Britain's Place in the Great Plan · 3

Now as to these ideals: What is the profound difference between them? In India the human being is regarded as “the man, the wife, and the child”. None of the three is complete by him or herself. The Hindu scrip­tures have it: “God created men to be fathers and women to be mothers”, and the ideal human being is therefore defined in one of the great books of the law as “the man, the wife, and the child”. The family is the unit, not the individual. And this has profound and far-reaching results. The family has grown in India into what is called the joint family. That is to say, that the father and the mother and the sons and their wives form an ever-increasing family, the daughters becoming part of the family of their husbands; and in these joint families, which still exist down to the present day and [64] stretch backwards far into the night of time, there is practically scarcely any distinction between the children of the family, so far as regards fathers or uncles; they are all one family; with the result that among the Hindus has grown up a sense of community that you do not find here in the West, where the married couple go out to make a separate home, a home of their own, separate from the parents. And all through this joint family there is common property belonging to the home, and the elder the trustee of that property; and, looking back to the village life, you see how naturally that grew up in those villages, which are the units of government in India, made naturally out of families and allied families. That has gone on, as I said, right down to the present day, but it is gradually breaking up. Individual­ism is asserting itself there as it has long asserted itself in Europe, so that the joint family is becoming less common, although in that huge population of India you find it up and down among the more orthodox Indians. There is a tendency to break away from it, and the result of that presumably will be to loosen the bonds of the family. One effect it had was that you did not have the terrible poverty that you have where individualism has swayed the people as an ideal, for the old people were inevitably nourished and guarded and cared for in the joint home; the children, they also were educated and trained and supported in the joint home. And this strong family tie influenced the whole life of India, first in making general the community ideal, which was the ideal of the village, and then in making the whole State largely communal, with the inevitable results that I will [65] speak of next week in the questions of holding land, crafts, and so on.

Now what comes out of that ideal when you look at it from the moral standpoint? Clearly the sense of Duty, the sense of Obligation. Where you take a family, elders, contemporaries, and youngers, the success, of the family or its destruction rests on the discharge: of the mutual family duties and obligations. In India it has not been the way to look upon man as born free, because to the logical mind of the Hindu a baby left free and untended, without others performing duties and owing obligations to it, would have a remarkably small chance of surviving into boyhood or girlhood or maturity; for the baby is a helpless creature when born into the world. And the whole result of recognising that fact; and looking on the family as a unit in the State, gradually transferred the idea of duty and obligation within the family to duties and obligations of the citizens to the State. That is the dominant note in India: Duty. They have their own word for it, an untranslatable word: DHARMA. And the whole civilisation is practically worked out on the basis of the family. If you take the duties which grow out of the family tie, the tie of blood and the affection which grows up in the family from duties rendered by each to each, you have there in love the real bond between elders and contemporaries and youngers, with the recognition of the various duties which each owes to all. And if you take that family idea which knows no law, since “love is the fulfilling of the law”, and if you extend the family idea to the members of the Community or of the State, if you [66] see them as elders, contemporaries, and youngers, and duties belonging to each grade in life, you then pass on to what was the original of the Caste ideal, not as it is today, a matter of pride, of oppression, but as it was in the days when it was founded, and founded on the ideal of the family. For you have there - and the thought has come back again in Ruskin - the recognition of the functions in every Nation, without which a Nation cannot exist; you have the citizens of the State with their duties to the State, the functions which they discharge, so that all the functions of the individual become part of a National Service; and in this great division of the Castes - which was into Brain-Workers, Rulers, Organisers and Distributors, or Merchants, and Producers of wealth - you have there the four great functions of National life, each equally sacred as a Function discharged to the whole, not simply an individual gaining his livelihood, but a citizen performing a certain part as an organ in the National life. And as long as they went by qualities, as long as each type of human being passed into his appropriate discharge of function as marked out by his capacities, so long the organisation was fruitful of good to the State; but when it passed into being a mere matter of birth, when it became purely hereditary, when into the Caste of Brain-Workers some­one might be born who had no high intellect, who was not a scientist, or philosopher, or teacher of religion, or teacher in the schools or colleges or universities, but had capacities quite other, fitting him for other work, then it was that Caste confusion arose, because capacity no longer marked out the function to be discharged in [67] the Nation; it became a hereditary matter, and those who were born into a particular family need not have any necessary power or capacity for the Caste to which they nominally belonged. And so you had the destruc­tion practically of the system, for the life went out of it. While the life was in it, and every citizen of the State was himself discharging a National Service and not simply gaining a livelihood, then it worked well and gave great stability to the social system. How that might be brought into modern life without the rigidity which ruined it, and ruins it still in India; when it shall be made dependent on the faculties as shown in the educational period, marking the avocation into which a boy or a girl should pass - then in the fulness of time you will have what was good and avoid what was evil in that system. And that some of the great thinkers of our own time have seen. Ruskin was one; Auguste Comte was another; but he brought in the hereditary principle, and made it even more hopeless as an organisa­tion of the State.

