SOURCE: Niebuhr, Reinhold. “Blind Anger.” Nation 157, no. 11 (11 September 1943): 300-02.
[In the following review, Niebuhr offers a negative assessment of Between Tears and Laughter.]
We have learned to respect and appreciate Lin Yutang as a kind of Wise Man from the East. Beginning with My Country and My People, in which he interpreted Chinese culture for the West, he expounded a philosophy which in our Western tradition would be called Epicurean but which he defined as a combination of Confucian and Taoist viewpoints. He gloried in the earth-bound and sober common sense of Confucianism and poured his scorn upon the heaven-storming fanaticisms of the West.
Perhaps he intended the same spirit to permeate his new book [Between Tears and Laughter], for we are told that the Chinese title, literally translated, means “weeping, laughter, both wrong.” But the tragedies of the war have long since drawn him out of his partly Epicurean and partly Stoic equanimity. There is little in this volume of the “law of measure” which the title betokens. The fact is that Mr. Lin is very, very angry. Anger may, on occasion, distil more wisdom than serenity does; the author's anger is therefore no explanation of the fact that this book will add nothing to his reputation or stature. It is strident in tone, sometimes cheap in expression, full of contradictory opinions,...
BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
"The Sage is one who has first discovered what is
common in our hearts/'
MENCIUS
"O my friend, why do you, who are a citizen of the
great and mighty and wise city of Athens, care so
much about the laying up of the greatest amount of
money and honor and reputation, and so little about
Wisdom and truth?"
SOCRATES on trial
"The building of a peaceful world is not something
to be accomplished by the writing of a treaty. It
takes time to work out the relationships of men and
women, but if we hope for peace, it must be done."
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
BOOKS BY LIN YUTANG
Published by THE JOHN DAY COMPANY
MY COUNTRY AND MY PEOPLE
THE IMPORTANCE OF LIVING
MOMENT IN PEKING
WITH LOVE AND IRONY
A LEAF IN THE STORM
BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
LIN YUTANG
THE JOHN DAY COMPANY NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1943, BY LIN YUTANG
All rights reserved. This book., or parts
thereof, must not be reproduced in
any form without permission.
This is a John Day Wartime Book.
This complete copyright edition is produced in full compliance
with the Government's regulations for conserving paper and
other essential materials.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PREFACE TO MYSELF vii
I. THE SITUATION
1. A CONFESSION I
2. KARMA IO
3. THE EMERGENCE OF ASIA 1 8
4. THE SUICIDE OF GREECE 23
5. CHURCHILL AND PERICLES 33
6. WORLD WAR III 50
II. THE METHOD
7. THE "WHITE MAN'S BURDEN" 58
8. GOVERNMENT BY MUSIC 65
9. MATHEMATICS AND PEACE 74
10. DEFENSE OF COURTESY 8 1
11. EUROPEANIZATION OF THE WORLD 87
12. DEFENSE OF THE MOB 93
13. THE FUTURE OF ASIA HO
III. SYMPTOMS
14. PEACE BY POWER 121
15. A PHILOSOPHY OF PEACE 127
16. PEACE BY POINT RATIONS 133
17. THE SCIENCE OF THE BLOODY EARTH 146
1 8. THE INTELLECTUAL'S DILEMMA 159
IV. DIAGNOSIS
19. THE CHARACTER OF THE MODERN AGE 163
20. ORIGINS OF THE MECHANISTIC MIND 174
21. SCIENCE TO THE RESCUE 1 86
22. THE SEARCH FOR PRINCIPLES 2OO
23. THE COMMON STANDARD FOR MEN 206
24. EPILOGUE Kj^A 1 ? (lit CiiB 2I4
1
TO
RICHARD J. WALSH
PEARL S. BUCK
IN ABIDING FRIENDSHIP
PREFACE TO MYSELF
THE purpose of this book is to say something that must be
said and say it with simplicity.
The age calls for simple statements and restatements of
simple truths. The prophets of doom are involved, those who
would bring light must be clear.
Our problem is the problem of moral decay and regeneration.
From a handful of dust faith must come. There is more hope
in a heather rose than in all the tons of Teutonic philosophy.
I do not know how to say these things, but God give me
strength to say them.
The shadow of another war already looms before us. We
have to think straight and think fast.
LIN YUTANG
I. THE SITUATION
1
A CONFESSION
AS I take up my pen to put down the thoughts bursting for
expression in my head and my heart, I am troubled by the
question of ruthless honesty and whether it is worth while. The
question is not whether it is worth while to myself, but to the
public. I have decided that it is worth while. For every good
book is worth the reader's while when there is a real com-
munion of the spirit, and this is possible only when he feels
he is being taken into the author's confidence and the author
is willing to reveal to him the innermost searchings of his heart
and talk, as it were, in an unbuttoned mood, collar and tie
loose, as by a friend's fireside. Nobody is ever misunderstood
at a fireside; he may only be disagreed with. Agreement of
opinion is the least important thing; disagreement is not only
profitable, but necessary to thinking. At the fireside of a friend
there is many a heated argument, after which both friends see
many things not seen before. The writer who is willing to let
go is sure of being understood, and only friendship which can
stand occasional plain speaking is worth having.
I may as well make a confession here. For a month or so, I
have been living in a daze. My mind, as I look back upon it
now, has been a complete blank I can only remember fuming
and lying awake at night, thinking, thinking, thinking of how
to break the solid wall of the Washington blockade of supplies
for China. And thinking, lying awake at night, over the puzzle
that President Roosevelt gave us. "Even now," said the Presi-
dent, "we are flying into China as much Lend-Lease material
as ever traversed the Burma Road." That statement contained
a joker, and I didn't like it I didn't like joking and quibbling
2 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
about vital supplies for my country at war. I knew the exact
tonnage being flown in, which, no official has dared to make
public. It was the last straw, and broke the camel of easy-paced
Chinese patience. It was a slap in the face, and stunned me into
a half-daze.
Let me tell you how the Chinese camel broke. I had been
slapped in the face before, or rather I felt China had been,
successively. My country being pledged to a life-and-death
struggle with Japan, these slaps were so personal that I felt as
though someone had slapped me bodily. I have heard of pris-
oners being slapped by the Japanese, and have often wondered
what Jesus would say about that. Jesus' injunctions ended with
the second smiting on the left cheek; what one should do after
turning the right cheek, if there was a third slap, followed by
a fourth, the Bible did not tell us. Always it was not the injury,
but the abuse, that hurt. What I could not stand was not self-
ishness f or that I could always understand ; what I could not
stand was bad manners. It was not so hard to be kicked unin-
tentionally; it was harder to be told that being kicked didn't
matter, or that the kicker had just never thought anything
about it. I knew as well as any American that America was
shipping oil and scrap iron to Tokyo to bomb Chinese women
and children. Chinese patience is big enough for that. In a
hypothetical case, if China should now declare herself a neutral
and send scrap iron to Japan while the United States is fighting
her, meanwhile maintaining a friendly relationship with the
United States and praising her for her "heroic struggle," I
doubt whether there would be as much equanimity in the
American press or American diplomatic quarters as China
showed before Pearl Harbor. But when President Roosevelt in
the summer of 1941 called this policy of shipping iron and oil
to Japan a "success," with evident satisfaction, that was the first
big slap on my face. Of course all who hurt people with their
words hurt through thoughtlessness. It obscured all the pin
pricks before the steady protests of the State Department to
A CONFESSION 3
Tokyo on the violation of U. S. property rights in China, on
the damage to an American warehouse and three benches at
Wuhu or a church building apd four cats at Chinkiang, while
ignoring the bombing of Chinese women.
The second slap came when the London Government or-
dered the Burma Road closed a second time. Since Britain, as
events clearly demonstrated, neither meant for a moment to
hold Burma with her own troops, nor would allow the en-
trance of Chinese troops, it was, in fact if not in name, an order
to close the Burma Road. But then an English general gloated
over the fall of Burma and expressed his "satisfaction" at the
campaign which "gained three months for strengthening of
India's defense."
The confiscation by General Wavell of China's Lend-Lease
supplies arriving in India and Burma without previous notifi-
cation of Chungking was a third slap.
The failure to make some slight effort to relieve the blockade
of China by adequate air transport, and the obstructionist and
dilly-dallying attitude of certain Washington bureaucrats in
this matter, was a fourth big slap.
The shabby treatment accorded the Chinese Military Mis-
sion, sent to Washington to provide information and counsel in
establishing a common war plan against Japan, was a fifth slap.
The smearing campaign about China's "fascism" and "im-
perialism" and "hoarding of supplies" as justification for not
giving military aid to China adding insult to injury was a
severe sixth slap.
Naturally, when, on top of all this, President Roosevelt put
a joker in his statement about a perfect state of things regard-
ing air transport to China, when it was actually scandalous and
unprintable, the Chinese camel broke down. At least, as one
Chinese, I did not think it was funny. . . . Further double
entendre and lies about Stalin objecting to Chiang being in-
vited to Casablanca kept me in that stunned condition for a
month.
4 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
Then yesterday afternoon I took a walk in the uptown cross-
streets, straggling with myself and striving for light to avoid
a nervous collapse. I tried to see my own country as Americans
would see her. Also I determined to view China's role across
the decades. I arrived at two conclusions.
One of these conclusions, which had been slowly forming in
my mind in the last month, was that China should travel the
road with America and England in the next decades as a
friendly nation, under two conditions. The first condition is
that under whatever semblance or form of World Federation
may be established, China will never, judging from her present
experiences during the war, be accorded true equality, because
she is Asiatic. She will be deprived of an air force of her own
at the time the war stops, if her Allies can help it. She will not
be accorded true equality until she is like Japan, twenty years
from now, when she can build her own tanks and guns and
battleships. When that time comes, there will be no need to
argue about equality, such being the standards of the moderjqi
age. Meanwhile, acting with the traditional Chinese wisdom of
"pretending to be a damn fool," Chink will be big enough for
a few more insults and humiliations. Even Japan had to stand
for the 5:5:3 for a time; the profound effect of this on Japa-
nese psychology is deeper than westerners suspect, or can even
understand. But there is the enormous patience, the bigness,
the reasonableness of China. The second condition is that while
acting as a friendly nation, China must learn the important
lesson of acting for national self-interest as western nations
have done and are doing. Such a friendly status should not
prevent China from seeking her own profits and national
strength as the only road to equality with the western powers,
nor, if similar circumstances arose, should it prevent her from
sending scrap iron and oil to the fighting enemies of her
"friends," or closing her "friends' " strategic lines, in order to
appease another powerful neutral.
I am convinced that this will be the shape of things, and will
A CONFESSION 5
be the road China must travel before she will be treated as an
equal, all talk of culture and friendship notwithstanding. For
China, being newly initiated into the family of nations, is like
a boy on his first day in school. His mother has told him to be
polite and courteous to everybody so that his parents will not
be ashamed of him. But I am the uncle who has been to such
a school himself and who knows too well the ways and ethics
of such schoolchildren. Seeing his nephew being beaten on his
way home, the uncle takes off his coat and teaches the boy to
hit back as the only way to gain the respect of the fellow
schoolboys. I would stop the boy from moping. . . . Who can
tell me that the uncle's advice is wrong? From this conviction,
I gained a certain strength, and I am not going to be upset by
further slaps in the face before China reaches equality of arms,
because I am expecting them as the natural law of modern
world politics.
The second conclusion I arrived at was a mystic one. It was
an intuition. I saw China growing strong, and Russia growing
strong, and all Asia growing strong. I know that this nation
of 450,000,000 people, united and awakened and purged by the
war-fire, is coming up; the strength lies in her and nothing the
western nations can do can stop her or keep her down.
From these reflections I regained my calm. Now I can be
amused by these self-important nations who think they can
dominate the world by sheer force, when Hitler has failed. I
am no longer angry; only the stupidity of it all is a little boring.
These thoughts blew like a whiff of clean air through the tor-
tuous maze in which my will and my mind were imprisoned
and paralyzed for a period. I came home, and ransacked the
refrigerator, and laughed. My children said that a great change
had come over me.
The human mind is a curious thing. It can take just so much
and no more. In a recent discussion about bastards, my friends
and I went over all the great talented bastards of history not
the "bastards" according to the New York taxi-drivers, which
6 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
include all New York pedestrians. We discussed the social
handicaps of illegitimate children, and how some succumbed
and others by sheer force of character or intellect overcame
them. Confucius was one; Ts'in Shih-huang, who built the
Great Wall, was another. These became the tougher for what
they had gone through. At a point, when the mind is strong
enough, it always transcends the personal circumstances. Some-
times, provided the mind has sufficient moral and intellectual
strength, it turns futile rage and scorn into a comedy of spar-
kling tears and laughter.
When such a mind comes into contact with the sordid reali-
ties of this world its pomposities, hypocrisies, and stupidities
the sparks that are set forth produce a beautiful pattern. Now
this I hold to be the function of the human mind to set off
sparks. When Dr. J. B. Watson and the host of scientific idiots
picture the human mind as consisting merely of a set of reac-
tions to dinner bells, instead of to ideas, idiosyncrasies, and
vagaries of this blessed middle state, all you can do is to throw
up your hands. . . .
So even in despair,, man must laugh. The present world
spectacle may be tragic. I share in all the depths of spiritual
misery of this tragic decade. I do not believe in an automatic
millennium that is going to blossom out of this spiritual desert.
I smell too many corpses around. Human souls have smells as
well as their bodies. Quite a few souls in a group identified by
their love for Otto, Franco, and Hirohito have a smell that is
distinctly stuffy. Others smell of the attic closet. This age is
tragic, I admit. Is it not tragic, for example, that while in the
last World War almost everyone believed it was the war to end
all wars and wanted to make it so, now in this Second World
War almost no writer that I have read dares even suggest that
this is the war to end all wars, or act on that belief? We have
lost the courage to hope.
The fonder you are of your ideals, the greater your heart-
breaks. When you wish, for instance, that some slight but posi-
A CONFESSION 7
tive steps may be taken for the freedom of India, because India
stands as the symbol of the issue of freedom for all nations,
and that ideal is very dear and real to your heart, and some-
body crushes that ideal like a flower, you feel a sort of pain.
But there is never a human tragedy but has its comic ele-
ments. There was probably never an age when the practical
affairs of men did not look like a madhouse to some sane and
perceptive minds, and there was never an age without its buf-
foons. In this connection I recall an excellent passage by Hein-
rich Heine in his Reisebilder:
Yes, even in the highest pathos of the world tragedy, bits
of fun slip in. ... On this great stage of the world all
passes exactly as on our beggarly boards. On it, too, there
are tipsy heroes, kings who forget their parts, scenes which
obstinately stay up in the air, prompters' voices sounding
above everything, danseuses who create extraordinary ef-
fects with the poetry of their legs, and costumes, which are
the main thing. And high in heaven, in the first row of
the boxes, sit the dear little angels, and keep their lor-
gnettes on us comedians here down below, and the blessed
Lord Himself sits seriously in His great box, and, perhaps,
finds it dull, or calculates that this theater cannot be kept
up much longer because this one gets too high a salary,
and that one too little, and that they all play much too
badly. ...
Alas, our risers are not gods, but puny, fallible men, like
the kings who constantly forget their parts, and we common
men should be their prompters. Sometimes, as on the American
scene, while the pyrotechnics of Peyroutonism are going on,
the American prompter's voice does seem to sound above
everything. At heart, the prompters mean only well. And it is
not in America alone that old actors tend to forget their lines;
in the four corners of the earth, the play is not going too
8 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
smoothly; and there seems to be a great deal of shouting and
confusion over this scene in Spain, that scene in North Africa,
and another scene in Austria in which the producer and the
prompters cannot come to an agreement as to whether Otto of
Hapsburg should step out on the boards or not, and still an-
other scene of terrific confusion in India, where men fighting
for freedom are fighting men fighting for their freedom*
And do not forget, prompters do help to save a performance.
Old actors are forgetful creatures and a little prompting in
time may yet help them to come off with a creditable perform-
ance. When the play is finished and the curtain rises again and
again, the prompter is even willing to join in the applause and
bring up the bouquets. But while the performance is going on,
the prompter's heart is in his mouth when the actor goes on
forgetting for a third and a fourth time, and does not even
seem to understand the theme of the whole play. After the
performance, the old actor will swear at the prompter in the
wing, "You presumptuous, meddlesome fool! I knew per-
fectly well what I was doing." It is then up to the prompter to
humor him by saying, "Of course you did. You were perfectly
magnificent as ever, Horatio!"
So comedy is mixed with tragedy and the play goes on> and
we see Edea and Hull rehearsing hurriedly, after the second
act has opened, that scene about Russia which properly be-
longed to the prologue of the play. There are saints and sinners,
and democrats and imperialists, and the imperialists are fight-
ing for freedom and the democrats are fighting for empire,
which means both are fighting to surrender their proper do-
mains, or pretend to. Gandhi prays and fasts, which is such a
curious act that no Christian can understand it, while Lord
Halifax remarks that if he, as an Episcopalian, were to go up
to the roof of the Viceroy's Palace to pray to God and fast, he
would probably be sent to an insane asylum. There is Sir Nor-
man Angell, hody defending the right to freedom and the
right of England in fighting the Indian right to freedom. I
A CONFESSION 9
wonder what the dear little angels sitting in their front row
boxes and looking down with their lorgnettes would do. I have
a feeling that the year 1942 was the year in which the angels
in heaven wept over their namesake on earth. If angels have
tears. . . .
The time of world tragedy is hardly the time to laugh. But
the prompter means well, even though if he shouts out too
loud he contributes to the comedy, for there is something in-
trinsically funny about human mistakes. Every age has its
buffoons and the buffoons make you laugh. Great men make
great mistakes and small men make small mistakes. Then the
great men love to point out the small mistakes of the small
men, while they do not wish to have their great mistakes
pointed out by the small men. A mistake is something which
it is the privilege of the great men to commit and of the small
men of this earth to point out after they are dead. Death comes
and the buffoonery is over and we take the historical view.
Dead men tell no tales and answer no arguments, and dead
censors delete no passages from the books of posterity; so let
them have the pleasure of deleting them now. We can already
smile at the mistakes of Neville Chamberlain, the errors of the
then popular national heroes of Versailles and of all the League
of Nations officials in the last decade, because now the mistakes
are irretrievable and pointing them out indicates a fine his-
torical sense. On the assumption that all our dead ancestors and
all the great statesmen of the earth are fools or buffoons except
those still controlling our lives, we can go safely. The great
thing about the teaching of history is that we must teach his-
tory but must not let history teach us.
Everything has its place and time. We men of the nineteen-
f orties can smile at the mistakes of the nineteen-thirties, and, in
turn, the men of the nineteen-fif ties will laugh at the mistakes
of the nineteen-forties. It is this historical perspective that shall
save us. When the war is over, the snails will be on the thorn,
and the world will wag on, very much alive, as it always does,
io BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
between tears and laughter. Sometimes there are more tears
than laughter, and sometimes there is more laughter than tears,
and sometimes you feel so choked you can neither weep nor
laugh. For tears and laughter there will always be so long as
there is human life. When our tear wells have run dry and
the voice of laughter is silenced, the world will be truly dead.
2
KARMA
BUT if we take the historical perspective and view the develop-
ment of human events, we are struck by a paradox which the
science of human history so far has not been able to solve and
the economic school of historians tend to ignore because they
cannot make head or tail of it. That is the so-called "imponder-
ables" of history. The word "ponder," I understand, comes
from Latin pondus which means "weight/' and "imponder-
able'* means to me not so much something which we cannot
ponder as something which we cannot measure or weigh*
What a sad admission for the "scientists" of history! But there
it is, a thing without weight or mass or shape or form.
Yet, while we may be perfectly contented with the facts and
figures in contemporary events and policies, such as the num-
ber of dive bombers and tanks with which we know we are
going to defeat Hitler, we get curiously spiritual when we view
human events of the past across a stretch of decades. We run
up constantly against these "imponderables," or "spiritual
forces" or "psychological factors" a kind of irreducible re-
siduum which defies further scientific analysis. In other words,
we are forced against our wish to accept a spiritual concept of
history. But our temper of thinking is such that we hate any-
KARMA ii
thing which we cannot conveniently weigh or analyze or put
in mathematical formulas. If we could have an; electrometer to
gauge the voltage of sentiments, we would immediately fce able
to understand them. As it is, with a sense of concession to an
unconquerable enemy, we lay it in a corner of our laboratory,
muttering something about not knowing what to do with "that
puzzling substance."
So I must speak of "Karma." The Hindus have evolved a
perfect theory of the law of moral action, and you can under-
stand this law of moral action only when you take the his-
torical perspective. Briefly, it is the theory that we are respon-
sible for our moral thoughts and actions, that these thoughts
and actions have a causal relationship with the past and the
future, and that we cannot escape from the chain of causation.
It is almost like the law of cause and effect in physical motion,
and the law of the indestructibility of matter and energy in the
physical universe. We have nothing remotely comparable with
it. The very fact that popular Christianity, as well as popular
Buddhism, seeks this balance of rewards and punishments in
the future life shows that they do not recognize, and are not
aware of, the adequate principle of moral causation in this
present life.
Reading President Roosevelt's speech on Lincoln's Birthday
I found that Lincoln was a Brahmin; in fact anyone who be-
lieves in the persistence of the effects of our thoughts and
actions is a Brahmin. There was a quotation from Lincoln
given at the end of Roosevelt's radio broadcast:
Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this
Congress and of this administration will be remembered
in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignifi-
cance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial
through which we pass will light us, in honor or dishonor,
to the latest generation.
12 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
Abraham Lincoln happened to state the principles of Karma
accurately and adequately in this single passage. "We cannot
escape history": that is Karma, Lincoln might have said in
1862, "The sounds which I am uttering now vanish apparently
into thin air, yet they persist into eternity. If we had a scien-
tific apparatus delicate and sensitive enough to catch and record
these sound waves, which, we don't, we might find that these
sounds stretch into the eternity of space. Similarly, with our
moral actions." "We will be remembered in spite of ourselves":
that is inescapability, "No personal significance or insignifi-
cance will spare one or another of us": even the smallest act
has its consequences. "Light us to the latest generation": the
effect is practically eternal, through effects producing further
effects. "In honor and dishonor": we bear the dead weight of
the past and carry in ourselves its shames and its glories. In
other words, the moment we live in is a causal and indissoluble
link between yesterday and tomorrow. The word "now" has
mathematically no meaning and no boundary: some time
elapses between my writing the first letter "n" and the last let-
ter "w" The stream of time is carrying us forward; we live
between yesterday and tomorrow.
In the light of this Brahmin theory, the thesis "Let's win the
war first an<d talk of what we are fighting for afterwards" sim-
ply does not make sense. Time refuses to be cut up like this,
"Win-the-War-First" Churchill's dictum is philosophic non-
sense, based on the grip of inertia of the past and fear of the fu-
ture. It is based on his complete unwillingness to escape from
the past and his great desire to escape from the future. One
must live in mortal terror of the peace to refuse to think about
or discuss the postwar problems. I know and I notice that even
W-t-W-F Churchill is forced, as time goes on, to discuss the
status of the British colonies and of Polish frontiers before he
can see his way to win the war. Meanwhile the time machine,
the wheel of Karma, is carrying Churchill forward, as a spring
torrent carries a leaf swiftly and surely toward an overflooded
KARMA 13
dam. Sooner or later, it will reach that much feared overflooded
dam of peace unless it is left behind by time.
There is a law in physics that "action and reaction are equal."
