CHAPTER XIX

CONCLUSION

There are many other subjects connected with the renaissance of India that I should like to enter into, but I cannot do so here. This book is already too full of matter that is never easy, and is sometimes controversial. Such subjects are the real ideals and ideas that underlay the religions of India, Hindu, and Mohammedan, and which gave them life until they were hidden under priest-made ritual and killed; the early history of India as a history of ideas and civilisations, and not a stupid agglomeration of battles and intrigues; the absolute necessity, as shown in all history, of representation and legislation being by territory, and not by class, nor race, nor religion; and there are many others. Perhaps some day I may return to these matters, or, more happily, other writers will undertake them. They will see the interest and pleasure to be derived from the study of humanity and ideas, and will leave on one side the dusty frippery of ceremonies and creeds and customs, of the details of battles and palace intrigues and dynasties. Life lies under all these things, and they but affect it as old clothes do a man. Meanwhile, I have done what I can to show the causes of the trouble in India and to indicate in what way it may be met.

Only in some such way as that I have sketched, only by following principles of the nature here indicated, can the Government of India be drawn into accordance with the people. The Government must learn to understand those many millions over whom it has acquired so great a power, and in understanding them acquire sympathy with their desires and needs. The people must learn to know, and recognise, and feel that Government does understand them; that it has sympathy with them, and will help them onward to that goal whither their Destiny is calling them. So will both work together toward that end.

To conquer India was great; it is the one great deed whereby we shall live in history; but to make of India a daughter, not a subject, to help her grow out of our care till she is strong enough to walk alone, that will be greater still.

No nation in the world's history has ever done a deed like that.

To conquer India required great courage, it required ability of the highest, it needed self-denial, self-sacrifice of the individual for the nation. What will the freedom of India need in us? It will need qualities higher even than these are. It will need courage, as great as or greater even than that which we have shown before--the courage to leave alone; it will require self-abnegation and self-sacrifice, not for our own nation, but for India, for Humanity; it will require a sympathy and understanding such as no nation has ever yet felt for a foreign people.

Can we do this?

I do not know. Can we with whom representation except of the wire-pullers of the party has ceased to exist, in whose schools of all kinds and in whose universities there is no education, whose legal system is bad beyond all expression, who have under free forms less real freedom than most other countries, can we give to India what we have not? I think that we shall have to take the beam out of our own eye first. Are we prepared to do that?

What will it need in India? It will need courage too, it will need self-restraint not less than that which we shall have to show, the courage to go slowly, to restrain the rising tide within the banks of safety, to so direct it that the flood will fertilise, not destroy.

It will need more than this. What ruined India twice, and what ruins her now? Division. Race, caste and creed are curses when they make one man despise or hate another. There is one God. Brahma and Allah and Jehovah are but names for One if truly seen. His kingdom is in neither Church nor creed nor Prophet, neither in temple nor in holy place, but in the hearts of men--all men. If you read truly you will see that in the beginning all religions were ideas, great streams of hope and truth driving to one ideal. All truth which is a living truth is One. But formulæ and castes and creeds and ceremonies and forms, rites of all kinds, are priest-made things that kill and petrify. All souls come here from God; not Brahmin souls nor Pongyis' souls nor Christian souls alone, but every soul in every man that lives, they come from God and so return. They are part with us of the eternal "I" in which are lost all "yous" or "theys." Can the Brahmins forget their legendary pride and prove their vaunted worth by leading India to an equal freedom and not keeping her back by the slavery they have thrown upon her? Can the Moslem, casting off the mould of dead tradition, remember the Omniades, their tolerance, their wisdom, their civilisation; what they did and, above all, what they did not do?

Can the Buddhist believe that life is good--not evil; to be made the most of, not feared nor shunned? to be loved and lived?

I do not know. These things are all upon the knees of God.

But for a real new India to arise all these things must come to pass. She is now India Irredenta. And to be redeemed all Indians must offer up as sacrifice, not their good things, but all those evil things they cling to blindly--their hates and their divisions, their pride in what they should be thoroughly ashamed of, their quarrels and misunderstandings. There were a sacrifice that God would love.

Will it come to pass? Who knows? We can only do our best--all of us.

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