Now, looking for a moment at those family duties that I spoke of, externalise them to the Nation, make them universal, make them to be rendered by all and made permanent, and you have the social virtues. When you realise duties, when you realise that the nature of the duties depends on your own faculties and on the faculties of those around you, then you begin to realise what it means when it is said that “love is the fulfilling of the law”. For in that family emotion when rendered uni­versal and rendered permanent as a part of the character, you have, instead of emotion, virtue, all the virtues that [68] grow out of love. And that has been admirably shown by an Indian writer, Bhagavan Das, who pointed out that out of the emotion of love, made permanent in the character, all virtues grow; out of the emotion of hate rendered permanent, all vices develop; and for the first time, I think, these Foundations of virtues and vices were shown clearly and definitely by him, one of the outcomes of modern Indian thought, valuable when you are dealing with the building up of a civilisation. Let us then take, as we well may, because there is no challenge on this point, that the great idea, the ruling Ideal of India, lies in the discharge of duty and the obligations between members of a Community or a Nation.

Now when you look at Greece and Rome, they come, as it were, half-way between Asia and Europe, influenced by Asia certainly and then influencing Europe; you have a peculiar change in the family, and the State becomes purely masculine. This comes out in Aristotle. He says that everyone who is a citizen of a State must be capable of fulfilling any office in the State; and he took it for granted that there were a large number of offices in the State, in fact practically all of them, that could not be filled except by men; and so no one but a man could be a citizen in his City State. That again influenced Rome very largely, with the addition of the tremendous power given to the father of the family - the power of life and death over his sons. And curiously that purely masculine ideal was revived in modern Germany in its Ideal of the State. If you take a well-known writer, Bluntschli, you find him declaring that the State must be masculine, and he argues in his book on the line of the pure masculinity [69] of the State. That has probably passed out of State ideals by the war. Passing from Greece and Rome, on which I need not dwell, you come to the modern idea­l call it modern although you have just to look for a moment at your Anglo-Saxon forefathers, whose Village System was practically the same as the Indian, and you find there the same arrangement of the Villages; they brought it from Central Asia, and on that English liberty is founded. The unwritten laws of England, the un­written Constitution of England, those are based entirely on that great Village System in England, when the Teutonic people came over and brought it with them. And that unwritten law and Constitution is what has been picked out from time to time in history, as in the Magna Carta, in the Bill of Rights - before all Statutes, before all Parliaments, the inalienable right of the Aryans to life, to liberty, and to property, and on that is based the great Liberty of this country; that Liberty that England has held up as an ideal in the past, and to which if she is false today she seals her own doom, for she has been Liberty’s standard-bearer among all the Nations of the world, and has made Liberty synonymous with her name.

And now we come to the ideal of that, so different from the ideal of the East; it is the Ideal of Individuality - the individual. Now that is a necessary ideal. With­out the strong individual you could not take the next step onwards, the next great step in civilisation. For you can no more build a house without bricks or stones, than you can build a lasting civilisation in which the sense of individuality had not been developed. Now [70] that is based on Christianity. Christianity was the first religion in the world that laid tremendous stress on the value of the individual. The other religions, like the polities founded on them, always took as unit the family, never the individual; and that is the peculiar value of Christianity to the world - it brought out the sense of individuality and its value. It has worked much harm on its way, for that is but one of the two great ideals of Christianity; the other one was the Ideal of Service. After strength had been developed, after strength had proved itself, then strength was to be used for service and not for oppression; that was the second point. Now the first was connected with the development of the concrete mind. You remember that I pointed out to you how these various capacities in the human being were evolved one after another in the long course of evolution; and just as emotion and art and the love of beauty were the special evolution of the Keltic sub-race, or the Latin races, whichever you choose to call them - Greeks, Romans, southern European peoples - just as emotion was the mark of the Kelt and is the mark of the Kelt today, so the concrete mind was the mark of the Teuton - the German. Teuton is a better name, because Germany is only one part of the Teutonic sub-race, and Scandinavians and Britons, all these belong to that great sub-race, and in them you find the high development of the concrete mind. Science is its mark; the immense development of science among these people of the Teutonic sub-race is due to that development of the lower mind in man which works by observation, by reasoning, by argument, by logic, caring less for the [71] beauty of expression than for the depth and the strength and the logical character of the thought. The profound difference between the two sub-races, Kelts and Teutons, is one reason of the constant misunderstandings that you find between England and Ireland, members of those two sub-races, the one moved by emotion, the other by reasoning, the one full of impulse and the other more cautious and more logical. Looking at this - this development of the concrete mind, with the tremendous sense of its own rights, its own individuality - you come to the more modern phase of thought, where you have the individual clothed with his rights as the unit in the State. They talk of course about the contract, the social con­tract, that everybody knows never took place, and is only a word used in order to explain a certain relationship between human beings, that each has his own rights inalienable and born in him, rights that he may properly assert against all comers, the inherent liberty of man­ - profound truth, although veiled in so much of error and for so long.

