^m' UNIVEF n 3 ^o 1 =^? ft "> ^^^^ — ( 3 3ITY OF CA RIVERS 210 0195J rH] ■- L DE LIBRARY 3 8059 3 WA ITS iSON, R S ANI SIIE sANT LIBRARY ONIVERSli ' ■• ^ u.lMft THE WAR AND ITS LESSONS ANNIE BESANT FOUR LECTURES DELIVERED IN LONDON, OCTOBER, 1919 LONDON : THEOSOPHICAL PUBLISHING HOUSE 9, St. Martin's St., W.C. 2 1920 CONTENTS. PAGE 1. The War and the Builders of the Commonwealth 3 2. The War and its Lessons on Fraternity 23 3. The War and its Lessons on Equality . 45 4. The War and its Lessons on Liberty . 65 I.— THE WAR AND THE BUILDERS OF THE COMMONWEALTH FRIENDS: I am to speak to you to-day on the Lessons of the War, and in domg that you will naturally understand that I am speaking as a Theosophist on the application of Theosophical teachings to the problems of our own time ; for truly the use of all knowledge is to illuminate the path of action. Knowledge is sterile where it is not applied to the direction of conduct, and the use of Theosophical teachings — studied so long by so many all over the world — is to illuminate the problems of the present critical time. For thirty years and a half I have been a student of those teachings, and during that long time I have never found them fail to irradiate the darkest obscurity, and to keep the heart at peace, whether in the storms of public life or in the trials of private life. But in speaking on the lines laid down by those teachings, I would ask any of you who may not know it to remember that no member of the Theosophical Society is bound by what I sa^^ We have so firm a belief in Truth that we do not desire to make it a barrier in the fellov\'ship of fellow- students of the Truth, and, therefore, there is no teaching of Theosophy which is binding on the members of the Society which really exists to spread those teachings. We believe that Truth is recognised the moment the eyes reach the position whence that Truth is visible. We do not desire to us? any Truth we have, as Robertson of Brighton once said, turning the Bread of Life into a stone to cast at our opponents. On the contrary, we leave every member of the Society absolutely free to accept or to reject any Theosophical teaching, and although I happen to be President of the Society, I have no more 4 THE WAR AND THE BUILDERS power than the youngest member of it to bind any other member to my interpretation of its teachings. And so, if any of you, members or non-members, should disagree with anytliing I say, please remember that I am speaking as one who has studied but not as one who desires to convince, unless the Truth is spoken and exercises its own convincing power ; for no Truth is true to you or to me unless we have assimilated it, made it part of ourselves. That can never be done by the speech of another : it must be gained by the effort of the individual intellect, by the intuition of the heart. Now, with regard to the War and its Lessons, let me first point out to you what, it seems to me, is the part that War plays in the evolution of mankind. The Divine Wisdom regards this world as part of a series of worlds, regards humanity as one of the grades of an ever-ascending series of the developing divine life. Many are below us in that ascent ; many are above us ; and the events which take place on the surface of our globe are events which are really shadows thrown down from the great ideas which rule in the Higher World, and gradually translate themselves into action on our own physical globe — on many other globes as well, but I am concerned with our own. Looking then at this great series of worlds of Uving beings, we would see in war the physical result of the confhct of great principles and great ideas in worlds other than our own ; so that it comes to mean to many of us not a mere struggle of kings and of armies, not even a struggle of nations, but fundamentally the means of transition from one phase of principle, of idea, to another succeed- ing phase. Two ideas in conflict on the higher are translated in the physical world into physical war, and we naturally hope that as mankind advances and grows more and more out of the dominance of the body and of passions into the clearer hght of the intellect, wars will gradually disappear with the higher evolution OF THE COMMONWEALTH 5 of mankind, and the rougher methods of force will give way to the subtler energies of reason, of argument, of compromise, and of arbitration. That would be the general view that those who accept the Theosophical teachings would take of war. More than that, certain definite results come out of it, accompanying these great changes of dominant ideas embodied in civilisation- You find, for instance, that in the earlier days especially, when there were great invasions of one nation by another, both invader and invaded profited by the ex- change of those ideas, those ideals, which were embodied in one or the other • that is, you can trace for instance in India the influence of the invasion of Greece. Indian art still shows traces of the influence of the art that was born in Greece. So later also, in the invasion of the Mughals, you will find there that the great art of the Mussulman invaders has left a never-to-be-eradicated trace on the art of India. Each party is really enriched as the result of the invasion. Sometimes there is a great conflict of fundamental ideas, as in the case of the war between Russia and Japan, embodying to some extent at least the ideals of the West and of the East. At the time that that war came about, for the first time in the whole of its history, the great ideals established by India — for India has been the Mother of the ideals of the East — these ideals were in danger of being lost to humanity. No armed invasion had done that, but the gradual permeation of Indian civiUsation by the somewhat materialistic thought of the West, on which this civilisation had been based and out of which it now is perishing. That peculiar, subtle permeation of thought was undermining the ideals of the East as they had never been undermined before. Now, although both sets of ideals are necessary for the progress of humanity, differences of tradition, differences of climate, differences of custom, differences of religious beUef — all these had tended to make very 6 THE WAR AND THE BUILDERS different the ideals of the East and of the West. They could not be lost without a loss to humanity at large, and as there was a danger of the eastern being lost in this powerful sweep of western influence, it was thought well among Those who guard the evolution of humanity, who guide the destinies of man, that an eastern nation should triumph by that which the West had regarded as the great arbitrator of power, by War. And so the nation of Japan ^ an eastern nation which had taken up western ideals more than any other people and had armed itself and had organised itself for war in the western waj' — just because it had armed itself and was an armed power, which was necessary to impress the West, it was chosen as the Standard Bearer of the eastern ideals, to save them from falling into disrepute and disrespect by the more glittering civilisa- tion of the West. So Japan conquered and became numbered among the Great Powers, a curious develop- ment for an eastern nation from the western point of view. Now, the last Great War had a much larger destiny and sv/eep than these other wars to which I have alluded as an example of the results which have grown out of war. This war was part o^ the preparation of a new step forward in the evolution of the human race, for one of those tremendous changes wliich take place from time to time when one type of civilisation is passing into another and the civiUsations concerned are, there- fore, engulfed in a tremendous conflict between the dying and the birthing ages. These transitions come from time to time in connection with very definite changes in evolution, marks that one tj^pe is reaching its zenith and beginning to decay and another is being born to grow and gradually to overtop the one that preceded it. Hence the great change : the great principle embodied on the one side, autocracy as built in the past ; on the other, democracy as it will be known in the future. OF THE COMMONWEALTH 7 An immense transition, the change of the centre of power, and such changes, the student of history beUeves, come in connection with changes in the physical and mental up-building of the human race. Now, in Theosophical teaching we recognise two great types of races : the one fundamentally different from the preceding race which it is going to supplant in the leadership of the world, and which divides itself into many, many branches, all of which show the characteristic mark of the imprint of this fundamental race, but differ in their smaller characteristics and are easily distinguishable thereby, the one from the other. Now, we call the great primary race the Root Race, a very simple, obvious name — just as you have a tree from the root, and the tree branches out into its different branches. The great Race to which we belong, to which the Indians belong, we call the Aryan Race. I say " we," because the word is used somewhat differently by different schools of ethnology. I take the word by which in Theosophical books we speak of it. Sometimes we speak of it by number and call it the 5th Race, which includes what we mean by that number "5." In the constitution of the individual man, the mind of man is regarded as what is sometimes called the 5th principle. That is a Theosophical technicality which I only want to indicate as an idea, without going into the cause as to why that particular number is given to the mind. We call it the 5th Race because mind is its dominating characteristic ; the human mind, whether you take it as concrete mind used so much in Science in its observations, in its classification of observations, in its induction from those to some great sweeping hypothesis, in its deduction from that hypothesis to be tested by many carefully- planned experiments. That is what we call the concrete mind of man, because based on observations of the concrete, of observations of facts which lead up to 8 THE WAR AND THE BUILDERS great theories of life and of evolution. These theories of Ufe and of evolution belong, we say, rather to the higher mind, the higher intellect, the generalising, synthesising department of the human mind as the other is the analysing and the classifying. The Aryan Race, from our standpoint, is a Race which in the gradually sequential evolution of mankind has, as its dominating characteristic, the development of the intellect, of the mind. Wherever you find the branches of that Race you will find that that is funda- mentally a distinguishing mark. When you come to deal with the subdivisions of the Race — we speak of them as sub-races in order to show their common ground but that they are not the fundamental Race out of which they all sprang — when you come to deal with these we find that they in turn have still the mind as the predominating characteristic, mind and other characteristics of consciousness. I will take one of them, such as emotion. Now, emotion in Theosophical nomenclature takes the 4th place, is below that of mind, and if you take the 4th sub-race of the great Aryan Race, the Keltic, that which gave birth to the Greeks and the Latins, that which in modem days you find represented in the Irish of the three great divisions and the Highlands of Scotland, those you call the Latin races, the French, the Spanish, the Italian, you will find that in the whole of these nations growing out of that sub-race emotion plays a very great part in the workings of the mind. What was the great characteristic of Greece ? Beauty. And of Rome ? Law. Now, law and beauty are only two sides of one great principle. You cannot have beauty without harmony, proportion, symmetry, and all these are the production of what we call the laws of nature, as well as in the type of mind in which emotion is under the influence of mind, harmonising into beauty whatever form that beauty takes. It does not matter if you take QF THE COMMONWEALTH 9 it in the form of art, in painting, in sculpture, in music ; whether you take it in the form of literature, where the form of the literature is as essential as the presentation of the idea which that literature embodies. If you take as an example French Hterature, where you have clear- ness of expression, perfect adequacy of word to idea, you will at once realise how that contrasts with the Teuton, the 5th sub-race as it is called, in which the thought is everything and the form comparatively indifferent. If you take as an example the German language, the extraordinary clumsiness of its con- struction, you will see how it keeps the mind in the balance until the end of the sentence where you come upon the verb, which expresses the whole meaning. If you take Mark Twain's travesty of it you will at once see the extraordinary difference between the language of the Kelt and the Teuton ; in the Teuton the concrete mind, the scientific mind, in the Kelt the emotional. One reason, by the way, for the difficulty between the English and the Irish is very largely a difference between the Teuton and the Kelt. Neither can understand the other ; neither can look at the thing from the other's standpoint. If all of you could look at it from the standpoint of Theosophical teaching, as I do, you would see the problems are explicable by differences which are based on differences of constitution succeeding each other in these succeeding sub-races, and that these differences might largely be solved by an under- standing of the differences in outlook which thus would lead to mutual compromise, to mutual peace at last. Passing over that, I want you to realise that in this great War in which the Aryan Race has been involved in all its branches, in which others have to some extent joined in from outside, that in this you are coming, you have come, to one of these great changes in the dominance of one sub-race or another, that you are in a great transition period, and that in the war that has c 10 THE WAR AND THE BUILDERS ended you are seeing the ending of the civilisation of the 5th sub-race, after it rises a little higher than it has risen yet, and the emergence of the new sub-race, the 6th, in which intuition — as Bergson indicated — will be dominant over intellect. Gradually that race, only just beginning to be born, will take humanity onward one great step further in its evolution toward human perfection ; hence the turmoil, hence the clash ; for what has been the dominant characteristic of this 5th sub-race ? It has been the development of the principle of individualism. That denotes the part of the 5th sub-race of the 5th Root Race, culminating in this race of humanity of the principle of mind. Now, mind is the combative part of the human being, the questioning, arguing part of the human constitution. If you consider your own mind you know that whenever a new idea is presented to you, your first impulse is to reject it. There springs up in you without your wish a feeling of antagonism, unless it be an idea which in other lives you have been familiar with. But the ordinary mind at once is antagonised by it. In a way it is a fortunate thing, because you have to remember that false ideas thrown out by careless thinkers would hinder instead of help if at once welcomed. Intellect, that competitive part of the mind, needed to be developed. It was absolutely necessary for the next sub-race in evolution ; the key-note of the next sub- race is going to be union (not unity), the union of different nationahties and classes. Unity is a still higher stage that lies far in front. Union being the next stage, it was necessary to have something to unite, necessary to have bricks for the house, and so there had to be a great development of the individual mind. You may remember, for it throws light on general problems which I have no time to go into, that older civilisations were based on the idea of the family, not on that of the individual. European civihsation OF THE COMMONWEALTH 11 is based on the idea of the individual, not on that of the family. The fundamental differences, therefore, were that in the one the idea of duty and of responsibihty was ensured, and in the other the idea of claiming, of asserting, a right. That is the fundamental difference between the civilisations of the East and of the West ; the eastern are all based on the idea of the family and the result of that is that the idea of duty dominates the idea of rights : the responsibihty to the whole is more clearly seen than the advantage of the part. The inevitable result of that in the long course of ages, of millennia, was that the feehng of individuaUsm diminished too much and the feeling of subordination increased too much. As humanity moves in cycles, somewhat in the corkscrew fashion, we all return to the point reached before but on the higher level, so in the civilisation which lies in front, to which we are tending, you will find that idea of the .society as a family returning once more to dominate the thought of the world. It was necessary to develop the individual and his rights, but that cannot last. It gave birth to our civilisation of combat, of antagonism, of isolation, so that as I said some time ago it seemed as though we were beasts fighting in a jungle, instead of a society of human beings governed by the law of mutual self-sacrifice. So it was that right through that civiUsation you have had struggles : the struggle of individual against individual, the struggle of class against class, the struggle of nation against government, and of government against nation, and it has rightly found its apotheosis, and the beginning of its end, in the terrible war of which the results are still being prolonged in the name of peace. Now^ for a moment taking that as the characteristic of the past, accepting if you will for the moment that union is going to be the characteristic of the future, reahsing that in each sub-race of the past, whether you take the Egyptian, or the Persian, or the Keltic, or 12 THE WAR AND THE BUILDERS going right back to the first of all, the Indian, the original Aryan, you will see in the whole of these special characteristics the mark of a certain dominant characteristic. You see it in India in that sense of responsibility, of duty, of being part of a whole, which is put together in the one untranslatable word " dharma," and which made Dr. Miller of Scotland say that the two great gifts of Hinduism to humanity were, on the one side, " the immanence of God " and, on the other, " the solidarity of man". And that is a true view, taken as it was by a Christian missionary with very keen insight, who lived for very many years of his life as Principal of the great Christian College of Madras. The two things are two aspects of one great truth. The immanence of God implies the sohdarity of man. It is only one fact visible from two different points of view. If you look at the Egyptian, the civilisation of the whole borders of the Mediterranean, there you find Science predominating ; if you look at the Persian, purity is the note ; if its purity marked the civilisation here you would not have your rivers poisoned with dyes from factories or being made drains for towns, because the purity of air, of earth, of water, were fundamentals of the great Iranian religion, and it was a crime to soil their earth, or water, or air. A little infusion of that into this country of the West would immeasurably improve your country of England at the present time. That probably will come. In the next sub-race, the Keltic. I have mentioned the characteristic. The Teuton is the