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.