Now in Christianity two great doctrines disappeared which had existed everywhere in the elder civilisations of the East. I mentioned them in my first lecture ­the doctrine of Karma, or cause and effect, universal causation; and the doctrine of Reincarnation, the individual life prolonged, dwelling in one body after another, passing innumerable times through birth and death, and bringing with it into each successive birth the results of past struggles and past failures, as ex­plained last week. These underlaid the whole of the thoughts of the East, and do still. The doctrine of [72] reincarnation, that, as already said, had been taught in various forms in the early Church and by the early Church Fathers, was banned by the Church in the sixth century, I think it was, and so it vanished for a time from the Christian world, except among heretics, among the Albigenses and others. That was a necessary loss of a great truth, because the doctrine of reincarna­tion does, as already pointed out, diminish the value of each separate individual human life. If you have not done it in this life, you will do it in another; if you have missed your chances here, you will grasp them in another.

The doctrine is coming back again now that the strength of the individual is well established in the western world. It is re-emerging because of its eminent rationality, because of its obvious applicability to the varying capacities of men. At the time it was obscured in order that the individual might grow into strength and power. Now inevitably that led to much of conflict, not only of Nation against Nation, but of class against class, of man against man, and so you had the great struggles that you find in Europe. The individual claimed his own right: “Let the best man win”; it is a very popular axiom still, but that means anarchy. “Let the best man serve” is the truth, and that means ordered progress. And that is the second great ideal of Christianity. It was that on which the Christ laid such immense stress. “Let him that is greatest among you, be as he that doth serve. Behold, I am among you as he that serveth.” And so again in the writings of one of His great Apostles you [73] find that supreme truth in the example of the Christ: “Though He were rich, yet for our sakes He became poor, that we by His poverty might become rich”. There you have the doctrine of Human Brotherhood, the doctrine of human sacrifice, put in a single sentence, embodied in a superhuman life. And that second great ideal, following, as it did follow in the course of evolution, on the unbounded strength of the individual and his grasping, with the resultant anarchy, has now to come to the front as the dominating part of one of our great ideals of the future. That is the greatest contribution that Christianity has made to the world, not an enforced sacrifice, but a voluntary sacrifice, the sweeping down of the high to lift up the lowly, and the using of all strength for helping the weak.

Now much has been done in Britain to emphasise that truth, and there is one point I would like to put to you, because I know it is one as to which a very great and not wholly unfair attack is made on the great combinations of manual workers here - a groping after a very great truth, but crude in its expression, and so easily twisted and shown to be absurd and mischievous. For it is put in a very crude form - that the best work­man shall limit his skill, his work, his production, so as not to outdo his weaker brother, whose capacity and skill are less. Now that is the doctrine which has been more attacked perhaps than any other in Trade Unionism; and naturally so, put in that very crude form, for people see that it diminishes production and thus injures the Nation. “You are making a certain arrangement for helping certain brothers in your Union, but you are [74] injuring your Nation by diminishing your own productive power”; and, put in that way, it is difficult to defend. But if you can see what underlies it, if you can see into the dim gropings of minds which have caught a glimpse of the beauty of Brotherhood and are trying to realise it in the family sense, in which the younger is not crushed because his capacities are less or his strength is smaller, but rather helped and cherished by his elders because he is yet young, and not able to fight for himself in the battle of life; if you can see that in that there is a sense of a larger Self that has to be served above the smaller Self, then you will realise that they are groping after a mighty truth, only the way in which it is put is crude and unwise. And it is as well sometimes to look at a thing that you do not like from its better side and not from its worse, to try to see the motive of the people who make a rule that seems at first so mischievous, so restrictive; and you can only do it by, as it were, trying to get into their hearts and minds, and thus see at what they are really aiming. Then you will begin to realise that just because that feeling of brotherhood has grown up among the manual workers in the country, that Britain is perhaps almost the only country which can make the great transition into a higher civilisation with­out a revolution which shall whelm the Nation in disaster. It is just that realisation that everyone is part of a larger Self, whose interests have to be thought of, a Self that has to be expanded and has to embrace the Nation and not a particular craft only, which is true; so that you will not have certain bodies of workers set over, as it were, against the Nation, striving to impose [75] their will upon it by the power of numbers and of the National life which they hold in their hands, but you will have an organised Nation, in which everyone will have his place, everyone will have his work, will have his own function to discharge. Then we may realise that this is really what we are striving after, to under stand how to reconcile the claims of the Nation and the claims of the individual, the family Ideal of the East and the individualistic Ideal of the West.

