT HARVARD

Gilbert V. Seldes

This article is not intended in any sense as a reply to the Confessions of a Harvard Man published several months ago in The Forum by Mr. Harold E. Stearns. The importance of those articles, as Mr. Stearns had reason to point out, lay not so much in what they told about Harvard as in what they told about him. Precisely. Analyses of the temper of Young America have their place. The temper of Harvard itself, however, is something quite apart, and it is to that alone that this article is devoted. The importance of it lies only in the number of significant and true things it tells about Harvard.

And that, perhaps, is importance enough. I say this in none of that college spirit which makes a man believe that his college, because it is his, is singled out for the peculiar attentions of the high gods who brood over academic welfare. A change, such as I am describing, if it took place at any other college, would be quite as important. The fact is that it could have taken place nowhere else.

Which brings us to the old Harvard and the popular misconceptions of its character. It was supposed to create a type of man, effeminate, detached, affecting superiority, incapable, and snobbish. Certainly men of this order did graduate from Harvard, but the great truth is that there was no Harvard type; there were always Harvard men, but there was never a “Harvard man.” The importance of this distinction is inestimable, because it points to the fundamental thing in the older Harvard life: its insistence upon individuality. In that the old Harvard struck deep through superficial things and came at once upon the fundamental thing identical in democracy and in aristocracy. It bestowed each man in accordance with his deserts and, following Hamlet’s dictum, according to its own nobility; and gave him according to his needs and according to his powers. Like every truly democratic institution, Harvard was aristocratic; like every truly aristocratic institution, Harvard was democratic. At the very moment when it was supposed to be breeding aristocratic

snobs, Harvard was fulfilling the great mission of democratic institutions in encouraging each man to be himself as greatly and completely as he could. At the very moment when it was supposed to exercise a mean and narrowing influence over its students, it was fulfilling the great mission of cultural institutions in helping each man to a ripening of his powers, to enlargement of his interests, and to widening of his sympathies. Its effeminates went to war against dirt and danger and disease; its snobs devoted themselves to the advancement of social justice; its detached men became bankers and mill-owners and journalists; one of its weaklings conquered the world. The great thing was that in all of them the old impulse to a deep and full life remained; the tradition of culture was beginning to prosper. So that Harvard could send out a statesman who was interested in the Celtic revival, a littérateur with a fondness for baseball, a financier who appreciated art and a philosopher who appreciated life. At the same time it graduated thousands of men who took with them into professional life and into business life a feeling, perhaps only a memory, of the variety and excellence of human achievement—men who without pride or shame, which are equally snobbish, tried to substitute discipline and cultivation for disorder and barbarity. It is no petty accomplishment.

To achieve it Harvard had to stand with bitter determination against the current sweeping toward the practical, the immediate, the successful. At the same time it bought its cherished democracy of thought at the price of social anarchy. The college as a body made very little effort to protect or to comfort its individuals. It was assumed that he who came could make his own way; if the way were hard, so much the better! The triumph would be sweeter. The great fraternities grew in strength, possibly because there was no countervailing force issuing from the college itself. But there was never a determined organized attempt to make the individual life of the undergraduate happy or comfortable. In its place there was a huge, inchoate, and tremendously successful attempt to make the intellectual life of the individual interesting and productive. Each man found his own; fought to win his place, struggled against loneliness and despair, and emerged sturdier in spirit, younger and braver and better.

Some fell. They were the waste products of a civilization which was harsh, selfish in its interests, generous in its appreciations, a microcosm of life. A pity that some should have to fall! But it would be a greater pity if for them the battle should cease. Because the fighting was always fair. The strength which developed in many a man in his efforts to make a paper, or a club, or even in qualifying to join some little group of men, was often the basis of a successful life. With it came an intensification of personality; the absence of a set type made the suppression of the individual at Harvard almost impossible. I am certain that no one with a personality worth preserving ever lost it there.

I wonder whether those who speak and write about democracy at our colleges ever realize the importance of this intellectual freedom. Mr. Owen Johnson is not unconscious of it, yet his whole attack upon the colleges, practically unchallenged, was on account of their lack of social democracy. It is considered a dreadful thing among us that rich A should not want to talk to poor B; but it would never occur to us to be shocked if they had nothing to say to each other except small talk about baseball or shop talk about courses. And if the choice is between social promiscuity and intellectual freedom, we must say, “Let their ways be apart eternally, so long as they are free.”

The terrible fact is that the undergraduate in his effort to attain social unity has sacrificed the liberty of thought. It would be indelicate for a Harvard man, however generous, to condemn other colleges. Let Mr. Johnson speak for Yale: “It is ruled by the tyranny of the average, the democracy of a bourgeois commonplaceness.” And an undergraduate wrote in The Yale Literary Magazine that “we are accounted for as one conglomeration of body first, head next, and last and least, soul. As one we go to chapel, as one our parental authorities would like to see us pastured at Commons, and as one we are educated.” For Princeton The Nassau Lit writes this significant editorial: “It is not long before the freshman learns that a certain kind of thinking, too, is quite necessary here, and from that time on, until graduation, the same strong influence is at work, until the habit of conforming has become a strongly ingrained second

nature…. Four years of this … results in a certain fixity of ideas…. We are brought up under the sway of what seems to us a rather bourgeois conventionality.”

Apart from the fact that the term “bourgeois,” contradictory to the aristo-democratic ideal in essence, occurs in two of these statements, I do not think that they call for extended comment. These things, at least, no man has been able to say of Harvard; even to this day there remains a fierce, jealous, almost joyous tradition of intellectual freedom—in spite of all!

I say “in spite of all,” because I am now leaving the old Harvard and am about to record the deep conversion of recent years which says a prosperous and Philistine No to everything the old Harvard has said, and which is surrendering its spirit to the very forces against which the old Harvard made its arm strong and its heart of triple brass. I do not mean that Harvard will cease to be great; I do mean that it may cease to be Harvard. It is hard to deal with a phenomenon of this sort solely by means of actualities. I am describing the disintegration of a social background, the subsidence of one tone and the emergence, not yet complete, of another. But, yielding to the present insistence upon “facts,” I shall name a number of significant developments which indicate the nature of what I have called the changing temper at Harvard.