THE MODERN REVIEW
No. 5
No. 173
THE PROBLEM OF AHIMSA
There is a problem before the modern world, in the East and West alike, which cannot be laid aside. We have to discover, in the government of nations, the moral equivalent for War. If humanity is not to sink back into the beast, a substitute in political action must be found, which shall keep intact the courage and the daring of man, that has been associated with War in the past. We must take away from the ultimate political struggle the cruelty, the intolerance, the violence, the murder, the hate which war produces. All that has shone out in the past in martial deeds, all that has been sung in legend and epic about heroes and warriors and knights, must be preserved, but its objective must be changed from the slaying of men to the slaying of evil, from hatred of men to the hatred of evil systems.
I well remember how, in a recent visit to Japan, the Poet Rabindranath Tagore was asked to commemorate in a poem, which should be carved upon the rocks, the martial deeds of two Samurai, who fought in mortal combat against each other and perished side by side at a certain spot on a lonely mountain road. At the time this request was made, I was with the Poet, and I can well recollect the look of pain, which came over his face, as he listened to the story. He went out silently to his own room and after a while he came back with these lines written —
They hated and killed, and men
praised them
But God, in shame, hastens to hide its
memory under the green grass
As the Poet showed me the lines he had composed he said nothing, but there was something in his pained silence, that I saw, which could never be forgotten. It reminded me of the Buddha, or the Christ.
The years that have passed since August, 1914, have caused a revulsion of mind about war which lends a ray of hope to the future. It is now recognised even by the generals themselves, who were the principal actors in the struggle, that another such conflict would mean the end of western civilisation. The shelling of Louvain and Ypres, of Arras and Rheims, the devastation of one of the fairest lands on God’s earth, the northern land of France, the infinite torture of human lives in hundreds of miles of trenches on the Eastern and Western fronts, the inhuman outrages of poison gas, the bombs, growing ever larger and larger, hurled down upon non-combatants from aeroplanes, the Zeppelin raids, the barbed wire entanglements heaped with mangled dead, the submarines and their victims, the underground mines which dynamited away whole mountain sides like a volcanic eruption, the lying and persecuting press propaganda, the epidemics of moral degeneracy which ran like a plague through the great cities,— these are some of the things, that we have now learnt to associate with War.
But even this is not all. We have experienced, also, the aftermath of War. We have seen the Law of Karma being fulfilled in all its terrible exactness, proving the truth of Christ’s words,—“They that take the sword, shall perish
