Bolshevism From an Eastern Angle

I

CAN Bolshevism carry the East? Lord Curzon some time ago spoke as if the British should play the part of some high and lonely sentinel, some watcher of the skies in Central Asia, and try to grasp the significance of these troubled times. New planets swim continually into our ken. What response do they rouse in our consciousness?

For over five years Bolshevism has run its course. Even if it falls from power in Moscow soon, it will not immediately be ended. Over weak minds it has established a moral superiority throughout the world. Fear is a bad counselor, and many of our postures toward Bolshevism betray fear. The public feeds itself on travelers’ tales about the bogey. One says it is like this, another that it is like that. The public listens to them all — to these men and women who have actually heard the monster roar. Bolshevism is civilization’s obsession, the world’s nightmare. Capital cowers over an atlas, looking, alas! in vain, for some country untainted by breath of Bolshevism, whither it may fly. In Persia, in 1921, British Government servants spread among British subjects a panic that should make a Briton blush. ‘Flee to the coast,’ ‘Women and children first.’ and such lifeboat mottoes, were the orders of the day. Had we allowed the Germans to establish such a moral superiority over us as we yielded to the Bolsheviki, we had been doomed men. The only true answer to the défaitiste who told us that we could never ‘boat the Boche’ was, ‘No; we could not hope to beat him, if enough of us felt as you do; but happily you are in a hopeless minority.'

Let us take a pull of ourselves. There is plenty of time. Civilization will not collapse overnight, even before the united soul-force of Lenin in the cold North and Gandhi in the hot South. What, after all, is demoralizing us? Two things: First, there is our own weakness. Civilization’s conscience is making a coward of it. If we had risen to the height of our mission, could any vision of a Red proletariat, fired only with a frenzy for our destruction, have come to trouble the sober sanities of life? We have said, and we have believed, that the capitalistic system is an instrument of human progress. But how if we have regarded human progress as a by-product of the system, and if the only thing for which we have cared were dividends? That would account for some of our present tremors. For clearly, if we saw dividends as a byproduct and human progress as the main affair, we should fall back upon evolution; and the capitalist would say to the truculent Trotsky: ‘Touch me if you can, my dear fellow. I am in the cosmic scheme of things, and beyond all harm.’ But it takes more aplomb than even a profiteer possesses to enable a capitalist to assure himself that the maintenance of his dividends is written in the scroll of the cosmos.

Western civilization then, or, if you prefer it, capital, to win the fight, must first settle any little accounts it has with its own conscience. This will put the most surprising heart into it.

Its second ground of fear is its military ignorance of its adversary. I use the word military because we are at war, and it is essential to discover the opponent’s force; but I must not be misunderstood as referring primarily to his armed forces, for, pace Mr. Churchill, this is not a war of bayonets, though bayonets at times play a part. In spite of all the travelers’ tales, in spite of our various Intelligence departments, the plain man still feels that he is confronted by a strange terrifying monster. Omne ignotum. He has now imported into the three simple syllables of one word, Bolshevism, fear of every kind, and is in danger of hypnotism from it.

Let us search, then, for the force behind Bolshevism. I have Russian friends who have escaped from the Terror, who label it simply, and quite sincerely, ‘Anti-Christ.’ There is a large body of people outside Russia that holds a similar view. They are convinced that there exists an ancient diabolical secret society of international Jews, the members of which are animated by an undying hatred of Christianity and of the social order of the Christian era. Having unlimited financial resources, these conspirators are supposed to toil, unhasting and unresting from generation to generation, to promote unrest, distress, and despair in the world, till at last some final cataclysm of anarchy shall enable the conspirators to step forth from the shadow and give peace and order to an exhausted world under the beneficent rule of a prince of the House of David. With the crash of 1914 we are supposed to have entered on the final agony; and hence it is that the hands hitherto hidden can already be discerned at work in the shadows. For us there is no more peace. The ‘good old days’ are fled beyond recall. The virus of discontent has entered the veins of the working millions of mankind, and will not release them till the old order is destroyed. We march from strike to strike. Step by step, the propertyowner is driven to the wall. At the wall he will disappear.

Here then is one theory, and — let us make no mistake — it is a widely held one. But the proofs are wanting that Bolshevism has this mysterious force behind it. We need not therefore accept it. Yet a prudent general mentally credits his opponent with all the possible resources open to the latter, and then contrives his counterstrokes. The conspiracy theory, however strange and fantastic, is clearly not impossible; so let us for the moment assume it to be true. In that case we should have opposed to us religious fanaticism, long experience, and vast wealth.