It has a certain awe-inspiring simplicity, like the law of uni-
versal gravitation. It takes some courage to state simple things
like that, but back of it are some complicated mathematical
equations, probably twenty-seven letters long, that the layman
cannot handle and does not even suspect. The similar law that
action and reaction are equal in the realm of moral action is
equally subtle, but less capable of mathematical proof. The
Buddhist doctrine is that Karma is "cumulative," that it is
something that is accumulated day by day and year by year by
our little acts and our secret thoughts, almost like physical mo-
mentum that one gains or loses by little acts, hesitations, and
delays. This Karma carries one along toward a future situa-
tion eventually salvation or death. Buddha himself states it in
plain psychological terms when he says in the opening sen-
tences of the Dhammapada:
All that we are is the result of what we have thought:
it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our
thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought,
pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox
that draws the carriage.
All that we are is the result of what we have thought:
it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our
thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought,
happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves
him.
This sort of teaching requires a little Hindu imagination
which conceives of moral things almost as real as physical
things. If we could give our moral self a body, we would find
that body consists of ganglions of our thoughts, acting like
vaso-motor nerves producing muscular actions. The sum of
I 4 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
such actions acting on the persons themselves and on fellow
human beings would produce the momentum of human events
and determine the future situation of the human world and
of the individual selves. Evil breeds sorrow and good breeds
happiness, as inevitably and as accurately as one billiard ball
sets another rolling at a particular angle and with a particular
force. That is the theory of moral responsibility of all human
acts and thoughts, and that is what the Buddhists mean by
the Wheel of the Law ("Dharma"), and again, in a more
pathetic sense, by the Wheel of Karma.
We have to be satisfied with some such statement of the
moral laws of the universe. It has sufficient austerity and rigor
about it, which is what we want. We are used to economic
thinking. Bales of cotton and marginal excess of exports over
imports and lowering and raising of tariffs are easy and clear
to handle mentally; there is something neat and tidy about
them. "Bales of cotton" makes sense, but "bales of good will
and co-operation'' rarely does, and we dislike hazy, unclear
thinking. Once in a while, however, our politicians leave this
comfortable realm and, by lapses of thinking, launch forth into
abstract phrases like "the unconquerable spirit of man against
oppression" and the "force of the human love for freedom,"
and the public grows a little restive with the lushness and
emotion. Then, by further lapses of memory, our columnists
and publicists once in a while further indulge in terms like
"the invisible forces of history" and the "psychological factors"
and the "imponderables" as if they were real things.
The fact is, we hate to ponder over the imponderables. The
more we ponder over them, the more cloudy or confused our
thoughts become, and the very realistic and straight-thinking
lobbyists and Senators soon call us down for handing out sen-
timental stuff and rubbish. Secretly, we feel a little ashamed of
ourselves and a little sheepish for committing such sins of the
spirit, and we make a resolution to talk of tariff quotas and
stick to brass tacks next time, and, God willing, we shall sue-
KARMA 15
ceed. Wrecked reputations can still be salvaged if we talk next
time in Lard-hitting terms that this age can understand. Raise
the standard of living, for instance sheer physical, animal
living or minimum wage standards and guaranteed income.
Nobody will misunderstand that. Eventually everything comes
back in terms of gold, unless it is silver, for we are living in
the Golden Age. All that glitters is not gold: there is antimony
and tungsten, but at least there is a price for it.
That explains our impatience with lush sentimentality. But
there are many things we have to do with that we can neither
weigh nor measure nor even prove. Tlie dignity of the individ-
ual x for instance, and the idea of equality and freedom, can
never be proved, for science can never prove that the individ-
ual is dignified or even free. On the contrary, if science is
science, it can only prove there is no such thing as freedom,
or where would be the prestige of the mechanical laws? These
things forever elude us, but held at a respectable distance and
clothed in eerie shapes, their presence nevertheless seems real.
In our forgetful and less scientific and mathematical moments,
we know they have a meaning, an existence behind a veil,
a shape that comes up behind us on a silent night as we are
sitting by the fireside and suddenly puts its hands across our
eyes and whispers, "Guess who?" Persistently these shapes
come to haunt us. Only to the spiritual thinkers do they become
real, almost with a weight and mass and form.
The Indian conception of Karma somewhat scares us with
its exactitude. Truth pays (it makes us happy) and justice pays,
and, if Indian metaphysics is right, freedom of the soul pays
enormous dividends. Actually Buddha and the Brahmins never
talked so vulgarly, but they meant substantially the same thing.
We are willing to consider the imponderables if we can be
made to see that they produce results, sometimes very impor-
tant results, and if we can prove that action and reaction are
equal in the moral as well as the physical realm. And so the
word "Karma" has come to mean for me a means of restating
16 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
a spiritual concept of history, of asserting the reality of moral
causes and effects over against economic causes and remedies.
Unless this is understood, our discussion of peace and war can
never rise above the level o swine~and-slop economics.
The China war is a fairly good illustration of the law of
Karma for the present called "imponderables." The strength
of Chinese resistance can be proved to be equal to the measure
of the enormities of Japan's previous acts. It is of the very es-
sence of Karma that we must speak of its "cumulative" effect
over a period of years or decades, until it is finally shown in
visible events. Whence arose that great moral force which
united the common people of China against the Japanese and
precluded die desertion of local generals to the invader's side,
which was commonly believed possible?
This force can be understood only as reaction to the sum
total of Japan's previous acts. To mention only a few in this
series: the Twenty-One Demands of 1915; the overt intention
to rape Shantung at the Versailles Conference; the rape of
Manchuria in 1931; the Shanghai War of 1932; the brazen and
shameless wholesale smuggling of Japanese goods under Jap-
anese army and consular protection in North China in the
years 1932-1936; the encroachment on Chahar in 1933-1934;
the sneak attempt to penetrate Inner Mongolia in 1936. All
through the years 1931-1937, anti-Japanese demonstrations were
suppressed in China. But the emotional reaction, though invis-
ible, steadily accumulated and accounts today for the inner
strength and stubbornness and unity of Chinese resistance.
Furthermore, according to the law of Karma, no small act,
however insignificant, happened without sending a ripple
through the following decades. Such a local happening as
cutting ofif the nose and ears and gouging out the eyes of a
Chinese diplomatic official, Tsai Kung-shih, Chinese Foreign
Commissioner at Tsinan in 1928, left its imprint on the Chinese
mind and spirit as much as the wholesale rape and slaughter
at Nanking in 1937. The Japanese thought that the "episode"
KARMA 17
ended with the official "closing of the Incident"; the Karma
theory says it did not. The Japanese could not escape history,
nor could the Chinese. Briefly, that was why the Chinese and
the Japanese had to fight. "A small injustice can be drowned
in wine/' says a Chinese writer, "but a great wrong can be
restituted only by the sword," Here moral causes and effects
are immensely real.
The same is true of the war in the West. If someone could
gauge the voltage generated in 130,000,000 American breasts by
the Pearl Harbor attack, he could be almost certain that the
moral effect was as disastrous for Japan as the physical effect
was militarily advantageous for her at the initial stage of the
war. But it is exactly such generated voltage that our diplomats
and army men despise and ignore when they start out like
small men to direct the greatest campaign of world history.
There are a rhythm and a pattern of things in human his-
tory if only we could detect them, I understand that X-ray
pictures showing strains caused by impact on metal and lucite
reveal highly interesting patterns which the naked human eye
cannot see. And I am told by anti-vegetarians that when we
cut up a radish, the agony of its spirit is shown in an outra-
geous emitting of electric currents that must be a scream. We
cannot hear the scream of the radish, nor could Hitler reckon
the "karmatic" currents set up by outraged and cut-up Europe.
But history will make these plain enough in time when their
effects become evident. And Hitler is not going to escape his-
tory. In other words, he is not going to escape the Wheel of
Karma. I really wish Hitler were a Buddhist He would have
been a little more subtle. What the Germans never really un-
derstand is metaphysics, all Teutonic tomes to the contrary.
It is, however, not Hitler alone who ignores the karmatic
currents of history. We of the Allied nations do not admit that
such karmatic currents of "imponderables" exist, and we are
not providing for them, being contented on the strictly swine-
and-slop level of war and peace planning. We simply have no
i8 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
conception of Karma, Economics makes no distinction between
human mouths and pigs' snouts, and all the charts and disser-
tations on food and populations and tariffs are no more than
the counting of snouts. The idea is that if you segregate the
hogs in different sties and throw in enough hog fodder, with
the fences neither too high nor too low between them, the hogs
are going to live in peace, and then a millennium will descend
upon the earth.
3
THE EMERGENCE OF ASIA
MEANWHILE the Wheel of Karma grinds on, which is my
way of saying that invisible forces of history are breaking
up the international structure of this world. Politically, we ig-
nore them. We are acting in this war as if these forces did not
exist. The laws of Karma can never be defied or nullified. We
are sowing what we do not mean to reap.
The one great fact in this world war is the emergence of
Russia and of Asia, but we prefer to ignore it. I have made
a passing discourteous reference to Sir Norman AngelL As a
European liberal, he is probably as good as any. But as a
European liberal, his liberal concepts of the necessity of world
co-operation and standing and falling together are strictly
"white" and limited to west of the Suez Canal, and specifically
to a refurbished form of "Union Now" with England. His
notion of Russia and of Asia stands intellectually on a par with
the Tory Lady Astor, who says, "I would like China and Rus-
sia to be in the framework of a new society formed by America
and the British Commonwealth, but they would have to get
into the 'British way of thinking.'" Such superb gems can
THE EMERGENCE OF ASIA 19
only be cut in London. The following mathematical riddle has
always puzzled me: if the diameter of the human skull is five
inches five, but the thickness of its sides is also five inches five,
what is the empty space in between ?
The nineteenth-century world structure is crumbling, and an
Empire breaks unwillingly. If one could see the invisible
forces rising and risen in Asia, one would be forced to look
upon this Second World War as a revolution in the world
structure. This revolution is being forced by Asia upon Europe,
and not by Europe upon Asia. For verily, we are witnessing
the birth pangs of a new earth, without being sure of the "birth
of a new freedom," The forces of a rising Asia are steadily
moving on.
Japan is trying to force a revision of the world map by battle.
China is forcing a revision of Asiatic roles in world politics by
enormous hope and self-reliance. India is trying, futilely, to
force a revision by addressing prayers to air patrols and riot
squads and the flogging whip. The lack of vision on the part
of the Allied leaders, however, has compelled them to fly in
the teeth of this Wheel of Karma. And not in Asia alone,
but throughout the earth, forces are rising, growing, to demand
that birth of a new freedom of which Abraham Lincoln pro-
phetically spoke, so that the world shall not be "half-free and
half -slave." These forces are causing a dislocation of our gen-
eral ideas and traditions. But being unprepared and caught
unready, we are meeting them, not with clarity and simplicity
and strength, but in utter confusion. The first principles being
not yet established, we are lost in a desert of temporizing
ingenuities.
I do not often quote Jesus, but I must quote him this time.
When ye see a cloud rise out of the west, straightway ye
say, There cometh a shower; and so it is, And when ye
see the south wind blow, ye say, There will be heat; and
it cometh to pass. Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face
20 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
of the sky and of the earth; but how is it that ye do not
discern this time?
The emergence of Asia and I think of Russia as half-Asiatic
is the one greatest single fact of this war. It has upset the
war schedule and is going to upset the peace schedule. It will
upset everything in fact except Lady Astor's imperturbable
"British way of thinking." If we don't look out, the mesmeric
powers of Lady Astor's "way of thinking" can think the world
revolution to a stop. -But it is my belief that even if we
wanted a modified survival of the nineteenth-century fabric in
the form, of a fairly white domination of the world, it is now
a little too late. Asia is too aroused to submit and too big to
spank* The West must either plan for co-operation with Asia
or plan without it and make ready for a bigger and better war.
Ernest Hemingway, on his return from China, quoted a
Chinese officer as saying, "You know why the Englishman
wears a monocle ? With one eye, he sees what he wants to see
and with the other eye he does not see what he does not want
to see." German officers wear monocles, also. But that is also
why monocles can never be popular in the United States or
in China. Lady Astor really means that the Russians and Chi-
nese should wear British monocles, but we happen to dislike
them, and so do the Russians. So it seems there is little chance
of seeing "Russia and China in the framework of a new society
formed by America and the British Commonwealth." As a
Chinese, I. would rather hang the new society and keep my
binocular vision.
The emergence of Asia simply means this: the end of the era
of imperialism. Nothing is going to stop it. To keep up the
nineteenth-century system, the white man would have to stran-
gle Russia and China. Now it is a little too late. The West may
still try, as Professor Nicholas John Spykman bravely advises:
"It is well to remember that, whatever may ultimately be
achieved in the form of integration and federation, we will
THE EMERGENCE OF ASIA 21
start more or less where we left off. Unless the United States
continues to struggle until she has defeated not only her ene-
mies [Germany and Japan] but also her former allies [Russia
and China], the postwar period will begin with an interna-
tional society composed of numerous independeiU, jstates"
which is what Professor Nicholas John Spykman dares not
contemplate. Am I to suppose that this is the type of political
doctrine being taught in American college classrooms? I re-
member, during World War I, the term "power politics" used
to be written as Machtpoliti\ and had a German flavor; now it
is not necessary Germany has conquered us from within.
The fact is, that, granted a little common intelligence in the
racial make-up, any nation will come up in time. How did
nineteenth-century imperialism begin, and how did the white
man go about conquering the world, and what made him think
he was superior to the other peoples? Because the white man
had guns, and the Asiatics had none. The matter was as simple
as that. Study the Boxer War and the Sino-French war of the
nineteenth century. Chinese soldiers in those days carried um-
brellas and brandished knives; many others were archers. Only
in the first decade of the twentieth century did we hear of
Yuan Shih-kai's "New Army/' and by the "New Army" we
simply meant that his soldiers were the only ones who had
rifles. If the comparison is disillusioning, let us even assume
that one army had fowling pieces and the other had Krupp
rifles.
If my reader is still following me, he can at once see that the
only logical way to keep Asia down permanently would be to
keep the knowledge of the use of rifles and guns from the
Asiatics as we are trying to keep the American bomb sight
from the enemy. Stretch it across the decades, and you know it
cannot be done. For a century that discrepancy in arms alone
maintained the white empires in Asia. What the great Second
World War suddenly revealed is that now the Japanese, the
Chinese, and the Russians all have guns. This fact is going to
22 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
change world history; the discrepancy no longer exists. What
is more, the Japanese can fight as well as the white men; so
can the Russians; so can the Chinese. They are all fighting.
Now what? Disarm them? Police them? Keep them down by
Culbertson's "quota principle" like the quota principle of
5:5:3 for British, U. S., and Japanese navies at the Washington
Conference ?
The white man's mission has become a paradox and a boom-
erang. The white man gave the yellow man the Bible and guns.
He should have given him the Bible, which he himself had no
use for, and kept from him the guns that he himself used most
expertly. He thought, that if he shot a few yellow men on
earth after his missionaries had saved their souls for heaven,
that ought to make it even. But he was mistaken. Now the
yellow man has learned to take the Bible as seriously as his
white brother, and I am sure the sons of Satan, yellow and
white, well equipped with tommy guns, will plunge this
world into another orgy of blood. That is to say, if we are
naive enough to think that all we need to do is to transfer
the standards of Europe to Asia and impose the white man's
power politics on a world scale, we shall have the whole world,
instead of Europe, as an arena of periodic bloodshed and
slaughter.
I am sure that all "progressive-thinking" people, including
some professors, are thinking in this direction. The beautiful
pattern of European, chaos, its standards and its ethics, will
become the pattern for the future world: all Hottentots will
have a quart of milk a day; the Hindus are to put on collar
and tie; Madagascans are to go to church; and the world is to
be thankful for it. That is the white man's mission and the
boon European civilization will confer upon the world, only
with a few periodic volcanic eruptions, it is admitted, whose
hot lava of destruction will run over some village in Guadal-
canal or Burma. On the other hand, he is going to have a quart
of milk a day. Is that not a bargain ?
THE SUICIDE OF GREECE 23
Our present solution for the changed world picture is in
fact quite Dimple. The white man is saying to all the other
races of the world: "I am trying to be perfect even as our
Father in Heaven is perfect, but all you natives need to do is
to be perfect like me and get into my way of thinking, and I
am sure our Father in Heaven will be quite pleased with you.
He wouldn't mind if you had a little heavier pigment. Now
toddle along." That is the New Jerusalem according to Lady
Astor, Clarence Streit, and Sir Norman Angell.
THE SUICIDE OF GREECE
THE solution for the international problems arising out of the
emergence of Asia suggested in the previous chapter does not
seem satisfactory or attractive to me. International suicide is
never attractive.
Herr Professor Nicholas John Spykman prefers a heroic,
uninterrupted march of the United States of America to world
supremacy by just a couple of more wars in which she shall
continue to struggle until she crushes only a couple of hun-
dred million Russians and only four or five hundred million
Chinese. . . . He prefers this to the unthinkable alternative of
"an international society composed of numerous independ-
ent states." I prefer the latter. The Spenglerian gloom of
Spykman's prophetic and professorial voice is after all de-
pressing; we common men should be a little more cheerful.
What Spykman means is simply that western civilization had
better commit suicide as Pericles* Athenian Empire did. Let's
be a little learned and professorial and tiresome and go back
to Thucydides.
24 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
Greece perished because she jailed to solve the problem of
empire versus -freedom. European civilization must also perish
if it fails to solve the problem of empire versus freedom. How
perdition will come about we cannot foretell like Nostradamus.
But the by-plays of the conflict of forces and the episodes and
the different phases of development, which may take genera-
tions for us but are only moments in the eyes of God or of
mankind's history, will be essentially the same as those that
brought about the suicide of the Greek world.
There are too many similarities. The advantage of delving
into Thucydides is that there the picture is focused into a
smaller and simpler scale, its geography is foreshortened in
space, and its half-century of conflict and decay is now conven-
iently foreshortened in time. Briefly, it was the conflict of
Athenian sea power and Spartan land power, and the sad
story of the failure of moral leadership. The dream of an
All-Greek Federation petered out, owing to that moral failure
and to the unwillingness or incapacity of Athens to solve the
problem of empire versus freedom. We are wise after the fact
and can put our finger on the arrogance and stupidity of the
Athenians as the psychological cause of that failure. Let us only
hope that the dream of world federation may have less the
character of the Delian Confederacy, and that there be no
Alexander from across the mountains to descend upon and
desolate the Ionian plains and wipe out what was a world of
glorious human achievements. The tragic motivation of that
historical drama was that the heroine, Athens, democratic and
brilliant and arrogant, loved freedom for herself, but could not
understand the equally passionate love of freedom of the other
Greek cities.
Reading history sometimes gives one a curious feeling in
the pit of the stomach. For the similarities to the modern world
are rather alarming. Unquestionably the Athenians were demo-
crats; but unfortunately, democracies could also commit sui-
cide. Human art had never soared higher than in Athens; the
THE SUICIDE OF GREECE 25
light of sweet reason and a wide-awake curiosity had illumi-
nated her mind, and simplicity and harmony had beautified
her spirit. Athenian pride was justifiable. Modern presidents
can boast of no greater achievements in their democracies,
or in modern civilization in general, than Pericles did of the
achievements of the Athenian way of life in his Funeral Speech
in honor of the fallen heroes at the end of the first year of the
Peloponnesian War. The tone is strikingly like an American
Presidential Address,
Before I praise the dead, I should like to point out by
what principles of action we rose to power, and under
what institutions and through what manner of life our
empire became great. . . . Our form of government does
not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others. We
do not copy our neighbors, but we are an example to them.
It is true that we are called a democracy, for the adminis-
tration is in the hands of the many and not of the few.
But while the law secures justice for all alike in private
disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized; and
when a citizen is distinguished, he is preferred to the
public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as a reward
of merit. Neither is poverty a bar, but a man may benefit
his country whatever be the obscurity of his condition.
. , . While we are thus unconstrained in our private
intercourse, a spirit of reverence pervades our public acts;
we are prevented from doing wrong by respect for author-
ity and for the laws, having especial regard to those un-
written laws which bring upon the transgressor of them
the reprobation of the general sentiment.
And we have not forgotten to provide for our weary
spirits many relaxations from toil; we have regular games
and sacrifices throughout the year; at home the style of
life is refined; and the delight which we daily feel in all
these things helps to banish melancholy. Because of the
26 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
greatness of our city, the fruits of the whole earth flow
in upon us; so that we enjoy the goods of other countries
as freely as of our own. . . * And in the matter of edu-
cation, whereas they [the "Nazi" Spartans] from early
youth are always undergoing laborious exercises which are
to make youth brave, we live at ease, and yet are equally
ready to face the perils which they face. . , .*
Pericles could not have spoken better if he were giving a
speech in honor of the heroes fallen at Guadalcanal. He could
write the Thanksgiving Proclamation for 1943 in exactly the
same words. For here is the essence of democracy as Pericles
perceived it and as Thucydides reported it from memory (and
his own imagination), and in the exact terms in which a New
Times editorial might have put it:
For we are lovers of the beautiful, yet with economy, and
we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness. . . . An
Athenian citizen does not neglect the state because he takes
care of his own household; and even those of us who are
engaged in business have a very fair idea of politics. We
alone regard a man who takes no interest in public affairs,
not as a harmless, but as a useless character; and if few of
us are originators, we are all sound judges of a policy.
The great impediment to action is, in our opinion, not
discussion, but want of that knowledge which is gained by
discussion preparatory to action. For we have a peculiar
power of thinking before we act and of acting too, whereas
other men are courageous from ignorance. . .'.To sum
up: I say that Athens is the school of Hellas, and that the
individual Athenian in his own person seems to have the
power of adapting himself to the most varied forms of
action with the utmost versatility and grace. ... I have
1 Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, Bk. II, Ch. 36-39.
THE SUICIDE OF GREECE 27
dwelt upon the greatness of Athens because I want to show
you that we are contending for a higher prize than those
who enjoy none of these privileges. . . . 2
There was never a clearer defense of the strength of Athe-
nian democracy and of the Athenian way of life. Unfortunately,
it was an imperialist democracy, and the Greek world remained
half-slave and half-free. Athens had survived her "Great War
I" the Persian Wars and the defeat at Salamis; it was rather
the failure of moral leadership, the arrogance and stupidity of
the Athenians in failing to recognize the principle of freedom
and equality for all Greek cities, that led to incessant wars and
the final catastrophe. In the words of Professor Godolphin:
Athenian control of the Delian Confederacy after the
Persian Wars brought Greece face to face with another
great problem of the fifth century, the conflict between
an imperialist democracy based on maritime power and a
conservative aristocracy based on military superiority. The
exhaustion produced by the Peloponnesian War, the in-
adequacy of any Greek State as leader, combined with the
failure of Pan-Hellenism and the chronic inability of the
Greeks to create a genuine federation, leads to the political
solution of the fourth century. 3
Which was suicide.
One could wish that Athenian and modern parallels were
less exact. On the basis that human chicanery, the play of
power politics, and the emotions of jealousy and fear are the
same in all ages, Thucydides was quite right in his predictions.
"But if he who desires a true picture of the events which have
happened, and of the li\e events which may be expected to
happen hereafter in the course of human things, shall pro-
*Ibid., BL II, Ch. 40-42.
8 Francis R. B. Godolphin, Introduction to The Greek Historians, pp. XIX-XX.
28 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
nounce what I have written to be useful, then I shall be
satisfied."
