Therefore I ask you to have the strength of faith and clarity of mind to
know for certain, that the lumbering structure of modern progress,
riveted by the iron bolts of efficiency, which runs upon the wheels of
ambition, cannot hold together for long. Collisions are certain to
occur; for it has to travel upon organised lines, it is too heavy to
choose its own course freely; and once it is off the rails, its endless
train of vehicles is dislocated. A day will come, when it will fall in a
heap of ruin and cause serious obstruction to the traffic of the world.
Do we not see signs of this even now? Does not the voice come to us,
through the din of war, the shrieks of hatred, the wailings of despair,
through the churning up of the unspeakable filth which has been
accumulating for ages in the bottom of this civilisation,--the voice
which cries to our soul, that the tower of national selfishness, which
goes by the name of patriotism, which has raised its banner of treason
against heaven, must totter and fall with a crash, weighed down by its
own bulk, its flag kissing the dust, its light extinguished? My
brothers, when the red light of conflagration sends up its crackle of
laughter to the stars, keep your faith upon those stars and not upon the
fire of destruction. For when this conflagration consumes itself and
dies down, leaving its memorial in ashes, the eternal light will again
shine in the East,--the East which has been the birth-place of the
morning sun of man's history. And who knows if that day has not already
dawned, and the sun not risen, in the Easternmost horizon of Asia? And I
offer, as did my ancestor rishis, my salutation to that sunrise of the
East, which is destined once again to illumine the whole world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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