But Christianity, after all, is its own witness. Either it is what it claims to be, — in which case it will certainly triumph, and there is no need for little people like ourselves to fuss about its perils, — or it is the lie which the supposed conspirators are imagined as believing it to be. In the latter case we stand to lose a sham; but if we admit the possibility that the nature of the universe is such that a conspiracy of hate could gain a final irreversible victory, then we may at once despair. For such pessimists, existence should be insupportable.

The bulk of thinkers will remain nervously optimistic. They do not really believe in the possible ultimate triumph of evil, and will refuse to allow themselves to be stampeded back into obscurantism, and submission of the conscience to outside authority, as a means of combating a supposed danger to religion and ordered government. On the other hand, they are from time to time seized with nerves, and worry intensely about the future because they lack positive faith either in evolution or in religion. So that we come back to our own consciousness. If we believe positively in good, not even the hypothesis of a diabolical conspiracy has any terrors for us. Whoever may attempt to usurp authority, we have no other real leaders in the world-struggle with Bolshevism than those who possess unshakably this positive belief.

If this sinister international conspiracy exists, we have doubtless an immensely harder row to hoe; but provided we ourselves are all right within ourselves, we can remain supremely confident of victory.

II

We can now turn to consider the strength of Bolshevism itself, whether we regard it as a movement cunningly engineered by arch international conspirators, or as an independent manifestation, an outcome of Tsarist rule, the Russian temperament, the World War, and whatever other factors analysis can bring to light.

What is force? When one is in the Middle East, — a place which will soon thrust itself more on the attention of the West, and is likely to dwarf those domestic politics to which we seem to have returned with unaccountable ardor, after a brief glimpse of a finer kingdom in the dusty rapture of the war, — between Leninism in the North and Gandhiism in the South, it is plain enough that in one sense both these men are right. Force is ultimately moral force, or will-power. It was the fanatical force of Lenin’s steely will that kept the wretched Slav peasant, long ago overdone with suffering, in winter trenches, or sent him over the top against Poles or Georgians or some other ‘objective.’ Gandhi’s power lay in his devotion to his idea, his complete indifference to all normal worldly baits or bribes. How is an average comfortloving European, with a humdrum sense of duty, but by no means indifferent to worldly success and popular opinion, to combat such a man? Yet we have got to combat such men, and there is a way to do it.

If we push our inquiry a stage further back, we find that it is the passionate will of Karl Marx that we have to meet in Russia. For everyone who reads Lenin’s writings with care sees that the force of Marx’s idea has hypnotized Lenin. Lenin makes no pretence of original thought. He would consider originality blasphemy, even as Peter or Paul would have scorned the idea of going one better than Christ. Lenin glories in being the slave of his master. He sees himself as the true commentator, the purifier of the Marxian church from the heresies introduced by those who have not understood or have willfully misrepresented the master’s teaching, the essence of which is revolution by violence. It is Marx then with whom we have to deal, for Marx being dead yet speaketh. He too is in a choir invisible. He has woven a spell that binds millions of workers, and this is the spell we have to break. That Lenin is the true interpreter of Marx is clear to every unprejudiced student who has no interest in Socialist bickerings. Whatever the Second International may say, Marx plainly preached the necessity of violence.

Now what is the force which Marx has breathed through Lenin into civilization’s enemy, Bolshevism? How have the wills of men been captivated so that ordinary kindly mortals, big gentle Slavs, people full of music and tears, will rage and kill? Some explosive was there already in the heart of humanity, waiting at this moment of world-tension, or Lenin would have detonated in vain. Look through the string of causes that the various writers and observers give us. Tsarism, the war and its upheavals and scandals, the peasant’s earth-hunger, Tolstoyism, the intensive culture of a numerically small Intelligentsia largely debarred from political outlets — all these things, and others too numerous to mention, have a real meaning, and one has one’s self seen them at work in Russia.

And look again at the list of reasons why Bolshevism, which, some optimists would have us believe, represents not three per cent of the Russian people, maintains itself. A marvelous spy system, militarism, an appeal to national spirit in a succession of campaigns thoughtfully provided by short-sighted Westerners, a ruthless, intellectual dictatorship, log-rolling, corruption, terror, greed — all these again have doubtless a meaning. But neither list, however we lengthen it, will in itself furnish the key. They are, as the Oxford philosopher said, a string of onions without the string. There remains some unifying principle. Let us find that, and we shall have found the secret of Marx’s and Lenin’s success; and we shall also have found the means of defeating them.

