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 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
 
 
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