Out of E. M. Forster’s _A Passage to India_ (1924) comes a compassionate plea for British understanding of India. But even understanding is not enough; there must also be love. This great subcontinent, divided by geography, economics, caste, and religion, has a heritage of misery and discord. The book’s two great themes are the divisions which sunder India and the love which alone can make it whole. It has been taken by the British without love in a union which is rape. In one of the parallels which inform the theme, this action is represented on the interpersonal level by the projected loveless marriage of Adela Quested and British civil servant Ronny Heaslop. The novel moves to a climax when the hysterical Adela mistakenly accuses the sensitive Dr. Aziz, a Mohammedan Indian, of attempted rape in the sinister Marabar caves. Aziz is acquitted, but his career is ruined and his spirit desolated. But the influence of Ronny’s dead mother, Mrs. Moore, returns, through the memory of her and the presence of her two other children, to dispel some of the evil. At the book’s end Aziz achieves a partial reconciliation with Cyril Fielding, the Englishman who has defended him at the cost of ostracism. But as they part Aziz shouts: If it’s fifty-five hundred years we shall get rid of you, yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then ... you and I shall be friends. As an appeal either for love or withdrawal from India, the book is a political instrument. It is also a revealing commentary upon one of the causes of what Winston Churchill called “the dismemberment of the British Empire.” =Aldous Huxley and George Orwell: The Future in Perspective= Huxley’s _Brave New World_ (1932) and Orwell’s _1984_, which followed it seventeen years later, are political instruments through the honor and revulsion they will create in any reader whose political beliefs are formed by the democratic tradition. Although both these fine novels are written in the future, neither is a fairy tale spun from air. Their only resemblance to fairy tales is a horde of enough all-too-real goblins and witches to make a month of _Walpurgisnachts_. Huxley, using godlessness and immorality, and Orwell, using totalitarian government, create nightmares well calculated to increase resistance to tendencies in modern life which could produce the results so strikingly conjured up in their novels. THE CONTINENT =Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Nihilism and Its Rejection=