I must not hesitate to acknowledge where Europe is great, for great she
is without doubt. We cannot help loving her with all our heart, and
paying her the best homage of our admiration,--the Europe who, in her
literature and art, pours out an inexhaustible cascade of beauty and
truth fertilizing all countries and all time; the Europe who, with a
mind which is titanic in its untiring power, is sweeping the height and
the depth of the universe, winning her homage of knowledge from the
infinitely great and the infinitely small, applying all the resources of
her great intellect and heart in healing the sick and alleviating those
miseries of man which up till now we were contented to accept in a
spirit of hopeless resignation; the Europe who is making the earth yield
more fruit than seemed possible, coaxing and compelling the great forces
of nature into man's service. Such true greatness must have its motive
power in spiritual strength. For only the spirit of man can defy all
limitations, have faith in its ultimate success, throw its search-light
beyond the immediate and the apparent, gladly suffer martyrdom for ends
which cannot be achieved in its lifetime and accept failure without
acknowledging defeat. In the heart of Europe runs the purest stream of
human love, of love of justice, of spirit of self-sacrifice for higher
ideals. The Christian culture of centuries has sunk deep in her life's
core. In Europe we have seen noble minds who have ever stood up for the
rights of man irrespective of colour and creed; who have braved calumny
and insult from their own people in fighting for humanity's cause and
raising their voices against the mad orgies of militarism, against the
rage for brutal retaliation or rapacity that sometimes takes possession
of a whole people; who are always ready to make reparation for wrongs
done in the past by their own nations and vainly attempt to stem the
tide of cowardly injustice that flows unchecked because the resistance
is weak and innocuous on the part of the injured. There are these
knight-errants of modern Europe who have not lost their faith in the
disinterested love of freedom, in the ideals which own no geographical
boundaries or national self-seeking. These are there to prove that the
fountainhead of the water of everlasting life has not run dry in Europe,
and from thence she will have her rebirth time after time. Only there,
where Europe is too consciously busy in building up her power, defying
her deeper nature and mocking it, she is heaping up her iniquities to
the sky, crying for God's vengeance and spreading the infection of
ugliness, physical and moral, over the face of the earth with her
heartless commerce heedlessly outraging man's sense of the beautiful and
the good. Europe is supremely good in her beneficence where her face is
turned to all humanity; and Europe is supremely evil in her maleficent
aspect where her face is turned only upon her own interest, using all
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