sub-race of strife. But now, in the middle of this striving civilisation, you see the beginnings of union on either side. If you think of the Christian religion, which is the religion of this 5th sub-race, you will see that the two great fundamental principles that are embodied in the civilisation of Europe, oi Christendom, are the value of the individual OF THE COMMONWEALTH 13 above all else and the corrective to that — the principle of sacrifice of strength to weakness, of power to helpless- ness, for although it has not yet become very prominent in Christendom, you will find it among the noblest and best Christians — the effort to reahse the words of the Christ • "He that is greatest among you, let him be your servant. I am among you as one that serveth." This great corrective for an over-arrogant civilisation has been coming out during this century and the latter part of the last century in the spread of social service, in the spread of altruism, in the realisation that the rich must not live for themselves alone, nor dream that the world is made for them and not for humanity at large. You can see how that Christ idea that the greatest is he who consecrates his strength to service is correcting the worst excesses of the civilisation ; although it is not widespread enough to prevent the present type of civil war in almost all the nations of Christendom, it is really the beginning of the new seed in the matrix of the old. If you will accept that idea for the sake of grasping the conception that the next development of civilisation is towards union, the going back to the ideal of the family on a higher level than was held by older civiUsa- tions, then you will reaUse that the movements among you which are fighting in that direction, which are trying, however clumsily, to consecrate strength to the service of the weak, that show themselves in the form, however ill-digested at present, that the most skilful ought not to sacrifice the least sldlful to his personal gain and advantage, in the utterances that are being thrown out on every side by thinkers — you will realise there is a dawning recognition of the duty of the part to the whole ; very imperfect, very often overborne and thrown aside in the contest of individual or class, but none the less there. While the superficial things are temporary, that state of recognition of the duty of the whole 14 THE WAR AND THE BUILDERS to the part, the social duty that is a permanent element in human growth, will come into prominence in a nobler and happier future. Now, the war has helped curiousty in this. During the war it was necessary that individuals should sub- ordinate themselves to the whole, otherwise the whole would have perished, and so you had a great development of what is called the power of the State. That is translated here as power of the Government. The conception of the future as regards the State is that it only means the Nation organised : not the Government, the State, over against the people, but the people, in their executive capacity, organising themselves for the better carrying out of the various forms of civiUsed life. That will be the note of the new civilisation as it asserts itself, and you can trace it in many of the movements of the present ; you can trace it in the very apotheosis of the old system in which the many were sacrificed to the few, as you get it in the form of the American Trusts. Now, what is a trust ? It is the organisation of an industry, any particular kind of industry, trying to embrace all who take part in that industry, as in the steel industry in which all workers are brought under central domina- tion, and that domination the domination of a few individuals, individuals of exceptional intellect, excep- tional abihty, exceptional organising capacity. The result of it is a large increase in the work of production, a very large decrease in the cost of production, the getting rid largely of competitive advertising. That is the form against which individuals are struggling over in America. You have had organisations, but for what ? For the enjoyment of the few — multi- millionaires — and the subjugation of the many, the labour of the many turned to the advancement of the few with the result — bitter struggles. You see more clearly the result of the system when it is embodied OF THE COMMONWEALTH 15 in the form of Trusts and when you see the selfishness of those who perfected the system. But it has a very great value, hideous as it is ; it means organisation to make production more effective, to use less in pro duction, and all that you want to do is to change the organisers into agents of departments of the nation, to utihse their brains, their power to organise, for the nation and not for themselves, so that instead of producing to enrich the few you make them produce to enrich the nation. That is the inevitable result of Trusts when they become intolerable, as they are becoming intolerable in America. They have proved the advantage of a system, but you must substitute the nation for the few ; you must learn to produce for use, not for profit, including in use everything that is necessary for future production. Now, the first charge upon production has always in the past been the subsistence of the labourer. That is what is being struggled after at the present time. The establishment of a minimum wage, what does it mean ? It means that decent human Uving is recognised as the first charge upon production. That is what a minimum wage m-eans— the recognition of the great principle that every human being has a right to human life, and the great struggles going on are not, as they may appear to you, for some small increase of wage or decrease in the number of hours worked ; they are struggles for a human life of culture, of education, of refinement, such as they see in those above them. Although they make this possible for others, they have no share of it themselves, and that is what imbues them, very often crude, ill- thought out, ill-digested, very often lacking in a sense of responsibility to the nation as a whole. But have you and I any right to blame the workers, when we remember that we have profited by their labour, that our keener sight, our balanced judgment come from that special leisure to think, the leisure which we deny 16 THE WAR AND THE BUILDERS to them ? I am not one of those who approve of the present strike, but I can see it comes of the desperation to which the men have been driven. Their fundamental feeling may be badly expressed, carried out in unwise ways by those who by mistaken judgment have acted wrongly. We have to consider tliis point : we have learned by war how to organise. Labour has been organised by war for the production of munitions of war. A terrible blunder will be made if that power of organisation is not turned to production in peace, which gives that civihsation materials instead of muni- tions. The same hands that made shells can make clothes ; the same hands that fabricated the terrible weapons of destruction can fabricate the needs of peace. Do not lose sight of the principle of organising necessitated by war which led up to the departments of the nation organised to carry out their particular work. If you want to reaUse what that organisation means, look at the present organising for the distribution of necessities. You could not have done that before the war ; you would have had chaos before the war ; now you have distribution of the necessities of hfe going on all over the country. Do not forget that lesson of the war ; do not let that good product of war be lost, but turn it to the profit of the whole. For true it is that in all terrible disasters there is right on both sides and there is wrong on both sides. It should be settled by arbitration, not by a struggle to the death, as they say, not by a fight to the finish ; it should be settled by reasoned judgment, mutual compromise, until a common ground is found and the nation is saved from suffering. That is one reason why none of us not immediately involved should use any bitterness about the struggle either on the one side or the other, taking our share of the burden without complaint, without grumbling, each of us willingly bearing the suffering for the sake of the larger good to the whole OF THE COMMONWEALTH 17 that will come out of it, if a common ground be found. That common ground will have to be ultimately the organising of the nation as a whole. Now, that existed in the East in the old days in what you call the caste system, really the organising to perform the work. That is gone ; it cannot be revived, but it can be improved, be brought back on a higher level when you realise that the nation is unity as well as diversity. If the next civilisation is going to make that a reality, is going to co-operate instead of to compete, is going to share instead of to grab, is going to work in union instead of one class tearing the throat of another class, this is the time. The New Age, for which all this turmoil is preparing and for which the war itself was preparation in teaching this great nation how to organise that it might preserve its national life, is in sight. It would never have learned its lesson when people so selfish in realising national responsibility were competing individuals. It has been forced to learn from the war how to carry out production and distribution for the benefit of all, and if we can take to heart that great principle, then we shall be laying broad and firm the foundations of the New Era that is coming. Now, in the New Era the State and the Nation will be the same ; the State will not be a bureaucracy as it is now even here to some extent, but the administra- tors will be the servants of the people, in departments of the National life organised for the good of the whole and not for the benefit of a part. We can all help in reaUsing that ; but there will be others needed to raise the walls of this great new civilisation of which you and I can only lay the foundations. The Builders of that new time, whence will they come ? Many of you may not believe in reincarnation ; probably many of you do not believe in it, because you have not thought it out. Reincarnation means that each one of us ere djang has gained a certain amount 18 THE WAR AND THE BUILDERS of experience, that when that experience has been changed by us in the higher worids into power, faculty, capacity, then we come back again into this world to use that higher capacity and power for service. That is putting it in a rough and ready way, but that is what it means. Dying is not losing but gaining, gain- ing time, just the time wanted to assimilate the results of our experience here so as to bring that experience back as faculty. Now, in that the war has played a very, very great part. If you noticed in your picture papers when you have been looking at the Roll of Honour that almost all those were very young men, young men, sometimes boys. You could see it in all their faces, the youth of those who had sacrificed their lives for England's sake — boys' faces, boys' eyes, boys' mouths, clear, frank eyes looking fearlessly at the future, soft mouths not yet hardened by the struggle of life. From one point of thought the saddest picture possible, because looking at it from here it seemed as if all the youth of the nation were being swept away, the boys of the nation being taken out by death. It was a wonder- ful time that you had in those earlier days of the war when your Universities emptied themselves into the Army, when from pit and shop, from mine and factory, the young came forward and gave themselves to the defence of their country, offered themselves for a great ideal; the ideal of hberty, of national honour and national faith, the pledge given which must be redeemed otherwise the nation would be disgraced — great ideals, although foolish men talk of them as though they were only words. When these youths gave themselves for the flag, what was that flag ? Not a piece of bunting but the sign of national life, of liberty in a country which had guarded more than its own liberty, the citadel of the liberty of others, the refuge of every rebel throughout the last century. That was the country for which they were wilUng to die, willing to sacrifice their youth. OF THE [COMMONWEALTH 19 The ideals then" were splendid, though to-day they have been lost. Those were the ideals for which those youths went and gave themselves to mutilation and death. Do you think it means nothing for England and other lands, that their boys gave themselves to die in the young splendour of their manhood ? It means everything for you in the future. Those who sacrificed themselves for mighty ideals, hoping for nothing for themselves, they had in them the germ of the coming civilisation, those who gave themselves that others might Hve, might be happy, might be free. Those whom you think you have lost, you have not lost from England at all. It is they who will be the Nation's Builders of To-morrow, they who will come back again to shape the civilisation, not the one for which they died but the nobler one they recognised in thought. You think you have lost them. No, you have not lost them ; you have gained them for a greater England. Other nations also have gained them. They are coming back now in the little children of the new sub-race, the new type that is making its appearance over in America, in Australia, here. It has been recognised in America as a new type. They call it the "American " type ; but it is not so very much American. It is the new human type which is being bom from the men and women of the present day. These are the Nation Builders of To-morrow. * I read in your papers in far-off India a lament for those who had died, who should have been the workers in the coming future, and I thought to myself that if they only realised the eternal law of nature, that nothing is lost, that nothing is swept away really, that men do not die though the body is struck off, they would not fear. Men leave the body and, gathering up the efforts of experience, they reap the harvest of their sacrifice, coming back to help the world for which they died, and to build the greater civilisation on the ruins of the old. Those who have been brought up 20 THE WAR AND THE BUILDERS in the present cannot shake themselves utterly free. In the young of to-day you see the dreams of the future ; in those who were bom eighteen, nineteen, twenty years ago you have the promise of the future, but very crude, very unrealising, very often mistaken, but still with the heart of truth. It is the young who will lead in the future, not those who are mature, not those who are growing old ; it is the young who will be the Nation of To-morrow, and we are seeing it already in the thoughts, in the aspirations, for we are tending towards what we call Socialism, union in society, when each will have their duty to others and all will work for the common good. What is the great axiom of Socialism? "From everyone according to his capacity; to everyone according to his needs." But that is the law of the family, the oldest in the family bearing all the burden for the babies in the family, giving them all they need. And it is truly a law of nature ; it is the law which will gradually become supreme ; it is the recogni- tion of the unity of man, where men are not to fight and struggle, but to co-operate and to help. You will remember the beautiful words of a man of science of the last generation, one who did not believe in life on the other side of death. He quoted the old saying : " Let us eat and drink for to-morrow we die," but he changed it in application ; he said : " Nay, let us join hands and work, for to-day we are alive together." That was the true inspiration. If life be short, make the best of it, but if life be unending, as it is, then not only make the best of it in the present life, but realise that out of the present grows the future, a future of unimaginable splendour for mankind. Beyond is life unending ; realise that, and as you live to-day you will win your result in nobler experience to weave into added faculty and power for yourselves on the other side of death. Reahse that with added powers you will learn to use the experience you have gained in the world. You OF THE COMMONWEALTH 21 are not going to some indefinite life where all you have gained will be wasted, where everyone will have every- thing they want. I heard the other day of a dying woman who put her feelings into homely but practical words. She was brought up to believe in a heaven with angels standing around playing harps, and she said : "I wish they would not give me a harp. I don't know how to play one. If they would only put a baby into my arms I should know what to do with it." And so she died. She spoke a truth greater than she knew. There will be no harps except for those who are very musical, who have had musical training here. There will be work in this world to do according to the faculties we have fabricated out of past experience, knowledge, self-sacrifice. That is a great truth which as it spreads removes all fear of death and makes us know that everything we make, we make for humanity and the service of the race. So our first lesson of the war is the power of organisa- tion, the power of co-operation, the power of man together to do better for all than can be done when man works against his fellows instead of for them. The great national truth is that the Nation Builders of the future are those who passed away from us by sacrifice. They will come back, eyes already open to their duty, strong enough to build a mighty Order by helpfulness instead of by struggle. I care not for words ; call yourselves by what name you will, but realise that each of you is only a fragment, a frag- ment with divine Hfe within you, life trying to unite the fragments into unity, a splendid whole. Try rather to do away with the feeling of strife and to increase the feeling of unity, so shall we be able to reap out of war the result of its past lessons, and leaving war behind us go on all-confident into the future. 23 II.