This history has come to a stage when the moral man, the complete man,
is more and more giving way, almost without knowing it, to make room for
the political and the commercial man, the man of the limited purpose.
This process, aided by the wonderful progress in science, is assuming
gigantic proportion and power, causing the upset of man's moral balance,
obscuring his human side under the shadow of soul-less organization. We
have felt its iron grip at the root of our life, and for the sake of
humanity we must stand up and give warning to all, that this nationalism
is a cruel epidemic of evil that is sweeping over the human world of the
present age, and eating into its moral vitality.
I have a deep love and a great respect for the British race as human
beings. It has produced great-hearted men, thinkers of great thoughts,
doers of great deeds. It has given rise to a great literature. I know
that these people love justice and freedom, and hate lies. They are
clean in their minds, frank in their manners, true in their friendships;
in their behaviour they are honest and reliable. The personal experience
which I have had of their literary men has roused my admiration not
merely for their power of thought or expression but for their chivalrous
humanity. We have felt the greatness of this people as we feel the sun;
but as for the Nation, it is for us a thick mist of a stifling nature
covering the sun itself.
This government by the Nation is neither British nor anything else; it
is an applied science and therefore more or less similar in its
principles wherever it is used. It is like a hydraulic press, whose
pressure is impersonal, and on that account completely effective. The
amount of its power may vary in different engines. Some may even be
driven by hand, thus leaving a margin of comfortable looseness in their
tension, but in spirit and in method their differences are small. Our
government might have been Dutch, or French, or Portuguese, and its
essential features would have remained much the same as they are now.
Only perhaps, in some cases, the organization might not have been so
densely perfect, and, therefore, some shreds of the human might still
have been clinging to the wreck, allowing us to deal with something
which resembles our own throbbing heart.
Before the Nation came to rule over us we had other governments which
were foreign, and these, like all governments, had some element of the
machine in them. But the difference between them and the government by
the Nation is like the difference between the hand-loom and the
power-loom. In the products of the hand-loom the magic of man's living
fingers finds its expression, and its hum harmonizes with the music of
life. But the power-loom is relentlessly lifeless and accurate and
monotonous in its production.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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