The parallels are in fact uncomfortably and alarmingly exact,
Athens was a democracy. It was a sea power, fighting die land
power of Sparta. Will Durant expresses the situation well:
But the basic cause of the war was the growth of the
Athenian Empire, and the development of Athenian con-
trol over the commercial and political life of the Aegean.
Athens allowed free trade there in time of peace, but only
by Imperial sufferance; no vessel might sail that sea with-
out her consent. . . . Athens defended this domination as
a vital necessity; she was dependent upon imported food,
and was determined to guard the routes by which that
food came. In policing the avenues of international trade
Athens performed a real service to peace and prosperity
in the Aegean, but the process became more and more irk-
some as the pride and wealth of the subject cities grew. 4
She enforced extraterritoriality upon the other Greek cities;
any case involving Athenians arising within the Confederacy
had to be tried at Athenian courts; only Athenian justice was
good enough, although no one need imagine that the Athenian
jurors were internationally minded liberals devoid of a hidden
warmth for their fellow citizens and of contempt for the aliens.
The federation on a basis of freedom and equality which was
the only hope for survival of the Greek world had degenerated
into a farce. For under whatever form and whatever name,
Athens had to dominate the Greek world. She had to control
the fleet created in the name of the Confederacy for the com-
mon defense of the Greek states against aggressors and inter-
national brigands. Only such an international police could en-
force international peace in the Aegean Sea. It became such
a farce that Athens coerced others to join the League and
*Will Durant, Life of Greece, p. 439.
THE SUICIDE OF GREECE 29
demolished the other cities that refused to join, for common
protection, what was now frankly and unashamedly called her
"empire."
If we may believe Thucydides [says Will Durant], the
democratic leaders of Athens, while making liberty the
idol of their policy among Athenians, frankly recognized
that the Confederacy of free cities had become an empire
of force . . . the inherent contradiction between the wor~
ship of liberty and the despotism of empire co-operated
with the individualism of the Gree]^ states to end the
Golden Age?
Thucydides, an Athenian, was ingenuous and impartial
enough to tell us that the real cause of the Peloponnesian War
was the domination of Athenian power. The Athenians were
determined to enforce a Pax Athenica. They were for free
trade, being themselves dependent upon imported grains from
Egypt and Thrace, and were modern enough to enforce eco-
nomic sanctions. Megara rebelled and helped Athen's enemy,
Corinth. Pericles ordered all Megarian products excluded from
Attica and the Empire. Megara and Corinth appealed to Sparta.
Sparta intervened, and demanded the repeal of the embargo.
Pericles agreed, but demanded in return the throwing open
of Spartan cities to foreign trade. Sparta agreed, but countered
with the demand that Athens acknowledge the full independ-
ence of all Greek cities. Pericles, however, refused to preside
over the liquidation of the Athenian Empire. Thereupon
Sparta declared war. Writes Thucydides, "The real though un-
avowed cause I believe to have been the growth of the Athe-
nian power, which terrified the Lacedaemonians and forced
them into war: but the reasons publicly alleged on either side
were as follows . . ." 6 i.e., quite different.
*lbid. t p. 440.
6 Peloponnesian War, Bk. I, Ch. 23.
30 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
It is therefore correct to say that it was Pericles' Athens that
ruined the Grecian world, and that the love of power and com-
mercial imperialism were the causes of war in ancient as in
modern times. Athenian arrogance and love o power resulted
in a pattern of power politics very similar to that of the pres-
ent day disaffection of allies, coercion in times of strength and
cajolery in moments of weakness, shifting alliances and coun-
teralliances, internecine wars, and final exhaustion and ruin.
Will Durant's judgment was as follows:
Under him [Pericles] Athens had reached her zenith;
but because her height had been attained in part through
the wealth of an unwilling confederacy, and through
power that invited almost universal hostility, the Golden
Age was unsound in its foundations, and was doomed to
disaster when Athenian statesmanship failed in the strategy
of peace. 7
We would be naive if we believed that the problem of an
imperialist democracy was new and peculiar to the modern
world. The Athenians were thoroughly familiar with the prin-
ciples of power politics and the doctrine of force. They knew
imperialist prestige hinged upon "firmness" in dealing with
subject cities. That "firmness," no less than that of the Viceroy
of India, was shown in her dealings with cities that demanded
freedom, and the firmness demanded the massacre of all male
adults of a rebellious Melos and selling their women and chil-
dren as slaves, much as they prized "freedom" and "democ-
racy" for themselves. It demanded the slaughter of 1,000
ringleaders of the Mytilene rebellion; the logic of imperialism
demanded it. Said Cleon to the Athenian Assembly, "You
should remember that your empire is a despotism exercised
over unwilling subjects who are always conspiring against you ;
they do not obey in return for any kindness which you do them
* U.je o] Greece, p, 442.
THE SUICIDE OF GREECE 31
to your own Injury, but only in so far as you are their master;
they have no love for you, but they are held down by force." 8
Gifted with lucid reasoning, the Athenians could make a
no less eloquent defense of power politics and "expediency"
against "honor" than ourselves. In the famous debate between
the Athenians and the Melians, the former said:
But you and we should say what we really think, and
aim only at what is possible, for we both alike know
that into the discussion of human affairs the question of
justice only enters where the pressure of necessity is equal,
and that the powerful exact what they can, and the wea\
grant what they must. ... Of the gods we believe, and
of man we know, that by a law of their nature wherever
they can rule they will. This law was not made by us,
and we are not the first who have acted on it; we did but
inherit it, and shall bequeath it to all time, and we know
that you and all mankind, if you were as strong as we
are, would do as we do. 9
Ribbentrop or Lord Linlithgow could not have improved upon
this.
The innate belief in force was the reason why Athenian
statesmanship failed in its strategy for peace. The Greeks did
believe in a sort of Karma in the form of "Nemesis"; retribu-
tion followed hybris, "insolent violence." The Greek dramatists
played upon the theme of the vengeful Nemesis of insolent
success, but in international politics they were as good as blind,
though no blinder than we are today.
There is something comically Aesopian in that debate be-
tween the Athenians and the Melians, the former trying by
threat and cajolery to induce the latter to join their "World
Union," and the latter praying to the former like mice praying
8 Peloponnesian War, Bk. Ill, Ch. 37.
ibid., Bk. V. Ch. 89 and 105.
32 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
to a cat to be denied the pleasure of physical absorption into
the belly of the Athenian she-cat. Substitute the Hindus today
for the Melians and we have a Thucydidean picture of modern
politics:
Melians: It may be to your interest to be our masters,
but how can it be ours to be your slaves ?
Athenians: To you the gain will be that by submission
you will avert the worst; and we shall be the richer for
your preservation,
Melians: But must we be your enemies? Will you not
receive us as friends if we are neutral and remain at peace
with you ?
Athenian?: No, your enmity is not half as mischievous
to us as your friendship; for the one is in the eyes of our
subjects an argument of our power, the other of our weak-
ness, 10
After Winston Churchill had made a speech in the House
of Commons on March 17, 1943 supporting Mr. Stanley, Sec-
retary of State for Colonies, John Dugdale, Laborite, asked
whether he was aware that Mr. Stanley's "somewhat truculent
speech created misgivings both in the United States and the
Dominions." The Prime Minister responded, "We must equally
beware of truculence and of grovelling."
That Thucydides could analyze the psychological motives
of our modern statesmen so skillfully is merely evidence that
ancient and modern men are essentially alike. Yielding and
compromise would be construed as a sign of "weakness," even
when Socrates chose to give himself thirty days to die. The
seventy-year-old Socrates happened to believe in scttyagraha, and
in the integrity of spiritual principles. His accuser, Anytus*
stood for law and order and even for public morality. Anytus
went to the temple to worship. Anytus, too, was a good man,
10 Ibid., Bk. V. Ch. 92-95.
CHURCHILL AND PERICLES 33
and a God-fearing man, by all public records. There was
another good man, Pontius Pilate, who once washed his hands
of an important matter. Who ever said that Pontius Pilate was
a bad man? He merely declined diplomatically to interfere
in the private affairs of another nation, even though it in-
volved the murder of an innocent man. There are in fact more
historic analogies than we can stomach.
CHURCHILL AND PERICLES
READING history may be a costly effort. Thucydides in the
Modern Library costs 95 cents, but the failure to read it prop-
erly may be much more costly to the modern world. For today
the issue of empire versus freedom is unsolved and ignored.
Therefore the issue of India as a test case must be studied.
The issue of India is more than the issue of India; it is the
issue of freedom and what we intend to do with it. Because
we will not even face the issue of empire versus freedom, we
have come to the perfectly anomalous position which bothers
anybody but an Englishman that in this war of freedom the
Indian fighters for freedom are in jail for committing the
crime of fighting for freedom.
Freedom what magic in that word! Let Freedom ring! But
Freedom must doff the sari and wear a European gown be-
fore we can love her. There is the English freedom which we
associate with cozy English cottages and beautiful lawns and
the Lake District, and there is the Indian freedom riding on an
elephant in the Indian jungle. Men's minds are limited and
cannot see that she whom we love wears but a thin white mus-
lin veil around her body, and wraps herself neither in a Union
34 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
Jack nor in a loincloth. She dwells in the hearts of man and
can be seen only with the eye of the mind.
So the English are fighting to be free and at the same time
fighting the Indians who are fighting to be free, and the
Indians are fighting to be free in order to help the English
fighting to be free in this war for freedom. This has become
such a confounded mess that if the Englishman in India ever
thinks, he ought to die of apoplexy. I have no fear that he will.
One just does not discuss the Fotir Freedoms in India, nor
hear them mentioned. It is a little awkward, isn't it? Win
the war first and use your brains afterward. Only a robust
English mind can survive these logical inconsistencies, and I
have no doubt it will. You are sure of it when you hear the
tone of satisfaction in the Viceroy of India's report on killings
in India: 940 killed, 1,630 injured, 60,229 arrested, 26,000 con-
victed, 18,000 detained without trial since August, 1942. As a
correspondent in the New Republic puts it, "the Viceroy re-
ports it like so many stuck hogs on line in a Chicago packing-
house." Every one of those hogs is a fighter for freedom, and
not afraid to be beaten, flogged, or sent to jail for it, A hog is
a hog, or ain't it?
I have recently acquired, undeservedly, a reputation for being
"anti-English," at least among a few ladies in New York, be-
cause I spoke for the freedom of India as if I meant it. What
the connection between the two is, I have utterly failed to see,
and my lady friends are not able to enlighten me. My position
is quite clear: I am not anti-English; I am anti-idiots of any
nationality, including my own. I am not just against Churchill's
Tory policy toward India I detest it. That Churchill is Eng-
lish I know, but to me that is entirely incidental; I should de-
test that India policy whether its author were an Englishman,
a Frenchman, a Jap, or a Chinese. I happen to be able to dis-
tinguish English Tories and liberals, and I happen to like the
Archbishop of Canterbury better than Winston Churchill.
When two Englishmen hold opposite views, like the British
CHURCHILL AND PERICLES 35
Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury, American
editors think it is their duty to agree with both of them, as a
matter of social amenity, and make a present to them of the
things men are fighting for. I would not make a present of the
things men are fighting for to my best friend, or to my mother,
or to God Himself. I yield when it is a question of local do-
mestic politics, I yield when It is a question of the internal
economy of a foreign nation. I will yield even when it is a
question which to send first to China vital war supplies or
Coca-Cola for the American pilots in China. But I will not
yield when it is a question of freedom, because I mean it, and
I believe in it, and I know that we have today no alternative
but to choose between empire and freedom. Because Churchill
is so unashamedly for the principle of empire, I am sure he
was a bad student of Greek at school This does not matter;
what really matters is that, by his domination of Allied war
and peace aims, he is changing the character, the issues and the
objectives of this war, in which Russian, Chinese, English and
American boys have to pay with their lives. This is too im-
portant a matter to be hushed up even among true friends of
England.
The fact is, no one has the right to make a present of the
things men are fighting for to his best friend, or to his mother,
or even to God. In every age and every period of history, after
every war and every revolution, Liberty and Reaction go side
by side together and struggle for supremacy for the moment
It is every man's duty to use his intelligence and stand by
Liberty and the revolutionists, and fight the Old Guards of
Reaction without fear and without favor. Some American edi-
tors wish to coddle both at the same time. But there stands the
Old Guard, faithful unto death, taking an oath to preside over
the nonliquidation of the British Empire. Despise not the Old
Guard, American editors/There is much wisdom in his old
head. Beware of the man who always finds God on his side.
When the Old Guard announces that he "means to hold his
36 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
own," including what belongs inalienably to the Indians, and
the Chinese, Americans and Russians might just as well fight
for the British Empire, are we to say, "Amen"? It would be
perfectly satisfactory to me if this were a private war between
Germany and England. Let whoever wins hold his own, while
the subject nations are their pawns. If the subject nations do
not like it, that is matter for consideration in another separate
war between the "p awns " and their masters. But this is not a
private war, and other peoples are involved. When the British
Premier declares his intention to go on ruling the British pos-
sessions, the Chinese at once think of Hong Kong, the Indians
of India, the Dutch of Java, and the Americans of the Statue
of Liberty.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill, discussing the future
of the British Empire in the House of Commons, said on
March 17, 1943, "The government is convinced that the ad-
ministration of British colonies must continue to be the sole
responsibility of Great Britain." This clearly, definitely, and un-
mistakably reveals that Churchill envisages the keeping of
India, Burma, the Malay States, the Straits Settlements, Hong
Kong, Ceylon, and other possessions. It also necessitates in fair-
ness allowing other empires to keep theirs. The picture is,
therefore, definitely the restoration of white empires in Asia.
My view of Churchill as the Prince Metternich of the next
Peace Conference is therefore correct.
It is wrong to assume that Churchill forgets Asia; he never
forgets Asia as a group of colonies. Perhaps what we are
liquidating is not the British Empire but the whole imperialist
system of a world half free and half slave. The question is
whether or not we are fighting for certain principles to make a
future war impossible and to make a juster and better world.
But these are obnoxious questions all whether the liquidation
of the British Empire, or of the Dutch Empire, or the French,
or the Japanese Empire. Let's not talk about them. Win the
war first. When the war is over, Prince Metternich will surely
CHURCHILL AND PERICLES 37
be there, and then the wrangle will begin. Then thirty or forty
years later, we shall start all over again.
History cannot be understood through the inconsequential
issues of details that newspapers so busily discuss, after they
have been censored. History can be understood only as seen in
the minds of men who direct a nation's policy. While Indians
claim that Sir Stafford Cripps in the early stages of the discus-
sion promised them a National "Cabinet," and Cripps' fol-
lowers just as hotly deny he ever promised them so much real
power as a National "Cabinet," only fools will deceive them-
selves that they have the real facts of the situation. Cripps 5 mis-
sion can be properly understood only by studying the mind of
the modern Pericles who initiated and directed the whole
Cripps' mission. Anyone who reads the following statements
of Winston Churchill regarding his basic attitude toward India,
in 1930-1931, and still cannot understand why Cripps failed
must be something of a moron. In order to understand the
handling of India, we must understand our Pericles. In Janu-
ary, 1930, Winston Churchill said, "Sooner or later you will
have to crush Gandhi and the Indian Congress and all they
stand for" which happens to be the principles of the Atlantic
Charter as applied to India. During the Simon Commission
and after, he was the loudest in protesting against negotiating
with the Indian leaders as injuring the prestige of the Empire
and its public servants. In March, 1931, he said, ". . . We are
assigning exaggerated importance to individuals in India with
whom we shall never be able to agree and are injuring the
prestige and strength of the British Government in India for
dealing with all these problems." In February, 1931, he said >
"To transfer that responsibility to this highly artificial and re-
stricted oligarchy of Indian politicians would be a retrograde
act. It would be a shameful act. It would be an act of coward-
ice, desertion and dishonor. It would bring upon Great Britain
a moral shame which would challenge forever the reputation
of the British Empire as a valiant and benignant force in
38 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
the history of mankind." This is Kiplingesque, both Church-
ill and Kipling having been press reporters of the Boer
War and sharing the same opinion about "the lesser breeds
without the law." Alas, in the sixteenth century, he might have
been heroic; in the seventeenth and the eighteenth, he might
have been competent; in the nineteenth, he might have been
great; but in the twentieth, he is a Kiplingesque anachronism,
His principles firm, his language clear, his purpose determined,
he has explained not only the Cripps' mission but the entire
India policy, present and future, in those words. Pericles could
not have spoken with greater dignity while his Empire flour-
ished, Cleon the leather merchant could not have been more
patriotic, Eucrates the rope-seller could not have been more
determined, and even Hyperbolus the lampmaker could not
have babbled in sweeter notes to Athenian ears. I may be ex-
cused if the lines of Matthew Arnold on "Dover Beach" come
irresistibly to my mind :
Sophocles long ago,
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
CHURCHILL AND PERICLES 39
So we will not go into the issues of the India problem. Both
the Hindus and the English have perfect arguments and, for-
getting the central issue of human freedom, can confuse you
with a mass of details. There is never a time when a person
wants to do a thing and fails to find reasons for his action, or
when a great nation decides upon an objective and fails to find
the plausible procedure. Sometimes to enter into argument
with a person is to pay him the compliment of believing in
the worth of his arguments.
I am sure that if the Indians were told that there are Prot-
estants and Catholics and Jews in the United States, and New
Dealers and anti-New Dealers and Republicans and Democrats
and Communists and Socialists and Yankees and Southerners
and Negroes and Baptists and Methodists and Seventh Day
Adventists and Episcopalians and Mormons, and that Jews,
Italians, Greeks, and Irish live on the same streets in Jersey
City, and that there are probably two hundred and fifty Chris-
tian sects in America, the Indians would despair of ever un-
raveling the racial and religious complexities of the United
States. Yet Hindus and Moslems live on the same streets in
India and get along just as well as, if not better than, the
Italians and the Irish in Brooklyn. What is more important,
they are all united upon one thing, the freedom of their coun-
try unless, it be two things, the freedom of their country and
hatred of the English. The same would be true of the Croats
and the Serbs and Jews and Catholics in Jugoslavia, which we
did not hesitate to join together in one country when it suited
our purpose. The fact is that if the Moslems did not exist, the
English would have to invent them. Religion is the greatest
godsend to the British Empire, and the English may well thank
the gods for it. The British Empire and monotheism don't go
together. Polytheism is more valuable than you think.
But I will, and I must, go into the issue of India as the issue
of freedom for all peoples. Wearing no monocle, and unable to
agree with Lady Astor, I happen to think of the freedom of
40 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
India exactly as I think of the freedom of Norway or Greece
or Poland. I should be equally opposed to the extermination of
freedom in Greece or Poland, either by Germany or by Russia,
no matter what my sympathy for Russia and what my antipa-
thy for Nazi Germany.
Now this attitude happens to be very difficult to understand.
Some Americans can make the convenient difference between
freedom from England for the Thirteen Colonies and freedom
from England for India. Words spoken by Tom Paine are re-
garded as the Bible of Democracy; the same words spoken by
Gandhi or Nehru are regarded as heresy and treason to our
war effort. Not being an American, I cannot see the difference.
To me, George Washington was as "anti-British" as Gandhi or
NehrUj and just as stubborn* A binocular vision is an incon-
venient thing. I know that Churchill is tremendously popular
in New York, and I could have been a little smooth and ap-
plauded the hero I admired during Dunkirk. But I prefer to
stick to my binoculars or to my two naked eyes.
I am dense enough not to be able to see the difference be-
tween the Indians fighting for their freedom and the French
underground organization fighting for theirs. The Government
of India has published a White Paper showing that the Con-
gress leaders are guilty of actions or speeches leading to popular
uprisings and sabotage. Two East India trunk railways were
sabotaged, it is stated. If the Paris-Lille and Paris-Lyons Rail-
ways had been sabotaged, how the American press would have
hailed those brave fighters for freedom and liberators of man-
kind! What tribute to the human spirit, evidence that it can
never be conquered by physical force! Two trunk railways
have been sabotaged in India and I agree this is highly regret-
table because it hampers our war effort. But what would you
have the Indians do?
For two and a half years after England had declared war on
behalf of India without first consulting the Indians them-
selves, the Congress leaders held off, while the English would
CHURCHILL AND PERICLES 41
do nothing to improve the situation. Frantic appeals for free-
dom and the immediate proximity of the Japanese in Burma
precipitated the Cripps' mission. The Indians wanted real power
in the defense of their country; the British Government would
not give it to them. The only solid accomplishment of the
Cripps' mission was that the idea of "Pakistan" received Eng-
lish official blessing and laid the basis for future dissensions in
India. Appeals for reopening negotiations after the Cripps 5 mis-
sion were vain. The war over India was fought in America;
the English had won here and were satisfied. The Congress
and Indian popular opinion were getting restive. Indian bitter-
ness mounted and Indian morale deteriorated. The English
rulers were still silent. What would you have the Indians do?
Address more prayers to stones ?
After every effort to reopen negotiations had failed, Gandhi
gave advance notice to the Viceroy of India about the civil dis-
obedience campaign to be started. The English would not be
intimidated. Gandhi begged the Viceroy for a chance to see
him/The Viceroy with true viceregal dignity refused. The
Congress leaders were put in jail, illegally, according to Eng-
lish judges. The unarmed "rebellion" was quelled. The sit-
uation was "well in hand." The American press expressed the
opinion that after this success of force, the English would be
"magnanimous in victory," and some effort at reopening nego-
tiations might be made. The English were still very "firm."
After waiting exactly six months, Gandhi announced his
intention to fast, as a protest against a moral wrong, not a per-
sonal wrong committed against himself, but a moral wrong
against his nation. He knew he was addressing a prayer to
stones, but he could not do otherwise. Acquit him or condemn
him, Gandhi would not alter his ways. Gandhi was stubborn
and the Viceroy was still adamant. Gandhi was in imminent
danger of death, and the last blow was about to be struck
against all hopes of future co-operation between England and
India. The Government of India published a seventy-six-page
42 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
WHte Paper, showing that the Congress was guilty of acts and
thoughts leading to violence. It is the duty of the Government
of India, we are told, to maintain peace and order, and the
Congress leaders are disturbing it. "Anyway, we are getting as
much from India by force as we could by any other method*
Meanwhile, the situation is well in hand. And we are fighting
for liberty."
The whole question of the correctness of the Karma doctrine
depends on whether one believes the ripples of action stop
there, like a closed chapter, or go on to join forces with other
new ripples.
If what the British Government had wanted was a show of
strength to uphold the Empire's prestige against a helpless sub-
ject nation, it got it. But if the British Government set out to
regain the love of the Indian people and have better co-opera-
tion in the future, then they have lost their chance forever.
Repression by force of rebellion, armed or unarmed, could be
understood and even excused. But after the English demon-
strated their superior physical force, and satisfied themselves
and the world that they were still the master, the Congress
leaders were still denied the opportunity of coming together
with non-Congress leaders to work out a political solution, after
an explicit request by the Indian leaders then out of jail (Oc-
tober, 1942). I cannot excuse this stupid English policy. The
plea that "the Indians themselves would not come together"
makes no sense to me. Separate detention cells are hardly the
ideal situation for exchange of ideas, even among the Indian
Yogi. And Gandhi is not a Yogi. "Thoughts that burst prison
walls" is a fine literary flourish, but is not for mortal men like
Rajagopalacharia or Sapru or Nehru.
The whole English policy makes sense to me only on the
supposition, which is real, that what the Asiatics think or feel
about it does not matter so long as the "Allies" have superior
weapons. In fact, the whole conduct of the war in 1942 was psy-
chologically determined by the one habit of thinking that what
CHURCHILL AND PERICLES 43
the Indians, the Chinese, and the Russians feel does not mat-
ter. Why? Because England and the United States are going
to have an overwhelming air force.