— THE WAR AND ITS LESSONS ON FRATERNITY FRIENDS : You will have noticed that, in the arrangement of the subjects of these lectures dealing with Lessons from the War, I have taken the ordinary maxim which has so largely dominated Europe since the days of the revolt of the Colonies that are now the United States, and the French Revolution — Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. But you may also have noticed that I have reversed their order, and that I am going to speak to you on Fraternity first, then Equahty, and lastl}' Liberty ; and my reason for doing that is that without Fraternit}^ and Equality, there is really no possibihty of fullness of Liberty ; that Liberty is the crown of progress, not the first step, and that, although increasing Liberty comes with Fraternity and Equality, the perfection of Liberty can only come when Fraternity is the basis of society, and when the thought of the Brotherhood of Man has redressed the inequalities of nature. And so, I am taking them in this reverse order, and am to-day to deal with Fraternity, with Brotherhood. It is not without significance that our Theosophical Society makes the acceptance of Brotherhood the only condition of admission to its ranks. No doctrine is propounded ; no religion is made the criterion. The only thing we require from one who would join our members is the recognition of Universal Brotherhood, and the reason for that is very much the reason that I am putting 24 THE WAR AND ITS LESSONS to you for taking it first of the trio : that, without that recognition no real progress is possible towards the ideal of humanity that must be our goal. Brotherhood must be recognised not as a mere senti- ment, not as a mere feeling, but as a law of nature, without which there is no stable basis for society, without accord with which no permanent progress can be made. And it is as a law of nature that I would ask you to consider this question of Brotherhood, for laws of nature, as you know, are inviolable. We cannot break them ; we can only disregard them. We have no power really to disobey, but only to disregard ; and when we disregard, it is not we who break the law, it is the law that breaks us. And until that great fact is realised as regards Brotherhood, societies built on other foundations will always be found, after a while, to perish ; and only by harmony with this fundamental law can any human society hope to endure. Now, we cannot find an example in history of the sohd building of society on the law of Brotherhood ; we cannot find one civilisation, which has not only endured but progressed, because built in accord with the law. There is one civilisation which has lasted more than seven thousand years, and can be traced through these millennia, because to a great extent the law of Brother- hood was its basis ; but though it has lasted, it has also degenerated in the passage of time, and only by reform- ing itself into a full recognition of the principle can that mighty civilisation of India hope to continue through the coming millennia, as well as having endured through the past. All the other great civilisations have perished one by one, and we study them not as living societies, but through remnants of societies that are dead and entombed. Think for a moment, then, how one can test our law in the past. By their perishing ; for all that is built in disregard of natural law must perish, and its perishing is as sure a proof of the reality of the law, as the ON FRATERNITY 25 endurance of one that had been built on the law of Brotherhood. Take the marvellous civilisation of Greece, that which has dominated Europe and European thought since its day, that which is still for Christendom the criterion of philosophy and literature, which still gives the models of art, of beauty, which reached marvellous perfection in the individual, which built up societies, City-States, whose citizens are an example and a marvel to the world ; for perhaps scarcely any ideal of a City-State has been greater than that which dominated Athens, the ideals of beauty, of responsibility to the State, of the subordination of the welfare of the individual to the welfare of the State, the holding up of the State as the measure of all that WcLS great and noble in human society, the State to them meaning only the organised Nation. But then there was the great difference set up between the Greek and the barbarian. All who were outside that pale of beauty, of poHsh, of intellect, of might, were classed together as the barbarians of the outer world — a very real distinction, for it was a distinction by those great qualities that belong to fnan as man, but that ought to be a universal possession, and not only the possession of a class. And so we find in Athens, with aU its splendour, that it was based on slavery, that the slave was hardly regarded as a man. If you take the descrip- tion of Aristotle as to the nature of a slave, you find him ranked as a piece of property, not worthy hardly of the very name of humanity, and there was the rotten foundation that made Greece perish, only to leave behind marvellous memories, ideals, which, as I have said, have dominated Europe from the days of Plato to our own. And stiU they form the great instrument of what has been called cultm'e, that exquisite polish, which gives beauty to the rough stone of human nature, which is not education, though education be necessary to it, which is the fine and exquisite polish that makes D 26 THE WAR AND ITS LESSONS all life beautiful in its harmony and in its grace, that which should be the heritage of every human being when Fraternity is recognised and has become the recognised law of society and of life. If you take instead a modem civilisation, that of the United States, you find there the same kernel of slavery existing right down to within ten years of the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century. It is often said that democracy is incompatible with slavery ; perfect democra cy truly ; yet you have had a very fair example of it in the United States, contemporaneous with slavery, and we have never heard people saying that the United States are therefore unfit for self-government. It was quietly accepted by Christendom until, by the terrible scourge of Civil War, it was cut out of the life of the American people. I spoke of one civilisation, that of India, which had endured through the whole of this period, and the reason for that is that a very definite attempt was made in the foundation of that society to estabhsh the principle of Brotherhood ; that is why it has lived. It realised that Brotherhood in man was based on the essential truth that in every man resides a fragment of the Divine Life, the root of the fundamental equality of all. It recognised that man was divine at his heart, and not essentially evil, essentially corrupt ; and, when it regarded him, it saw in every human being the potential God ; saw that before every man there lay the unlimited possibilities of evolution into the God-made-manifest, that the hidden was to become the manifest, the potentialities to be unfolded into powers ; and recognised at the same time the different stages in human evolution, which are the inevitable result of the different number of hves lying behind each life of to-day. For evolution is by reincarnation ; each is built up from nescience into omniscience ; the same great pilgrimage lies before euery spiritual intelligence that comes to clothe itself in ON FRATERNITY 27 matter in this physical world ; that order realised the differences of age in the unfolding of the Eternal, and, remembering it, recognised the real inequaUties, not in man himself, but in the apparatus that the Spirit was forming for his own completer self-expression. And so it looked on all men as a family, in which youngers, and equals, and elders existed, but existed in a family union, and not as isolated and warring individuals. Hence, it founded that remarkable institution, which has become so corrupt, and is so misunderstood in the West, that which is called the institution of caste. Now, caste was devised for service ; it has become the expression of social tyranny, instead of social service. Hence, it is doomed to disappear, but it has lasted for at least seven thousand years, and still lasts, and is strong in many parts of India to-day ; a social institution that has lasted so long, and has kept a civiUsation stable, prosperous, and wealthy, is not a thing to be simply denounced, but to be under- stood, so that what is useful may be preserved, while what is mischievous may be discarded. The origin of that was the different qualities in human nature as they are unfolded in the long series of reincarnating lives, and their arrangement in an order which should suit each individual who was bom into it, and give him, not only contentment in the present, but certainty of growth, immediate and future. And so each caste was made within itself a pure democracy, but, between the castes, there was difference, a training ground for human beings, to make them realise that all should exist for service, and not for individual gain ; and so they were taught that the man who was wise and learned had the duty of the teacher, to impart the learning he had gained ; that he was bound to teach without remuneration ; bound to teach everyone freely, who came to him for teaching ; for it was recognised that wisdom is the highest thing a man can gain, and 28 THE WAR AND ITS LESSONS that the learning, later transmuted into wisdom, should be freely given to all who needed it, and not made a matter of barter in the market-place. So the other three of these great castes had each its established work : one to defend the Nation and administer its affairs ; another to earn wealth that might be paid out in the service of the Nation ; and the youngest of all to do the duty of the manual work necessary for the benefit of the whole ; all this by mutual service and mutual duty, and not in pride, or arrogance, or isolation. That was the old theory, designed to lead in its perfection to a recognition of Brotherhood indeed, but because it v/as turned aside from its original purpose, because it became a matter of personal pride and self-glorifica- sion, therefore it has led in later days to degeneracy and has to pass away, to be replaced by something nobler and better, having done its work, having become an anachronism. Now, looking thus at the past, how shall we deal with our question of Brotherhood in the present, and in the future ? We have seen the law destroy and preserve ; can we see how we may build so that it may preserve what we build ? To understand that, we must begin, as I said, by recognising Brotherhood as a law of nature. What is the first lesson that the War has to teach us as regards Brotherhood ? I think the first and most important lesson, because the furthest reaching, is that it is only by the lifting up of a great ideal, recognised by a whole Nation, that the feeling of Brotherhood in that Nation can be begun and can proceed ; for what was the first result of the War ? An immense springing forward of classes to defend the whole of the Nation ; the giving of themselves by the young, not only from the Universities, though that was naturally prominent, but from pithead and shop, from every class of the community. The young poured out in the recognition of that great ideal of Liberty, and ON FRATERNITY 29 of defence of the weak. That was the ideal that fired the youth of the Nation, for the young of a Nation are always the most susceptible to the great ideals which are raised up as landmarks of the future. Not from the old, but from the young comes that swift recognition of the attraction of the Coming Day ; just because they are young and unspoiled, just because they have not been through the mill of competition, and the terrible struggle for a hvelihood, therefore, can the Spirit ^vithin them speak more plainly and reach out towards the ideal, which is to be recognised and realised in the future. And that, in its conscious force, is one great lesson of the War : that only by the recognition of a great ideal will you ever make great social changes and improve the condition of society as a whole. Argument by itself will not do it, however sound the argument, because the majority of people really do not think very much ; they simply drift, as far as thought is concerned. Nor can you do it by appeals to emotion only, for emotion, unregulated b}' knowledge, is likely to be a destructive force instead of a beneficial one, and certainly will not construct the great edifice of the future. Neither by appeals to logic, nor by appeals to emotion, is the regeneration of society to be brought about. You have to appeal to something higher, something nobler, something greater, wliich is found in every man, because in every man the hidden God resides, and answers to the ideals which are pitched sufficiently high. It must be a great ideal appeaHng to the unselfish, and not to the selfish, in man. I know that sometimes people think that the crowd is moved more by appeals to passion, to prejudice, to class feeling, to selfishness, rather than by appeals to unselfish ideals, but this is not so. The truth is that the higher you pitch your ideal, the more general and the more passionate is the response from the ordinary crowd of human beings that you may 30 THE WAR AND ITS LESSONS address. It is not the appeal to selfishness that will stir a great crowd to enthusiasm ; it is the appeal to some act of sacrifice, some noble, heroic deed, such as of one of those miners who goes down into the poisonous gas in a pit in order to save his comrade from the death that threatens him there ; or some other appeal to sacrifice at the danger of life, that moves the common crowd to enthusiasm, far more than appeal for material gain, for this and that. That has to be remembered, because otherwise we are afraid to pitch our ideals too high. What you ought to be afraid of is to pitch them too low. There lies the danger, and there the difficulty in building society on a new basis, as it must be built if it is to last, and to grow out of the chaos of the moment into the cosmos of the Coming Day. And that lay at the back of the appeal that fused classes together for a time in those first days of enthu- siasm of the War ; because the appeal was to self- sacrifice, therefore it drew the young, as a magnet draws soft iron, for in the young that spirit of uncalculating self-sacrifice is found. It is the strength of the Spirit witliin, which hves by giving and not by taking. So class disappeared in the trench, colour disappeared in the trench, man knew man in the trench ; and the danger is lest we should forget what in the struggle of war was learned, lest the old feelings should revive — as they are reviving to-day — the separation of class from class, instead of the co-operation of class with class. That is the danger that threatens peace, and means only the translation from one kind of war to another, for the war between classes is as frightful as a war of Nations, perhaps even more frightful, for it destroys the feeling of a common country, which is the necessary precedent of Brotherhood. We have to consider how we can carry this feeling into the struggles which mark the transition period towards peace. We have thus to frame our ideal, the ideal of Brotherhood ; ON FRATERNITY 31 we have, instead of conflict, to make applications of the law of Brotherhood in dealing with the condition of society, and the difficulty is not in recognising the law, but in finding out how to apply it to the concrete conditions among which we have to live, and out of which our society has to be framed. So you must realise that, while Brotherhood is a law of nature, there are other laws of nature also which have to be considered. The law of Brotherhood is as fundamental as the law of gravitation. You cannot build a stable house if you disregard the law of gravita- tion, but also you cannot build a house that will endure unless you have good materials to work with, good bricks or good stones, and good mortar to bind them together in a union that will endure. You have to realise that stabiUty is found by understanding the laws, and applying them so as to bring about the result at which you aim ; and it is not enough to speak of Brotherhood, unless you try to apply it to conditions of society, and realise also that other laws must be applied, if the application of Brotherhood is really to succeed. Now, there is another thing which is a law of nature, which many people seem to think is in conflict with Brotherhood, and that is Justice, Justice is essential in the building of a social fabric, if that is to endure, and it is in very truth one of the conditions of the Brotherhood that will endure, for we have many unions, many local brotherhoods, as we also call them : brother- hoods of employers, on the one side ; brotherhoods of manual workers, on the other ; brotherhoods for philanthropic purposes ; brotherhoods of all sorts and kinds ; but we seek a National Brotherhood, and then an International, until all humanity is bound together in one mighty Universal Brotherhood. Hence we have to consider Justice as well as Love, and they are only two sides of the same thing. True Love is the same 32 THE WAR AND ITS LESSONS as true Justice, and the bad results grow out of what you call hate on the one side, or injustice on the other. Now, what does Justice mean ? It means giving to every man what is due to him, to every creature what is due to it. And the measure of what is due to anj^ creature is the measure, on the one side, of his needs, on the other, of his usefulness to the social union. Neither of these can be left out of consideration. Every child has a right to the conditions in which every quaUty he has brought with him into the world is able to find its full development. That is the condition ahke of social Justice and of Brotherhood, which will be gradually established among us. And we have to be careful lest in the search for helping our fellows, we confuse Justice with what is sometimes called charity. Now, charity is no substitute for Justice ; and that is the point on which I fear many people are con- fused in their thought to-day. I will take it in a case which may, for a moment, shock some of you, until you realise how the trouble works out. There is a great inclination to-day, and rightly, towards social service, and that is spread in every direction, sometimes by bodies formed for the purpose, and then it is useful and uplifting ; but it appears also in another form amongst us, as when you get what is called the good-will of the employer, who makes himself the agent of social welfare to those whom he employs. Now that, at first sight, is very commendable when you find the man, who has made great wealth, using large portions in the helping of those who have made it ; when you find him building garden cities, or opening schools, or making reading- rooms, doing everything that can be done for his work- people, and doing it with the best motives. When you find " the admirable man," " the good employer," it is natural to praise him in contrast with " the bad employer " ; but suppose you try to work out why it i^ ON FRATERNITY 33 necessary, why it is you have to give in charity what a man ought to have as the result of his own labour, fairly recompensed. Then you find that the workman has been unfairly paid, and that out of the unfair profits made by him the employer gives a fraction of his gain back as a gracious and kind benefit. That is charity ; that is not Justice ; and it works out its natural effect ; it works out the effect that, when the time comes for some struggle, this kind of service has tied the hands and feet of the workpeople who have received it, and has made them helpless in the hands of the employer who gave it. That is the other side of it. And so people have rather harshly called it " strike-insurance," an insurance by the employer against strikes on the part of his workpeople. They are afraid to strike, lest they should lose the benefits they have received, because he may withdraw that which he had bestowed on them. The result is that they are reduced to a worse slavery, because the iron chains are covered with flowers, and in the beauty of the flowers you forget the appalling result of the chains which are concealed. That is what you have to recognise. If you will look a Httle closely into the subject, you will see how that works out in practice. It is not the good-will only that has to be looked at ; that is creditable to the man who does it, if he does it from good-will. You have to look at the result on the whole social structure, and see how that very work, meant for good, ceases to be good and subtly brings about fresh evil, preventing the funda- mental changes necessary for the eventual realisation of human Brotherhood. Now, let me try to put that to you. Think for a moment what are the conditions of civihsed society. People have to Uve, every member of it. The first necessity is Raw Material. Call it earth, land, what you Uke, everything that nature provides for you, free of cost. The second stage is the turning of "the raw 34 THE WAR AND ITS LESSONS material into articles, which