For, have not Britain and India something to learn of each other, as I suggested in the beginning? And may we not find next week, in looking more into the detail, that each has something to teach the other, each has something to give? That in this age-long evolution towards different Ideals each has gone to excess along its own particular line, and needs to be corrected by the other? That the Ideal of the family carried to excess has led to too much submission, too much subservience, too much erasing of the individual, too little care for liberty? But India has been learning and assimilating the Ideal of the West more rapidly than the West is inclined to learn and assimilate the Ideal of the East. For India has caught from you your sense of liberty, your feeling of the value of the individual, your realisa­tion that a Nation to be really great must be free throughout; and that this is to be won, not - if it may be - by conflict, but by mutual understanding and sympathy and desire to serve. And so it is that in these Ideals, which seem to be so contrary, we may find in each the corrective of the other; that we have to blend together the liberty of the individual and also the [76] welfare of the Nation, that the Nation is a family on a larger scale, a greater Self, to which the smaller selves must conform themselves; that we may find after all that in these two Nations, one the great elder of the East, the other inspiring and largely guiding the West, that. they have been brought up apart, that they have been developed separately, that their religions have been different, in order that the two great Ideals might be gradually evolved throughout the ages, and then brought together, then bound together, then united, different as they are; that we may find the blending of two great Ideals, the joining together of two necessary views of human life, and so may find a reconciliation, not for these two great countries only, but for the whole of Humanity.

Then it shall be realised that men live not for themselves but for all, that even Nations exist not for themselves but for all the other Nations together; and from these ideals of family and of individuality we may find a yet higher Ideal, in which each shall take its place, and that shall form in turn a platform on which a still mightier Ideal shall lift itself - that great Ideal of Nations as one Family, the Ideal of Universal Peace. [77]

Lecture IV

The Ideal of the Future

FRIENDS: In reading a newspaper today I found a very interesting lecture by Sir Michael Sadler, who is ap­parently very largely in his thought as to the reorganisa­tion of Society running along the line on which I have been trying to lead you in the last three weeks. He points out - he is speaking at Mirfield, opening some buildings for a new Community - he points out that modern civilisation is a colossal fact, and then goes on to say that this modern civilisation has been achieved by the courage and labour of western men during four centuries. It is obvious from the context and from looking back that he is really starting with the sixteenth century, after the Wars of the Roses, and passing on through the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth. Then he says that through these centuries “the great characteristic, the essence, of Western Civilisation, was Power. Its phases had been: the power of the individual Pioneer; the power of the State; the power of the Sea; the power of the Machine; the power of Coal; and the power of High Explosives”. And through this stupendous outburst of Power, Providence had permitted [78] a great change in the minds of men all over the world. Then he goes on to say:

In the heart and conscience of modern civilisation there is now foreboding, Power, which is the essence of modern civilisation, threatens to destroy it. Three men as typical as Viscount Grey, Mr. H. G. Walls, and the Dean of S. Paul’s, warn us that modern civilisation is at the cross-roads of its destiny. Unless by some deflection of its recent purpose, Power can be concentrated upon the constructive works of Peace, it will destroy civilisation by War.

Then he goes on to point out that just at this moment there is a certain tendency to turn back, with “some amount of wistfulness”, he calls it, to medieval times; and he slightly elaborates that thesis, and shows how in Industry there has been some revival of the Medieval Guild, how in Art a similar change has shown itself, how in Politics the Nations are looking to a Council of Peoples, and are recognising Nationhood but trying to allay its rivalries. And alluding to Matthew Arnold, he says that he felt in himself the attractions of the Middle Ages as a Past, but that instead of that “men are looking at a possible revival drawn from it as the dawn of a new era”. And finally he goes on to say that history cannot repeat itself, but that though we cannot go back to the Middle Ages and become medieval in our thought and way of life, it is possible that

the future may blend some medieval ideas with those derived from the age of Power, and that what is perilous in some modern tendencies may be transmuted by a re-discovery of some aspects of Mediaeval Life into an improvement of the present condition. All honour to those who, while bravely modern in spirit, are willing to learn from and to practise what was best in the Mediaeval way of life. [79]

And he mentions three Powers that, he says, then worked in harmony in the life of Christendom; they were: the Priesthood, the Empire, and the University; “For all three, in a form adapted to modern needs, the modern world may find a place”.