The handling of the problem of India is merely a symptom
of the failure to recognize the issue of freedom versus empire,
of general spiritual unpreparedness and the belief that re-
sentment, fear, and hatred do not matter so long as "the situa-
tion is well in hand," which simply means that rioters caa be
quelled by riot squads and which is exactly Hitler's way of
thinking. We may be quite sure that after the war, the "situa-
tion" will heaven better in hand, while the reasons for denying
India freedom will remain just as valid. If the East and the
West differ in political philosophy, it is usually in this: we
disagree on the usefulness of temporary success achieved by
arms. The Asiatic takes the more subtle view that in the long
run good will or bad blood does count, that force is futile, and
that there can be no peace until there is peace in the human
heart (justice).
Today in this war, there is only one issue Empire versus
freedom. Two world leaders stand at the opposite poles:
Chiang Kai-shek, for whom "patriotism is not enough," and
Winston Churchill, for whom it is. Every thinking man must
choose between the two. The measures and standards of Euro-
pean power politics and Asiatic ethical tradition do not meet
Mencius sharply defined them 2,200 years ago. "In a world of
moral order, the great characters rule the small characters, and
the great minds rule the small minds. In a world of moral
chaos, the (physically) great rule the small, and the strong
rule the weak. The (first) two are (the principles of) heaven.
Those who obey Heaven shall survive, and those who disobey
Heaven shall perish."
The issue of empire versus freedom is dividing us. While
the war is on, we should hold the issues in abeyance to the
extent of not letting them deter our common war efforts, even
though our very strategy in Asia is determined by what we
44 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
desire to see in Asia after the war. But it is the duty of every
writer and thinker about contemporary trends to inform the
public, to caution it if necessary, and in no case to falsify the
picture of events. The seeds of disunity are already there, and
since we cannot blink them away, we might as well point out
their presence and forestall future dissensions before they be-
come too advanced for remedy. If the war does not break us,
the peace may. For it is absolutely certain that there will be no
peace without collective security, and no collective security
without American collaboration in the postwar world; but
America's collaboration or isolation will depend only on one
thing, the character of the coming peace. Sir Norman Angell
goes about preaching about collective security and against
American isolationism. But Sir Norman Angell has not the wit
to see that all his preachings may be rendered vain by a peace
treaty that provokes American revulsion. For more important
than preaching about the importance of American collabora-
tion is the securing of a peace that is worth American collabo-
ration. Americans do not have to be preached to. Psycholog-
ically, present-day Americans are more ready to renounce
isolationism than certain Europeans are ready to renounce the
politics of power and imperialism. Both must be renounced at
the same time; otherwise Europe is merely asking American
collaboration in European imperialism.
I warn that American collaboration must ultimately depend
on a just peace that the American people can approve, and that,
however we may wish otherwise, an imperialistic peace will be
followed by America's revulsion and reversion to isolation. Sir
Norman Angell forgets how American isolationism arose as a
matter of historical fact. It arose out of revulsion against the
Versailles Treaty and out of a sad disillusion that the "war to
end all wars" had turned out to be a war for spoils. If a'nother
Versailles comes, the American nation will feel such a revul-
sion against being the victim of wily European politics^ that
they will withdraw in disillusionment and disgust again. Re-
CHURCHILL AND PERICLES 45
vulsion against and disgust with the crushing of ideals after the
stupendous sacrifices are human, and the American nation
cannot be asked to be inhuman. For if American collaboration
and American participation in the World Police are wanted,
they are wanted to defend the world order laid down by the
coming peace treaty, and the American people must be con-
vinced that that world order is worth defending. In a hypothet-
ical case where that world order consists of the restoration of
Asiatic colonies of the European powers, the function of the
World Police will be to maintain by force that system of colo-
nies, with American money and lives pledged to its main-
tenance. But America, like: China, happens to be in a curious
position; it has not got a single colony. Take away from the
Americans certain principles of justice, and they will have
nothing to fight for or worth fighting for.
I believe the principles of the Atlantic Charter are an ade-
quate and dependable basis for a durable peace, even as Presi-
dent Wilson's Fourteen Points, if not sacrificed and scrapped
at the time of peace negotiations, would have been an adequate
and dependable basis for peace. Yet these very principles are
already branded by one of the Charter's initiators as "fairy
tales" and the discussion of their application at present is al-
ready regarded as "dangerous."
America's stand is clear. The cause in this war is the freedom
of all peoples and all nations of the earth. The Atlantic Charter
is meant to apply to all peoples "everywhere." The American
people are with President Roosevelt. America's stand is clear.
The flag of freedom has not been pulled halfway down.
Yet there is unfinished business between the two friends
who drafted and signed the Atlantic Charter. Over a year has
elapsed since President Roosevelt defined its scope and Win-
ston Churchill will not say with Roosevelt that the Atlantic
Charter applies to "all peoples everywhere." He has refused to
define its scope or give assurance that the American interpre-
tation is right. He refused its application to India by saying
4 6 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
that the provisions of the Charter did not "qualify in any way
the various statements of policy which have been made from
time to time about the development of constitutional govern-
ment in India, Burma, or other parts of the British Empire."
In other words, the noble principles of the Atlantic Charter
were for everybody to practice except the rulers of the British
Empire. Note that his own "various statements" on the subject
were, in December, 1931, "I did not contemplate India having
the same constitutional rights and system as Canada in any
period which we can foresee 9 '; and in January, 1931, "No one
has supposed that except in a purely ceremonial sense in the
way in which representatives of India attended the conferences
during the war, that principle and policy for India would be
carried into effect in any time which it is reasonable or useful
for us to foresee!'
But that was back in 1931. The Atlantic Charter was signed
in the summer of 1941. America had not yet entered the war
then. There was an advantage in leaving it undefined, for if
Churchill had defined it then as he has now, America might
never have entered a war for empire. But the Allies have had
successes ia 1942 and 1943, the prospects of victory are visible,
England is growing confident and strong, and America has
already irrevocably committed herself to the war. What he had
left undefined he has now defined to a nicety. When, on March
17, 1943, J. McGovern, Laborite, asked whether the Churchill
statement on the British Empire meant that "Britain does not
intend to give up its occupied territories at the end of the war,
as well as Germany," Churchill retorted, "That would be a very
insulting parallel to draw." (Associated Press, according to the
New Yor% Herald Tribune, March 18, 1943). Lest he should
be misunderstood as construing the Atlantic Charter to mean
liberation of countries subjected by England as well as those
subjected by Germany, he took special care to let the world
know exactly what he meant through Brendan Bracken. If
anyone "is going to make the catastrophic error of destroying
CHURCHILL AND PERICLES 47
or handing over our goodly heritage I think there is enough
toughness in the fibre of the empire to resist such a sugges-
tion. . . * We must fight for our rights," he declared to
Bracken. "Having been a foundation member of the United
Nations, we are not going to tell our people they can be pushed
around by any other nation in the world. It is the duty of the
United Nations to remain united."
It is common sense to say that, even as the date for the inde-
pendence of the Philippines has convinced the Filipinos of
America's sincerity, so a date set for India's independence
would convince the Indians of England's sincerity. Why then
has the date not been set, and who opposed it? We read in
John T. Whitaker's We Cannot Escape History the illuminat-
ing account. "A group in the cabinet decided to flush his
[Churchill's] hand and force immediate action. As one of the
men in that session later expressed it, 'Mr. Amery had finished
his suggestion that we should promise India dominion status
at a fixed period after the defeat of Hitler. Other members of
the government were prepared to support his initiative. Before
they could speak, Mr. Churchill let out a roar like a wounded
lion. The room was cleared as swiftly as if there had been a
lion among us in very truth. As yet the subject has not been
raised again.' " (p. 243)
That is why we are confused. The issue of empire versus
freedom cannot and may not be evaded, though Churchill took
care to talk of "winning the war first" and evade it as best he
could before the tide turned. He knows at least what he stands
for, and says so, and President Roosevelt does not know what
to do, or whether it would be the wise thing to contradict him
now. So long as Roosevelt keeps silent on the issue of freedom
versus empire and avoids a verbal tilt with his friend, the world
must remain confused about our war aims. Know the Old
Guard, and forget that he wears a bowler; in other times and
in Austria, he might have worn a mustache. Forget that he is
English, or that, as the New Yor^ Times described him ("Re-
48 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
view of the Week," March 28, 1943), he has been "for the past
two decades a Tory of Tories," or as Harold Callender said in
the same issue, that he is "a sincere imperialist of the romantic
Kipling era." The age has no use for imperialists of the ro-
mantic Kipling era, nor for Prince Metternichs.
That is why we are today already in confusion about the
applicability of the Atlantic Charter, which raises issues re-
garded by British Prime Minister Churchill as "dangerous" to
discuss now, according to the New Yorl( Times editorial of
April 4, 1943-
Yet the issues have been raised [according to the same
editorial], and out of the debate are emerging two broad
concepts for an international organization for the future.
One, based on a strict interpretation of the Atlantic Char-
ter, envisages a world in which large and small nations
will live side by side on terms of equality and cooperate
politically and economically through some kind of world
organization for purposes of collective security and mutual
welfare. The other, more European-bound, envisages a
Europe under the joint guardianship of Russia and Great
Britain, with the smaller nations leaning on the one or the
other of these two powers according to proximity. * . .
The first concept may be Utopian, but it is the American
idea expressed in global terms. It is on this idea that Amer-
ica deals with local authorities as it finds them, and still
recognizes the integrity of the small Baltic states on Rus-
sia's frontier. The second concept is not Utopian, but re-
alistically based on a balance of power and power politics.
The same editorial concludes with the profound remarks:
Here we face a situation in which two considerations
are implicit. On the nature of the postwar settlements will
depend in large degree America's final attitude toward in-
CHURCHILL AND PERICLES 49
ternationd cooperation. At the same time, evidence or lack
of evidence which we show now of our willingness to play
an active part in world affairs, when the fighting ends,
will be the most Important single factor in shaping the
character of the postwar treaties.
To be forewarned is to be forearmed. If American collabora-
tion is wanted both during and after the war, there is a price
for it, and that price may not be less than freedom of mankind
and the principles of equality and justice. My observation is that
the American nation is perfectly willing to pay the colossal
price of world collaboration during and after the war if it can
be convinced that it is worth the price. It is in this sense that in-
dications of reversion to a spoils system of the Versailles pat-
tern frighten me. There will be no collective security if some
one nation wants only to collect and fails to recollect. It is in
this sense that my heart sank within me when I read in the
March, 1943, issue of Britain, the following statement by Sir
Edward Grigg, condensed from his article in the London Sun~
day Times:
Both the British and the American Governments have
declared to France that her empire will be restored in its
entirety, and to Spain and Portugal that no part of their
empires will be taken from them. We must assume that
similar assurance, if required, would be given to the two
colonial powers which are members of the United Nations
Holland and Belgium. Is it, then, the British Colonial
Empire only which is to go into liquidation?
Sir Edward Grigg was Governor of Kenya and has held
other high offices in the British Government. Secret treaties
like those preceding Versailles are already beginning. The char-
acter of the war is becoming clearer every day. Old dogs can-
not learn new tricks and never will This generation of political
50 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
minds cannot learn to fight a new war and devise a new peace.
That was how the Fourteen Points of Wilson were sacrificed,
and that is how the principles of the Atlantic Charter are
already placed in doubt and will be sacrificed later.
The Allies cannot win a common war with divided minds.
Sooner or later, every man and woman must think and decide
for himself or herself whether we are fighting for freedom or
for empire, for between the two there is no compromise and
besides the two there is no third alternative. We must choose
between Roosevelt and Churchill, for we may not choose both.
They are only two ideas.
6
WORLD WAR III
WHILE we consider binding up the economic sores of the
postwar international society, we are not even beginning to
scratch the surface of the moral malignant tumor that is called
twentieth<entury culture. The region of the tumor being sen-
sitive, our statesmen and publicists are too scared to touch its
surface. That is why our governments have consistently fol-
lowed the policy of "win the war first'* For the time being, the
win-the-war-first boys are having their way. The roots of all
war balance of power, domination by power, trade, and racial
discrimination are all there; not a single factor is lacking. All
the lessons we could have taken from the Greek world are
being ignored; all the sources of possible conflict, so plain now
to the student of history, seem not to exist for the average
planner of peace for the postwar world. The house built on
sand by our learned architects will one day collapse.
For I have said that it is too late now to strangle Russia and
China. England, America, Russia, and China will unquestion*
WORLD WAR III 51
ably be the powers that will determine the movements of his-
tory in the next half-century. According to the English, who
are talking of giving India freedom after the war, there will
be also the good will or hostility of another 400,000,000 people
in Asia to reckon with. On the present pattern of Anglo-
American domination of the war, which means definitely
Anglo-American domination of the peace, we are clearly going
back to the centuries-old European theory of balance of power.
(We may, for purposes of the discussion, call the Anglo-Ameri-
can pattern of domination the "A-A" pattern.) The A-A pat-
tern will devise "checks and balances" so that the A-A world
and the non-A-A world will live in a kind of armed friendship
and hostile cordiality. Diff erent grades and formulas of "world-
co-operation" or "world police force" will be put forth and ora-
tors will speak about the new era of good will and co-operation.
Since power, however, is by definition something dynamic and
not static, there is no such thing as an actual* "balance of
power," Some powers grow and others weaken during a pe-
riod; some alliances deteriorate, new ones are formed. Then
the balance is upset once more and the nations of the world
are plunged once more into bloodshed until a new "balance"
is devised by a new generation of peace architects using the
old squares and compasses. The balance of power theory has
kept Europe in periodic bloodshed every thirty or forty years
for the last few centuries. The transference of the tactics of
power politics to the world as a whole can only mean the trans-
formation of this earth into a periodic arena. Power politics
and the balance of power always set up a state of tension
among the states, very similar to walking on a tight rope. This
state produces a condition of mutual fears and suspicions, and
as some of the states grow in power, the fears and suspicions
grow. For ten years preceding World War I and World War
II, one could see this mounting tension and fear and insecurity,
until someone decided it was time to strike first. The same state
52 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
of fears and antagonisms will inevitably produce the same re-
sult The pattern is unchangeable.
Thus World War III will come. The ferocity of future wars
will not deter us, the magnitude of sacrifice will not daunt us,
nor will the cries of mothers and wives keep us from the path
of duty, for young men of another generation, without the
experience of this war, will go forth to save civilization and
die for six, seven, or perhaps eight freedoms. But the blood that
will be shed all over the globe will make our present sacrifices
look like grandmothers' nightmares. Nature is a spendthrift in
birth and in slaughter. If men are ready for a big-scale fratri-
cide, God is ready, too. In half a million years, God can create
a bigger, better, and more reasonable species of beings. Nor
will those who believe in power politics have the right to com-
plain. Since power politicians defend their course of action on
naturalism or the natural "struggle for power," they must also
be ready to accept its consequences. If they pride themselves on
their "realism" about politics and war, they must also be "real-
istic" about the consequences of war.
Nor can we be scared now by the appearance of comets and
strange stars. Gabriel will not descend on the earthly plains and
speak to the sons of men. Harmless miracles of changing water
into wine will not stand our scientific scrutiny. A Jonah spat
out from a whale will not deceive us, but after careful ques-
tioning by reporters will be confined to an insane asylum.
William James's voice will not come from the dead to assure
us of a future life. The heavens will not rain fire and brim-
stone, and there will be neither a pillar of a cloud to lead us by
day, nor a pillar of fire to light us by night. Neither praying,
nor fasting, nor the singing of psalms, nor the burning of
candles will avail. For us, at least, it will be a God-empty world.
There will be just nothing to do about it.
No diplomat of course will talk of anything but good will
and the friendship of nations, and no diplomat will be fool
enough to act on these protestations. All forms of mandates,
WORLD WAR III 53
tariff problems, and police zones and international air bases
will be discussed and in time worked out. They may even
write a Fifty Years' Peace, which will be worth as much as the
Fifty Years' Peace of Nicias. All the peace delegates will be
good meiL, too, for they will be men who go to church; they
will be men of culture and learning and experience, good
fathers, good husbands, and good patriots all. But they will
build a house on sand.
Since the A-A school of thought is a very real, very potent,
and very influential one at present, the consequences of such a
policy of armed friendship against the non-English-speaking
world are fairly predictable. How well the A-A group can
divide the non-A-A group will depend largely upon the as-
tuteness of their statesmanship. China is pledged to A-A co-
operation in her foreign policy at present. How well that armed
friendship will materialize will depend on how successfully
the United States and England will drive China into the lap
of Russia. This, in turn, depends on China's judgment as to
what kind of allies will be more dependable and sincere in
the next war, and this again depends on her experiences with
her allies in the present war and the ensuing peace settlement.
China's position is decidedly anomalous, with regard to racial
and imperialist groupings though not with regard to ideology.
Being herself a nonindustrialized and therefore nonimperiaHst
nation, the possibility of her reaching a basis of equal partner-
ship with imperialist nations has never been proved or studied
carefully. But certain it is that she will not stand for social
"snubbing" for long, and she may give up trying to "keep up
with the Joneses" and look about for more heavily pigmented
allies and friends. Such a contingency would be indeed tragic
for the whole world, particularly with the background of In-
dian hostility against the English being fanned into a living
flame right now. Again, we shall not escape history.
It should be noted also that long before such a conflict comes
to pass, the antagonism of rising forces will be the logical
54 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
situation for the resurgence of Japan and Germany. Both sides
will secretly bid for their support and encourage them to re-
arm, as we did so successfully in the 1930-1940 decade. In other
words, in spite of all our sacrifices during this war, we shall
start all over again. That men should die is hard enough for
the mothers of men; that they should die in vain is heart-
breaking.
I may be wrong in prognostications of particular trends and
phases of development. But some such thinking and heart-
searching along historic lines on the subject of growth, balance,
and unbalancing of power are needed. The adequacy of power
politics as a principle must be called into question; the de-
pendability of the cardinal principle of balance of power in
building a stable peace must be debated, talked about, and chal-
lenged. Only so can there be depth in our reasoning. The
changes in our way of thinking must be basic if we are to be
saved.
There is a pattern of things invisible, of karmatic currents in
human history, that can be seen only with the eyes of the
mind. Sometimes it is given to poets to foretell the future, not
by astrology, but by acquaintance with the laws of the spirit.
To such extraordinary tninds, these laws become so vivid that
they assume the character of a "vision." Heinrich Heine was
such a poet with such an uncanny vision. From an. intimate
and intuitive knowledge of the German mind, he could proph-
esy the "German Revolution" and the character of the present-
day Nazi spirit with a frightening accuracy, and from a
knowledge of the forces developing in European thought, he
could prophesy the "European or World Revolution" and pre-
dict with striking clairvoyant power certain phases unrolling
before our eyes today. Speaking of the German thunder, com-
ing slowly but surely, he said:
Then, when you hear the rumble and clatter beware,
Frenchmen, you neighbors' children. . . . Don't smile at
WORLD WAR III 55
my advice, the advice of a dreamer who warns you of
Kantians, Fichteans, and natural .philosophers. Don't smile
at the visionary who expects the same revolution in the
material world which has taken place in the realm of the
spirit.
Writing in 1834, in Religion and Philosophy in Germany,
Heine spoke of the breaking of the brittle talisman, the Chris-
tian Cross, and the resurgence of the gods of the German for-
ests and warned that we should hear a "crash as nothing ever
crashed in world history."
The German revolution will not be milder and gentler
because it was preceded by Kant's Critique, by Fichte's
transcendental idealism, and even by the philosophy of
nature. . . . For if the Kantian's hand strikes strongly be-
cause his heart is moved by no traditional respect if the
Fichtean courageously defies all danger because for him it
does not really exist the philosopher of nature will be
fearful because he can join the primeval forces of nature,
because he can call up the demoniac energies of ancient
Germanic pantheism, and because then there will awake
in him that fighting folly that we find among the ancient
Germans, that fights neither to kill nor to conquer, but
simply to fight. Christianity has and that is its fairest
merit somewhat mitigated that brutal German lust for
battle. But it could not destroy it; and once the taming
talisman, the Cross, is broken, die savagery of the old bat-
tlers will flare up again, the insane rage of which Nordic
bards have so much to say and sing. That talisman is
brittle. The day will come when it will pitiably collapse.
Then the old stone gods will rise from forgotten rubble
and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes; and
Thor will leap up and with his giant hammer start smash-
ing Gothic cathedrals. ...
5 6 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
. . . and when you hear a crash as nothing ever crashed
in world history, you'll know that the German thunder
has hit the mark. At that sound the eagles will fall dead
from the sky and the lions in the farthest desert of Africa
will pull in their tails and slink away into their royal caves.
A play will be performed that will make the French Revo-
lution seem like a harmless idyll in comparison. . . .
Beware! I wish you well; that is why I tell you the bit-
ter truth. You have more to fear from a liberated Germany
than from the whole Holy Alliance with all its Croats
and Cossacks . * . n
One hundred and one years ago, in 1842, he prophesied the
"World Revolution/' a drama of which we have seen the be-
ginning and he could not tell the end. He, the friend of Karl
Marx, saw the character of revolutionary thought, but he also,
with his poet's vision^ foresaw the course of the present war
and the fate of Germany, France, England, and Russia in this
war all too clearly:
Communism is the secret name of the dread antagonist
setting proletarian rule with all its consequences against
the present bourgeois regime. It will be a frightful duel.
How will it end? No one knows but gods and goddesses
acquainted with the future. We only know this much:
Communism, though little discussed now and loitering in
hidden garrets on miserable straw pallets, is the dark hero
destined for a great, if temporary, role in the modern
tragedy. . . .
It would be war, the ghastliest war of destruction
which would unfortunately call the two noblest nations of
civilization into the arena, to the ruin of both: France and
Germany. England, the great sea serpent always able to
crawl back into its vast watery lair, and Russia, which also
Heine: Worfy of Prose, cd. by Hermann Kcsten, pp. 5 J -53-
WORLD WAR III 57
has the safest hiding places in its vast fir forests, steppes
and icy wastes those two, in a normal political war,
cannot be annihilated even by the most crushing defeats*
But Germany is far more menaced in such cases, and
France in particular could lose her political existence in
the most pitiful manner.
That, however, would only be the first act of the great
melodrama, the prologue, as it were. The second act is the
European and the World Revolution, the great duel be-
tween the destitute and the aristocracy of wealth; and in
that there will be no mention of either nationality or re-
ligion: there will be only one fatherland, the globe, and
only one faith, that in happiness on earth. Will the reli-
gious doctrines of the past rise in all countries, in desperate
resistance and will perhaps this attempt constitute the
third act? Will the old absolutist tradition reenter the
stage, though in a new costume and with new cues and
slogans ? How could that drama end ?
I do not know; but I think that eventually the great sea
serpent will have its head crushed, and the skin of the
Northern bear will be pulled over his ears. There may be
only one flock then and one shepherd one free shepherd
with an iron staff, and a shorn-alike, bleating-alike human
herd!
Wild, gloomy times are roaring toward us, and a prophet
wishing to write a new apocalypse would have to invent
entirely new beasts beasts so terrible that St. John's older
animal symbols would be like gentle doves and cupids in
comparison. The gods are veiling their faces in pity on the
children of man, their long-time charges, and perhaps over
their own fate. The future smells of Russian leather, blood,
godlessness, and many whippings. I should advise our
grandchildren to be born with very thick skins on their
backs/' 12
*Ibid. f pp. 136-138.
