of humanity is only possible, if we lose faith in the power which brings
to it strength, when its defeat is greatest, and calls out new life from
the depth of its destruction. We must admit that there is a living soul
in the West which is struggling unobserved against the hugeness of the
organisations under which men, women and children are being crushed, and
whose mechanical necessities are ignoring laws that are spiritual and
human,--the soul whose sensibilities refuse to be dulled completely by
dangerous habits of heedlessness in dealings with races for whom it
lacks natural sympathy. The West could never have risen to the eminence
she has reached, if her strength were merely the strength of the
brute, or of the machine. The divine in her heart is suffering from the
injuries inflicted by her hands upon the world,--and from this pain of
her higher nature flows the secret balm which will bring healing to
those injuries. Time after time she has fought against herself and has
undone the chains, which with her own hands she had fastened round
helpless limbs; and though she forced poison down the throat of a great
nation at the point of sword for gain of money, she herself woke up to
withdraw from it, to wash her hands clean again. This shows hidden
springs of humanity in spots which look dead and barren. It proves that
the deeper truth in her nature, which can survive such career of cruel
cowardliness, is not greed, but reverence for unselfish ideals. It would
be altogether unjust, both to us and to Europe, to say that she has
fascinated the modern Eastern mind by the mere exhibition of her power.
Through the smoke of cannons and dust of markets the light of her moral
nature has shone bright, and she has brought to us the ideal of
ethical freedom, whose foundation lies deeper than social conventions
and whose province of activity is world-wide.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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