doubt when we rush to the Western market to buy this foreign product in
exchange for our own inheritance? I am aware how difficult it is to know
one's self; and the man who is intoxicated furiously denies his
drunkenness; yet the West herself is anxiously thinking of her problems
and trying experiments. But she is like a glutton, who has not the
heart to give up his intemperance in eating, and fondly clings to the
hope that he can cure his nightmares of indigestion by medicine. Europe
is not ready to give up her political inhumanity, with all the baser
passions of man attendant upon it; she believes only in modification of
systems, and not in change of heart.
We are willing to buy their machine-made systems, not with our hearts,
but with our brains. We shall try them and build sheds for them, but not
enshrine them in our homes or temples. There are races who worship the
animals they kill; we can buy meat from them when we are hungry, but not
the worship which goes with the killing. We must not vitiate our
children's minds with the superstition that business is business, war is
war, politics is politics. We must know that man's business has to be
more than mere business, and so should be his war and politics. You had
your own industry in Japan; how scrupulously honest and true it was, you
can see by its products,--by their grace and strength, their
conscientiousness in details, where they can hardly be observed. But the
tidal wave of falsehood has swept over your land from that part of the
world where business is business, and honesty is followed merely as the
best policy. Have you never felt shame when you see the trade
advertisements, not only plastering the whole town with lies and
exaggerations, but invading the green fields, where the peasants do
their honest labour, and the hill-tops, which greet the first pure light
of the morning? It is so easy to dull our sense of honour and delicacy
of mind with constant abrasion, while falsehoods stalk abroad with proud
steps in the name of trade, politics and patriotism, that any protest
against their perpetual intrusion into our lives is considered to be
sentimentalism, unworthy of true manliness.
And it has come to pass that the children of those heroes who would keep
their word at the point of death, who would disdain to cheat men for
vulgar profit, who even in their fight would much rather court defeat
than be dishonourable, have become energetic in dealing with falsehoods
and do not feel humiliated by gaining advantage from them. And this has
been effected by the charm of the word "modern." But if undiluted
utility be modern, beauty is of all ages; if mean selfishness be modern,
the human ideals are no new inventions. And we must know for certain
that however modern may be the proficiency which cripples man for the
sake of methods and machines, it will never live to be old.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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