Now it is plain that this principle, to have produced such wide results in such different places, must be something very human and very simple. In fact, while we ransack heaven and earth to explain these catastrophic miracles, the explanation may be suspected to lie under our noses. Something simple and something human, some instinct common to the mass of mankind. Think long and think well, and little lights will begin to break in elusive points. Look inside you, the surest place to learn about humanity’s desires. What was it that enabled Lenin to sweep the wordy social revolutionaries, with their mistresses and motor-cars, from power in the autumn of 1917? What does Lenin give a Russian in return for forced labor and the bread of affliction? Liberty? Fraternity? Equality?

Liberty — clearly not. What about fraternity and equality? Neither Lenin nor Marx had any illusions about the brains and capacities of all men being equal. But is there not another kind of equality? We sometimes say in a canting way that we are equal in the sight of God. Most of us, of course, do not believe it. We feel sure that the penetrating eye of the Almighty discerns our superior merits. We even console ourselves for being passed over in the sight of men, or through what we consider the intrigues or jealousies of others, by the fact that, doubtless, we are getting full marks in heaven. But, on the other hand, there come times when it is borne in upon us that all comparison is impossible, that everything has its own value, and that ‘a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars.’ In regard to our estimate of men, such a moment comes in presence of peril. In a shipwreck, the typically good man saves the women and children, and himself goes down with the ship, though perhaps only because he has been brought up to believe that that is good form. The typically bad man jumps for the boats and leaves the women to look after themselves, which, fortunately, some of them prefer to do. But both the good man and the bad recognize absolutely the truth that all men are equal. For the bad man claims the right of self-preservation, and the good man never dreams of saying, ‘Being better than the rest of you, I must have the privilege of surviving. Make way, please.’

Now there we have it. What the rest of us realize in the trenches, or when the torpedo strikes, but forget when we ring the bell for the servant, this Lenin knows all the time. He cannot forget it, because it is part of his consciousness. When he, a highly educated professor from the petty nobility, talks with a workman or a peasant, he does not merely pose as talking to a social equal: he is talking to a social equal, and has no feeling of social superiority. To him one task is as good as another; and though shoveling snow is not his job, and is in a sense a ludicrous waste of time, he shovels snow in the Kremlin, without the slightest sense that he is doing anything menial or degrading. He has given the proletariat real social recognition. He has taken power; but he has made ruthless war on pomp and pomposity, flunkeyism and officialism. And so, though the dream of liberty recedes and the seas of blood are sickening him, the tortured Slav still stumbles after Lenin; for his ruler has given him that recognition of his manhood for which his heart hungered.

This, then, is Lenin’s secret, the very simple spell by which he makes otherwise sensible citizens join a dance of death. The potency of that spell throughout the world at the present moment is easy to see. We have already noted that the truth that we are all social equals becomes plain even to the most superior of us in the face of danger. Marx, who hitched his damnable wagon of bloody revolution to this truthful star, could not hope for the success, in those comparatively safe and solid nineteenth-century days, that has befallen his successor. For a revolutionary, it is good fortune to live in dangerous times; for danger exposes hypocrisies and shams, and gives him a chance of thrusting his panacea into the void.

Now, the World War has produced a feeling such as has never been in this world before, that all men are social equals, for each has his own value. Sitting in an underground shelter, listening to the Zeppelin bombs bursting overhead, the Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady discovered that they were sisters under their skin; and though in many cases the Colonel’s lady has since forgotten this important truth, Judy O’Grady imbibed it to an extent that has altered her forevermore. So have her brothers and her cousins, who returned alive from Hellfire Corner, or escaped the harvest of the sea. And here we have our finger on the cause of world-unrest. This transcends wages and hours. In all lands the war has brought up from the deepest consciousness of all under-dogs the desire for social recognition. Every badge of servitude is abhorred. It is not work that is abhorred, for mankind is incurably industrious. It is the insults to human dignity that vain pride and social superiority inflict.

Whether I am right in holding that the source of all world-unrest, wherever found, is fundamentally one, and whether I have touched the innermost aspiration of Labor in the West, I must leave you to decide. Let me turn to the East, which is more within my sphere.