58 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
Only to poets are the shapes of things to come so clear. He
knew the German spirit through and through, and he knew
the progress of the human spirit in Europe through and
through. Alas, that he had lived also through an age of revo-
lution and disillusionment, of the revolutions and Prince Met-
ternich! That was why he cried, "Beware! I wish you well;
that is why I tell you the bitter truth." Because he saw the
"revolution in the realm of the spirit," he could also foretell the
"same revolution in the material world."
We might yet try to see the further revolution in the realm
of the spirit in the century after Heine, with far clearer indi-
cations of the direction in which it has been developing. We,
too, might try to understand the character of the age we are
living in, and grapple with the problem of moral decay and
regeneration, although there is little evidence of regeneration
and a great deal of decay. We, too, might be able to predict a
disaster, but, once freed from the shackles of determinism, the
wisest prophet would be the one who refused to predict.
II. THE METHOD
THE "WHITE MAN'S BURDEN"
THESE are indeed times that try men's souls. Effective plan-
ning of peace without a philosophy of peace is impossible. A
revolution in thinking and in the method of thinking, of
political events in particular and of human affairs in general,
must be brought about before a revolution in world politics
is possible. The standards of morality, particularly of inter-
national morality, in this decade are notoriously at a low ebb.
THE "WHITE MAN'S BURDEN" 59
Compared with the French encyclopedists of the eighteenth
century, we are unworthy progeny of our ancestors of that
period of "Enlightenment." For fully equipped as we are with
a philosophy of war, the psychology of war, the politics of
war, and the implements of war, how can we escape war? The
most important question now is: after all the bloodshed and
sacrifice, shall we let it start all over again?
Ultimately, the problems of peace and war are determined
by the character of the effective faiths of an age. The problems
of peace are problems of man and the nature of man. I believe
they are strictly philosophical problems, problems of the things
that men believe in and live by. As I shall show later, it is
ultimately a problem of determinism versus free will, of deter-
minism of brute force and spiritual faith. Peace on earth is an
act of faith, and without faith we shall not be saved. It happens
that we are a generation without faith.
What we need above all is a theory of the rhythm of life and
of the unity and interrelatedness of all things. Without that
faith, the doctrine of force cannot be destroyed. The dichotomy
between ideals and action must be resolved, and an all-inclu-
sive, comprehensive philosophy must be produced whereby
ideals may be brought down from the clouds again to activate
the affairs of men on earth. High-flown idealism and pedestrian
realism must be joined together, so that idealists are no longer
regarded by businessmen as impractical and "realism" is BO
longer an excuse for dispensing with ideals in men's plans for
action. The rhythm of life and the unity and interrelatedness
of all things must be shown and shown conclusively, so that
they become a part of our faith for daily action.
This will come about in the form of a spiritual softening of
western philosophy, mental mellowness and moral maturity,
a ripening of the sparkling wine of western intellect. There
will be an inevitable maturing of the mind of this hard-hitting,
competing, caustic, corrosive age, where the hardness of steel
has entered into men's hearts and the iron of hate has corroded
60 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
men's souls. In this Steel Age, it is not only that men's ships
are made of steel plates; men's minds are also shaped thereby,
"Nature is soft," says Laotse, but men's minds are hard. The
human heart is one of the most changeful, elastic, flexible or-
gans in nature; that is why it must not be tampered with.
Be careful [says Laotse] not to interfere with the natural
goodness of the heart of man. Man's heart may be forced
down or stirred up. In each case the issue is fatal. By gen-
tleness, the hardest heart may be softened. But try to cut
and polish it, and it will glow like fire or freeze like ice.
In the twinkling of an eye it will pass beyond the limits
of the Four Seas. In repose, it is profoundly still; in mo-
tion, it flies up to the sky. Like an unruly horse, it cannot
be held in check. Such is the human heart.
I have every reason to believe that the human heart is a runa-
way horse now.
What surprises me most in western thought is the almost
complete absence of a philosophy of peace, by which I mean
of peace, not merely as a hope in some Utopian future, but
peace as a normal condition of living in the present, as applied
to the home, the nation, and the world. For instance, the tech-
nique of peaceful living, o domestic peace, national peace, and
world peace, is hardly ever developed. Western social thought
is either economics or political science. To me it is less satisfy-
ing than eating a juicy apple.
The technique of peace in the social and political sciences
is either the equal distribution of goods, the balance of pro-
duction and consumption and of import and export, or checks
and balances, or the regalia of courts of justice and the rights
and obligations arising out of scraps of paper, sworn to and no-
tarized according to the due process of law. Society is con-
ceived as an agglomeration of heterogeneous and conflicting
interests brought to live at peace with one another by the
THE "WHITE MAN'S BURDEN" 61
mechanism of law courts which operate to eliminate excesses
of liberty; in more liberal quarters, this concept is softened and
extended to include moral restraint, or the restraint of the un-
written law and public sentiment, with which Confucianism
entirely agrees. In general, however, the western view of society
and politics is legalistic and mathematical, like the point ra-
tion coupons. Apart from the generous motivating forces of
religion, the legal concept of a man living within the law is
hardly a flattering theory of human life, in which the bachelor
banker becomes the ideal citizen because as a banker he suc-
cessfully dodges the taxes and as a bachelor he successfully
dodges the women.
But even more than legalistic, the western view of the na-
ture, function, and aim of human life is almost 95 per cent eco-
nomic. It has gradually changed throughout the nineteenth and
the twentieth centuries through the steady increase of inventions,
so much that human progress itself has been already identified
with rising standards of living. It is almost the whole of what
we are talking, writing, and dreaming about.
From my college days, I have heard of the "white man's
burden" and have often wondered what is inside that knapsack
which the white man carries on his back around the globe. I
have now discovered that it is only canned goods. Poor Kipling,
he would not have remained alive and returned to be Lord
Rector of St. Andrews if he were deprived during his stay in
India of his store of corned beef and sardines. Still you cannot
deny that he successfully converted corned beef and sardines
into some good rousing verse, breathing pluck and faith in a so
very enlightened scheme of shipping that made corned beef
obtainable in far away Allahabad and Lahore.
The charge of "materialism" is no mere clicht. Materialism
is the very stuff and fiber of modern thinking, which domi-
nates all postwar planning and makes a philosophy of peace
impossible. Is it not true that almost all our proposals for die
future peace stem from the one assumption that the cure for
62 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
the ills of economic progress is more economic progress? Are
we not thinking of peace merely in terms of a free exchange
of trade, free flow of material, and "prosperity"? In other
words, peace is canned goods, bigger and better canned goods.
Peace is a condition where we may sell and sell abundantly.
"Heaven" itself is a concrete, fire-proof warehouse stocked to
the ceiling with canned goods. For the world is now business,
political business and economic business. A nation is a concern,
a government is only its shop counter, and its diplomats are its
traveling salesmen trying to outsell its competitors and beat
them to a new market, and its publicists and thinkers are its
expert accountants. The audacity of these thinkers of peace
hurts my soul.
Who can deny that economic thinking has superseded all
other forms of thinking, that economic issues have obscured
all other issues, that we are thinking of nothing but applying
poultices to our economic sores, and that our highest spiritual
hope is good business and plenty of consumer goods for all?
And who can deny that this power and profit motive con-
tains in itself the seeds of future wars ? Who can gainsay the
fact that we are living in a decade of moral and spiritual
bankruptcy and of the elimination of morals from politics?
Far from being an empty phrase, materialism colors 95 per
cent of our effective thinking. In fact, it is strangling our
thinking*
Soap is good. That is taken for granted. Nothing impresses
me more in American civilization than the fact that soap here
is good and cheap and available to all. At American hotels, it is
as costless as fresh air. Washing is both convenient and pleasant
in the United States. Americans are hardly aware of it, but
Europeans and Orientals are when they come to visit America.
Almost any soap you buy is bound to be of high quality. It is
not an article of luxury; soap with the most exquisite perfume
is obtainable even at the five-and-ten-cent stores. Soap has be-
come democratic. At least one problem has been solved. The
THE "WHITE MAN'S BURDEN" 63
problem of removing stains from dresses and rugs and scratches
from varnished tables, too, has been solved ably; there exist
almost miraculous remedies.
Technological progress and industrial research have gathered
such momentum that nothing is going to stop them. Imprison
all the scientists and disgrace all the directors of Du Pont and
General Electric, and material progress will still go on. Con-
demn the inventors of fluorescent paint and disfranchise the
perfectors of the air-cooling system, and new inventors will
rise from the Arizona desert and be shipped by some under-
ground organization to New York and Detroit with the con-
nivance of the police. You cannot dethrone science and you
need not.
Soap is plentiful. That is a positive achievement of American
democracy. The striking thing is that there is at the same time
a complete absence of a philosophy of peace. To give soap to
Hottentots, while American soap-makers at home make more
money, is not the road to peace. But that is the highest intel-
lectual level we can rise to. On the proposed Utopian plan to
sell soap to four hundred million Indians there is always com-
plete agreement, and even some degree of enthusiasm. On the
proposal to give India freedom, there are many reservations,
hesitations, rationalizations, and beating about the bush, and
not a trace of enthusiasm. If the Allies ever give back India's
freedom, it will be with a feeling of "just-too-bad, there Vnoth-
ing-else-you-can-do" despondency. Under such circumstances,
it is easy to be a spiritual prophet and denounce like Savonarola
the materialism of this age. It is no distinction at all. Just some
common sense will enable anyone to see this point. The strange
thing is, common sense is so uncommon. We have been awed
into silence by the economist, all of us. That is all.
If there is one thing I can be sadistic about, it is swine-and-
slop Economics. My only desire in life is to see the Economist,
the law-giver of Europe, dethroned, disgraced, and hanged. I
burn with rage whenever I see tables of percentages. If he were
64 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
not so smug with his little facts, it would not arouse such a
resentment in me. It's that expression which we see on the
face of PhlX candidates a stilted and hypnotized expression,
doped with facts and figures and statistical averages and me-
chanical laws a case of complete auto-intoxication. The im-
postor at least has a sense of humor, but the Economist is
utterly humorless and sincere. He has a fear of emotions; all his
educational training leads up to it He wants to be objective
only and prays God that he be delivered from all emotion. He
knows, and knows for certain, that for 1937 it (never mind
what) is 27% per cent, but for 1938, it is 34% per cent, and he is
as proud of his fractions as a cobbler is proud of leather. A cob-
bler of Gotham, I was told, proposed to defend the city with
leather. The Economist wants to defend the whole modern
civilization with his fractions and statistical averages* Somehow
if only the figures are juggled right, there will be peace in the
world. He tells you, this is science; it is positive, objective
knowledge. He has a special technique and a set of parapher-
nalia, with which he overawes the outsiders, and a special
language what a language! It is his oracles, and the god he
consults is Materialism, and of that god he is the high priest
Peace, we are told, is a highly technical matter, like the mak-
ing of synthetic rubber. It consists, we are told, of lowering
tariff barriers, establishing international air routes and air bases,
shipping and insurance credits and guarantee of capital invest-
ments abroad, easing of population pressures, raising the stand-
ard of living. Peace is just distributing ration coupons to the
world. So, if we get together an army of tariff experts, air
experts, shipping experts, insurance experts, rubber experts,
and cactus experts (of which there are fifty-seven varieties)
and alfalfa experts (those who specialize in the crinkly alfalfa
and the flat-leaf one), and divide all these experts into depart-
ments and sections, then we are going to have peace.
It is this form of materialism that is driving me mad. I have
no wish to be a spiritual prophet, but the Fact-Cult has gone
"GOVERNMENT BY MUSIC" 65
a little too far. The first step of wisdom is the realization of
this folly of the inadequacy of our conception of peace.
8
"GOVERNMENT BY MUSIC"
BUT what is a philosophy of peace? Peace is an ever-present
condition of living, rather than the abstract condition to be de-
voutly wished for in some distant Utopia. Peace is normal, as
health is normal. We have to have a philosophy in which we
believe that peace is positive and not merely the absence of
conflicts and wars a negative ideal. Peace is rich, peace is
satisfying, peace is* growth and movement and action and life.
Peace is as natural as harmony because it is the normal way
of man; man rejects war as he intuitively rejects discord or
dissonance in music. And the psychology of domestic peace,
national peace, and world peace cannot be very different it
is merely the harmony of social relationships. For that harmony
of social relationships there is a technique. Human philosophy
should occupy itself exclusively with that technique of social
harmony. ^
Naturally, I have been searching in Chinese thought for ele-
ments that might be contributions to the philosophy of world
peace. Human society in China is on the whole no better than
human society in the West. There are squalor, poverty, quar-
rels, corruption, selfishness, and social injustice. There are as
many reactionaries in China as in the West, only a little less
appeasers in high places. The thought causes a shudder. After
all, the man who deals with Darlan must envy Laval, who
can deal directly with Hitler. Both proceed on the principle of
expediency at the sacrifice of principles, but after all the man
66 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
who deals with an accessory must envy the man who is able
to deal with the principal Man in China acts both on "princi-
ple" (ching) and on "expediency" (cKuan)^ both fully recog-
nized by Confucian teachers. But somehow he still believes in
moral principles and values and their validity in practical
action.
Where China utterly differs from the West are the three
contempts: the contempt for the soldier, the contempt for the
the police, and the contempt for lawyers. China has lived for
4,000 years without police and lawyers, and the soldier is de-
spised. It is an unmathematical way of life, arising from con-
tempt for the mathematical way of thinking.
Evidently, here is a new approach. The Chinese believe
that when there are too many policemen, there can be no in-
dividual liberty, when there are too many lawyers, there can
be no justice, and when there are too many soldiers, there can
be no peace. Peace can be obtained only by putting the govern-
ment in reverse. Since this is a world of mixed characters, let
there be a government to put a few fellows in jail. That is
all the government exists for. True justice is obtained by set-
tlement out of court, and true peace is obtained when soldiers
are unseen, unheard of, and unknown. Ultimately the problem
of peace is the problem of general education in good manners
and music.
I am not joking when I say that this is the basic teaching
of Confucianism. It is the central, basic, and fundamental
teaching of Confucian philosophy, which merges political and
moral problems into one. For this is the strangest outcome of
the reputed Confucian good sense government by good man-
ners and by music. Americans, who are intensely practical, may
agree that government by police, particularly secret police, is
highly repellent. They may agree that government by law,
though workable, may be slightly inadequate and fall short
of the highest ideal. They know that government by a series of
verlotens in the Prussian style is not good enough for the dem-
"GOVERNMENT BY MUSIC" 67
ocratic individual, and that the good life is something more
than obeying a series of "Thou shah not V They know that
in a mature, full-grown democracy, peace and order ultimately
depend on the decency and self-respect of the individual.
I like Americans best when I see them breaking laws and
regulations, when I see at a movie theater that the audience's
sympathy is with the stowaway and not with the law-uphold-
ing captain, and when I see on the trains between Washington
and New York people smoking in every car marked "No
Smoking." These are born democrats, I say. When the situation
gets bad enough, it is not the Herr Conductor that will stop it,
but the public, by somebody writing to the 'New Yorf^ Times
pleading against the danger of ashes burning babies' arms. If
the public does not mind, neither will the American conductor.
But imagine a Prussian crowd smoking in a car where smoking
is verbotcnl They just can't do it, and that is why the Weimar
Republic fell and the Frankfurter Zdtung turned tail and they
needed a Hitler. Put a Hitler over an American crowd to tell
them not to do this and not to. do that, and see the result.
He would not survive three months before his head was
smashed. Democracy's reply to Prohibition was the speakeasies.
The history of the speakeasies is the glorious history of exactly
how much the American people would stand for verbotens,
and of how they would obey even laws passed by themselves!
I take off my hats to these Americans, because they are like
my own people, the Chinese. You can't "prohibit" the Ameri-
cans, nor can you the Chinese. An official prohibition to do a
thing is an invitation to a Chinese to do it. Long live the iden-
tity of our causes!
Even so, the practical Americans must doubt Confucius'
reputation for common sense when they hear of his proposal
to govern a country by music. Only a Saroyan could have said
a thing like that. Nevertheless, I maintain that Confucius was
quite sane, as I shall try to show. Confucius actually "sang in
68 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
the rain." 13 Confucius did say it, and said it time and again all
his life. Such was his precept about government and his em-
phasis on worship and song that one of his disciples took his
words literally. When Gonfucius one day approached a city
where his disciple, Tseyu, had been made magistrate, he heard
public singing going on in the squares.
Confucius grinned and said to Tseyu, "You are killing
a chicken with a big cleaver for killing a cow." "But I
heard from you/* replied Tseyu, "that when the superior
man had learned culture, he would become kind and when
the common man learned culture, he would become self-
disciplined." Confucius turned to the other disciples and
said, "You fellows, what he says is right. I was only pull-
ing his leg!" 14
I have chosen this aspect of Confucianism to show, by way
of contrast, the Confucian emphasis on spiritual values, and to
reveal the devastating inadequacy of the economic solution for
peace. The adolescent idea that peace can be achieved by a
mechanical distribution of goods, its crudity and its inade-
quacy, will become apparent. We must soon come to the posi-
tion of admitting that the man who talks of music and spiritual
harmony is not just a moron, and refuse to believe that only
the man who talks of canned goods is "practical." If practical
good sense means preoccupation with material realities of food
and clothing and shelter, that decidedly is not a characteristic
of Confucianism.
Of the factors of government, Confucius had this to say:
Tsekung asked about government, and Confucius re-
plied, "People must have sufficient to eat; there must be a
sufficient army; and there must be faith in the nation."
18 See the piece "Confucius Singing: in the Rain," With Love and Irony, p. 167.
u The Wisdom oj China and India, pp. 821-822.
"GOVERNMENT BY MUSIC" 69
"If you were forced to give up one of these three factors,
what would you go without?" asked Tsekung. Confucius
said, "I would go without the army first." "And if you
were forced to go, without one of the two remaining fac-
tors, which would you rather go without?" asked Tsekung
again. "I would go without sufficient food. There have
always been deaths in % every generation, but a nation with-
out faith cannot stand!' 15
Since the psychology of peace is the same, whether it be
domestic, national, or world peace, the factors of such a peace,
according to Confucius, may be appropriately examined here.
We have been used to treating politics as a separate problem,
as strictly a problem of the machinery of administration, cut
apart from morals. Confucianism envisages the government
as only one of the four factors of bringing about social order,
"rituals, music, punishments and administration"; in fact, it
is always contemptuous of a purely political solution as such.
Only so can we understand the fantastic theory of government
by music. The conception of peace is more than the mechanics
of keeping good men out of jail and bad men in it; it is re-
lated to true manhood and to social and national health, in
which music seems the best and most natural fruition of cul-
ture. It almost seems that the enjoyment of music provides the
aim and end and raison d'etre of culture itself.
For so are the nature and function of government and the
nature of domestic, national, and world peace conceived:
It follows, therefore, that to govern a country without K
(rituals, and the principle of moral order) is like tilling a
field without a plough. To observe K without basing it on
the standard of right is like tilling the field and forgetting
to sow the seeds. To try to do right without cultivating
knowledge is like sowing the seeds without weeding the
15 Ibid., p. 839.
70 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
field. To cultivate knowledge without bringing it back to
the aim of true manhood is like weeding the field without
harvesting it And to arrive at the aim of true manhood
without coming to enjoy it through music is like harvest-
ing and forgetting to eat the harvest. To enjoy true man-
hood through music and not arrive at complete harmony
with nature is like eating and not becoming well fed, or
healthy.
When the four limbs are well developed and the skin
is clear and the flesh is full, that is the health of the body.
When the parents and children are affectionate, the broth-
ers are good towards one another and the husband and
wife live in harmony, that is the health of the family.
When the higher officials obey the law and die lower
officials are honest, the officers have regulated and well-
defined functions afid the king and ministers help one
another on the right course, that is the health of the
nation. When the Emperor rides in the carriage of Virtue,
with Music as his driver, when the different rulers meet
one another with courtesy, the officials regulate one another
with law, the scholars urge one another by the standard
of honesty, and the people are united in peace, that is the
health of the world. This is called the Grand Harmony
(tashun}
From such a picture of world peace as the Grand Harmony,
it is clear that peace is not the absence of conflicts, but the
healthy result of a number of cultural forces. It is easy to
understand therefore why a political solution is necessarily in-
adequate and shallow in the "governing" of a country. Gov-
ernment is more than governing hence the role of rituals
and music. The four factors of social order work for a common
goal. "Li (rituals), music, punishments and administration have
18 For this and the following quotations, sec Wisdom of Confucius (Modern Li-
brary), pp. 239-240, and 252-261.
"GOVERNMENT BY MUSIC" 71
a common goal, which is to bring about unity in the people's
hearts, and carry out the principles of political order!'
The defense of government by music in Lify (chapter "On
Music") is made in curiously psychological terms. Rituals and
music help to achieve this social harmony by establishing the
right likes and dislikes, or what we call good taste in the
people. Social and political chaos comes from certain unregu-
lated desires. Ultimately, there can be peace only when there is
peace in the human heart; it cannot be imposed from without.
These psychological facts showing the origins of world chaos
are still true today:
The nature of man is usually quiet, but when it is af-
fected by the external world, it begins to have desires. With
the thinking mind becoming conscious of the impact of
the material world, we begin to have likes and dislikes.
When the likes and dislikes are not properly controlled
and our conscious minds are distracted by the material
world, we lose our true selves and the principle of Reason
in nature is destroyed. When man is constantly exposed to
the things of the material world which affect him and
does not control his likes and dislikes, then he is over-
whelmed by the material reality and becomes dehuman-
ized or materialistic. When man becomes dehumanized
or materialistic then the principle of Reason in nature
is destroyed and man is submerged in his own desires.
From this arise rebellion, disobedience, cunning and de-
ceit/ and general immorality. We have then a picture of
the strong bullying the weak, the majority persecuting the
minority, the physically brave going for violence, the sick
and crippled not being taken care of, and the aged and the
young and helpless not cared for. This is the way of chaos.
The people are therefore controlled through the rituals
and music instituted by the ancient kings . . . the rituals
regulate the people's feelings; music establishes harmony
72 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
in the sounds of the country; the administration orders
their conduct and the punishments prevent crimes. When
rituals, music, punishments and administration are all in
order, the principles of political order are complete.
We are now in a position to follow the close connection be-
tween music and rituals and good government a good gov-
ernment based on good taste.
Music unites, while rituals differentiate. Through union,
the people come to be friendly toward one another, and
through differentiation, the people come to learn respect
for one another. If music predominates, the social structure
becomes too amorphous, and if rituals predominate, social
life becomes too rigid. To bring the people's inner feeling
and external conduct into balance is the work of rituals
and music. The establishment of rituals gives a well-de-
fined sense of order and discipline, while the general
spread of music and song establishes the general atmos-
phere of peace among the people. When good taste is dis-
tinguished from bad taste, then we have the means of
distinguishing the good from the bad people, and wheij
violence is prevented by the criminal law and the good
men are selected for office, then the government becomes
stable and orderly. With the doctrine of love for teaching
affection, and the doctrine of duty for teaching moral recti-
tude, the people will then have learned to live in a moral
order.
Music comes from the inside, while rituals come from
the outside. Because music comes from the inside, .it is
characterized by quiet and calm. And because rituals come
from the outside, they are characterized by formalism.