are necessary for human sustenance and human consumption. That is Labour. The third necessity is the subsistence of the labourer, while he is turning the raw material into the manu- factured article which is necessary for human subsistence ; hence, Savings of Past Labour are employed for the suste- nance of present labour, and savings necessary to replace them as these are consumed, to keep an equally necessary store for the future. That is called Capital. Of course, you have here the hackneyed words : Land, Labour, Capital. I am only putting to you what they really are : raw material, the work that turns the raw material into the useful article, and the necessary savings out of this product for use in the future which is to exist on these, as the present is existing on those of the past. In the very simplest forms of human society, you find all these together. You find people settUng on the land, holding it in common ; you find them living on past harvests, while the present is being made ; you find certain simple implements restored when they are worn out. It is not without interest that in a little description, given by Commander Booth-Tucker the other day before the Joint Committee, of a village in India, he repeated the kind of thing he had seen ; the village now, as of old, hves by barter and exchange; coin is used more to melt down into ornament than as a medium to buy goods, and so on. In the village he described, he pictured how aU the people gathered together for the reaping of the harvest, how the harvest was divided among the different communities, each community with its own headman, who took charge of the share of the products belonging to the families of his community, and the whole business was very easily arranged. That is to-day a picture of the past preserved in the present ; but as society grows larger and more complicated, that simple arrangement cannot continue to exist, and so you find ON FRATERNITY 35 that, as times grow more complex, it is necessary to go beyond the very simple organisation of the village, where the potter exchanges his pots for the weaver's cloth, and the weaver exchanges his cloth for a share in the harvest of the agriculturalist. That kind of simple groups of labourers no longer survives in our complicated society, and so there arises gradually that representa- tive, to some extent, of the headman of a community, the organiser of labour, so that you have someone, or a group of people, who collects together mutual workers, and enables them to be more productive by working together and dividing the product of the labour than they can be in the simpler, earlier village system. So you have gradually growing up an organised class of men of brain, rather than of skill of finger, though the skill of finger may also go with brain. That man organises, directs, and controls, and because labour finds itself helpless while it is working to produce what is wanted for subsistence, the savings gradually become accumu- lated in the hands of the organiser, and so, after a time, you get what you call capitalists, and then quarrel arises over the division of the produce. You do not have quarrels in the village, because it is plain and clear that all must live, and that they live better by fair division than by quarrelling over joint products ; but when produce and savings are divided at intervals of time, and by many intermediaries, many find it easier to transfer than to work or to organise. You gradually get ^growing up your complicated system of the present, where you have overseer, capitaUst, and middlemen, all between labourer and consumer ; not an attractive nor a sensible state of things, because things come to be made, not for use, but for profit. Because brains are rarer than hands, gradually there comes into existence a class of those who accumulate largely out of the labour of many, and so great quarrels arise between capital and labour. And capital uses as its weapon 36 THE WAR AND ITS LESSONS the menace of starvation : " If you won't work on my terms, then go and starve," and the raw material is monopolised. As labour could not keep itself indi- vidually and face this, it combined ; and so the whole thing came to the condition where you are to-day, where the three constituents necessary for production are divorced the one from the other. That has been going on so long now that you have come to tliink it the natural condition of things. It is not ; it is bitterly unnatural, the result of man's selfishness and greed, and only by carefully thought-out arrangements by each human being can we come to live in peace and not in confHct. So we find ourselves, where we are to-day, where Brotherhood seems almost a hopeless ideal, and yet it is an ideal we must hold up. The tendency is for the single capitalist to think that he can get along all right if he has no labourers, but the one labourer cannot get along all right unless he can com- bine with his fellows ; and so the men gradually group themselves and unite the groups, so that a number of groups may be better able to fight the terms of capital. Then it becomes the question of mutual starvation, the question which could hold out the longest. " I will not work unless I can have what I want," says the worker ; and the other : "I won't help you to work nor organise you, nor give you raw materials to use unless you come to work on my terms." That is the chaos in which we have been involved for so many years. Now, in War we learned the lesson of co-operation ; better production, because done for the good of the whole Nation ; better distribution, because arranged for the good of the whole Nation. Each of you would have starved, if you had not rationed the whole Nation. " An impossible thing to do," you would have said some years ago, and yet you did it, and came through. Of course, you did not do it perfectly ; you did it with much jobbery, much unfairness, did it in the ON FRATERNITY 37 clumsy way in which first efforts must shape them- selves. You have now two large forces over against the other, one mighty in its possession of one of the essentials of production, and the other mighty by its growing membership, by its growing organisation, by its growirjg intelligence, the result of wider education, and the application of that intelligence to the problems of society. Can you imagine that the great mass of people, as they become educated, will lead the lives led during the last century ? Ought you to expect them to do it, if you believe either in Justice or in Brotherhood ? The great struggle to-day is not over a question of wage and profit ; it is the question of the basis of the whole of society and the position of each in it : each man and each woman to be honoured and honourable, and not to be a mere hand, as though a hand had no body, no brain, no heart. The very term used : " so many hands in a factory," shows the twisting of an unnatural idea, for these " hands " are human beings, men and women who need human lives, and they have not human lives at present in this chaos that exists. What does a human life mean ? It does not mean work all day, going to rest, to bed, weary, and getting up next day to renew the work, and going on like that day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, until childhood is turned to old age and the small pension, or the poorhouse, is the reward of a man's whole Ufe. That condition is impossible ; it ought to be impossible ; it is right that it should be impossible in the future. But how are we to change it ? Now, in this transition period, one way that the social conscience has discovered is to lay down what they call the minimum wage. That means really only a sub- sistence wage, but man does not Uve in order to subsist only. It is written in your scriptures : " Man does 38 THE WAR AND ITS LESSONS not live by bread alone." And that has to be remem- bered by the people who seek to frame the society of the future. Man has to live by the exercise of all his faculties, and not only for the support of his body. Why, I remember, some thirty years and more ago now, how the bus-drivers here in London left their houses before the children were awake, and came back to them at midnight, after the children had gone to bed, so that children and father did not know each other, because they were never at home together at the same time. The only time then that we could get them for meetings for the discussion of their condi- tion was at midnight, and so in snow and sleet, in mud and mire, we had to go down and meet these weary men coming off duty to discuss how these conditions might be altered. These are the things found to be going on and on, and what they call society dancing on the top of them ; but those days have gone, gone never to return, for society does not mean the fashionable world in the ballroom ; it means everyone born upon the land of the Nation, joining together into one mighty whole. If you have fixed the minimum wage, it ought to be one which enables the worker to become cultured, refined, polished, with leisure and with time to under- stand the beauties of nature and the beauties of art. These are in our lives, yours and mine. What right have we to these Uves more than they ? Above all, what right have we to say that others shall not have them, because we should lose the wealth they have made for us and we should be worse off ? It seems to me if you begin, in this transition world, to legislate specially for the worker, it is fair to legislate also for the employer. There should be a maximum profit as well as a minimum wage, and the difference between them should be divided into graded wages for higher skill and a reserve fund for the lightening of the financial burden on the Nation. ON FRATERNITY 39 It is said that while the worker may suffer, slowly and gradually, he will improve his conditions. It never seems to occur to people that men, who are making far more than they have any right to make in a com- munity, should forego some of it. It is quite true that labour needs to be organised, but the price of organisation is far too high ; there are many men now, who have come from the workers, who have had a chance of showing their abilities. As I heard it said quite recently : coal returns 2s. 6d. a ton to the miner who hews it out ; you know what it costs when you get it here in London. There is too much difference between the price you, the consumer, pay and the price the miner receives. The principle of the rearrangement must be that the increased pro- duction which comes by men working in co-operation must be shared in co-operation, and not in isolation. You have organised labour ; you have not organised the fair distribution of the results of labour, and where men work together for a common aim,; the aim should be national prosperity, and not family wealth, or class profiting, all to be paid for by the labour of the many. Let me say, in saying that, you have no more right to sacrifice the capitalist class than you have to sacrifice the class of workers, and there lies one of the dangers of to-day. There is so much resentment, fair resent- ment, at conditions which have endured for many years, that there is the danger of revenge taking the place of Justice. That is not fair, that is not right. The capitalist is a product of the system, just as the manual labourer is a product of the system, and this ought not to be forgotten. It is the result of the condition which we have all agreed with and accepted, not deliberately but unconsciously, implicitly if not expHcitly. We are responsible for the condition of things between capital and labour, because we have not put our brains and hearts to the solving of social 40 THE WAR AND ITS LESSONS problems. You have to remember that a man always at work has very little time to think out explanations and plans in detail. They know what they want ; they are not always in the mass the best judges of the methods whereby what they want can be obtained. We do not desire that the old brutal method of the employer in starving out the resistance of his workers shall be changed round to the possibihty of great groups of workers starving out others that they may gain their way. Great words were spoken by Shelley, prophet and poet as he was. Speaking for liberty, speaking for the worker, speaking for the labourer, he said to them, after blaming the action of the rulers and the wealthy : "Do not thus when ye are strong." It is a hard lesson for those to learn who have suffered ; the more reason that those who have not suffered, who have had the leisure to cultivate their brains, should apply themselves to the solution of the problems that are facing every class of the community, not facing just one class only. They have a very difficult lesson to learn, they who have suffered. Suffering does not tend to the promotion of patience. Can you expect that it should ? You must not forget that in the changes coming you must take them into counsel, and not try to make another arrangement to be forced upon them without their own consent, for there are brains there ; they have minds ; they have considered ; they are men who have worked and thought and lived. Many of them are the soundest thinkers in the country, and in saying that, I know that of which I am speaking. I am not speaking only on the platform from hearsay. I have been in the cottages of the miners of Northumber- land and Durham, have sat with them around their fires, have shared their meals with them, and talked over with them the problems of the day. I have discussed with them those problems to the full, the direction they should take in social quarrels. These men have ON FRATERNITY 41 thought and they understand. Take them into counsel ; do not look on them as " hands," but as comrades, who want to help in making Great Britain free and happy for every class of people born on the soil. Surely there is knowledge enough, love enough, to make this great change, in the ways of peace, and not in war. It is not the most depressed populations, not those who have been most tyrannised over, who are the best builders of the New Civilisation. They only know that they are suffering and want relief. It is to a country Uke Great Britain, to a country. Uke America, to a country like France — though not as much to France as to you and to America — they look that these great problems should find men and women who are capable of sympathy, endowed with much patience and willing- ness to sacrifice, and to act rather than to talk. That fundamental change in the order of things has to come. It is no use shutting your eyes to it. Things will never return again to pre-war conditions. Neither should they. For why should that great War have been fought, if we are to have the old methods of thought, of act, class differences, class hatreds? The War has dug a gulf between the past and the present, but we in the transition state are making worse war, warfare of class against class for that of Nation against Nation, The only question really for us is whether the transi- tion shall be made in love or hate ; if in love, then by the co-operation of all that is best in every class, not by impulse but by thought, argument by the leisured and the over-worked, by the whole of these together should this mighty problem be worked out to a successful conclusion. Compromise there must be in the transition state, but in making that compromise never forget that you must not compromise your ideal. You must never mar that ; compromise only on the methods for obtaining the ideal. That is a point you must always keep in mind. The ideal is Brotherhood. That must E 42 THE WAR AND ITS LESSONS never be compromised, never lost sight of. Nothing less than that will satisfy, nor ought to satisfy, the Nation of to-day. In your hands is the future. But you must compromise in methods ; you must com- promise over the table in the ways of bringing it about. In order that that ideal may be generally accepted, you must carry on all over society the great pioneer work of popularising it in act, not only in name. I know you cannot preach until you practise ; unless you can practise, your preaching is not effective. The field of a lecturer is only to point out possibilities, and suggestions from those who have thought have to be decided by experimenting by those who agree with the thinkers. Right action must accompany that work. Thought is sterile and fruitless without action. If the change is to come in hatred, if it is to come, as it is coming in many countries where tyranny has suddenly changed into licence, then it cannot endure, and we shall have to begin again. The mass of the people, say what you will, prefer order to liberty, but there lies a danger, if you turn them against you. The great mass of the people want to have their homes secure, want to lead safe Uves in prosperity, enjo3dng at the same time Liberty. With Liberty so far have gone struggle and pain and suffering, whereas Liberty should bring about peace and happiness and content- ment. Thus dealing with Brotherhood, I ask you to remember that you must accept it as an ideal because it is a law of nature, that you must remember that it is not separation, but Justice and Right Feeling, which will lead you along the path to universal prosperity and happiness. Be not afraid of your great ideals, but try to reaUse them. Do not scoff at th*^ ideal of the League of Nations, although it be no League of Nations to-day but one of classes and of Governments, See the ideal in it rather, and work for that ideal, so as to make it what ON FRATERNITY 43 it ought to be. In that great ideal lies the promise of the future ; in that Hes the possibility of the dis- appearance of war. Let us then stand by our ideals ; let us by mutual co-operation and consultation work out a method, the method to reaUse that with the least suffering to any and the greatest good for all. The great ideal is that all beings should be free, happy, contented, where each develops to the full all that is in him, but always to be wilHng in service for the benefit of all. That is what we all desire, whatever our class feeUngs may be ; and that is what we shall accompHsh if all join together for the common good. Some of us, at least, believe that One is coming who is the Master Builder of every successive civihsation, and we should prepare His way by love not hinder by hatred, by desire for separa- tion ; for so shall the days of war vanish, and humanity shall truly enter on the Path of Peace. 45 III.