III

Ten years ago, by contrast with the Russians the British were supposed to be politically popular in Teheran. I had a Persian friend who had spent many years in the British service, spoke English, and understood us well. He was universally reputed an Anglophile. But one night he opened his heart to me, and spoke, as nearly as I can recall his words, like this: —

‘You know, if Persia had to pass under either Russia or England, all of us Persians would really prefer Russia, though we trust you English more, and often lead you to believe that we should prefer you. Why should we prefer Russia? Because the Russians might be more brutal, but they have not got your rigid social attitude toward Orientals. Look at the general commanding at Kazvin now [there were Russian troops at Kazvin at the time]: we all see that he is a Mussulman. If the Russians came here, I or my son might hope to be a general in the Russian army. But if you came, the most that I could hope for would be to become a “native officer,” and by condescension be sometimes invited into the Mess after dinner, to have a glass of port.’

Now the whole of the British position in the East has been, as de Gobineau pointed out long ago, built up by maintenance of a caste system far more rigorous than the Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, or other famous colonizers ever attempted. Without this caste system, it is indeed difficult to imagine how we could possibly have obtained our success in India at all, or how a handful of whites could have maintained their dominance over so many millions. We selected good men, and they went East definitely as superior beings, to play the rôle of Providence to extremely helpless people. But the system that made our success is now outgrown. Our supreme self-assurance, our consciousness of other people’s inferiority, has become a canker eating the Oriental heart. The Oriental himself has hopelessly complicated the problem by his slow progress in sex matters. Until he can give to womanhood the same recognition of its own inherent equality of value which he demands for his manhood, real social intimacy between East and West is doubly difficult.

Here is another true story. Some years after the war, a young Egyptian of a well-known family of Lower Egypt was my fellow passenger on a Mediterranean boat. He had graduated at Oxford, and had also taken an agricultural course, and was now returning to his own country. He was, as I discovered from conversation with him, a raging Nationalist, thirsting to oust the English and, in fact, I saw him detained at Port Said, as the police had information that he was bringing seditious literature into the country. This Christ Church youth sat generally alone on deck when the evening gayeties began, looking on hungrily at the dancers; for it was July, and he was still full of memories of the first post-war Eights week and ‘ Commem,’ But one evening he secured a partner and danced. Presently I found myself sitting beside the wife of a senior military officer who was going out to join her husband in Egypt. She was a highly cultivated, charming woman, who seemed in general refreshingly free from prejudice in her conversation.

‘Did you see the “Gyppo” dance?’ I asked her with vague curiosity; for I had noted that he had danced particularly well.

‘I tried not to look,’ she replied with obvious sincerity. ‘That sort of thing gives me the creeps. I wonder it is allowed.’

Here indeed was the edge of an abyss between East and West of which we have all had experience, though it is too rarely frankly considered when we discuss unrest.

Some people will tell you that the East is sick of civilization. But that is merely the form which Gandhi’s fever took in India. The East is not sick of civilization; it is sick of patronage. It is sick of super-government. It has stirred in its sleep. Older than all of us, it has dreamed new thoughts while we supposed it dying. What will happen when the sleeper wakes? Has our hustling efficiency something yet to learn? Once again, is light upon our path coming from the East?

IV

How, then, is civilization to disarm Lenin? We have seen that the weapon with which he goads men to attack civilization is the rankling sense of injustice at social, rather than financial, inequality, which is now widespread both in East and West.

Clearly, in order to save itself, civilization will do well to proceed on scientific lines. Lenin’s idea, which is being used to our undoing, that all men are social equals, is after all a true one. Since, therefore, we cannot hope to expel it, have we phagocytes in our system capable of seizing on it, of incorporating it in civilization, even of making its recognition the hallmark of civilized man, as much a part of him as his breathing, or the circulation of his blood? If we can do that, we shall be immune, and can laugh at Lenin. His occupation will be gone; for in a society where all men extend to one another the courtesy and consideration required between social equals it will be idle to try to get up a bloody revolution.

We shall do something still more insidious. The great military lesson of the World War is compact in one word — the counter-attack. Before the war the last word of military wisdom was the offensive: ‘Attack, attack, attack.’ Prussia embodied it, and the French and ourselves were in danger of Prussian hypnotization. But the offensive school lost, both tactically and strategically. The offensive failed wherever it was tried, and finally it lost the war. It failed with us as completely at the Somme and Paschendaele and, most signally of all, at Cambrai, as it failed with the Germans twice at the limit of the Marne. The true field-strategy is to await attack and, when the enemy has penetrated into your line, to be ready with your massed reserves to deal a deadly riposte, far more crushing than a simple offensive.