Truly great music is always simple in movement, and truly
great rituals are always simple in form.. When good music
prevails, there is no feeling of dissatisfaction, and when
"GOVERNMENT BY MUSIC" 73
proper rituals prevail, there is no strife and struggle. When
we say that by mere bowing in salute the king can rule
the world, we mean thereby the influence of rituals and
music. When the violent elements of a nation are kept
quiet, the different rulers come to pay homage, the mili-
tary weapons are locked up, the five classes of punish-
ments are not brought into use, and the people have no
worries and the Emperor has no anger, then truly music
has prevailed. When the parents arid children are affec-
tionate toward one another, the juniors respect the elders,
and this respect is extended to all people in the country,
and the Emperor himself lives such an exemplary life,
then we may truly say that li has prevailed' 9
The constant contrasts of rituals and music as instruments
of social and political order are philosophic and quite revealing
and must help to correct the impression that practical Confu-
cianism deals only with kitchen pots and pans, or can ever
descend to the level of economic thought which reduces civi-
lization and progress to the two questions of alimentation ("a
quart of milk") and elimination (the flush toilet). "Truly
great music shares the principle of harmony with the universe,
and truly great ritualism shares the principle of distinctions
with the universe." Again, "Music expresses the harmony of
the universe, while rituals express the order of the universe.
Through harmony all things are influenced, and through order
all things have their proper place." Or again, "Musk illustrates
the primordial forces of nature, while rituals reflect the prod-
ucts of the creation. Heaven represents the principle of motion,
while Earth represents the principle of rest, and these two prin-
ciples of motion and rest permeate life between Heaven and
Earth. Therefore, the Sage tal\s about rituals and music"
Finally we arrive at the perception of the profound truth con-
cerning the creation of harmony, and the basis of a great na-
tion. "Therefore, the superior man tries to create harmony in
74 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
the human heart by a rediscovery of human nature, and tries
to promote music as a means to the perfection of human cul-
ture. When such music prevails and the people's minds are led
toward the right ideals and aspirations, we may see the appear*
ance of a great nation! 9
Confucius, I am sure, shares with me the impatience with
the techniques of alimentation and elimination as the means
for solving the present world chaos and planning a world
peace. We are miserably mistaken if we think that Asiatics
can be satisfied with the white man's canned goods. What they
prize are the empty cans because they have a tinkling sound
which pleases the ear and a shining luster which pleases the
soul. For their food, they prefer bananas.
9
MATHEMATICS AND PEACE
WE NEED a larger and subtler vision. I have referred to the
Chinese contempt for the mathematical way of thinking. This
weakness of ancient China was also her greatest strength. All
the important things in life lie somewhat outside the sphere
of the mathematically calculable. It is. the incalculables that
count, because it is the incalculables that make us human be-
ings and not the figures of machines. The soul, for instance, is
incalculable; so are God, freedom, decency, self-respect, hon-
esty, pride, and on the other side of the picture, hatred, fear,
revenge, sadism, personal ambition. It is these passions and
their idiosyncratic ways of which we know nothing that upset
human life. You cannot chart their course, but still you have
to make provisions for them. It is these things, about which
MATHEMATICS AND PEACE 75
the economists and mathematicians have nothing to say, that
are important in planning for peace.
Peace is not a mathematical formula and cannot be worked
out by mathematical equations. From what has been said about
the Confucian theory of government by courtesy and music,
it must have become clear that what Chinese thought lost in
precision it gained in subtlety. For in all things truly great and
utterly small, mathematics is inadequate. It is in measuring
astronomical and atomic motions that science is all agog and
recognizes that the laws of mathematics fail. And so what is
more important than the shape and configuration of the peace
after the war is our method of arriving at it and our concep-
tion of the peace process. Our conception of the peace process
is a mathematical one, and the Asiatic contribution to the ideas
for creating peace is first of all a challenge to the adequacy
of the mathematical approach. Mathematics is cold, but life is
warm; that is why mathematics must forever fail to explain
life. Reducing the musical note of C to a number of vibrations
per second does not explain Lily Pons or Elizabeth Schumann.
What explain Lily Pons or Elizabeth Schumann are the over-
tones which are somewhat beyond mathematical calculations*
He who goes for exactness must sacrifice subtlety, and vice
versa. Since peace is also a part of life, the mathematical ap-
proach must also fail to explain peace, or understand peace,
or create it.
In other words, peace cannot be arrived at by a point ration
system* The more blurred and indeterminate the natural boun-
daries, the happier the neighbors are. The less talk about tariff
barriers, the greater the flow of trade. The more inexact our
delegates' ideas of population figures, the nearer we are to a
peace solution. The less concerned the big powers are over
the undeveloped areas, the happier are the "natives." The less
thought we spend on the diameter of gun barrels, the less
imminent is World War III.
That is why I have a hunch that if we leave the planning
76 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
of world peace to women, we shall have it, because as the
average woman goes, they are pretty bad at figures. A fair pre-
caution to be taken against men delegates to the Peace Con-
ference would be to establish a rule that they must have flunked
at school in mathematics to qualify for the appointment or elec-
tion. Actually even Secretary Hull can think quite sanely and
philosophically about the deeper problems of peace if you
remove from his company that statistical fiend, Leo Pasvolsky*
For it must never be forgotten that even in the realm of die
physical world, science explains the how, but never the why
and the wherefore. It deals with the process, but not the ulti-
mate cause, nor the values of the end results* The process lies
within the field of mathematics, the values and primary cause
lie without. Science explains how the atoms behave, but does
not explain why they so behave. It describes how two mole-
cules of sodium and carbon come together, but does not explain
why they must come together. It describes acids and alkalis,
but cannot say anything about the ultimate acidity of acids*
It proves that quinine cures malaria, but does not know why
quinine kills the malaria germs. It describes to you the laws of
gravitation,, but does not pretend to tell you what gravitation
is, and why it must be. Before the ultimate Door of Mystery,
science always stops short and never enters. It sees acorns sprout
and grow into oaks, but cannot tell why they must do so. It
observes and proves the survival of the fittest, but cannot ac-
count for the arrival of the fittest. It explains how the giraffe
survives by his long neck but cannot explain the chemical and
physiological process that produced the first long neck. It tells
of the survival value of the spotted leopard, but is at a loss
about the arrival of the spots. It explains the survival value of
the flower's fragrance, but is bashfully silent as to how lilacs
and lemons develop their peculiar fragrance. It tells you that
silkworms spin silk from mulberry leaves and bees produce
honey from nectar and cows produce milk from common grass,
and not much else that is really enlightening. For ultimately,
MATHEMATICS AND PEACE 77
bees just produce honey and cows just produce milk and lilacs
just create out of the common sod that unmistakable, incom-
parable perfume. And they all do it simply, finally, and inevi-
tably.
Doubly is this true of the human realm and the realm of
the spirit. Christian preoccupation with matter and the ma-
terialistic conception of man and of human life and human his-
tory arouses in me an uncontrollable heathen rage. I have said
that peace on earth is an act of faith, and without faith we
shall not be saved. There is almost nothing of value in human
life that science can prove, and these human values we have
to take on faith. For one thing, the central concept of democ-
racy, the worth and dignity of the individual, can never be
proved; science can never prove that the individual is dignified.
Cold objectivity fails when a subjective attitude comes in, and
human life is 90 per cent attitudes. A woman is a lady when
she treats herself as a lady and a whore when she treats her-
self as a whore. The next minute, a whore can change herself
into a lady, by that ultimate hidden process which science must
fail to explain a process which belongs to the secret of life,
and which is as impenetrable to science as that by which the
lilac manufactures its perfume. Science has nothing to say
about human happiness, freedom, and equality, because science
does not, and cannot, deal with these human values. Freedom
of the will cannot be proved. The possibility of world co-opera-
tion cannot be proved. These things have to be proved, not by
science, but by faith and by human action. Even the future
of the son of a drunkard or a moron or a genius cannot be
proved or predicted. The individual always eludes science, and
it is only in the mass that the semblance of deterministic laws,
like insurance statistics, can be established. But unless the whole
view of human society is deterministic, the science of human
society cannot even begin. We have to concede either that
men and women are helpless pawns of certain mechanical
forces, or we must concede that any science of human activities
78 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
(science of history, or poetry, for instance) is an impossibility.
Therein lies the danger of the mechanical solution of the
problem of peace. But the western way of mathematical think-
ing is established. Hence our present utter confusion a hun-
dred postwar plans and not one way out. Not one plan gives
us the sense of assurance that peace will come. How com-
pletely mechanical our way of thinking is may be illustrated
by a few personal experiences of mine. J|
One of the greatest shocks in my college days was when I
learned the corpuscular theory of smell. I had thought that
smell was just smell, something if not spiritual, at least not
corpuscular, I had not troubled to explain it. The idea that
smell was transmitted by particles radiating from a body and
striking the nerve endings of my nostrils presupposes that
these particles constantly radiate in all directions as theoreti-
cally visible bodies and fill the air. That may be right and that
may be wrong; I have no idea. Maybe moth balls do throw off
those bodily particles. But we have to imagine the same of
almost all articles and beings, and the air must be chock
full of these smell particles. Dogs detect uncanny smells of
persons that we are hardly aware of; some must be positively
sweet, others repellent. If dogs had a language, they would
have a greater variety of words for smell than our highly inade-
quate words such as "fragrance" and "stench" and the vague
one "pungency." Certain smells would blend, like colors, and
others would not; it would be even possible to imagine a
symphony of smells, as we do of sounds. And all these particles
must dance in space. But the theory is on the whole tenable.
When it comes to light, the corpuscular theory is distinctly
shaking, for the best professors of light cannot agree on this
point. Is light matter, or is it a wave, an impulse, and if the
latter, a wave of what? There we are at a dead end. The cor-
puscular theory raises many theoretic difficulties. If light con-
sists of particles of something, and since two lights in a valley
on a dark night hit out in all directions, the two "bodies"
MATHEMATICS AND PEACE 79
must occupy the same space at the same time at any point
where the two lights are visible. In the end,, that light is a
body must seem to the man of the future like some medieval
superstition of this mechanical age. At present, we are held
down by a mechanical concept because we cannot think of
anything without a body. The substance of light is puzzling
us. Hence we call it "quantum/' which says nothing except
that it is a quantity. A quantity of what?
I remember also, while studying under Edouard Sievers,
being told that the essential types of rhythm of poetry are twos
and threes. Now that is common sense because one syllable
does not form a rhythm by itself, and a rhythm of four syllables
automatically breaks up into either one and three or into two
twos. But that would not be scientific. There is a semi-scientific
theory that our sense of rhythm of poetry has a pkysicalfam.
The two-syllable rhythm is based on the movement of our
footsteps left and right. And how about the three-syllable
rhythm? It is based on our respiration two for exhaling and
one for inhaling! This is not science, but what I call the "small
talk" of science, the irresponsible rumors. How often professors
of the humanities pass from science to scientific small talk the
layman is seldom aware such as the conjecture that the Roman
Empire fell because of mosquitoes, which produced malaria!
Like society's small talk, these are always pretty and tend to
make one prick up one's ears.
Recently, a friend of mine confided to me his theory of time.
His theory is that time is not an absolute quantity, but an
arbitrary one. For instance, the length of a morning cannot be
the same for an insect which lives for only a summer season as
it is for a human being who lives seventy or eighty years. I told
him that Chuangtse said literally the same thing. But, he said,
he had consulted a doctor about this idea, and the doctor had
suggested it was probably correct, but that the feeling of time
probably had something to do with the rate of the heart beat
of the animal! I was stunned. The layman is seldom aware to
8o BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
what extent the small talk, the improvable assumptions, per-
meate the so-called human sciences, like psychology, and how
largely speculative the whole fabric of psychoanalysis is. (Such
as, for instance, the speculative sally that childhood constipation
causes stubbornness or miserliness of character, and loose bowels
produce the habit of generosity. Shade of Roger Bacon!)
I mention these instances to show how incorrigibly mechan-
ical our present-day way of thinking is. Therefore, it is in-
evitable that in our thinking of peace we must also confine
ourselves to the mechanical barriers, zones, quotas, tonnages,
square miles, and population densities, and must perforce
neglect the higher and invisible things that alone make peace
possible. We have a kind of blind faith in figures. Ely Culbert-
son typifies this when he transfers his mathematical thinking
from contract bridge to the international peace force. Given
an international trump card, a "widow," that all parties can
call for, and given a certain distribution of cards, he believes
that it is impossible for any hand to win against the rest. He
does not say anything about the human equation of the bridge
players how one may play recklessly and another may miss
a certain chance through sheer preoccupation with a beautiful
lady at his side. The game will be like an automatic machine
that wins against all.
After the experience of the last war, the Senate of the United
States thought there was a sure mechanical means of ensuring
peace, viz., physical insulation from war areas by the cash-and-
carry principle. German submarines sank American ships and
American men and goods. That was how America was dragged
into war. Ergo, the mechanical insulation should lie in not
permitting American ships and American goods to sail in war
zones! It was simplicity itself. They forgot that there was a
human, psychological element: there might be a time when
the people would not want to apply the cash-and-carry prin-
ciple, or indeed a time when the people would not stand for
its application. And so again, what was built with cards was
DEFENSE OF COURTESY 81
no stronger than a house of cards. No, neither Arabic figures
nor Roman numerals can give us a system of peace. Arabic
figures are only good for ration systems or lottery tickets; they
may be used as instruments for peace, but they can ne ver insure
peace.
So I am still for Confucius, and for government by music
and by good manners. Confucius passes at once beyond the
frontier of the mathematically calculable and goes to the root
of social and political order in moral order. He goes even be-
yond the "political" machinery of law and government and
tries to "create harmony in the human heart by a rediscovery
oj^liuman nature." He points out the strife and chaos resulting
from unregulated human desires, that come from the impact
of the material world.
When man is constantly exposed to the things of the
material world which affect him and does not control his
likes and dislikes, then he is overwhelmed by the material
reality and becomes dehumanized or materialistic. When
man becomes dehumanized or materialistic, then the prin-
ciple of Reason in nature is destroyed. From this arise re-
bellion, disobedience . . .
10
DEFENSE OF COURTESY
AT THIS point, I feel I must offer a defense of government
by courtesy and good manners, or government by "rituals,"
Curiously, the concept of 7f covers both, and extends to the
concept of establishing political order by a prevailing sense of
82 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
moral order, of which the social, religious, and state rituals are
to be the symbols.
This prevailing sense of moral order, through establishing
the psychological attitude of orderliness, is the philosophic aim
of //, the central concept of Confucian teachings. For Confu-
cianism was known as the "religion of li! f Still, the notion
of courtesy, just ordinary social courtesy, remains vivid above
the deeper philosophical interpretations. The Chinese call their
country "The Country of Courtesy (/i) and Accommodation
(Jang)" They meant that the Chinese civilization was entitled
to the name of civilization in contrast to the surrounding bar-
barian tribes and they were barbarian tribes only by virtue
of its emphasis on courtesy and accommodation ( ff aprs vou$")>
whereas the barbarian tribes to the north, south, east, and west,
knew only of fighting one's way through and knew not the
culture of letting the other fellow get in first.
We alone knew when to bow once, when to bow twice, and
when to bow three times. We called it the mark of civilization.
It was to be a country of people whose culture was permeated,
whose manners were changed, and whose hearts were influ-
enced, by worship and song (rituals and music). We were to
bow and sing on state occasions, bow and sing at village fes-
tivals, bow and sing at wedding ceremonies, and bow and sing
during archery contests. Through this bowing and singing,
our hearts were supposed to be changed, we were to feel refined
and civilized, like the lords and ladies at the court of Louis XV.
Confucius said of archery contests that the gentleman also en-
tered "into contests, but that he "bowed before he went up and
drank a cup after he came down. Even at contests, he was a
gentleman." Through the ceremonies of worship, secular and
religious, we were supposed to imbibe a sense of respect for
social order and be taught the attitude of humility in civilized
intercourse. Through ancestor worship as a symbolic ritual, the
people's attitude of respect for and gratitude toward their elders
was to be inculcated and established. Once when Confucius
DEFENSE OF COURTESY 83
was assisting the King of Lu at a conference with the King of
Ch'i, he so shamed the neighboring king and his entourage
by Lu's superior manners and classical music that the King of
Ch'i felt like a barbarian, humiliated and disgraced, for Ch'i
offered at the conference music and dance of the Yi barbarians
in what is now eastern Shantung. "When you watch a nation's
dance, you know its character," said Confucius.
Confucius understood mass psychology better than anybody
else. Rituals were symbols, and the masses needed symbols. For
a baron to wear a cap with nine strings of beads or to worship
at Mount Tai, exclusive privileges of the Emperor, would be
not only an insufferable outrage of good manners, but would
be indicative of a rebellious spirit and of social chaos. When a
baron used at his feasts dancers in eight formations, to which
only the Emperor was entitled, instead of in four, which was
proper to a baron, Confucius exclaimed, "If one is to stand for
this, what will one not stand for?"
Since words were also symbols, Confucius developed another
central concept on the correct use of terms. His only book was
a compilation of Annals (Ck'unch'iu) with the sole purpose
of restoring a sharp discipline in the correct use of terms and
titles. The idea was that when he wrote down the words
"Baron of Ch'u" (who had called himself "King") in his
Annals, the latter suffered a moral and psychological defeat
and should be shamed out of his disregard for the social and
moral order. It was in this sense that Mencius said of this book
by Confucius that when it was written, "The unruly nobles
and rebellious spirits trembled."
This whole psychological approach to social order is very
curious. It would be a comparatively easy matter for some
Ph.D. candidate to write a thesis on "The Psychology of Con-
fucius" by dressing him up in western terms like the "psychol-
ogy of habit," "psychology of imitation," "acquired childhood
reflexes," and "mass conditioning by symbols." I am all for
psychology, because it alone holds the key to human behavior,
84 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
provided the psychologists could give up its title of a "science"
in the sense of a natural science, and confine themselves to
sharp and witty observations of human behavior and human
motives, as Confucius and William James did.
There is a closer relation between good manners and peace
politics than one might think. I know what is war politics
and power politics, and I have been somewhat hard put to it
to think what is peace politics. Round and round the circle we
might go and might not find the answer. Take out the politics
of power and of struggle for selfish interests, limited only by
the law, and what have we got in its place? Confucianism ex-
presses a huge dissatisfaction with the conception of govern-
ment by law. For the law always falls one step behind manners
and morals; the most charming things men do are always those
that rise above legal obligations. "Guide the people with admin-
istrative measures and regulate them by the threat of punish-
ments, and the people will try to keep out of jail, but will have
no sense of honor. Guide them by morals and regulate them
by good manners, and they will have a sense of honor and
respect." "In presiding over law-suits I am probably as good
as anybody. The point is that there should be no law-suits at
all." 17 The conception of legal restraint is postulated on the
idea of selfish strife and struggle among the elements of society.
Laws cannot stand against bayonets, and when a local or inter-
national brigand tears up the law or takes the law into his
hands, what have we got to defend the law and defeat the
brigand with except those noneconomic and nonmaterial fac-
tors the outraged conscience of mankind? No, we do not
escape psychology. Secretary Hull's "orderly processes of nego-
tiation" represent the civilized procedure for international ad-
justments. But what is the spirit of these "orderly processes" ?
Polite diplomatic phraseology apart, is it not the spirit of good
manners, of courtesy, and accommodation? What do civilized
men do, and what should civilized nations do? Will they ac-
17 Wisdom of Confucius, p. 198.
DEFENSE OF COURTESY 85
commodate? Will tliey yield to one another? The spirit of
courtesy and accommodation is the very antithesis of the spirit
of strife and contention. It is the true basis of civilized living,
and it is also the only possible basis of a more civilized world
order.
I think the Casablanca Conference failed not merely because
Stalin refused to come, in spite of President Roosevelt's and
Winston Churchill's going to North Africa, instead of meeting
at Washington or Montreal. It failed on the score of bad man-
ners. China's role in this war in 1943, we are told, was dis-
cussed, decided upon, and handed out to China. Casablanca
revealed to the whole world that Britain and the United States
intended to run the whole war themselves. That they are not
conscious of their bad manners is more the pity, for they will
be equally unconscious of their bad manners at the peace table.
These do not look like the principles upon which we are going
to build a lasting peace by willing co-operation based on good
manners and mutual respect. One cannot win a war for de-
mocracy by dictatorial methods.
The reverse of this case is equally true. China's bowing
in foreign relations has been the cause of misunderstanding
with her Allies. Stemming from courtesy and self-restraint, it
is taken for a sign of weakness. Silence and absence of protests
against the shipping of oil and scrap iron to Japan were taken
to mean profound satisfaction with the state of affairs.
The Stettinius report showed that for the two months of Jan-
uary and February, 1943, Lend-Lease shipments to the United
Kingdom amounted to $470,098,000, to Russia $293,370,00, and
to China $1,067,000. Such a 763:1 ratio means, if the amount
were to be given out in equal daily portions to the three na-
tions by turns, China would have to wait two years, one month
and three days before she got one day's amount. How did
China invite such preposterous contempt? By China bowing
and looking extremely well pleased. An aggressive stenogra-
86 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
pher asks for a raise in salary. A good-mannered stenographer
never does.
That discrepancy in manners between a well-bred person
from a good home, and an aggressive social world where every-
body is accustomed to brandishing his fists to get what he
wants, is the cause of the whole unmitigated failure of China's
foreign policy with her Allies in the last six fighting years. By
our kowtowing we were misunderstood. China has been acting
like a college freshman just initiated into a fraternity, ready
to shake everybody's hand. China must quickly shed her good
manners and give somebody a black eye before she can be
understood and gain the genuine respect of the fellow members
of this strange fraternity. While the smug Allied statesmen still
allow themselves to think that the Chinese government and
people are extremely grateful to them and are looking up to
them as worshipfully as a puppy that has been thrown a piece
of dry bone and is perhaps even willing to stand up on its
hind legs to entertain the company, some Chinese must tell
them the bitter truth. The bitter truth is that behind the cour-
teous front, resentment against the conduct of certain govern-
ments is very bitter, that the Chinese are frankly disappointed
in their Allies, are getting the impression that their Allies are
wholly selfish and insincere and that both Churchill and
Roosevelt show no comprehension of the nature of Asiatic
problems. They are, moreover, uncertain of what their Allies
are fighting for.
The psychology of peace politics is simply this : rough people
fight; courteous people don't. Fighting is a social and inter-
national disgrace. Courteous men fight sometimes, and when
they do fight it is certain that the other party is a barbarian
or he is living in a barbarian world with barbarian neighbors,
where good manners do not avail Only good manners, accord-
ing to Mentius, distinguish men from the beasts.
EUROPE ANI2ATION OF THE WORLD 87
11
EUROPEANIZATION OF THE WORLD
THE European world is falling apart because its moral values
have gone and there is just nothing to hold it together. Nation-
alism, racial prejudice, militarism (or simple belief in a social
order based on force), commercialism, and the development
of the machine are breaking it up before our eyes.
Because of the working of these forces in the absence of faith
and of a spiritual concept of man, because the economic man
has replaced the spiritual man, everything is cracking. Nothing
works; nothing guarantees stability. The League of Nations
did not work. Disarmament conferences did not work. The
Briand-Kellogg Pact, with the solemn signatures of kings and
presidents, did not work. International pledges and treaties do
not work. The mania for goods and markets and exploitation
of material goes on*
So Europe is upsetting the peace of the five continents. Be-
cause of Europe and the European current of ideas and Eu-
rope's example of imperialism and materialism to other con-
tinents, women in Singapore have to die, Burmese villagers'
houses have to burn, and peasants in China and in the Caucasus
have to watch bombs falling on their fields.
But being itself a slaughterhouse, Europe is now planning
to transform Asia and Africa into a gigantic slaughterhouse.