Now under that conception there lies, I think, a pro­found truth. I should go much further back than the Mediaeval Age. It is, I think, the tendency only of the modern European mind which stops within the boundaries of Europe and the age of Europe and refuses to go further East, where civilisations endured for so much longer periods, periods of which it would not be unfair to say that some aspects of Medieval Europe were the reproduction of the further East. I mentioned to you, I think, in one of my lectures, in speaking of the East, that Europeans always look back only as far as Aristotle, except Maine, who saw that Humanity had had a much longer experience before Aristotle was born than since his time, and desired to trace much of modern Europe right back to the immemorial traditions of India and her organisation for the individual and the State. Tonight I am going to try to draw out some of those ancient ideals, which, blended with our modern ideals, may give us an Ideal for the immediate Future. Not for the very, very far-off future, for Nations, like indi­viduals, cannot proceed by immense leaps, immense changes in human nature; but, given time and thought, I believe there are no limits to the power of perfecting our Humanity, and that the task before us is so to change the forms of our polity as to enable a great change to take place, which is imminent, on our threshold - as, in [80] fact, I have suggested to you in the lectures that lie behind us tonight.

Let me very briefly recall to you the path along which I have tried to lead you. In the first lecture we dealt with the question - Is there a Plan? Then in the second we considered the methods of the Plan, having seen reason enough to accept, as a hypothesis even, that a Plan underlies the whole of the evolution of our world, the whole of the evolution of our system, and probably far, far beyond. In that second lecture we studied the methods, and we found that these might be divided into two parts - the involution of life in matter, and the evolution of matter into a great succession of forms. Looking at the involution, we saw the five stages. The Self, the great Unit, descending into contact with matter, preserves its own essential unity; we may call it the world, or plane, of Unity. Then we saw within that Unity internal divisions arising, so that we had Union; these cohered still together and were encircled as it were by the Unity itself. Descending into a third stage, we found distinct separation; barriers arose, it is the plane of Intellect, the I-hood, the Self-hood, coming downwards in order to shape bodies for his own expression. Then we came to a fourth stage, where attractions and repulsions seemed to be the great new elements unfolding in the life. And lastly, to the denser physical, where the life was most cribbed and cabined, most resisted by external matter - matter almost smothering the life, which had then to subdue matter and make it plastic for its own purposes. Looking at the evolution where the life was to ascend [81] again through the five stages, we found how that showed itself in the formation and the forms of matter. It passed through the lowest of these and made the Mineral Kingdom in the physical world, then onwards to the Vegetable, onwards to the Animal, until it reached the Human form, until Humanity appeared. And we saw that that, so far as we can judge, is the highest form that has yet appeared in this up-climbing of the life, and we noticed in that human form greater and greater refinement and beauty were introduced, and that when the human was, as it were, fixed as the model form, then great internal changes made it more and more responsive to the moulding life within. And we traced that evolution upward, and we found that it had in its way unfolded not only the form of man, but desires and passions and emotions, the second of the upward stages; that it had unfolded mind, the third of the upward stages; and is now on the threshold of the fourth. Looking at it in that way, we came by a sort of compulsion as to what that next stage must be, as we glanced backward at it when the life was occupied in its descent; and we found that we were on the threshold of the plane of Union, where separation was to be largely overcome, where working together was to take the place of working against each other, where we might look forward to a civilisation which should recognise Brotherhood as the law of life, and where gradually we were to see developed all the changes in the polity and the mechanism necessary to make a great co-operative, instead of combative, civilisation. And looking at these great stages, as they came one after another on the [82] stage of Humanity, we noticed that in these there were successive waves, as it were, of civilisation, and that in every case, except the last, there was a Lawgiver moulding the outer civilisation and a Teacher giving a religious form suitable for the proposed outer polity, a religion which should give out the old truths in a new shape, and thus by stage after stage should bring out the various perfections of the ever unfolding life. But in the fifth we found that there was no lawgiver - there was a religion - no lawgiver to make a polity, because it was the age where individualism especially was to be developed, whether in the individual or the Nation, and hence a religion was given which had in it two great ideals to be successively shown on the world-stage in the great drama. On the one side the evolution of the individual and his value; on the other side the duty of the individual, when he had gained and realised his strength, to turn that strength to service and not to oppression.