In the moral world there is no difference. It was our strength that we were the attacked and not the attacking party. It was our weakness that we had not massed our reserves, and were not ready with our counter-stroke till late in the war, when our propaganda did deadly work. Lenin has penetrated civilization’s position. We must deliver our riposte instead of quarreling among ourselves. If civilization, in face of a common peril, will abandon petty national jealousies and bickerings, as well as class jealousies and bickerings, and will embrace the axiom that all men are social equals, so that the man who won the D. C. M. will not be required to cringe to his employer, who peradventure was a profiteer, it will conduct the deadliest of all counteroffensives. For the vulnerable spot of both Lenin and Gandhi is precisely the same as their strong point, namely, that they are sincere. Lenin believes that civilization must be brutally shattered before it can be remade. Gandhi, now in prison, also despairs of Western civilization, and believes that the East must annihilate it by boycott and produce a new civilization modeled on the East’s own ancient wisdom. If civilization can show that it is indubitably finer than the thing whereof they despaired; if, in short, it can steal their thunder, it will carry confusion into the very souls of these men, it will undermine the foundations of their belief, it will divide their will at its very seat, and end by making them our helpless prisoners.

But this, you will say, is sheer idealism. Is not this the old story that nothing will save us but a change of heart? When the founders of all the world’s great religions, and all the hosts of teachers to whom they have given birth who pray for and preach to us on Sundays, Fridays, Saturdays, and whatever other holy days different religions have selected — when these have not yet succeeded in producing that change of heart, why waste time and ink in writing to the Atlantic Monthly about it?

Now that is just where the East comes in. After all, the founders of religions, or evolution, or the march of civilization, or whatever other motiveforce or label we ascribe to progress, can be said to have failed only in the sense of having not yet succeeded. Respice finem. And the battle is obviously much more than half won. Mankind has suffered an immense change of heart since each man had to guard his own cave, and clubbed his bride; or since a king’s slaves sweated under the lash to build such follies as the Pyramids; or since we burned heretics; or since that pre-war past, — which seems so remote but is yet only a few years gone, — when we British thought that to give old men pensions or young women votes would violate the laws of nature. The mere fact that the world’s workers are now everywhere clamoring for social equality is in itself a proof that we are within an ace of coming to it. The question is merely whether we are coming to it through red ruin and the breaking up of laws, or whether we are coming to it through a change of heart. If, like Lenin, you despair of civilization, there is nothing for it but the former. If you believe in civilization, we shall attain it by the latter. But the question is no longer unpractical idealism. It is urgent, and has come up for settlement.

The West is not likely to collapse to Lenin. He makes big dents in its line, he makes a temporary break through in Budapest, or Munich, or perhaps on the Clyde, or in Dublin. But, all in all, the West, where the big masses, the great industrial armies, are deployed on both sides, may be trusted to hold for civilization. Lenin’s attaque brusquée has failed, to his intense surprise. The world-revolution, whereon he counted in 1918, did not come. He has had to settle down to siege warfare. Sometimes his spirits rise when he reads a bulletin from Turin, or Milan, Cork, New York, or Chicago. But, in general, he is checked, though at great cost. And there is little sign of the great counter-offensive.

V

All this time the side-shows are going on in the East. There is an odd parallel to the Great War in this Greater War, in this second chapter of the momentous volume which the war began. It is already an historical curiosity to read the memoirs of some British soldiers. They might well serve as a warning to us now not to forget the East. For these soldiers damned the side-shows in every mood and tense. Saloniki was an obsession to them, and the word could not be written with calmness. They called it a politician’s stunt, ignoring the fact that it had the full sanction of French military opinion; for the famous French military genius was true to itself and resisted the obvious temptation to call for every available man to hold the sacred soil of France. Yet it was the side-shows, Saloniki, Palestine, and Mesopotamia, that finished first, and were the sure forerunners of the great victory in the West.

If the Western front can do no more than hold, if it is at present unpractical idealism to talk to holders of stocks and shares of a change of heart, is it possible that the supposed corrupt and somnolent East can deliver the moral counterstroke that will free the world of Bolshevism?

I believe that it can and will.