— THE WAR AND ITS LESSONS ON EQUALITY FRIENDS: I am to speak to you this morning on the subject of Equahty, and my subjects rather increase in difficulty, as they succeed each other. Fraternity, on the whole, was the easiest to deal with ; Equality is more difficult ; Liberty will be the most difficult of all. And the reversal that you have noticed I have made is because the true sequence of thought risas from the basis in Fraternity to the conditions in Equality, and to the crown of evolution, of development, through Liberty. Now, the great lesson with regard to Equahty that the War taught us was, so I think, that a man must be judged by his value, and not by Ms particular position in the present social order. It was found that men of all ranks volunteered for the front, were ready to sacrifice themselves, were moved by the same great ideal, and, in that way, the world itself was shown that you must look on a man for what he is, not for what he has of outside trappings, or of social rank. Men fought side by side in the trenches, rose through the rank of private to officer by distinguishing them- selves above their fellows, learned in the trenches to trust each other, reaUsed in the trenches that no man stood alone, but needed to be shoulder to shoulder with his brother-man. Surely it ought not to be impos- sible to carry on that lesson into the days of peace ; 46 THE WAR AND ITS surely those who found they needed each other in the trenches should feel the same when they return to civil life. Not only within the Umits of a Nation, but within the vast Umits of the Commonwealth, men should realise their own unity with their fellow -men, should learn that equaUty and diversity go hand in hand to enrich and not to bring about a monotone in society. And is it unreasonable to have the hope that those who in war learned that lesson may carry it on in the reorganisation of society with which every great Nation is now faced, may carry on the lessons to new applications, may cUng to the principle and work it out in civil life. So that, whether within the Nation, or within the Commonwealth, whether in these little Islands or in the vast overseas lands that form an integral part of the Commonwealth, men may realise their need for each other, may recognise their essential unity, and, therefore, essential equality amid all possibiUties of difference, of diversity, and so may build up what has never yet been seen in our world — a Commonwealth of Nations worthy to endure, one great step forward on the road which will lead ultimately to a Commonwealth of all humanity ? For this is the great hope that Ues beyond the intermediate steps that are necessary. They cannot be leapt over at a single bound, and hence in dealing with Equality we need to find the deep principle on which that Equality is impregnably based ; we need to search in the human constitution, in its manifold differences and inequaUties, for something which is in common, something which is universal, something which belongs alike to every man, woman and child within the great circle of humanity ; for unless we take that deeper view of Equality, unless we can recognise it as it really is, then the numberless inequalities around us, natural as well as artificial, would make the word Equality a mere empty sound, and not an abiding principle of life. LESSONS ON EQUALITY 47 Now, what is that Equality which makes all funda- mentally, essentially, equal ? It is because in the heart of everyone there resides, and is slowly unfolding, the seed of Divinity which has taken the outer form of man. I am not confining that Divinity to the human form. There is but One Life within the universe, and in that One Life all things inhere. We cannot deny it to anything, without implicitly denying it to everything. We must recognise that that Divine Life is immanent in everything that we find in our world, or that exists in the universe of which our world is a part. There is no life save the Life of God, omni- present, immanent in everything that exists. All the various lives are deified through the Life Universal within the all-embracing tie which binds everything into an expression of that Life, because it is infinite in its multiplicity, in its manifestations, practically innumerable in its forms. The very lowest is only held together by that Life ; the loftiest existence only exists because that Life is embodied in it ; from the dust beneath our feet to the Highest Being in any part of the Universe, the One Life moves and lives ; in That alone reside the varieties of form expressing some part of that Life. I am confining myself only to humanity, because that is what we are chiefly concerned with here in dealing with reconstruction ; but in order to avoid any misconception, I remind you of the universality of that Life, and I may quote some ancient words that the existence of God is found in the stone, that the feeling of God is found in the vegetable, that the dawning mind of God is found in the animal, and that in man that Life rises to self-consciousness : he remembers, he forecasts, and so far on our physical globe is the highest organisation we have of the Life Divine. That is the ancient view of this immanence of God, not denying, but asserting that Life transcends 48 THE WAR AND ITS our world, and all worlds that are, but recognising that in the lowest, as in the highest, that Life should be realised, and according to its capacity to manifest, so is the duty of each to the other. That includes, of course, in its wide sweep, all sentient beings as being the nearest to humanity. S. Francis of Assisi saw our little brethren in the animals and birds that surround us, shut out no sentient being from love, compassion and duty. It is well that we should remember that to the lower forms especially belongs the doctrine of rights, to the higher forms especially the doctrine of duties. This, then, is the basis of Equality, the seed of Divine Life in us all, and at the beginning of our apparently separated existences, we see there that all are on the same level ; when we look onwards into the far-off future, in which the hidden God shall become more and more the God manifest, then can we catch gUmpses that, far beyond, Equality is shown in its highest manifestations, instead of in only its lower, and between these two — which have sometimes been called " the Divine nescience " ending in " Omni- science" — there is neither beginning nor ending in this infinite circle of Life between these two points, both of which we are able to glimpse, however temporarily: that there are between these two points endless ranges of diversity, of inequality, outer and inner differences of unfoldment of the Spirit, differences of development in the bodies which enshrine that Spirit ; hence natural inequality is the thing we see most plainly, for the Equality is hidden among the inequalities of nature, and of society framed by man ; that essential Equality is the equality that you find in a family of one blood, born of the same parents. It does not imply equality of function, but differences: not equality of age, but diversity. No one, however, in a family is below or above another, the babe is as much part of the family LESSONS ON EQUALITY 49 as any working member of that same band ; and the tie of love and duty that binds the family together should be in the community, and in the Nation, the same recognition of love, the same discharge of duty. Now, we must separate this fundamental Equality from this difference of evolution and unfoldment, that goes with this fundamental difference of age. We did not all come into the world at our human beginning at the same time, any more than all children were born at the same time. We came in in waves, and so we find oldest and youngest in the human family as in the local family, in the single human family ; but that does not go hand-in-hand with what we call social status ; it does not go hand-in-hand with any of the outer marks of society, that make people belong to one class or to another. Turn your minds for a moment — for I shall come back to that — ^tum your minds for a moment to the long course of evolution of a single individual, born into the world in a physical body of a very low and undeveloped tj^e; so low, that in your world to-day you cannot find an example thereof; so imperfect, that you would call your very lowest savage a being very much higher than primeval man. Some traces you have found in geological researches, something you can glimpse of what he was in those far-off ages, and you see there the unfolded Spirit, encased in a rough, undeveloped body, which is improved as the Spirit unfolds. And ' through the long, long course of repeated births into this world, of births into other worlds, where that experience gathered here is changed and transmuted into faculty, into power, into capacity ; all along through manifold earth exis- tences and existences elsewhere, you can trace the unfold- ing Spirit making his cage a body more and more highly developed, an apparatus through which the spiritual life finds more and more perfect expression. Sometimes that notion of many, many Uves wearies 50 • THE WAR AND ITS the people who hear of it, and have not been brought up in the knowledge of it from their infancy, as amongst eastern peoples. They become tired when they think of all these lives before them — they do not like the thought of all these lives in front, which they cannot forecast ; they do not realise that the tiredness is only the tiredness of the body in which they are living, that that young, eternal Spirit knows no weariness, knows no tiredness, knows no exhaustion, but an ever-welling spring of splendid hfe, rejoicing in the exercise of his powers, and joyous as he springs onward and onward to ever mightier self-realisation. This is what hes before everyone of you, whatever may be your position in evolution ; nay, lies before the lowest of our criminals, before the vilest in our civihsation. None are shut out from it, none can be shut out from it. If we are more developed, it is only because we are older than they ; they are the children, we are comparatively the adults ; but we, in our brains, in our emotions, are babes to those who rise high above us in the super-human ranks of conscious Beings, and as we look for tenderness from Them to our weaknesses, so should we look on our social babes, learning the first, hard lessons of human Ufe. If that be true, it is also true that from nothing that man can dream of, of beauty, of grandeur, of splendid achievement, can anyone of you be shut out in the hves that lie in front ; nothing that you can dream of as grandest and sublimest, nothing that you can hope for in the moments of your highest aspirations, nothing that has shone to you hke a star when you have read some story of human greatness, sacrifice, splendour, but shall be yours in the coming days, when you have climbed to the place that others of high achievements hold to-day. And if you can reaUse that, you will never in the inequalities of outer appearances lose a sense of EquaUty in the Oneness of your Divine Life : and on nothing less than that must you base it ; on LESSONS ON EQUALITY 51 nothing less than that view of evolution, which is more beautiful and much more full than I have to-day been able to put it ; nothing but that can make you secure in your recognition of Equality in face of the many horrors and abominations of human hfe to-day. Nothing but that should make you indignant with the tyrannies, but compassionate with the ignorance of a brutal human being, pitiful and sorrowful, for it is far worse to injure than to be injured : to be injured is only a remnant of the past you have outgrown ; to injure is to soil your future and tie yourself down. And this larger view is wanted, when you are thinking of recon- structing your society, for knowledge as well as love must be brought to that great task. I said I would come back to it. You must not confuse Equality with social status, or with class. Get rid of all ideas of class, when you are thinking not only of the fundamental idea of Equality, the Unity in God, but also of the manifest inequality which may be found among human beings of any social class. It does not follow that because a man is born what is called a noble that therefore he himself is noble ; it does not follow that because a man is born in the very lowest part of our social disorder, that that man is reaUy himself low. You must realise there are nobles in every one of your classes ; there are vagabonds in every one of your classes also. Classes do not answer to realities, if you are Uving in social anarchy, not in social order ; and so put away the idea in this of rank, of class, and of all these ordinary distinctions that we have made which do not answer to the inequalities of Nature. Now, what ought a society to do in face of these inequalities of Nature ? A very gallant attempt was made to deal with these thousands of years ago in the ancient civi- lisation of India, and it was made by what is called the caste system, trying to sort people out into their natural places in society, necessary for a Hfe of their own 52 THE WAR AND ITS among these different wide-spread castes. That was the original idea, and it worked admirably for thousands of years, but it does not work now, because of the outer confusion existing there as here. That being so, what ought we to do in trying to bring about effective, external equaUty, as well as recognising the inner, fundamental Equahty ? Clearly, our duty is that society should redress as far as possible the inequaUties of Nature ; that we, who find people are born different in capacity, in power, in characteristics, we should do all we can not to intensify these inequaUties, as we so often do to-day, but to lessen them and not to make artificial inequalities, deepening and strengthening the natural inequalities ; for within the limits of a single Nation will largely be found one type. In what we are pleased to call "civilised" Nations — I doubt the wisdom of the epithet as Nations are at present, but taking it as the word is used — you find very much more of Equality than you would imagine in Nature, in any of those who are born into that Nation. They are certainly not equal, looked at in detail, but in very many cases it is mere difference in evolution rather than higher or lower rank in evolution. 1 mean by that that some have developed particular qualities and others different ones ; you have infinite variety of evolution, and you cannot classify it all as higher or lower. One may be greater in intellect, another may be greater in art ; one may be well-dowered emotionally, another may have emotions that are somewhat arid and restricted. At no one point in evolution can you expect to find all-round equilibrium, far less all-round perfec- tion. There are many qualities that belong to you and me that are so opposed in their nature, in their partial development, that we cannot develop them at the same time. That is one reason for the difference of sex, the evolution of sex, which is too much over- looked. There are certain quaUties that we call feminine LESSONS ON EQUALITY 53 because they are more prominent in women, at any rate speaking generally, than in man ; others are called masculine because they are more common in men than in women. We do not always remember that evolution of qualities is conditioned by the functions of the physical body : that one particular type of body more suited to emotion is the feminine ; the type of body more suited to cold-blooded reasoning is the masculine type. I know that is sometimes exaggerated. But there is that fundamental difference in the bodies of the two sexes, absolutely necessary for carrying on the existence of the race. To put it physio- logically, the woman is more developed in the matter of glands ; the man is more developed in the matter of certain nerves. These are physical differences you cannot get rid of, necessary on the one part for motherhood, on the other part for the work in the outside world. Now, that difference of sex is to balance ultimately in one human being, composed, of course, of both types of human perfection — both the strength that is mascu- line and the love that is feminine. As human beings rise higher and higher in the scale, they begin to blend the characteristics of the two ; they are able to be strong, yet compassionate ; they are able to be tender, and yet develop power. More and more in the highest types of human kind, you find blending the qualities called masculine and feminine into one nobler type of human being, approaching human perfection. But in the intermediate stages the difference was wanted, and so was brought about by Nature ; and when these quahties are developed, then the blending process begins, and you find the quahties of the saint and the quahties of the hero blended into one splendid specimen of humanity. Now, this difference arose in the development of our very many quahties, and you cannot talk about higher 54 THE WAR AND ITS and lower in the sexes, but only of difference. We are really only complementary the one to the other. You have to reaUse in evolution that every single life plays its part, contributes its quota according to its experiences, and that as these lives are different, the results of them all in the present life must be different, not necessarily to be put over against each other as higher and lower, but rather to be regarded as different stages of the unfolding Life, showing itself out in particular specimens of the human race. Having thus noted these differences, having also noted the similarities produced by a common type of civihsation, how shall we begin to diminish the inequahties and to increase the equahties in our society ? Clearly, we must begin at the beginning as far as we can. We cannot begin altogether, because of the races before us, who have influenced our building of to-day ; but we can at least begin with the beginning of a new form of human Ufe. And that means we must first of all turn our attention to the mothers of the nation. There lies the point at which we must try to redress the inequahties that are artificial and not natural ; to reduce the natural inequahties by greater equahty of condi- tions. We must begin with the mother-to-be, for the life of the child begins before it comes forth into the outer world, and the condition of the child at its birth, its balance of mind and emotions, as well as its physical form, depend very largely on the condition of the mother during the pre-natal period. Hence, the care that should be extended by the Nation to the mothers on whom the coming generation depends ; hence, the love, the patience, the peace, with which they should be surrounded. Now, take for a moment a woman of the higher and richer classes, who is going to give an heir to some great house. You know something of the care that surrounds her every moment during the long months of the pre-natal life of her babe ; how she is shielded from LESSONS ON EQUALITY 55 anxiety, how everything that is beautiful, and restful, and helpful, is gathered around her, how all troubles are as far as possible kept away from her, how every necessity of the body is cared for, all for the sake of the life that is yet unborn. But when you come down to some London cellar — your mother-to-be Uving in some London slum — the coming motherhood is only thought of as an extra burden on the slender resources of the bread-winner; however loving h"usband and wife — and take them at their best, not at their worst — still they cannot avoid the remembrance that when v/ages are too small for the family that is, they will be still smaller for the family that will be. She cannot escape from anxiety, from trouble ; she cannot be surrounded with all that is fair and beautiful ; her whole surround- ings are squalid, her food is rough, her labour far too great for the health of the coming child, nourishment sometimes too Uttle, for the mother is the last to be fed in the house where resources are narrow — mother-love makes her think of those around her and she stints herself that others may be better fed : the bread- winner must be fed ; the little children must be fed ; the mother can be ignored ; so the unborn child suffers also, because of the suffering of the mother. She has to go on working and working until near the time of birth, and when the child is bom, what comforts sur- round her in her poverty-stricken home ? How is the little one cared for and welcomed ? For a baby of the higher classes, everything that is soft and tender and deUcate and beautiful is gathered together around the cradle, and in the room of the little child. Realise what that child has and what there is in the cellar of the slum, and you reaUse that the inequalities that spring out of these different conditions are unjust, artificial, and criminal, and not part of the inequaUty of Nature. You might have a case — you have sometimes — where the baby who is surrounded with every care, all tenderness. 