And so we came still further onwards, and we were able in this long, long evolution to find, in studying two great divisions of our globe, East and West, that there we came to a great conflict, a conflict first physical, and then a conflict of civilisations and of ideals. And you remember how I pointed out to you that in the East the family was the unit in the Nation, while in the West the individual was the unit in the Nation; that inevitably out of that there came great differences, fundamental differences, in civilisation; for the ideal of the family inevitably develops the sense of corporate life, the sense of the duty of every member of the family to every [83] other, the binding sense of obligation of the various parts of the family; the elders, the contemporaries, and the youngers were bound together in their mutual relationships by this binding law of duty. On the other hand, where the individual was the unit, necessarily the idea of inherent rights arose; and that these rights, as well as the ideal of duty, had both been carried to excess. In the East, where duty was the ideal, there had developed tyranny, the feeling of duty tending to over-submission; while in the West the ideal of rights run to excess led inevitably to conflict, and finally to anarchy. And so it is that along that line of thought, although in very much fuller detail, we find the same fundamental idea as we find here in the rapid sketch made by Sir Michael Sadler, and we realise that we are indeed at the crossway for Humanity today; that Humanity has to work out a new form of civilisation, as it has worked out so many forms of civilisation in the past. And so I would say to you that there is every reason for hope and no reason for despair; for man has rebuilt many shattered civilisations on a better basis, and can rebuild the civilisation that lies shattered behind us by the War into a nobler, a more lasting, civilisation if - and that if is the condition - if he will recognise the laws of Nature as they have not been recognised in the past, the Law of Brotherhood as the basis of civilisation, the Law of Sacrifice as the life and the sustainer of civilisation. And so we come in our study to ask here again, very, very briefly, not in detail, how were the older Nations organised? and we may put it, I think, shortly in this form: in those of the East [84] and in Feudal Europe, Mediaeval Europe, but especially in the East, the communal feeling was in the ascendant, men felt themselves as a community far more strongly than as individuals; while in the civilisation called by Sir Michael the civilisation of which the essence is Power, there men felt themselves much more as in­dividuals than they realised the bonds of living in a community, the natural feeling which is vital in the future. And looking at it in that way, then we find evolved in the East what is known as the Caste system. That was based entirely on the ideal of Duty; the Duty of the learned to teach; the Duty of the strong to protect; the Duty of the organiser and the distributor of goods to distribute them; and the Duty of the pro­ducer to produce. So that you have four great functions coming out in the National life the Duty of the teacher; the Duty of the protector; the Duty of the organiser and distributor; and the Duty of the producer of wealth. And wherever you find a Nation, these four fundamental duties must always exist; you cannot get rid of them. They are woven into all social, and communal, and National life. And we have to consider how these four functions, the functions of the educator in the widest sense of the term, the functions of the legislator, the functions of the merchant, and the functions of the producer, how these ought to be arranged in a recon­struction of society.

Now the ruin of the caste system was brought about by its becoming a matter of birth only instead of a matter of capacity. There lies the reason why it has become a rigid system which it is found necessary to [85] destroy, if India is to rise to real freedom and real citizenship. And when we look at the less-developed form of caste, the feudal system, we find the same characteristic there fundamentally, the idea of Duty. Privilege was counterbalanced by duty, and there again the birth element came in and led to its destruction eventually. When we look on the later centuries and find the great struggle that takes place in England - we can take England as an example of other western countries - where the individual fights, as it were, for his own hand, there arises the feature of class, and into that from feudalism comes also this element of birth. Personally, although that is a mere detail, and many of you will very likely disagree with it, I think it a very good thing in a Nation that great National Service should be recognised by honour; I believe that that is good, but when it descends to somebody else who has not deserved it, then it becomes an abuse, a danger. If you want to bring in the element of birth you ought to copy the Chinese, who put it on a much more sensible footing. Where a title of honour was given in China, the ancestors were ennobled and not the posterity. Now, that, I submit, is eminently reasonable. They have something or other at least to do with the man who has done great service to the State, as they are his ancestors, and so they may share in the recognition; and the other advantage is that they are not on the physical plane at the moment, and therefore they cannot in any way dishonour the title to the Nation’s respect which is bestowed on a particular person. But the moment you run the other way arid ennoble the posterity, then you [86] bring in a mischievous element, the element of birth, for it does not follow that his posterity will do well; as a matter of fact, they are sometimes exceedingly unsatis­factory. Then you get a great danger and a great cause of anger, that privilege is given where there is nothing in the individual to deserve it. Privilege gained by duty is one thing; privilege going with an individual life that has no duties imposed on it by the State is a very different thing, and is a source of decay in a civilisation.

Now, looking at it then for a moment from that stand­point, I would ask you: How are we to find out some way in which these functions may be divided? There is only one way that I can think of, and that is by capacities; and the capacities can only be understood, found out, by education, if in education you allow the natural faculties of the child to develop. If in education you insist on a high level of general education and culture, then, and then alone, can you look for social equality. If you take a scientist, if you take a highly educated philosopher, if you take an educated man of any type, provided he is highly educated and cultured, such men or women can meet in perfect social equality, although their avocations may be entirely different. It is not a question of what the man does, it is a question of what the man is; and education is absolutely necessary before social equality can possibly be gained in any Nation. Hence also education must be prolonged far more than at present is recognised as necessary in modern life. People in modern life are quarrelling over half-timers, over boys and girls who are to earn their [87] own livelihood; but I claim for every child of this Nation the right to develop the whole of his faculties to the utmost extent that those faculties are capable of development, and that implies a long education, not a short or a medium one; it implies not only what I said, that a certain level of education and culture must be common to everyone born into the Nation, but it implies also that as the particular capacities of the young person develop themselves, that is the mark of his place in the National life. What is called vocational education, in the fullest sense of the word, is necessary in order that all the individuals in a Nation may find their appropriate sphere of work; work for which their faculties fit them, and which therefore is an enjoyment in the carrying of it out, and not a drudgery, as it too often is in our own days. Hence I submit that the time for education is the whole period of youth, vocational in the latter part, general in the earlier; and that the education should go as far as the faculties are aided in their development by it - roughly, during the first twenty - one years of life.

