INTRODUCTION
THE aim of this book is to describe the life and work of the two men whose personalities, in the author's opinion, most forcibly embody the spirit of the present age. The ideas preached by Lenin and Gandhi, their words and actions, will perhaps afford future generations clearer evidence than anything else of the motives of our time, of what spheres it accomplished permanent work in, and of how far it fell short of our hopes. Later ages will measure the significance of our epoch by the standard of the work of Lenin and Gandhi, and the inadequacy of these two men will show the tragic deficiencies of our age, which set itself the task of attaining the unattainable, the concrete realization of age-old Utopias.
Both of them, Lenin as well as Gandhi, in different ways undertook the heroic and at the same time adventurous experiment of putting into practice the long cherished dreams of humanity. They were both rooted deeply in their own nations, and their reforms and their methods were entirely the result of the destinies of their countries, of the limitations of Russian and Indian conditions, and that at a moment when both nations had arrived at a turning point in their national development. But the political enterprise of both the Russian and the Hindu goes far beyond the narrow boundaries of the national and the temporary. Russia and India were merely to be the subjects of a great and universally valid experiment whose success was to give an example to the world and to spread the new doctrines of the two reformers over the whole earth. Lenin and Gandhi were upheld by the emotion of an ecstatic faith, the faith that their country was called to redeem humanity.
Therefore the words of these two men have the
vii