56 THE WAR AND ITS and all that is possible, is a very poor specimen of humanity, very httle developed, of very small intellect, and with very shallow emotions, and yet he has every- thing. The other may be — not necessarily is — a babe with a strong brain, and wide, deep emotions. These make no difference in his surroundings. That inequahty can be — it must be — redressed if you are ever to have social order in this land. It must be realised that the mothers of the Nation are the Nation's care, for the children of the Nation are the Nation's assets for the future. That is a question which they used to talk about from another standpoint ; " pauperising the already poor, removing responsibility from the bread-winner," and the rest. It is the Nation's responsibility, because the Nation is the loser by social disorder. We cannot afford to leave matters in that condition. Motherhood is a function of the Nation, about the worst paid function there is. You pay your man and woman for other things, but you do not support them for the great gifts they are prepared to give to the Nation. I know things are changing ; the social conscience is awakening. You find towns here and there, like Bradford and other towns, where mother welfare is thought of, and child welfare is considered ; where good milk is suppUed to all who cannot buy it ; where decent surroundings are made for aU those who within their family have them not ; where rooms are ready for the mother-to-be, and she is surrounded with care and kindness and plenty. What is one town among so many, or a dozen towns for the matter of that ? Everywhere that should be found. It is only the redressal of social injustices, only the refusal to allow mother and child to suffer because the bread-winner is already badly treated by society ; but in the intermediate state, while these outer, economic conditions are being changed, you cannot afford to neglect the mother and child, for it is they who are to build up the society that is yet to be, and this LESSONS ON EQUALITY 57 is where we must begin trying to redress inequalities. I know that we cannot do it all at once, but we must begin, and be fast in the doing. Then, we come to education. Now, what ought education to be ? Physical, to begin with ; plenty of food for the growing child, plenty of well-devised exercise to help in the buming-up of the food, and the changing it into healthy muscle and nerve for the human body. It is in the childhood of the coming men and women that foundations of health or disease are laid, of long life or short life. You cannot make good later the half-starved childhood ; nothing you can do later on will make good what has been lost by the neglect of the little child. Take Austria to-day. It is said that in Vienna 80 per cent, of the children are suffering from rickets, or tuberculosis — 80 per cent. Now, these diseases mean deformed, or diseased, manhood or womanhood. It will not be 80 per cent, of the adult population: large numbers of these will have died of them before, fortunately for the Nation. Think what that means — that legacy of the War. Of the population, 80 per cent, of it cannot grow up into healthy, vigorous manhood and womanhood. Nothing can undo it. The thing is done. You may modify and improve a little, but you cannot cure one of the results of the war. The child, then, must have abundance of food ; as much, you may say, as the little one wants, because the healthy child surrounded by healthy food will not eat to excess. Of course, if you have a half-starved child, or a delicate child, and give it much to eat — well, then, you are likely to make it unhealthy ; but a healthy, vigorous child, with plenty of resources, will not over- eat itself. It wants more than you think, in order to have a margin out of which it is to grow, and short food means an ill-developed physical body. Then, you have to develop its emotions, on which F 58 THE WAR AND ITS morality, remember, depends ; to encourage all that comes out of it of love and service, to discourage the more selfish tendencies that survive in the young child. You must have intellectual education to make the very best of the brain and the faculties that work through that brain in the child, and you must try to unfold the spiritual being, who welds the other sides of the nature into one exquisite whole. These are the four great departments of education ; physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. There must be no grudging of it. It must not be too short in time ; it must be sufficiently varied in character. You must not try to force the child into a mould, but allow it to develop along its own lines ; you must find what is in it of best benefit to the Nation of which it forms a part. You now take the child whom, you wiU see if you watch it, has a passion for engineering, mechanics of every kind. He shows it with a running mouse ; he shows it with a watch that he pulls to pieces, in all kinds of toys that he enjoys. You do not trouble to notice that ; you want to turn him on to some intellectual career, where his mechanical genius will have no outlet and where he will always be dissatisfied with his work. He has a-vocation, but you ignore it. Your education must be vocational, not imposed by you, but grown into by the child himself ; his own qualities encouraged, balanced a Uttle by the wisdom of older persons, that he may not be only a one-idea man or woman, but trained so that the work he does in the world may be work that suits him, not work he dislikes. We hardly reaUse that work should be a pleasure, should be a joy. We look on leisure as joy, holiday time as happiness. Naturally, if we are doing that for which our faculties fit us, we rejoice in the doing, and are glad to be at work. People are only idle when they are not allowed to do the things they enjoy doing. So you make children think of school LESSONS ON EQUALITY 59 as unpleasant, instead of the most delightful place in the world, for the child wants to know. You don't know much about a child, if you don't know that. They weary you with questions. Nothing is more troublesome than the way a child asks questions, especially when you cannot answer them. That faculty on the part of a child meatis that he wants to understand the world he is in, and you won't let him. You want him to see the world as you think he ought to see it, instead of in the way the child wants, with his faculties brought over from the past. This means, of course, that education must be long. I do not think that educa- tion ought to be stopped until he is one-and-twenty. I do not believe that any child should be sent to work for a wage, until he has reached manhood or woman- hood. Mind, I am not saying he ought not to be taught to use his fingers ; ever\^ child should be taught to use his fingers, every child should have manual training, because he is only half a human being with brain, and senses, and no organism v/ith which he can bring about that which his senses see and his brain desires to achieve. Work for wage is a ver^^ different thing from this knowledge. " Oh, but think of the cost," it will be said. You have spent on your War very much more to destroy than you are willing to spend in building up the future Nation. You do not want aU the thousands of millions of pounds that you have spent in war to make complete education, and to educate your boys and girls, as the children of the higher classes are educated until they are men and women ; and you had better afford to do it, because on them the future wealth and prosperity of the nation depend. There is no lack really of the power to produce wealth ; there is bad distribution of it, bad arrangement of it, unequal sharing of it, but no insufficiency. You know perfectly well that all the capital you have is only 60 THE WAR AND ITS savings out of labour, surplus of production, as I said last Sunday morning, over consumption, put aside for future use. As long as you have such large stores of goods, you cannot talk of the power of production being insufficient to keep the people, and to provide all that is necessary for future happiness and prosperity. Why, one of the commonest thing in your upside-down state of society is what j^ou call over-production ; you have made too many things for the people to use. And so well are things arranged here, in this country of England, that you may have the stores of your merchants over- flowing with goods, while the people, who laboured to make them, walk past them bare-footed and almost naked. A splendid civilisation this, that makes the success of labour the starvation of labour ; yet apparently there are not brains enough or hearts enough to change that ridiculous condition of affairs. That has to be reorganised, as I pointed out to you last Sunday morning. I need not go into that again now. I only want you to realise that a man in work, beginning at one-and-twenty and ceasing, shall I say, at fifty, will have produced a great deal more than he has consumed, and yet there is sqme wonderful arrangement between producer and consumer — a gulf into which all his surplus has disappeared. You had better find out what is this bottomless pit which makes so many difficulties, and put a bottom to it, so that it may no longer be a gulf and abyss into which productions can later disappear before they enrich the prodiicer. Now, at the present time your Govern- ment is sending out the surplus productions of labour, and selling it in millions of yards, town by town. There must be something very wrong somewhere, where you get such phenomena in your civilised society. So I plead for long education for the children, and for leisure for those of older years, and leisure when experience is ripe and is wanted for the helping LESSONS ON EQUALITY 61 and guiding of the Nation ; and I submit that real division of functions would give us great ideals, and experience should find out the way, should put these ideals into practice. The old should teach the young, and the vision of the young give out great ideals for a better social state, while their inexperience makes them incapable of carrying them out. The elders, with their experience, ought no longer to be engaged in any productive work, but should bring the wealth of their knowledge to the reorganisation of society in what- ever rank they are born. Vou want the experience of men of the pit, as well as the experience of organisers of industry, as you call them. There is the way in which you would destroy the artificial inequalities, and then only the natural would remain, and before very long, most of these, where they are natural, when they are no longer intensified by artificial difficulties and obstacles, would disappear. Many a child, who with education would have been strong in brain and heart, has been lost and stunted and dwarfed by the surroundings of his early Ufe. If you scrutinise the matter, you will see that if children are not educated, you sacrifice the Nation of citizens of whom the nation might be proud, because you have not been able to produce them. And I believe that you, you British people, can do more than any other Nation at present in building up that form of society. You have had so much self-discipline, so many struggles, you know the experiences of victory and of defeat ; you have known so many wars, such terrible conflicts, such bitter struggles, in which you have gained courage, endurance, patience, and power to guide. That is why I would fain see the beginnings of a higher order begin in these little Islands of yours, because I believe that you have won the power, you have won the patience, not to rush into revolution, but to bring about reforms. 62 THE WAR AND ITS rapidly, fairly, completely, which will make the Nation for the first time happy as a Nation, and not only happy as a class, and even they only happy here and there. And so it is I would ask you to set your brains and your hearts to work along these lines of thought — I am meaning, of course, if you agree with them — or find out better lines of thought and follow those ; for a speaker can only speak the truth as he or she sees it, not as it really is. Very limited is the vision of any individual, and many must co-operate to produce a great result. While we all look on tilings through our own prejudices, our own self-made limitations, many of us joining together, deliberately consulting, correcting each other's crudities, may build a nobler society, and all the outer limitations of vision may neutralise each other or supply each other's deficiencies if only they are used for common purposes, and not made matters of hatred, of vituperation, of abuse. There lies the need of Brotherhood, the fraternity which loves and seeks to raise every member of the human family. I do not despair of the future, for I believe in the God in man ; I believe that all the turmoil and the struggle of the present are nothing more than a pulling down of the out-worn, useless places in order that ground may be cleared for the building of a nobler edifice, of a more perfect construction. Looking at the history of the world in our measure of time, why should we be troubled, because for a short period of years there is destruction ? So much of selfishness grew up that in time it became rotten, so that it was necessary to sweep it away with that great broom of destruction that we call war. We have come out of that, being now with our faces turned to peace. That peace is possible. Do not let us add social conflict to the conflict of Nations ; do not let us add social hatreds to the hatreds of peoples. Let us realise our funda- mental Equality, the artificial nature of the many LESSONS ON EQUALITY 63 inequalities that surround us ; and let us realise that in our very inequalities there is something of value, if we can weave them into one great whole, the Nation come to be self-conscious. Then indeed will the time for real Liberty arrive ; then the conditions of true Liberty wiU be made. We must have as our foundation, Brotherhood ; as our methods, the seeking to remedy natural inequalities, or imperfections, in the Ufe of all ; and then, we shall be ready to go into that greater Liberty, which truly has been called in an old Scripture, " the Hberty of the Sons of God," because the hidden God will speak from within, in place of the compulsion of the outer law of man. He will no longer need suffering for progress, because love wiU have given him wings, by which he will make his way to the higher levels of human life. 65 IV.— THE WAR AND ITS LESSONS ON LIBERTY FRIENDS : " Man is born free, and he is in bondage everywhere." That was the war-cry of the end of the i8th century, and it contains a great truth, though it has been a battle-cry, rather than a suggestion for social reconstruction. It is true in a sense that man, the real man, the great Spiritual Intelligence who is man, that he is, as I say, free, when he is bom into the world ; but of all Hving creatures, man is the most helpless at his birth, and, therefore, is everywhere in bondage, for helplessness is bondage. That same cry in another sense is running round the world to-day. There is one great clamour all the world over for outer liberty, a cry from individuals, from communities, from Nations ; and everywhere you hear human beings crying out for Liberty, and sometimes finding themselves in a deeper and more hopeless bond- age. For that cry for Liberty is a cry from the divinest part of man, a cry for the thing most difficult to obtain, and yet in time the surest to be obtained. There is nothing which can prevent the attainment in time — the one thing that is needed for the attainment is an understanding of what is really meant by Liberty, what are the conditions of the free. Now, in quoting the old phrase of the later i8th century that man is bom free, but is in bondage every- where, we come face to face with the fact, that I have just mentioned, that he is born the most helpless of 66 THE WAR AND ITS all beings, and helplessness is bondage. The free baby would have a very short time of freedom in the body, and as you rise in evolution, you notice that the helplessness after birth increases. The lower creatures, they, very soon after they are born, are able to maintain themselves. The chicken, scarcely out of the egg, will begin to peck ; but, as you rise in the scale of animals, you find that helplessness increases with the growth in evolution ; that just in proportion as they become more and more evolved, so does the period of helplessness increase in length ; the period of dependence becomes greater and greater, until it reaches its present limit in the helplessness of the civiUsed babe. F'or, more and more it becomes realised, as time goes on, that the period of dependence for bodily conditions ought to be lengthened not shortened, that preparing here the at present highest products on our globe demands more and more time for the preparation; and we are asking more and more for the child, more and more for the lengthen- ing of the dependence of youth, more and more in which the child and the youth have to be helped, during that period of dependence upon the elders. And we reahse that if society is to change its form, and to become really free, then the individual man must first be free, and he must be free, not only from difficulty as to the very conditions of physical existence, but free also from the tyranny of emotions, which often lead to vice, and free from that tyranny over mind, that consists of ignorance, the worst bondage to which a man is subjected. In order that this freedom for the individual may be gained, the period of dependence has to be lengthened, so that, in lengthening that period, we are working really on a Une with Nature in her great work of evolution, and the freeing of the mind is the latest work of all. It is with the increase of the dominance of mind that the cry for real freedom arises. LESSONS ON LIBERTY 67 • Now, in glancing back on the evolution of man, as distinguished for the moment from the evolution of the body, which is just an instrument, we notice that mind in the earlier stages is stimulated to its exercise wholly by sensations. The earliest appearance of mind in the animal is stimulated by physical sensa- tions — the need for food, the need for the satisfaction of the sex instinct. These are the stimuli, which begin to awaken the workings of mind in the animal kingdom, and as we trace mind on into the human kingdom and study it in the savage in its lower manifestations, there again we find the same as in the animal, that the various stimuli of sensations are necessary, in order that the mind shall function, in order that the mind shall develop. When what are called the animal instincts are satisfied, the animal goes to sleep. It is at a comparatively late stage of animal evolution — among the domestic animals — that other attractions keep the mind and emotions at work; love or fear of the owner, various feelings which are dawning in the animal, these tend to keep him from sleep, and, similarly, we notice in the animal man the mind which is still utterly under the dominance of the body ; the lowest type of savage, when he has satisfied his hunger, when he has satisfied the sex emotion, he sleeps. Other things can keep him awake, hunting, fighting, growing out of the necessities again of the body, and out of the more passional emotions of the mind. Still, as you trace it onward, a similar peculiarity is visible. The least educated of our population, those who have