When the truth that all men are socially equal dawns upon a man, it can strike him in one of two ways. In that ultimate moment, truth is balanced on a razor’s edge. On the one side is all good, on the other side is all evil. He may see truth in a flash in the form of ‘You are as good as I,’ or he may see it in the form of ‘I am as good as you.’ In the first form, it is evident that the Prince of Wales saw it during the war, and that was what he meant when he told us quite simply that he came into his manhood. Hence he rules all hearts because, though his job is to be Prince of Wales, we feel instinctively that he recognizes the manhood of everybody, and does not conceive himself as a superior being.

We have seen the instance of the typically good man and the typically bad man in the shipwreck. Lenin and Trotsky, like Marx, have seen the truth, but for them truth is poisoned at the source. Corruptio optimi. Fundamentally, good and evil are two facets of one truth. Lenin and Trotsky are now banking on the evil that is in mankind. And though it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom, it must be confessed that, when an upper-dog does see the truth, he is more likely to see it in the good sense than is the under-dog. For the upper-dog’s trouble is that he has been accustomed to think himself not only as good as, but also a lot better than, other people. Whereas the underdog’s trouble is that for many generations he has been made to feel that he is inferior to other people.

Now it is the contemplative East and not the industrial West that is the eternal trustee of the pure facet of truth. Throughout the ages, when toiling man has grown fretful, and the lights that had seemed so clear to his fathers have become dim to him, the East has relit the torch and put a song in his heart. So it seems likely to be again. Many devout Christians have often wondered what was the historic mission of Islam, and they have conceived it only as a thorn in the side of Christendom. The day seems coming with rapidity when we shall all recognize the service of Islam to the world. It is the barrier on which Bolshevism will break, and it is from the heart of Islam that a new conception of human freedom is likely to be given to the West.

For there is just no danger at all of real Bolshevism in the Middle East. India is a storm-centre, for, as we have seen, the socially superior attitude of the British has bred evil passions. But in Central Asia there is no such focus of hatred. Trotsky’s purely materialistic Communism and its base appeal cannot penetrate Islam, for Islam will transmute it into something finer. There is, indeed, a strange spiritual unrest in Islam. The Khalifat agitation is the merest outward sign of a deep stirring, which, in my view, will ultimately find its expression, not in military ebullition, but in a great religious revival, which will be so untainted with reaction or clericalism of any kind that it will powerfully influence the world. On occasion the East has a moral courage that far exceeds the West’s. It is capable of converting the Sermon on the Mount into a serious political programme, under the sway of a great religious teacher. Everywhere in the Middle East one finds the expectation of him, and the belief that, in spite of contrary appearance, a golden age is near. The Shiahs await the Imam, the Sunnis await the Mahdi, the Wahabis look for a second coming of Christ. The Jews in Jerusalem are convinced that the Messianic age is opening. The Bahais go further, and from the Persian heart of Islam announce to all religions that the fulfillment is upon us. Between the Mediterranean and the China Seas their numbers grow apace.

And meanwhile Islam, which for twenty years followed politicians and believed in constitutions, is now faced with the bankruptcy of mere political machinery. It has turned in upon itself, to seek a remedy for those ills which neither kings nor laws can cause or cure. Pan-Islamism has become a vague but powerful yearning for fellowship. Thought is building up new political conceptions, and, in particular, one notices a reconciliation between kingship and democracy as a trend of Asiatic political theory. A new interpretation is given to the divine right of kings. In this dream the king is the central symbol of the love of his subjects. He, being at the centre, has the largest circle of friends, and is therefore the most loving, as well as the most beloved, man in the kingdom. He is the servant of all, and makes no other claim save loving service; hence he can have no enemies and is truly royal. The kingdom produces enough wealth for all, and every man finds as much pleasure in his neighbor’s prosperity as in his own. So that all are contented, for every man regards his own property as equally at the service of his neighbor, and knows that his neighbor’s property is at his service.

We shall be told that this is against human nature. But human nature is two-sided. Once more we are in presence of the two facets, one evil and one good, of a single truth. What is certain is that mankind’s greatest leaders have made many men see only the good facet; therefore the power of seeing must be in human nature. It is true that only a great teacher can do this. The earnest expectation of the East is such that it is reasonable to await such a teacher. There is a void which must be filled; the power of evil let loose from Moscow has brought the world face to face with it. And in such turning points of the world’s history the new light which has enabled men to carry on has never failed them. The life-force does not fail.

For in the whole universe there is only one truth. You may see it sparkling brightly in the light heels of Karsavina, or gleaming fitfully in the dim pages of some dull divine.