Leaving that for a moment - for I shall have just for an instant to return to it in dealing with our Ideal - let me point out to you that the next thing you have to consider is the result in the past of the economic condition of the Nation. You have to start with the question of the holding of land. You have to consider the relationship between labour and capital in the production of wealth. Unless these can be organised on a system of mutual advantage and National con­tentment, it is impossible, it would be unrighteous, that any civilisation should endure. And so, glancing [88] back­ward, we find one point of enormous importance as regards the land, and that is, if you take a country like India, land has always been communal property until quite lately. There was no such thing as private ownership of land until after certain arrangements made by the British; until they came there, and brought their own ideas with them, there was no idea that land should ever be held as private property; it was held for use, not for ownership; and the arrange­ments which were made with other parties in the Village -which was the place where all National wealth was produced - the arrangements made were such that the Village held the land and it was used by the people of the Village. I have not time to go into the details of that. It is an admirable system if you care to look it up. But it came to an end in southern India in 1816. Let me remind you that what we have in India as a Province, you have as a Kingdom. Our Province of Madras has a larger population than England and Wales, and you have to consider that when you are trying to study a very complex civilisation, that varies very much according to the past history of India. But this one may say: everywhere where there were Kings, the King had a right to the produce of part of the land; a part of the land was put aside for the King in exchange for his protection, and cultivated for him, and he was given the produce of the land, not the land. And when he “gave a Village”, as you sometimes find, to some successful General, all that the successful General had was the right to the produce of the King’s land, but never the ownership of it. Looking at it in that way, [89] you find that the land in India, with the crafts which were carried on in the Village, were enormously re­munerative; that these two things, land, labour-and-capital joined together, were the producers of wealth throughout Indian civilisation. And I may remind you that it admittedly lasted more than five thousand years, and all Indians say immensely longer. I do not want to dwell upon it, but contrast that five thousand years with the four centuries that Sir Michael alleges cover your own civilisation of Power. Not that you need necessarily reproduce it, but that you can learn some great principles from it, and that one great principle is that the land of a Nation is the gift of Nature to the Nation that lives on that land, and not to individuals; and that great principle was recognised not only in the East, but also in Feudal times in Europe, and that is why I classed Feudalism to some extent as Communal, for land in Feudal days, held by the great Nobles, was held under conditions, principally of Military Service, as also in the case even of the Yeoman who held the land under the Feudal System; before that the Village system, which was brought from the East, prevailed, and characterised the times of your greatest freedom, the times of the Anglo-Saxon. But these Feudal nobles bore very heavy duties; they had to bear the whole protection of the Nation, to guard it in Peace and in War, and only by that duty could they keep on holding their land.

Now I know that many great landholders, having been relieved from all duty imposed on them by the State, have imposed duty on themselves by the tradition [90] of their great Order, by their hereditary love for the people who live on the land; and in the cases of men who feel the duty of their past, it has made them the friends and the helpers of their people, and they have discharged, splendidly discharged, their many duties; but they imposed the duties on themselves; it was not the recognition that with the land went duties, and with privilege went responsibility. And so you find many who disregard it and care not for it and are indifferent, and who look on the wealth that comes to them by their ownership as theirs by right, instead of wealth conjoined with duties. And that has been terribly broken up by the War, because, as you know, the great landowners suffer tremendously from wealth taxation, and so they are selling their lands and great houses, and the whole of that side of English civilisation is passing away, with all in it that was beautiful and splendid in its time. It is going down in ruin.

And then, trying to see how the other things are to be changed, I have to remind you that what is called Capital is not only the surplus of labour employed on land or material, but it is also, not as so many people seem idly and foolishly to think, enormous stores of coin, but much more largely credit, so that it vanishes in a most remarkable way. It is not really safe; it is repre­sented by pieces of paper, securities they are called, but they have become “scraps of paper” to a very large extent in regard to the value generally given to them. If you want to see how credit can collapse, look at Russia, where the revolution from which so much was hoped in the beginning has had to allow - despite the [91] ideas of those who led it - Peasant Proprietorship, a new form of ownership, and now is saying that it must have capitalism back again - the result of over - rapid changes where fanatics tried to force a sudden revolu­tion for which the masses of the people were not in any way prepared. And so we come back to this; we find this tremendous difficulty facing us, that the land­holders are disappearing; and if you think for a moment of the land-holding as land, you will realise that the land and all that was in the land belonged to them, so that many of them have become enormously wealthy, where coal was discovered, or in other cases iron has been found in their properties, and it is those discoveries that have largely made the enormous differences between wealth and poverty in modern life; not only the wealth of the surface of the land, unjust as that was unless duties were performed in exchange, but everything in the land laid up there by Nature through thousands and millions of years was brought to the surface and became their private property; so some of the enormous fortunes were made of some of the great landholders; and of that you have to think in dealing with reconstruc­tion, because we have now come to the great difficulty that with the disappearance of these great landholders Labour and Capital find themselves face to face. Between them the duel is going on to the destruction of both.