had the smallest opportunity of developing the powers of the mind, are those who are most avid of sensations. It was not a mere joke, but a real insight which made Patrick Geddes say that pubUc-houses were built at comers in cities, because the lower type of human beings gather at comers where the streets cross, and that they gather there, because it was there they obtained 68 THE WAR AND ITS the maximum of sensation ; passing people, passing vehicles, all tended to draw their attention, and so to keep them awake. And there was a very real truth in that statement, put by Geddes in his habitually striking and graphic form, for it is really sensation, even among our own people of the lowest developed type, which acts as stimulus to all mental effort. A very curious point is seen, when the mind is very highly developed. As it develops, it becomes more and more sufficient for itself, less and less dependent on any outside stimulus — nay, not in the least dependent, but able to overcome the ordinary stimuh of hunger, thirst, and the need for sleep, and so on. It is said of great German philosophers hke Schopenhauer, that he, immersed in concentrated thought, would remain as much as thirty-six hours at a time unconscious of any physical craving, unconscious of any stimulus from without ; at a still higher stage in the evolution of mind, where the human being has set himself de- liberately to develop his own powers of mind, where he has turned his trained intelligence to strengthening and deepening that intelligence to rise to a stage of con- sciousness unknown to' the ordinary intelligent and thoughtful man, where by prolonged and persevering meditation there is gradually developed the power, not only to fix the mind on a central point of thought with concentrated attention, but to drop even that object of thought, and to rise ever higher, or sink deeper still, whichever way you prefer to look at it ; then he reaches a point that a great Indian philosopher called passing from meditation with a seed, an object, to meditation without a seed ; when the intellect strives to become self-conscious, to realise itself, and not only the objects it cognises. Then, in the earlier stages of that, the inclination is still to fall asleep. The individual who is trying simple meditation, knows by personal experience that the first difficulty he has to overcome LESSONS ON LIBERTY 69 is the tendency to fall into physical sleep, when the mind is not kept awake by attention to a special object of thought ; and that which is the " cloud upon the sanctuary," which many great Christian mystics have talked of, is that period of transition from one stage of consciousness to another, which is really the passing from the mind that observes to the mind that, self-conscious, penetrates into deeper realisation of being. There again there comes that strange phenomenon that with- out some stimulus without, or witliin, the mind tends to sink away from thought to pass into a condition of nescience. Now, when you have studied the whole question of Liberty from this standpoint of evolution, when you have tried to see man finding himself in mind, really the conscious way to Liberty, then you begin to grasp something of the nature of what Liberty is. You notice in history that all the great changes in the world have been brought about by a revolution of mind, not the many revolutions you find in history, revolutions of hunger, revolutions of misery, revolutions against oppression that has become intolerable to the outer Ufe. These come and go, impermanent, outbursts of passion, normally ending, because men are ignorant, in a new dic- tatorship, or the reverse of that, anarchy, because there was no real root in a recognition of the very meaning of Liberty. But in the revolutions v/hich have sprung from some great ideal, which have been mental before being in any way physical, which are impelled by the yearning and the determination to be free — which has its root in mind and not in body — there you realise the very nature of the intellect, the individuality of man, the man becoming conscious of himself ; and that has led up to — because the highest achievements of the intellect can only be reached when the intellect is freely exercised — that impulse of emotion, that struggle against outer compulsion, where it soars upward, because in its very 70 THE WAR AND ITS nature is that upward climbing, and because the will to be free is only another form of the will to know. In such a struggle after mental freedom, religion has not always played a helpful part, for in most of the religions of the world you find an inclination to impose an in- tellectual slavery. The great difference between religi- ous freedom and religious slavery is that in the one case truth is followed by the intellect, and not accepted until the intellect recognises it, while in the other the truth is imposed by outside authority, whether it be of book, of church, of any form of orthodoxy, the truth found by another imposed on the human being from without. Two great eastern religions are entirely free from that intellectual form of slavery ; the religion founded by the Lord Buddha, who laid it down as one of His final precepts that you were not to believe because the thing was spoken by authority, not to believe because you found it in Scriptures, not to believe because it came to you by tradition, or from your elders, not to believe even though He Himself had taught it. And you find it also in the yet older religion of Hinduism, one of the reasons for its long survival, for in religious matters, in matters of philosophy, of metaphysics, of spiritual life, Hinduism is absolutely free. There is no such thing in the intellectual world of Hinduism as orthodoxy. You find in its great schools of philosophy, accepted as orthodox by all, the school of Atheism, and the most intense Theist does not deny the place of that as one philosophical school, for it is recognised there, by the very depth of its psychology, that the intellect can only do its best when left absolutely free, and that it is better to be deluded into error in the search after truth than to remain quiescent in acceptance, and not to search after truth at all. The moment you realise that, then there is no Umit you can put on the intellect, no subject too sacred to be investigated, no authority LESSONS ON LIBERTY 71 too mighty to be challenged at the bar of reason. The intellect rises by effort and not by acceptance, by struggle and not by passivity; and just as the eagle rises with unfettered wings toward the sun, so does the eagle of mind rise to the Sun of Truth shining above it, and the wings must be free, if the intellect is to rise. It is true that it will later find the atmosphere so rare that its wings cannot there support it — so does the eagle in its upward flight — but that is an internal disabiUty and not an external compulsion ; religion can only be at its greatest when intellect is free, and all the great conflicts have grown out of the bondage of the intellect under imposed authority from outside. Now, when that is reaUsed, our ideas of Liberty gradually become somewhat clarified, and we begin to see then what really is this Liberty. Whence does it spring ? And the answer is that it is of the very essence of Life itself, inseparable from Life. Now, what does that just mean ? Those who believe in the Life Universal from which Life all other lives are derived, fragments of Deity, see that as that Life becomes em- bodied in many forms, one aspect after another shows itself out through the embodiment. Sir Oliver Lodge, speaking of what he called " vital force," and justify- ing the phrase against the scientific views of the last century, differentiated what he called vital force from the other forces that we know in the world, and he made one very acute and very true distinction. The ordinary forces in nature, he said, can be changed and directed by opposing '"orces, and when the one is greater than another the weaker yields to the greater. And so, he said, if you push a stone you have to overcome the resistance of the stone, due to the weight of the stone, or, in other words, to the attraction which draws that particular piece of matter to the vaster, huger matter of the earth itself. But, he said, when you begin to push what he called the living thing, you have not only 72 THE WAR AND ITS to overcome the difficulty you had with the resistance of the stone, the resistance of weight, but you find another force in the Uving being to be reckoned against you, push- ing you as you push. That is a very acute distinction. It is true that if you push a stone, and if you are sufficiently strong, you can move it. But the instinct of the life is to resist outside compulsion. My own countryman, when driving pigs to market, ties a string around a leg and pulls the pig the way he does not want him to go. The pig resists and goes in the other direction. That is a practical application of Sir OUver Lodge's theory of vital force, and the theory is a true theory. It is of the essence of Life. Life resents compulsion. You may coax, you may induce, you may persuade ; the very moment you compel, you find the push against com- pulsion. The thing you like to do if left alone, you object to do if someone tries to make you do it. That in- stinctive rebellion against compulsion is a sign of senti- ent life. I should not have said, as Sir Oliver Lodge said, of Life, because life is in the stone but not sentient, not yet self-conscious ; it is where sentient life is found that it can be named — quite rightly for mankind — vital force, the manifestation of Life in its conscious mode. Now, if you accept that for a moment, you get a little nearer to the instinct for Liberty in man. You find as man unfolds, as he climbs the ladder of evolution, he does not only want to be comfortable, he wants to be free ; he not only wants to have his cravings satisfied, to have sufficiency of all things, to have luxury and an easy life. On the contrary, you find that the best types of man have preferred hardship with Liberty to luxury with bondage. And that is a part of human nature, because human nature is divine, because the All-Self is free, and that instinct for Liberty is in every separated self embodied in sentient form, and there is nothing that you can do that will destroy it. Whether it be in the individual, or whether it be in the Nation, LESSONS ON LIBERTY 73 you cannot slay it, although you may slay the form. If fire could have destroyed it, the stakes of the Inquisi- tion would have burned it to death ; if water could have destroyed it, the rivers of Scotland rising inch by inch over the mouths of the Covenanters would have drowned it ; if earth could have destroyed it, the prisons of tyrants would have crushed it. But these have only strengthened the instinct for Liberty. No matter can crush it, no water can drown it, no fire can bum it, no person can slay it, else tyranny would have crushed Liberty ; but it is not so. It survives every form of tyranny, every form of destruc- tion. You may slay the body ; you can never slay the yearning for liberty in the spirit that is divine, and the yearning for Liberty, the determination to be free, the inner following of the light of freedom, that needs no argument and no defence ; it is as eternal as God Him- self is eternal, and until you can annihilate God, you can never annihilate the love of Liberty in man. And that you have to reckon with. Now, what is the bondage into which man is born ? It is first the bondage of physical necessities. These cripple him, as long as they are not supplied, and this has been the great instrument of tyranny all the world over: "Submit or starve." Sometimes in the brutal form of slavery, chattel slavery ; sometimes in the less brutal form, serf slavery ; still, in — I cannot say in a less brutal, sometimes it is a more brutal form of slavery — what you call wage slavery. These forms have domi- nated mankind, although they have not destroyed the desire to be free. There, then, is one condition for making man free ; necessities, physical necessities, must be possessed in sufficient amount, not only to keep the body alive, but to make it capable of everything that a healthy human being is able to achieve. One condition of freedom for the individual, then, is the full supply of bodily necessities, without which the body perishes. G 74 THE WAR AND ITS Then there is the slavery which many, who think them- selves free, are subject to — the slavery of their emotions, sometimes good and sometimes bad, but slavery always. To get rid of the bad emotions, the slavery of various forms of vice, that is comparatively an easy task — not so easy, as we see around us, but still comparatively easy in the grosser forms, forms that most of us have out- grown. In the subtler forms, very few have found freedom from the dominance of those emotions, which have their root in love and not in hate, and, therefore, have their right place in the man, although they ought not to enslave him. In the bringing of these under control, in holding them, as you might hold a high-spirited horse, with the reins of the mind, there lies much of the evolution of mind into freedom at the present time ; for, remember, it is not paucity of feeUng, poverty of emotion, which is desirable. You might as well say, when buying a young horse, that it is better to buy one which is weak, spiritless, without energy. You know the very contrary is the case ; you want vigour and strength, energy and spirit in the nature of the animal that you are buying. It may be more troublesome for a time ; it may need more training to turn him to your purpose, but it is on the strength and vigour of the animal that its usefulness to man depends, and so with your emotions. It is on their strength, their vigour, their power, that your value really depends as human beings. Only power may turn to destruction as well as to useful service. They may master you, instead of you mastering them, and just as you do not want a runaway horse with broken reins in your hands, so you do not want runaway emotions, however good in their essence, unless you can control them, guide them to noble purpose by the reins of the mind, and by the influence of the Spirit. So man in a great eastern Scripture was compared to a driver in a chariot, and the chariot was the body, LESSONS ON LIBERTY 75 and the emotions were the horses, the reins, the mind, and the road along which the horses wanted to gallop, the road of desires; and it said, then, that the charioteer should hold his reins firmly, and with well-broken horses should drive along the road determined by the will. That is so, for only as desires lose their power to move you, only as your emotions are dominated by the will that comes from within and not by the objects of desire that allure from without, only then do you become master over them, using the tremendous strength which comes from emotions kept well under control. So when you come to deal with the mind, you find a similar task is before you : first, to conquer ignorance, the deadUest foe of man, to train the mental faculties, to encourage the growth of latent powers : not in order that you may be content with the lessons of the school and the university ; not to be content with the thoughts and opinions of others ; not to be content to repeat, but in addition to that to remember in your daily hfe that if you would search mentally for truth, you must yourself be true, you must be accurate, pains- takingly accurate, in whatever you speak, as well as in striving to make your thought accurate, the true reproduction of the facts you are considering. Thought must be accurate ; observation must be accurate. Exag- geration is one of the commonest forms of inaccuracy, and this because it lowers truth. It is at the basis of many faults in the character. How many exaggerate : sometimes to improve a story, and make it more dramatic ; or only to make one's self bulk more largely in the minds of others, than one would bulk if one told the story with absolute accuracy ; to exaggerate in many ways and to depreciate in many others as well ; to reach our judgment by way of emotions and not by way of justice, which is one of the noblest faculties of man ; to depre- ciate where we do not like ; sometimes to ascribe false motives ; to take part in the frivolous gossip, which is 76 THE WAR AND ITS one of the worst social offences and productive of more misery than most people imagine. As an evil story passes from one to another, the first one says : " That may have been the motive for doing it " ; the second who repeats it says : "I think that was the motive " ; and the third : " That was the motive " ; and so it ever grows and grows, until it becomes the slander of an innocent person : and all these faults are rooted in the mind. Only the true can find the true, and that is why it does matter what you believe, why it is not true, as many of the men of the world say, that provided you live weU, it does not matter what you believe. It matters infiiiitely, for only out of true beliefs can great and true Ufe come, only out of true hfe can grow great faculties for holding true beUefs. Far truer is it to say with an Indian scripture : " Man is compacted of his behefs, for as he thinks so he is." Hence is it that that truth of the mind is necessary to freedom, the last and most difficult acquirement of all. And so looking at it, it is true that man is born free and he is in bondage to physical conditions, to emotions and to mind. Moreover he is helpless in his younger days, and, therefore, in the higher forms of sentient Ufe is bom in the family. But in the family a new relation appears, the relation of duties, obligations, the obligation to the younger in helpless infancy till he passes on into helpful manhood ; the parents who supported and guarded in the childhood, becoming in their turn supported and guarded by sons and daughters in the strength of their manhood and womanhood. So we pass into a new aspect and we have to deal with the great problem how to reconcile the liberty of the individual with the obligation of the family, and of the larger family that we call the State, that we call Society. And it is face to face with that problem that our world is standing to-day. Now, in the family, there is a certain inevitable LESSONS ON LIBERTY 77 discipline of life: however you may love the child, however you may surround him with all that he needs and give him as much Hberty as is practicable in order that you may study him and find out what he wants, what is his character, an inevitable discipUne falls upon the child even in the family ; for he finds out by his own experience that if he is selfish, others are incUned to reciprocate the selfishness ; that if among his play- mates he grasps at everything, his playmates will grasp back at him and deprive him of the things he wants; that if he is bad-tempered, unsociable and unfriendly, he wiU gradually find himself avoided ; all this he does not Uke. You cannot compel other children to asso- ciate with one who makes his playmates unhappy, and spoils the happiness of all around him. That is what I call the inevitable discipline of life which falls upon the child, however great the freedom that may be granted him. And one of the problems of the family is how to reconcile the benefits of freedom to the child with the responsibiUty of social life, the life of the family and school into which the child is entering ; a difficult problem to solve, but gradually, of course, it solves itself to some extent. Education ought to be used in order to help in that great reconciUation, in order to