It still thinks that the world owes Europe a debt, and that the
world has to come up to European standards of living. Europe,
I know, still intends to appropriate the world. There are the
British Empire, the French Empire, and the Dutch Empire.
Even Portugal has got a concession, Macao, in China! Thank
God the Spanish Empire has crumbled and collapsed, otherwise
we would have just as complicated problems in South America.
88 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
Today Asia and Africa must still be the cows that produce
the milk for Europeans. Why? Because Europe wants to raise
their standards of living and educate them toward self-govern-
ment! Who in the first place robbed them of their liberty and
their self-government? Who says that the standards of living
in India have improved, and not deteriorated, after two cen-
turies of English rule ? Sir Norman Angell dares not contradict
the fact that the abject poverty of the Indian peasants is worse
than even that of seventy years ago, owing to English exploita-
tion and the killing of native industries. While I am writing
this, the boast of some English bureaucrats in India, "the situa-
tion is well in hand," keeps ringing in my ears. I see the
Empire breaking, but unwillingly. But unless the Empire
breaks itself, the issue of Empire will break the Allies and the
Peace Conference arid render futile all that men are dying
for now.
But at present, the Europeanization of the world is not just
an idea, an abstraction. The democratic leaders of the world
are transferring to Asia their sin-smelling and strife-breeding
power politics, with the sure result that Asia, by means of a
prepared and planned balance of power, will be kept in con-
tinual bloodshed and strife and mutual slaughter for the next
three centuries, after Europe's noble example. Europe is the
focus of infection on this earth, and its toxin spreads through
all the five continents. When will the plague burn itself out?
Why cannot Europe leave Asia alone ? How can we quarantine
Europe? How, in other words, quarantine European power
politics? I shall be able to show that without European inter-
ference, the problems of the future of Asia after the war are
quite simple. With the British, French, and Dutch Empires,
the problems of Asia will become as complicated as those of
Europe itself after the war.
And here, before I go on, I must make an exception for the
lambs of Europe and separate them from the wolves. I mean
the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Danes, the Swiss, who wish
EUROPEANIZATION OF THE WORLD 89
nobody any harm and who are pioneers in social legislation and
standards of enlightenment. The Dutch, the Belgians, and the
English are splendid people when they stay at home. The com-
pelling tradition of social decency is so great that all you need
to do to make an Englishman a gentleman again is to ship
him back west of the Suez Canal. Really the white man is
quite charming when he has got rid of his "burden." He can
even discuss Walter Pater with you.
But what are you going to Europeanize the world with?
The better knowledge of vitamins and nutrition, child care,
maternity care, and better foundations for women's dress are
conceded. Don't worry about those. The women of Turkey,
Iraq, Iran, China, and the Congo will bless you for these things
and gladly pay homage to Europe without question. But what
are you going to Europeanize the world with ? The European
standards of living, of course. Curious that one does not say
the standards of morals. Nobody dares to suggest that the
standards of morals and of thinking of the East or of the West
be raised. No, it is not the gospel of high thinking and simple
living that the economic man is the apostle of. Rather the
gospel of high living and fairly simple thinking, such simple
thinking as that material prosperity brings happiness, or that
the industrial man is happier than the craftsman. When one
speaks of raising the standards of living, one means clearly
and simply that laundry will be more pleasant, and dish-wash-
ing and vacuum-cleaning will be easier on the housewife, plus
perhaps a quart of milk a day for the Hottentot. One means
less hand labor. One means having a car and seeing a movie
once a week. One means exactly these things.
The message of raising the standards of living of the world
means simply that you want to move the people of the East
End and all the world to Park Avenue. But suppose the people
of the East End do not like Park Avenue and prefer to remain
where they are. Have they lost something important, and what
have they lost? Suppose the Hottentot does not care for your
90 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
quart of milk, and prefers bananas? Suppose the Oriental man
does not share your ideas of hand labor and the Oriental
woman does not mind washing her clothes on a river bank
while chatting with her neighbors, and thinks it pleasanter
than washing by a machine in a hot, steaming cellar ? Suppose
the Oriental man does not think it is such a bad thing to wade
knee-deep in rice paddies and plough his land, son in front and
father behind ? Suppose he believes it is good for the body and
the soul to use his hands in work and his bare legs in walking?
Suppose a man who lives in a mud hut of bare walls and pushes
a hand cart and therefore has a lower "standard of living" is not
necessarily living like a pig, as Occidental tourists constantly
assume? Suppose he has the culture of a self-respecting man?
Suppose he believes in paddling his boat instead of riding a
steamboat chugging its way through the water, all the while
feeling guilty inside of being corrupted by European standards
of ease and idleness? Suppose he prefers his wife to make her
own cloth shoes instead of wearing expensive leather shoes
that only idle city women can afford ? Suppose he believes in
mothers nursing their own babies, even in public? Suppose he
does not think nursing a baby in public is an indecent, im-
moral, and lewd spectacle, according to the code of Will Hays,
because the true function of the woman's breasts has not been
corrupted in him? Suppose he perceives the subtle physiological
truth that the human body is capable of infinite adjustments,
that habitual comforts cease to have meaning, and that the
hard life is probably healthier than the easy life? Suppose the
Seventh Heaven is in a Parisian attic to be ascended by dingy
stone stairs ? Suppose it is a human truth that a poor newspaper
boy is physically, mentally, and morally having a happier child-
hood than a rich man's son on Park Avenue learning to skate
with James the Butler and Charles the Doorman holding him
up by each arm? In other words, suppose material standards
of living are not worth raising at all at the price of increasing
EUROPEANIZATION OF THE WORLD 91
class hatred, increasing collectivism, loss of individual freedom,
and periodic conscripting of boys of eighteen for war?
At bottom, I believe, the modern European is as superstitious
as any Asiatic. The over-all superstition that is an intellectual
fad in the present era is belief in determinism, and that man is
primarily an animal, governed, shaped and controlled helplessly
by material environment. Besides the supreme god of deter-
minism, there are also some fetishes that the modern man
worships. I call a superstition any belief in something untrue,
and I call a fetish whatever a man worships beyond its proper
value. The three European fetishes are, the Potato Fetish, the
Population Fetish, and the Power Fetish. For verily these are
the gods of the modern era. Man is superstitious anyway; take
away his if(pn and he must^worship something else. Emotion-
ally, he has to be oriented somewhere. He who does not wor-
ship something is lost. Even an atheist must worship his
mistress's ankles.
It is these three fetishes that are molding men's thoughts
about the peace, based on the following axioms: (i) Men live
by potatoes. Metaphysically, man is a biped searching for pota-
toes, and human civilization is that aggregate historical force
arising out of the biped's search in the direction of potato
supplies. (2) The lack of potatoes is the cause of war, and the
possession of potatoes is the guarantee of peace. The more
potatoes you have, the more civilized you are, when you can
spell out happily the word "Prosperity." (3) The technique of
peace lies in finding and providing the exact ratio between
populations and potatoes. (4) Those who don't have power
must grow potatoes, and those who have power may eat, trans-
port, and otherwise dispose of the potatoes that the others
grow. (5) As is evident from a natural law, those who have
power must see that those who don't have power grow enough
potatoes for the others, or mankind will starve. There must
be free access to potatoes, there must be economic planning,
and somebody must rule the world. (6) War will not arise
92 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
between those who have power and those who don't The
potato or agricultural group is by nature stationary and pacifist;
the power or industrial group is by nature aggressive, com-
petitive, and predatory. Consequently, the members of the
potato-growing group are very cute and lovable and you may
now and then pinch their cheeks, but they need not be taken
into consideration. (7) War will arise, however, from the allo-
cation among the power groups of the potato supplies raised
by the nonpower groups. (8) Peace, it follows logically, is
merely a question of the equitable distribution of potato sup-
plies among the power groups. (9) Inasmuch as the power
groups are divided among themselves and by nature suspicious
of each other and business is by its nature competitive, aggres-
sive, and predatory, the obvious solution is to keep the power
so evenly and delicately balanced that none of them will dare
fire the first shot, although it may be conceded that someone
may. (10) Since power is dynamic and never static, this balance
of power can never be permanently maintained; constant ad-
justments and new alignments are necessary, (n) The tech-
nique of constantly watching out for a rising or new power
and making new alignments is called "politics"; the method
of switching about alignments and double-crossing former
allies, up to the moment the first shot is fired, is called "diplo-
macy"; the final upset of that delicate and unstable balance is
called "war." (12) This is not very satisfactory, but obviously
there is nothing better. (13) A really satisfactory and a most
desirable solution would be for one power or combination of
powers to acquire sufficient power to dominate the rest in some
sort of World Democracy. If the other power groups or potato
groups don't like it, what are they going to do about it? We've
got better guns and more guns. (14) Damn it, we are honest.
We are "realists" who, tell no "fairy tales" to deceive the people,
while the others who talk about justice and kindness as if they
meant it are "visionaries."
This is the high plane of international thinking about peace
DEFENSE OF THE MOB 93
problems in the year of our Lord 1943. It is the sum total of
our political wisdom. These tenets of thinking, when applied
to Europe, have produced European chaos and bloodshed for
centuries. The belief is, however, that when they are applied to
the world, they will produce World Peace. This is the meaning
of the Europeanization of the world.
12
DEFENSE OF THE MOB
AM I not painting too somber a picture of the modern world
and of the content of modern civilization? Have I not over-
looked something? And have I not exaggerated a bit, or at best
concentrated on the dark side of things? The reply is of course
that I have; but I am talking of politics, and politics is the
dark side of anything; it 13 the seat bottom of any people's
culture. Every culture has a cheery face, too, besides a pants*
seat. Perhaps I have been kicking merely at the pants' seat
alas, a foolish occupation!
For Europe is a bull, and I am merely its "gadfly" in the
Socratic sense. Liberals, in my opinion, should be merely gad-
flies to sting the buttocks of the wise and mighty bull which
is the state, and thps perform an extremely useful function.
For the old bull, after having grazed idly in the mountain
pastures, and getting a little bulky and fat, constantly tends to
doze off in the midst of danger. Its muscles are a little flabby
and its hide gets thicker and thicker. The gadfly buzzes and
buzzes and would give it no rest, and gets hated for its pains
or perhaps receives a lash from the sweep of the censorial
oxtail. What matter, if it has delivered its sting and kept the
old, wise bull awake ?
94 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
No; rather I am conscious of the hopes and dreams and
sweet longings and the impulses for good in any people. That
is why I am writing this book. When you have an ideal beauti-
ful as a flower, and when you see somebody crush that flower,
you feel it like a wound in your heart. Millions of men and
women are feeling that pain also, and even some resentment
against the person who crushes that flower*
For every war is a discovery of the people. Dunkirk is a dis-
covery of the English people; Stalingrad is a discovery of the
Russian people; Bataan, a discovery of the American people;
and Chungking, a discovery of the Chinese people. Certain
truths about the people tend to be continually forgotten and
are rediscovered only under the stress of war. The people have
certain qualities that have nothing to do with the workings in
the dark chambers of high politics, or with the degenerate,
sophisticated literary circles. There is more truth, kindness,
heroism, romance, humor, pathos, more depth and richness of
life in a country doctor's office than in the Foreign Office of
any nation; and it is of this truth, heroism, romance, and
humor and pathos that the stuff of life is made, and by which
the stream of human life is carried on.
When I see on the screen pictures of Russian peasant women
helping to defend their country, English air wardens and
women police and nurses, American women making shoes for
the army when I see the efforts of the common people, vol-
unteers, nurses, WAVES, WAACS, workmen, truck-drivers,
welders, machinists, working at the wheel, at the shipyard,
the canteen, the factory, the ferry command, I know it is the
expression of the will of the people, coming out of the good-
ness of their hearts, and I respect that will and am impressed
by it. They not only say that they are fighting for a better and
kindlier world and a better and kindlier society, they believe
it. And they not only believe it, they want it. They not only
want it, but passionately desire it, and are willing to fight and
die for it.
DEFENSE OF THE MOB 95
So it is in the United States, and so it is in England and
China and Russia. The people want peace, a just peace, and
good will toward men. There is plenty of good will lying about.
Any people, particularly the illiterate and "ignorant" peasantry,
have certain old, honorable, sterling qualities, a certain sense
of right and wrong, of obligation and duty, that they live by.
The present war is a discovery of the laopaishing o China, of
the peasants of Russia, the commoners of England, and the
people, the real people, of America. Not one of them cares a
rap about imperialism; not one of them does not wish for
surcease from sorrow and wars and contentions in this world.
The people want peace. Why can't they have it?
And here we run into an intellectual dilemma of modern
democracy. If the people are sound at heart, if they desire
peace, and if at the same time they are living in a democracy,
why cannot the will of the people be effective? Has not some-
body been cheating them, and if so, who? And by what
method and on what terms are the people of even a modern
democracy being cheated? Briefly, the answer lies in the fact
that there is a growing tendency to hand over the government
of the country to bureaucrats and "experts," and the terms on
which the people are told to surrender their judgment to them
are that these experts have "all the facts," which the people, the
poor laymen, are not supposed to have. This is perhaps natural
in view of the growing complexity of modern problems, but it
also means that we are losing faith in the common man an
unhealthy, undemocratic tendency.
So I must come to the defense of the mob. The people of
the modern world are always a little scared of specialist learn-
ing, particularly of some special "facts," such as the bureau-
cratic experts say they have and the people do not have. This is
a curious phenomenon of modern democracy: to shout merely
"I have all the facts" is enough to scare the people into sur-
render of all judgment. Although this in itself has nothing to
do with objective science, the unquestioning respect for "facts"
96 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
is based on it. By claiming possession of "facts" alone, the
prestige of science is at once transferred to the bureaucracy of
the political elite, and a halo of sanctity descends upon it
Unless the nature of "facts" in human history is critically ex-
amined and the confusion of the facts of physical science with
the facts of human society is dispelled, the public in a modern
democracy will always be at the mercy of the specialists and
experts, economic and political, and that is the ruin of the
universe. A layman is a man who suggests that a thing can be
done, and an expert is one who knows exactly how a thing
can't be done. Consequently, peace experts are people who try to
convince you that there can be no peace. Consequently, if you
leave peace in the hands of the experts, we shall have to go on
fighting forever.
Evidently, there is a difference between a physical fact and
a social or political fact. When we say carbon and oxygen
combine to form carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide, that
is a fact, ascertained and final. Take, however, a social fact,
as in a court trial, for example, in which the best means of
establishing evidence known to men are applied. The ques-
tion is whether a man is guilty or not. The facts are reviewed,
arguments rehearsed, and a summary is given by the judge.
A jury of twelve sits and deliberates and a verdict is delivered,
and the accused is pronounced "guilty" or "not guilty." But
the fact of his guilt is evidently different from the fact of
carbon dioxide. Probably seven jurors have believed he is guilty
and five have believed him innocent, whereas it is impossible
by a vote among scientists to pronounce a substance carbon
monoxide or carbon dioxide. In strictly scientific terms, the
"fact" of his guilt would be no more than a fair surmise or
hypothesis, on fairly ample or insufficient grounds. The differ-
ence is that the natural scientist can reserve judgment on a
piece of substance or a phenomenon, whereas in human affairs
a decision, a choice, has to be made at a given date.
Again in human affairs, an individual fact may be ascer-
DEFENSE OF THE MOB 97
tained or established scientifically, but a social fact is always
an inference, like the jury's verdict of "guilty" or "not guilty."
Of course, if a man commits a murder in Times Square and he
is caught in the act, that is a fact* even a scientific fact. Un-
fortunately, the "facts" which our diplomats and experts tell
us they "have" are not of this order, but are primarily judg-
ments and evaluations of great social forces of a highly complex
nature. Such facts are always many-sided and multi-colored
and open to the most diverse interpretations.
But we are confused; we dare not trust ourselves. Who dares
challenge the experts' opinions on India, or on the handling of
North African affairs? Is Gandhi an appeaser, or is he a saint?
Were the French people of North Africa for Darlan or De
Gaulle? How can we people ever know? Is it not the part of
wisdom to reserve judgment? No, the people's instinct is al-
ways right, for the people always rely on first principles. For
nothing is plain in this world except first principles. Further-
more, there are no facts of history that any man ever compre-
hends in their entirety. Listen to Robert Murphy and to a
correspondent from North Africa, and you know it can never
be proved whether the "people" who were for Darlan are the
royalist rich refugees or the real people of France. Statesmen
can publish their memoirs and journalists can record conversa-
tions with all classes of people, and you may be sure that social
"facts" e.g., the prevalent sentiment in North Africa and how
it may be brought to light by a strong leadership and what are
the psychological repercussions in France of alternate policies-
are a blending of judgments, prejudices/ and piecemeal in-
formation. Such facts of history are generally as clear to the
mind of the average diplomat as the surface of the moon is to
the naked eye. One swears that there is a rabbit, another that
there is a monkey, and still another that there is a frog in the
moon. It is of such facts the diplomats speak when they tell
you they have "all" of them. The fact is, the poor mortals
sitting in their mouse holes or debating about the rabbit, the
98 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
monkey, and the frog are as confused about them as we are.
In fact, they are more confused by the steady gazing and
squinting at the moon. So when they try to shut you up by
saying, "I tell you it is a rabbit I know," you -should give them
the satisfaction of their pride and self-respect, but keep for
yourself a healthy suspicion that their eyes have been somewhat
exercised over it. You should reserve for yourself the first prin-
ciples, which are that there are lights and shadows on the
moon, and that Darlan and Peyrouton and all Vichyites are
the shadows while the people of France are the light. If you
say right is right and wrong is wrong, you may be sure that
you are right. You know you are the mob, and the mob is
always right, and be happy about it.
It has sometimes seemed to me that we don't need the Four
Freedoms, but only one Freedom Freedom from Humbug.
The supreme modern humbug is that the mere possession of
facts is a good excuse and justification for dispensing with prin-
ciples. Remember only one thing: the experts have all the facts,
while the people have all the judgment. This faith must not be
shaken, for when it is shaken, democracy falls into the hands
of the experts, and when democracy falls into the hands of
the experts, democracy just falls. For God speaks through the
people, and through the people alone.
I have a feeling that God always works through the mob.
The mob, after all, has a certain Divine Right. My inspiration
does not necessarily come from the Chinese Eoo\ of History,
which says, "God listens through the ears of the people 'and
speaks through the mouth of the people." It comes from an
intuitive insight and from my observation of history. When
the mob is resentful, it is God who is resentful. When the mob
is enraged, be sure God is enraged. When the mob is violent
and uses the guillotine, it is God who thinks it is time to be
violent and invent the guillotine. When the mob hesitates, it
is God who hesitates. And when the mob goes back to its
DEFENSE OF THE MOB 99
homes to pursue the daily business of life, it is God who is
happy.
Therefore when the public sentiment condemns a public
policy, it is God who condemns it. When public sentiment
revolts against Hitler's doctrine of power, it is God who revolts.
Only be sure that while God works with the mob, the devil
works through the experts and provides them with "all the
facts." Who can be sure that the "facts" which American offi-
cials have about North Africa are not ghosts in the cabinet
that the devil has put there by his magic? We all enjoy the
polite fables that in a department store the customer is always
right, in a monarchy the king is always right, and in a democ-
racy the Foreign Office is always right. For the people believe
in honest dealings and the principles of right; diplomats prowl
in secret like owls at night, and are happiest in darkness. The
struggle between the people and the diplomats in any nation
is, and must always be, the struggle between God and the devil,
between the powers of darkness and of light. Spell "Cliveden"
backward, and you will find a devil in it.
It was not the people of England and France who crucified
the Spanish Loyalists and put them in concentration camps;
it was their governments that did it. It was not the people of
England and France who set up the Non-intervention Com-
mittee and connived at Hitler's and Mussolini's open interven-
tion; it was their governments. The only real "facts" in the
situation are that the Cliveden set of England and the Lavals
of France feared and hated Communism more than they feared
and hated Hitler, It was not the people of America who em-
bargoed the supply of oil to Republican Spain; it was the
Government of the United States of America that did it. It was
not the people of England who gave Japan a free hand in
Manchuria and Mussolini a free hand in Ethiopia; it was the
public officials of the League of Nations who did it. It is not
the people who wish to delay definition of freedom for the
ioo BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
people of the earth, after the war and say "Win the war first";
it is the governments that are doing so.
I am not convinced that all the idiots lived in the past and
the great extraordinary minds live only in the present. History
has repeatedly proved governments to have been stupid and
wrong and the moral instinct of the people to have been right.
If the governments could be wrong in the past decade, they
can be wrong now. Be a gadfly, therefore,, and sting the govern-
ments.
But it is almost a law of human nature that we have all the
rights and privileges to sting a dead statesman, like Neville
Chamberlain, but not the living great of this earth. When the
harm is done and belongs to the past decades, when the suffer-
ings and wrongs of the people are mere memories, pointing
out mistakes is a luxury of the reminiscent historian whose
voice is calm and tinged with an exquisite regret. When the
mistakes are being committed before our eyes, to point out the
mistakes and errors of the living great is to arouse all the ire
of the red-hot patriots.
In a democracy, however, there is always hope. For leader-
ship in a democracy always consists in marking time and being
pushed by the people from behind. There the great leader
stands, with a glad eye cast on the right and a twinkling eye
on the left, while he marks time with his steps. If he is pushed
hard enough from the right, he totters to the left, and if he is
pushed hard enough from the left, he totters to the right. Only
thus is he able to lead the people. And if he is successfully
pushed in the direction we want him to go, we acclaim him a
"great man." That is why I love democracy, for I enjoy pushing
around our leaders, and why I detest tyrants, for I resent being
pushed around. There is hope yet in democracy, for if we the
people push hard enough this time, out of this war will yet
emerge one of the greatest leaders of democracy. Someday a
White Paper will be published, and like the old forgetful actor
who resented the prompter's voice during the performance, it
DEFENSE OF THE MOB 101
will say to the people after the show, "You presumptuous,
meddlesome fool! I knew perfectly well all the time what I
was doing." And the people will again say to him like the
prompter, "Of course, you did. You were, as always, perfectly
magnificent, Horatio!"
That is why I am writing this book, to do a little prompting
and gadfly-stinging and pushing our great leaders toward their
inevitable Destiny and their Niche in History, And when the
victory is over, they will smile upon us from the stage with a
triumphal smile, and we shall acclaim them from below, and
they will wave their hats in return. But in applauding them,
we shall be applauding ourselves and we shall be feeling happy
that they have been gladly pushed in our direction. For if
democracy has any real meaning, it is that it is we the people
who shall have won the war let the applause go to our
illustrious, extraordinary great minds.
Besides this unhealthy tendency to hand over the government
of a nation to an impersonal, anonymous political elite, there is
another purely political device by which the will of the com-
mon people can be easily defeated or circumvented even in a
modern democracy. As I watch the interplay of public opinion
and government policy in the foremost modern republic, the
United States of America, it is interesting to note that it is en-
tirely possible for a handful of men, some known and some un-
known, to get around the will of the people, to carry on with no
foreign policy, or even with a foreign policy directly contradic-
tory to the public sentiment of the people. Even with the facili-
ties of a free press, it always takes considerable time for the
public to catch up to what the government is doing or not
doing. This .results in a time lag between public opinion and
policy, of six months or a year; but by proper application of a
device, this time lag can be made to cover several years.