And with that rapid survey of how things are, we have then to realise that great changes should come not by force but by conviction. That is, by great ideals that capture the minds of the people, and so lend to them the enthusiasm by which mighty transformations [92] can be achieved. Do not, because I use the word “Ideal”, connect together with it the idea of the unpractical idealist, because I can assure you that if you study history you will find the idealists who stand out from the rest are the most practical people. It is mind and not form that is the creator; and if you could for a moment doubt that an ideal can arouse and transform the characters of men, look back to 1914, and see what the ideals then held up achieved, what an effect they had on the Nations of the world; when in that day when War first broke out, when England held up the ideal of liberty, of faith to her plighted word, and of the protection of a little country unfairly, unrighteously in­vaded, it was that ideal which sent all the youths of the Universities into the trenches and made them ready to die, not for some sordid reason, not for some hope of personal triumph, but for that great Ideal of Liberty, for which they were willing to perish in order that it might be secure. And that great Ideal rang round the world. It was that that awakened India; that which made India spring to the helping of England; that which drove her soldiers across the sea, coming to a land which was not theirs, to a people whom they did not know, to institutions and customs to which they were utterly alien, and yet which carried them into the trenches, there dying shoulder to shoulder beside your men, believing they fought for Liberty, and therefore willingly throwing their lives away. All that was said over here by your great statesmen who held up those ideals; it was Mr Asquith who taught Indians that a foreign yoke was degradation to a Nation, intolerable, [93] he said, and inconceivable; and his words rang round India. It was that which has largely made Indian unrest, that for which the only possible outcome was to give freedom, as your Parliament happily has begun to give it. Ideals, they are the mightiest things in all the world, the only things that can transform the world, the only things which can change human nature and make the selfish unselfish and the weak strong. And if you think of it for a moment, take it if you will in a much more concrete form than the one I have given. What is the Flag of a Regiment? You may say, only a piece of rag or cloth. Aye, but into that cloth are woven all the memories of the past; into that the common sufferings, the common struggles, the common victories, and also the common defeats; and that Flag of the regiment has become so much a symbol of its honour to rough men and to poor men, to those of the population here taken into the Army because they could find nothing else which would accept them, that it has transformed their character, so that they are now forbidden to carry their Flag into battle, because it was ever surrounded by heaps of corpses, because they would die rather than let it fall into the enemies hands. You cannot have a stronger proof of the power of the ideal within the roughest and the most thoughtless of men. It is to these ideals that I trust, to the Ideal of the Future, the creation of that civilisation which I believe the present generation will help in building.

And here I refer again for one moment to Education, only to remind you that the Ideal of the Future for education is in these words which I have already stated; [94] that every child born into our Nation must have the opportunity of developing every capacity he brings with him through the gateway of birth. That, and nothing less than that, is the education that he should have. And I go one step further: I claim that that education shall be free to the child of every citizen; not only the primary education, but the education of the higher schools, of the University itself. For wealth and capa­city do not always go together; ability and money are not always found in the same family; and it is capacity to profit by higher education that gives the child or the youth the right to that education.

Now, looking at it in that way, let us consider the three great divisions in a Nation as regards age. I sub­mit that the first twenty-one years should be given to the building of the citizen, that is, to the education of the child, of the youth, and of the young man - including, of course, in the word “man”, “woman”, as I cannot keep on saying always “he and she” - that is the educa­tional period.

Then, coming to the other extreme of life, old age, in that there should not be bread-winning any more than in the time of youth, for the value of old age to the Nation is experience, knowledge gained by living; and the old men will be the counsellors of the Nation, provided that you have a number also of the mature, of the young, in order that the future may be considered as well as the past.

And the middle period of life, from twenty-one onwards to whatever you make your beginning of old age - as it differs much with different people, - whatever that time [95] may be, the bread-winning period of life should be always between those two limits. The duty of the young is to study to be good citizens. The duty of the mature is to live the life of the citizen, discharging every duty faith­fully. The duty of old age is to be of any service they can to the Nation, in which they have been educated, in which they have served.