stimulate social feehngs, and gently to repress the anti-social as far as possible by experience; but experience may be very much aided by the warnings of the elders, by saying to the child : " If you will do so and so, you will find your hfe much happier." Happi- ness depends on our being together and happy together, not in being happy separately — that never lasts. And as families turn into society, and form a social family, none can find his greatest happiness in isolation. That inevitable pressure of society upon him tends to press him along the road to social happiness, and very, very often, the pressure is too much exerted, allowed to be too strong, so that it dwarfs and stifles instead of 78 THE WAR AND ITS training and helping. But we are face to face in this Nation with a bigger problem : how to reconcile the liberty of the individual with responsibihty to Society and to the State. That is the great problem which is facing us here in England to-day, and it cannot be evaded by the sacrifice of either. You cannot sacrifice Liberty to it, for on the Uberty of the indivi- dual depends the forward progress of evolution. Nature has found it so hard that she has only been doing it by confronting and setting one embodied intelli- gence to fight against another, and so to carry on the fight of the jungle into the foreground of modem society ; but the human being. Nature's highest product so far on our globe, he has a brain that ought to be able to solve by intellect what cannot be solved — at least, except in millennia — by the rough processes of Nature. For just as a farmer, when he wants to develop a certain type of animal, or a gardener a certain kind of plant, uses his intellect to quicken the processes of Nature, and, while he cannot go outside her laws, he can immensely hasten the laws he wants and neutraUse the working of the laws that oppose what he wants, so with human beings in Society. We can devise ways of neutralising the anti-social and encouraging the social, of minimising the evil and increasing the good ; for we cannot escape the necessity, if we are to go on into the New Era, the Era that some of us dream of, the Era where every human being in a Nation will have oppor- tunities to develop the highest of which he is capable ; no lack of food, education, culture, for everyone who is born into the State. If that great ideal is to be realised in the New World, of which we dream, it can only be realised by the building in the individual of an understanding alike of Responsibility and Liberty, the understanding that with Liberty goes duty, with Liberty goes service, and if the one be taken without the other we will have LESSONS ON LIBERTY 79 destruction and not construction before us in the near future. That is part of the problem that I want you to consider, once more not taking what I say, but only allowing me to submit to you some views on the subject that I beheve to be true. Now, what do we mean by Society, and what do we mean by the State ? Most people have a wrong conception of the State, for they identify it with the Government, and, therefore, they put it over against Liberty, inevitably from the way they look at it. You know how Sidgwick, and all the men of his school in the last century, held that the larger the sphere of the State the smaller the liberty of the indivi- dual, the smaller the sphere of the State the larger the liberty of the individual ; and so they were always trying to diminish the sphere of the State and increase the liberty of the individual. Now, we want the perfect individual, the individual who is free in the full sense, for I have mentioned that only out of such free men can you make a free society. You cannot turn really free men into slaves, neither can you suddenly transform slaves into free men. They have to grow into freedom, and they grow by the use of the freedom they have to the attainment of the larger freedom that is waiting for them to claim. Now, if the wrong concep- tion of the State is the Government, what is the right conception ? I submit to you that the State and the Nation should be conterminous. They are only two in words, and that which we now call the State, or Government, is only one of the functions of the Nation, one special function selected from the functions exercised by the Nation^ — functions necessary for a civiUsed, happy, prosperous Nation, and we shall never take the right view of the State until we look on it as conterminous with the Nation, every class in a Nation as part of the body politic of the State, one of the many parts which carry on the exercise of its 80 THE WAR AND ITS manifold functions ; and that which you want to substi- tute for the idea of Government is the idea of the Execu- tive carrying out the will of the Nation, in the way that the N-ation desires, and not contrary to the Nation ; that is to say — if you want to put it in a form that I do not Uke as well, for I prefer the form of the family — take it as a National Company. The whole of the people are the shareholders, your directors are the executive. They only work for you, not for their own advantage, their own benefit ; and if they do not work for your benefit but for themselves, you break them, and put in others for the good of the company, who will not try to get illicit advantages and illicit gains for themselves. And that is possible, as I hinted to you in one of the earlier lectures. You have great groups which have been formed in the higher civilisations, groups of capitalists on the one hand, groups of labourers on the other, because the existence of groups is necessary in order that you may pass on into the higher conditions, for, then, you will have the whole of the people function- ing for the benefit of the whole. Let us go into that just a little more closely. Is it true that we as indivi- duals have a duty, an obhgation, a responsibility to Society, growing out of the past and reaching on into the future ? Has it ever struck you to ask yourselves what each of you, as an individual, owes to Society ? The difference between the isolated savage in the jungle and yours in the Ufe of the England of to-day is due to the social efforts of the past. You are their product very largely. As you know, I beheve that you yourselves have come in over and over and over again into successive human lives. I am not forgetting that, but there is an evolution of environment as well as an unfolding of Life, and the two react one upon the other. With the improvement of environment goes the unfold- ing of Life ; by the unfolding of Life, the environment is improved. Neither school has seen the whole truth LESSONS ON LIBERTY 81 — the one that makes environment everything and the human being nothing, and the one that makes the human being everything and the environment negligible. You have to reahse that a man Uving in Society is a man whose outer body, whose mind and emotions are very largely the result of generations behind him, and influence generations in front ; that we must not only think of the individual evolution going on from hfe to life, but of the social evolution going on by the actions, the thoughts, and the emotions of indivi- duals in every successive generation. The brain that you have to-day has been evolved by the struggles of Society in the past, has grown and developed, not by efforts of your own Spirit, but your own Spirit in rela- tion with other Spirits, trying to make the material better, improving it for all in the Society more and more. We have to be greater and greater as the years go on; as it is recognised that all social duty springs out of the past and stretches everywhere into the future, the principle of the recognition of our duty to the Society of the present, made up of ourselves and those who are with us at the present time. Now, while the sense of individual liberty has strengthened, while it has gone on into a sense of class liberty, which is a step onwards, mind, it has not yet reached the point of the recognition of social duty, the duty to the Nation as a whole, the service that we owe to the Nation as a debt of our past, as the legacy to our future. And that is the thought that I want to ask you to take and think out very fully and carefully. What we are to-day depends very largely on the struggles of our forefathers, their struggles with Nature, their struggles for development, through which they have striven to build up this great English Nation and to make it what it is. To build that future is possible, I some- times think, to no other Nation so much as to the British, which can do more in the shaping of the true SociaUsm of 82 THE WAR AND ITS the future than any other Nation, Sometimes I think so, when I try to see things impartially ; sometimes the wrongs of the moment are apt to blind one's vision and to make one forget the possibihties, face to face with the actuahties. And yet, in looking over the Nations of the world and their histories, one can see among western peoples no Nation that has greater possibilities out of its past than the Nation that inhabits this realm of England and Scotland to-day. It has seen so much struggling, so much suffering. Ought that to be forgotten, to be overborne by the wrongs of the present ? At one's best one thinks it ought not to be forgotten, however much the wrongs of the present may almost madden for a moment. Yet now you find the great struggle, which breaks through the surface from time to time — which broke through the other day in the great Railway Strike, which threatens to break through again in a Coal Strike, that in America, a Nation akin to this Nation, is likely in about a week's time to throw two million miners out of work, by striking at the beginning of winter, the bitter American winter — and one begins to wonder what the outcome of it all is to be. It is because I believe that in this Nation there are possibihties growing out of the past that I cannot but wish that you should take the lead in the New Era ; for those who have lived under tyrannies, those who have been starved and ill-used, those who have been left to abject misery, it is not out of those you can build; but out of the hardy, patient, free, who have learned some measure of self-control, some measure of common relation, such as has been learned in this island of Great Britain at the present time. Whether we go on into the new world or down into destruction depends very largely on what happens in the next few years. I have no doubt of the triumph of Democracy in the long run. Whether it is to come in peace and con- struction for the world, or in war and destruction, LESSONS ON LIBERTY 83 that is for the people of Great Britain to decide more than for the people of any other Nation; for in your hands to-day lie more largely than in any other Nation's the destinies of mankind — I mean in the West, for I am not concerned to-day with the East, but with the problems in the West. There is no doubt that if it is to be a question of retaliation, starvation, in the rough justice of Nature, is a legitimate weapon ; it has been used against those who produce wealth — it would be a crude justice, revenge not social service, to use that same weapon in the great struggles of our own time. I know it is difficult for men brought up in traditions of suffer- ing, who have looked on wars as necessary, as indeed they have been, who have looked on civil wars as neces- sary, as indeed they have been, part of the training; but we want to take other lessons of another kind, and to drop the wars in which those lessons have been learned. Not easy, for they have largely influenced the mind, biased and prejudiced our thought. Certainly, we should not to-day much blame those who, out of the agony of long-continued struggle, have struck back as the only way to peace. And yet, I venture to submit there is a better way. Now, it is perfectly true that a smaU minority in the past have tyrannised over the people ; it is true they hold land and capital. The great nobles are few in number. At the most they are not more than seven hundred; but they are very strong in a way, not in their own numbers, but in the influence they exert, the influence of tradition, of custom, the influence of all those who have been connected with nobles, either through inter-marriage or family ties, the whole mass of those who are called, in the narrow sense, society; they have great masses of dependents such as manu- facturers, who make luxuries and think they are neces- sary, because the luxuries sell at better prices; and those who hate troubles, who are afraid of great 84 THE WAR AND ITS changes, of the justice which Ues at the back of the claims that are being made. For most people are afraid of justice. They do not love it, as they think they do. Very few people love justice, if they are not suffering from injustice. We often deceive ourselves when injustice presses on ourselves. Love of justice is a very different thing and that naturally is still rare. Many see what is ideal. We ought to hold it up more, for the people rise to an ideal as they rise to nothing else. What is the great ideal to be held before them to induce them not to strike back, so that we may be united in the happier world that we have to build ? People must reahse that necessities must be within easy reach of all, that education and culture, as I said, must be put within reach of all, that no part of the Nation must enjoy luxuries while there is one necessity unsuppUed. Labour must be turned to the supply of the necessaries of hf e, before it is made to provide luxuries for a minority of the Nation. Let us realise that all that is fundamental ; let us also reahse that those who produce and distribute, they also are born to social service and to take up the duty they owe to the Nation. It is no answer: "We shall suffer as well as they"; no answer to say if there is to be a great coal strike and industries are to be stopped, and people are to shiver through the coming winter : " Our families will suffer, too." The object of Society is to prevent suffer- ing, and not to gain our object by making others and ourselves suffer at the same time. We have no right to strike at the roots of social union in order that we may gain what we want. I do not want to palter with the justice of labour demands. I admit them to the full ; but I say we look to them, because they have suffered, to learn reason, not to inflict suffering on their brethren in order to gain an advantage quickly for themselves, which they can gain slowly by argument and reason, and the enormous LESSONS ON LIBERTY 85 power they wield. That is a point, though I know it is not a popular one, I am going to press on you. Social responsibility is fundamental, and compulsory upon every one ahke, on workers, as well as on others. It is true that they can starve the Nation ; it is true that they can make the Nation shiver with cold in the bitter months that are coming ; but people can only suffer up to a certain point. Riot and revolution follow, and the rest of the miseries to be seen in Russia to-day. But that is not the British way of doing it. I believe that it is only a minority which would loosen the whole fabric of Society for the sake of a sudden change, which would only be followed by a set-back of Liberty perhaps for a generation or two. Now, I, who say that, have known what it is to starve ; I, who say that, have seen many others starving ; I have been about among people in strikes ; I have been to the homes of the strikers ; I have seen the misery of little children, the death of the very young ; and hence I hold that that method of war should not be resorted to at the present time. The great mass of the people should have sense and courage enough to put things right through the power they have won by the vote. I know the ideal is a very, very lofty one, but I believe in the workers, and, therefore, I believe that the holding up of the ideal of social service as against social war will really foster the development of service, and make them lead us by peace and effort into the happier social conditions that we crave. That is that loftiest ideal of service, the greatest theory that Christianity has ever set before the world and which is what is put into the mouth of the Christ Himself: "The greatest amongst you is he that doth serve, and I am amongst you as He that serveth." The noblest title of the Pope, who is called the Vicar of Christ, is not King of Kings, connoting outer authority, but the title " Servant of the Servants of God," connoting the spiritual duty to the race. And 86 THE WAR AND ITS so in that older faith of Hinduism you see one strange phenomenon that many of you do not know. Just as there are outcastes at the base of the social pyramid, badly clothed, so there are outcastes at the top of the social pyramid, men who have abandoned wealth, ease and luxury, because they have voluntarily taken poverty and hardship in order that in poverty each may serve his people. There is there the outcaste by com- pulsion ; there is also the outcaste by renunciation ; and that voluntary poverty of the wealthy is one of the cures which ought to be brought to the healing of our social evils. If the workers can refrain from strikes that are blows at the hfe of the Nation, cannot the wealthy take the service of renunciation, of sacrifice, of willing sharing, so that the pathway to the better state may be made easier and swifter for the Nation as a whole ? If one dares to ask for further sacrifice from those who have been sacrificed for the Nation for generations, shall one not dare to ask for sacrifice from those who have profited by under-paid labour and by hving at ease on its sufferings ? Surely, on both sides something must be given. The greater sacrifice still comes from those who have made the long sacrifice. The other comes volimtarily, and would have in it a touch of loftier nobihty, as that higher outcaste in India. He has voluntarily embraced poverty, in order that he may teach and help the village population of his land. For Liberty, briUiant and glorious as she is, radiant as the Gods, she does not pass from the liigher regions in which she lives unfettered, save by the wiUing sacrifice of those who would claim her coming. Not in bloodshed and in riot, not in starvation and in misery, not in the sacrifice of one class compelled by another class, not by such means should Liberty come to this great realm of Britain ; but by wiUing co-operation between class and class ; by striving, by consulting, to find out the better way ; by patience LESSONS ON LIBERTY 87 and endurance everjrwhere ; by honest effort and struggle that the suffering may be minimised as much as possible for all, aye, and plenty be secured as rapidly as possible for all; by realising that Liberty brings with her sacrifice, and that after sacrifice comes the happiness, the prosperity, the welfare of the whole Nation. It is because I believe that to be true, that I would point you to an Altar of the Nation, on which our prejudices, our bias, our class prejudices and hatreds may be laid to be burned up in the fire of patience ; so that social service shall take the place of social tyranny; so that social helping shall take the place of social oppression ; for only when we reaUse Fraternity, when we are striving for EquaUty, only then will Liberty descend, and only then shall the kingdom of man be bom on earth, that man has conquered for his race and not for himself alone. Printed in Great Britain by UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, LONDON AND WOKINO D --OUU ncniMMtblONAL LIBRARY FACILITY L 1" ' ' ' 1 ' li 1 1 1 AA 0013inftKfl o ! 1 ! 1 i I i 1 j GAYLORD j I -R.NTtD,NU.S A.