As this time lag between the will of the people and a nation's
effective policy is not only natural but has become quite a fea-
102 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
ture of modern republics, let us study some instances and see
how it works. People may be puzzled about how the popular
will of American democracy for aid to China could have been
so successfully and adroitly parried over six years. The working
of this device will enlighten us. It always took about a year for
the public to catch on to what President Roosevelt was doing
and not doing, and for President Roosevelt to catch on to pub-
lic intolerance of the situation. And here I should make it clear
that, as a foreigner, I have, as a matter of general courtesy, no
right to criticize any government not my own in regard to its
domestic issues and policies. I do think, however, that among
allies at war, every citizen has the right and the duty to criti-
cize the conduct of allied governments in matters that concern
the common war, and particularly in matters that concern and
affect the war in his own country. I further think that such
mutual criticism is not only permissible, but decidedly healthy,
and preferable to a false sense of courtesy. Only in the same
spirit in which I would welcome criticism from Englishmen
and Americans of such conduct of the Chinese Government as
affects the common war, would I presume to say things about
foreign governments in matters that directly affect my own
country. In fact, I should be highly appreciative if an Allied
citizen would point out wherein the conduct of the Chinese
Government is slowing down the war with Japan and, by such
frank criticism, lessen the cost of Chinese lives before the war
with Japan is won. I believe true international understanding
can be based only on such a frank and healthy exchange of
opinion.
When the public was sufficiently aroused over the shipping
of iron and oil to Japan to bomb Chinese women and children,
after this had been going on for four years, it was time to take
some action. A "license" system was invented and the public
was lulled into silence, on the assumption that the license sys-
tem was meant to operate in restricting oil and iron to an ag-
gressor. It took fully a year for the knowledge to penetrate into
DEFENSE OF THE MOB 103
the public consciousness that every license the Japanese applied
for was granted by the State Department and that the total of
oil shipped to Japan had increased three times instead of di-
minishing. The public reserved judgment because the State
Department had "all the facts" and reserved them for their
own knowledge. In time, this was exposed and stopped.
Then the Burma Road was permitted to be closed. Public
sentiment wanted the supplies to China continued, and Presi-
dent Roosevelt therefore announced that America "would find
the means" to replace the Burma Road. The public was lulled
into silence again on the assumption that adequate air trans-
port was being provided, or at least planned, and the line of
propaganda was put out that air transport, sufficiently devel-
oped, could carry the same volume as the Burma Road. As late
as January, 1943, President Roosevelt tried to lull the public by
stating a literal truth, that the air transport was carrying into
China as much as ever traversed the Burma Road. This literal
truth had the ring of a Pond's Cold Cream advertisement: "She
is engaged. She uses Pond's." No one dared to specify the ton-
nage carried in; but I knew, and many Chinese at Kunming
and correspondents in India knew. The people did not catch on
to what President Roosevelt meant till a month or two later.
Now the public knows it. Now the scandalous situation is con-
ceded; something has got to be done. If an airplane can carry
one pair of slippers into China, ten airplanes can carry ten
pairs. But no, the propaganda line is completely reversed. Presi-
dent Roosevelt and others completely contradicted what he had
said a year ago. It is being drummed into our ears that the
Himalayas are too high, every plane has to carry its return fuel,
there are always rains and storms, and only a land route can be
satisfactory. Some air transports will of course be added to
pacify the public, and to be able to say we are flying in more
"than the last month for which complete reports are available/'
But we must wait for the reopening of the Burma Road.
The public is lulled into silence once more by the assumption
104 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
that plans for recapture of the Burma Road have already been
set. Besides., General Wavell started the march toward Akyab
unilaterally to silence the demand for action in Burma. Now
we are in for another lag, and it will not be till a year from
now that the public will realize there is no plan and no date
for concerted action in Burma fully a year after China was
cut off. The public does not know that concerted action is
necessary and Burma cannot be recaptured without the co-oper-
ation of the British Navy in the Bay of Bengal President Roose-
velt said we would help China as quickly as the Lord will let
us. The public does not know and President Roosevelt did not
explain that the "Lord's" name is Churchill and his first name
is Winston. It will take a year before the idea seeps in.
Anyway, while the American people are both friendly to
China and sincere in their wish to help China in this war, the
policy and acts of their Government are such as to suggest
complete indifference in the whole six years of the China War,
both before and after Pearl Harbor. Casablanca also condemned
China to at least four more years of intense suffering and
strangulation with the same cold indifference. The fact that
China was the first to fight the Fascists, that she has fought
single-handed for six years already, that she is condemned to
a total of ten years of war with Japan, that in the coming four
years, the Chinese people will be going through an unbearable
and steadily mounting inflation, general malnutrition, and a
double economic blockade by her enemy on the east and her
friends on the southwest these facts have not bothered the
heads of western democracies. But, as I told my people in 1940,
we must distinguish between the American government and
the American people, even as we must distinguish between the
German government and the German nation.
It is fair to point out here that if the same dilatory tactics
applied to the problem of getting supplies to China had been
applied to the problem of getting scrap iron and oil to Japan,
it could have been equally successful, and Japan might now
DEFENSE OF THE MOB 105
have a dozen million gallons less of gasoline and seven million
tons less of first-grade scrap iron to fight America with. On
the other hand, if getting supplies to China had been handled
with half the alacrity and cheerfulness with which permits
for shipments of scrap iron and oil to Japan were granted by
the American State Department, and if there had been such a
smooth-running machine for giving aid to China since 1939
as for giving aid to Japan, China would now already have the
striking offensive power to drive the Japanese into the sea
without the sacrifice of American soldiers' lives.
It should be clearly understood that I am not one given to
grumbling; when other powers help China, I do not hesitate
to express my appreciation. In the first years of the China War,
Russia gave China supplies cheerfully, speedily, and in gen-
erous volume, and Germany herself gave supplies to China
cheerfully, speedily, and in generous volume. What had to be
done was done efficiently. Particularly orders from Germany
arrived in China in characteristic German fashion, with every
detail worked out and jprovided for, with full repair parts and
ammunition and oil for a full year's supply and upkeep for
each unit, and with blueprints, instructions, and assembly tech-
nicians. When the hundred American P 40*5 were given to
China, they were deprived of their radio sets, and a Chinese
company had to cast about and order their own* And if you
knew the story of how China was to obtain an assembly man
for an airplane that arrived somewhere in India, you would
weep/After September, 1939, China could not get a hairpin
from Washington without British consent; everywhere she
ran up against British priority.
In time of war, there is also an artificial time lag, for, ac-
cording to our rulers, anything except the arrival of the morn-
ing sun in the east is a "military secret." There is always a
sensational hush-hush about something being cooked up in the
private chambers inside long dark corridors where grown-up
106 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
men move about respectfully and therefore silently and dare
only whisper* Like a pale, tender, ailing infant, the foreign
policy of a nation may be spoken of only in a whisper, and the
slightest draft of public knowledge will blow out its tender
young life. Poor infant, there it lies swaddled in stifling clothes
in an overheated suffocating room, and its father is a man-
diplomat slithering about in white gloves and patent-leather
pumps with perspiration on his head. Oh, diplomat-father,
hand back the baby to its mother, the people. Pull the blinds
up, so that she may see better* Perhaps the thing in the swad-
dling clothes being hatched out in the darkness of diplomatic
and "military" secrecy is only a squeaky little mouse or a young
chipmunk.
Wilson was right: there should be no secret diplomacy. And
Wilson was wrong: there can be no open diplomacy. Let's take
a look at his "facts" and see how a foreign policy is hatched
out in the dark without the help of the "mob."
For thus goes the day of the diplomat. Properly ensconced
on the top floor and comfortably inaccessible to the public, he
sits in his hard, upright, high-backed chair that used to belong
to the nephew of Louis Napoleon. On the side of the room
there is a long, plain table that comes from a very old Aragon
family of Spain. The room is richly and, what is more im-
portant, heavily curtained. There is an atmosphere of complete
silence, broken by tic'k c tic'k$ from the secretary's room. It is
insulated from the world, and yet it is not; there is on the
other hand, an air of intense excitement and power. In a spe-
cially built enclosure is a wireless telephone that will put him
in instant touch with some distant continent.
And this happened: He arrived at half-past nine. The safe
and tight-lipped stenographer who had looked beautiful twenty
years ago tiptoed in and whispered, "C. from Brazil has an
appointment with you and has already arrived." "Show him in
to Room C," said the diplomat. "The First Secretary is whisper-
ing there with the Bishop who has a message from the Vati-
DEFENSE OF THE MOB 107
can." "Room B, then/' said the diplomat. "Room B is also
occupied. The military attache is whispering there with Cap-
tain John of Soimioveria." "Take him to Room A." The elderly
secretary's brows lifted and she replied, with the pencil on her
lips, "Are you sure, sir, you want to talk to him there? It faces
the east and the morning sun shines directly into the room.
You know only the young stenographers see their callers there,
and it may be inconvenient." The first great problem of the
day had already come up, but the day was young and he would
not be upset. He gave the final instruction, "Show him right in
here, then!"
The secretary tiptoed out and C. of Brazil tiptoed in. You
could have heard a pin drop, and the diplomat heard his own
stuffed shirt perceptibly move against his underwear as he
breathed. The conversation began with "It is a bright day,
isn't it?" and ended with a low whisper, "Ah, very interesting,
how very interesting!"
The second and the third interviews ended with more "Ah,
very interesting's" in still lower whispers. The world in fact
was getting very interesting, made more interesting by a wire-
less telephone call from Stockholm. Now it became positively
amazing. He called Ankara. It was now astonishing. Never in
one day had he obtained so much interesting information or
learned so many secrets. He remembered having read some-
where a Chinese proverb, "A gentleman never steps outside his
threshold and knows all that is happening under heaven," and
appreciated its obvious truth. He was sure he knew all the facts
in fact, he knew too many. He had known all the facts all
along. What to do with them was the problem.
About five o'clock in the afternoon, he received another secret
report from Berne, which his secretaries had just decoded.
Again he was muttering, "How very interesting!" when he was
unpleasantly reminded that there was a press conference set at
5:15. What was he to say? That worried him very much. He
must not let the cat out of the bag. "Can't you tell them I've a
io8 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
sore throat?" he asked the secretary, really seeking her advice.
"That would be a poor excuse. Oh, you big boy, you know
what to say," said Dorothy adoringly. "I have so many facts
that I am utterly confused bewildered is the word/' he mut-
tered, still searching for light. Surveying his well-parted hair,
Dorothy said, "The inside of your brain appears less orderly
than the outside Courage, sir, you have handled the rabble
before. Broad generalities are always safe. And whenever it be-
comes awkward, there's the war . . /' Dorothy's voice lifted
toward the end.
Armed with the air o military secrecy, he went forth to
battle. He never failed in combat. At the critical moment, he
barked, "I know all the facts." The argument was unanswer-
able. The diplomat had all the facts, the press did not have
them ; the public felt beaten in an unfair game. He could not
tell the facts, moreover except in a White Paper to be issued
four years hence which the press correspondents would be at
liberty to challenge then if they liked So another day began
and ended, as many days had begun and ended, with a whisper
in his heart, "Ah, how very interesting!"
It had been interesting like this years before. The diplomat
had all the facts in 1931 during the Manchurian Incident. He
had all the facts during the Spanish War, He had all the facts
during the war in Ethiopia. He had all the facts when Hitler
marched into the Ruhr district. He had the facts at Munich.
He had the facts when the Panay was bombed, when Hainan
was occupied, when Japan moved into Indo-China, when the
Pearl Harbor attack was being planned. Alas, nobody questions
the facts. But what did he do with them. ?
But if the people are kept behind the facts> events move al-
ways ahead of diem. Without the first principles which the
common people have, every new fact and every new event
bring a new confusion. Let's deal only with the facts and not
with the first principles win the war first But North Africa
was invaded and created interesting problems without first
DEFENSE OF THE MOB 109
principles to meet them. The Russians drove the Nazis from
Stalingrad. There was a new problem. The Russians drove past
Kursk and Kharkov. The shadow of Russia's rising power
loomed larger. The Russians reached Rostov and passed Rzhev.
The problem pressed closer home. Will the Russians quit at
the frontiers? What a problem! Or will they advance to Ber-
lin? A worse problem still! The exiled government of Poland
has split with Sikorski. What an interesting fact! Czechoslo-
vakia's mind is divided. Another interesting fact! Stalin's order
of the day a fact, yet not so interesting because the public al-
ready knows it. Von Papen in Ankara. What an interesting
fact! Stalin is urging the Polish guerrillas to start fighting,
while the exiled governments in London are urging them not
to fight and waste their strength for the time being. Another
interesting fact! Hush, husk. ... So the facts keep chasing
after the week's rising and fast developing events, the diplo-
mats keep chasing after the facts, and the people keep chasing
after the diplomats, and the public is always six months or
twelve months behind. And our leaders still say, Win the war
first! Deal only with the facts!
Facts are always complicated; first principles are always sim-
ple. Without first principles, the facts overwhelm us and must
continue to overwhelm us, straight to the day when the Allies
shall sit down at the Peace Conference table. Facts are un-
knowable, the only things we can be certain about are prin-
ciples and ideas. That is why men acting without principles
must always be confused* The principle of gravitation harmo-
nizes all heavenly motions; the principle of love harmonizes all
earthly growth; and only the principles of sincerity and justice
can solve the problems of world politics. The war calls for a
moral leadership, a leadership that rests on first principles. It
calls for a man with the mind of Lincoln, with its simplicity
and its strength. But we are so busy throwing up and laying
bricks to build the second and third floors that we are per-
fectly contented to think about the foundation afterward. And
no BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
we are surprised that the bricks we laid on with so much pa-
thetic effort yesterday always threaten to go out of plumb today.
And so the problem of Russia frightens us. The problem of
Poland frightens us. The problems of Rumania and Czecho-
slovakia and the Baltic States frighten us. The problems of
India and Hong Kong frighten us. Above all the application
of the Atlantic Charter frightens us. We had meant to win the
war first, and talk about the peace afterward. But time does
not wait, and peace refuses to be kept waiting. Time waits for
no man, not even for democratic leaders. Meanwhile we can
only pray that God will temper the wind of events to our
shorn diplomat-lamb.
13
THE FUTURE OF ASIA
UNFORTUNATELY, God will not temper the wind. Poor
lamb, you'd better grow your wool fast.
I see nothing but starvation and chaos and bloodshed in
Asia. I know our policy in Asia will grow into a disaster, with
mounting confusion before the war is over. In the war coun-
cils of today,, there is a blind spot, and that spot is Asia. The
same absent-mindedness that characterized the situation sug-
gested in General Arnold's speech at Madison Square Garden
on March 6, 1943, will continue to characterize the Allied pol-
icy in Asia. As we refuse to think about postwar problems now,
so we refuse to think about Asia until the war is won- General
Arnold said, "Six weeks ago at Casablanca ... I headed for
the Far East. Before departure, President Roosevelt expressed
himself briefly, 'China's ports are closed, the Japanese hold the
Burma Road. How can we increase the air tonnage carried in ?
THE FUTURE OF ASIA in
How can we build a larger combat force?'" I thought that
President Roosevelt had known that China's ports were closed
a year before Casablanca. Thoughtfulness of this type really
resembles forgetfulness. I thought this must have occurred to
anyone who ever spent a minute's thought on the strategy of
fighting Japan from China. How could the most obvious fact
on the map of the Orient be forgotten, and why up to now is
there no plan, and no wish for a plan* for China's partnership
even in the war against Japan?
Meanwhile, General Arnold in the same speech made it
amply clear that increase of air transport will be difficult, for
supplying the China-India front means taking planes out of
the other fronts. There will be more planes sent to China as a
gesture to pacify the American public, so that the public will
be lulled into silence, but the basic policy will be unchanged.
Everything, we shall be told, will depend upon the reopening
of the Burma Road, but we are awfully sorry we cannot spare
the British Navy to land troops at Rangoon. The difficult we
do immediately, the impossible a little later on. China belongs
to the impossible. And we adore the Chinese.
A hurricane will blow. President Roosevelt announces the
intention to use China as a base to invade Japan the only
logical base, but between that announcement of intention and
actual planning, there will be another time lag of years. Events
will happen and the complex situation will become more com-
plex still, while we say that nothing in the Far East matters
until Hider is defeated/The public realizes now that the cut-
ting off of the Burma Road meant the isolation of China and
agrees that London was stupid in not permitting Chinese
troops to come into Burma and defend her own vital line, but
the public will not admit the stupidity of continuing the pres-
ent policy of dilly-dallying until either Kunming or Calcutta
falls. For Japan was listening when President Roosevelt de-
clared China as the only base for invasion of Japan. Besides,
ii2 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
the Japanese know the map of the Orient pretty well, even if
the others don't.
Meanwhile, where is the mechanism for concerted Allied
action in Asia? General Doolittle bombed Japan in spite of the
request of the Government of China that it be delayed a month
in order to give time for strengthening the Chinese ground de-
fense of her air bases near Kinhwa. The biggest air base in all
Asia with underground concrete hangars was needlessly sacri-
ficed. General Wavell started unilaterally the march toward
Akyab without consulting Chungking. Where is the mecha-
nism for concerted action? And why must China's role in 1943
be decided at Casablanca without her representation? And so
we must go deeper to the root of the matter.
The Chinese people as a whole are now convinced that the
blockade of supplies for China is political and not military. If
any doubt in Chinese minds existed, it was completely dis-
pelled by Winston Churchill's speech of March 21, 1943, The
situation had clarified, England was feeling confident and
strong. On March 17, four days before, the British Prime Min-
ister had made it emphatically clear that "the administration
of British colonies" including India, Burma, the Malay States,
the Straits Settlements, and Hong Kong "must continue to be
the sole responsibility of Great Britain." Now he made it
plainer than ever that Asia was to be kept down as a system of
colonies. The defeat of Hitler was to be the "grand climax of
the war/* after which only would begin a "new task/' the war
with Japan and reconquest of Asia. Then and then only, with
China kept isolated for years perhaps till after 1945 would
begin the "rescue of China" from the predicament into which
the London government had deliberately and according to pur-
pose thrown China by ordering the Burma Road closed a sec-
ond time. A "rescued" China then would not be a "leading
victorious power/' In fact, there will be no "leading" or "great
victorious" Asiatic "power" at all at the end of the war, so that
the nest of White Imperialism will be safe. A "Council of
THE FUTURE OF ASIA 113
Asia" will be set up, with "our Dutch Allies" and presumably
the French participating. We may be quite sure that at this
"Council of Asia" the ruler of the greatest number of Asiatic
colonies will naturally have the greatest representation, for
the maintenance of "law, justice, and humanity,"
Now everything fits into a pattern. The blockade of supplies
for China since 1939 can be understood. The closing of the
Burma Road and the weakening of China can be understood.
The refusal to let China have an air force of her own can be
perfectly understood. From the point of view of imperialist
strategy, it is superb and masterly. The Empire of Queen Vic-
toria had no better premier and no more devoted servant, with
greater sagacity, stronger courage, more far-sighted vision, and
a better political genius.
But why this scare about China and about Asia at all ? Asia
is frightening the Anglo-Saxon powers. By all principles of
justice, she need not, but by all principles of power politics, she
does frighten them a great deal. The future of Asia at the peace
table and after the war seems to me amazingly simple, if we
follow the principles of justice. On the other hand, I admit the
same problem looks as complicated as that of Middle Europe
by all the known principles of power politics. In fact, it can
look so complicated that it makes a true partnership of China
at the Allied War Council impossible. By bungling, Asian
politics can be made complicated enough to look like, and
actually become, a nightmare.
Fear, I am told, is one of the greatest driving powers of
mankind. Ladies are afraid of mice, diplomats are afraid of
birdies, and I am afraid of diplomats. So why shouldn't the
diplomats be scared of a mighty Asia? Professor Spykman of
Yale, for instance, is terribly afraid of a strong and united
China and of a united and strong federated Europe, and I am
terribly afraid of Professor Nicholas John Spykman.
What have we got in Asia as we picture the peace ahead of
us? Japan has been the upsetting factor. But Japan as a
ii 4 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
menace will have been eliminated after the war. What then
have we got in Asia to settle ? There is China, a great pacific
power, indoctrinated with principles of human, democratic,
peaceful living that are very close to the American tempera-
ment. There is India, determined to achieve her freedom,
which is nobody's business to interfere with, led by a political
party as strong^ as truly national in character, and as well or-
ganized as the Chinese Kuomintang, and by as wise, capable,
patriotic, inspiring, democratic leaders as Chiang Kai-shek.
China and India have lived as neighbors without one war in
the past four thousand years*
There is no background of racial hatreds, suspicions, wars,
or heritage of national antagonisms such as we find in Europe,
and the peoples of Asia as a whole are by nature not half as
aggressive as the Europeans. Russia will not fight China, nor
will China fight Russia. To the Chinese and to the Americans,
the future of Asia is simple. There is no problem for the
United States, because the United States will let the Philip-
pines go. Other people's jewels don't keep you awake if you
have no greed in your heart. No insoluble problems exist if the
Christian powers will let Malaya, the Dutch Indies, Siam, Indo-
China, Burma, and India go. All of them aspire to self-govern-
ment, and all of them will give trouble to Europe not when
they are masters, but only when they are to be exploited as
slaves. The moment you covet any of their territories and their
tin and rubber, however, your conscience will irresistibly com-
pel you to station troops there to prevent communal strife and
bloodshed, and then all your troubles begin. But whose blood-
shed ? Will the Javanese or the Indians or the Burmese threaten
the United States or England? Will not blood be shed because
the westerners will wrangle and fight for their tin and rubber?
On such a simple basis, it is possible to take China into im-
mediate and equal partnership in the war, laying plans together
and fighting together and dreaming together for some future
better world. Americans want to kill the Japs, and the Chinese
THE FUTURE OF ASIA 115
want to kill the Japs. America hasn't got a Hong Kong or a
Dutch Indies to worry about, and China hasn't got a worry
about Indo-China, or Siam, or Burma. China wants to recover
her own territory, and does not want others' territory. America
wants no territory at all, not even Kulangsu, my childhood
home. So let's get together and just kill the Japs as fast as we
can, and we don't have to worry if we lick the Japs too soon
or defeat Hirohito before we defeat Hitler. Some may want to
bomb the Japanese Emperor's palace, and others may not But
these are minor and inconsequential issues that need not make
us look beneath the bed before going to sleep at night.
That is the simple picture, a picture of achievable human
justice and of a f air prospect of lasting peace in Asia, at least
as fair a prospect as there has been in South America since the
downfall of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires. For peace
is possible in Asia. Peace is possible in North America and
South America. Peace is possible in Africa.
Peace is not possible only in Europe. And peace in Asia will
become impossible only when Asia assumes the European pat-
tern of balance of power. Of all the five continents of the earth,
only Europe has not yet learned to live at peace. Europe is the
focus of infection of this earth, and imperialism is the toxin
by which it spreads until the whole world is so sick, so sick.
Now for some good old confusion as some of our Allied
leaders will have it. If you knew the whole story you would
not eat a meal in peace, or sleep a wink at night. If I had to
look beneath the bed every night, I wouldn't want to live. But
there are people whose minds are otherwise constituted. Not
one thug, but possibly three or four, are hiding beneath the
diplomats' beds every night. There are great humbugs and they
beget little humbugs and they will dance attendance on us all
our life, if we will believe the diplomats, until we ourselves get
into the diplomats' proper frame of mind.
I have said that facts are always complicated and first prin-
n6 BETWEEN TEA'RS AND LAUGHTER
ciples are the only things we can be certain about. Let's now
leave the principles and go after the facts.
The first feeling is one of terrible uncertainty, for we cannot
be certain of one knowable fact. What are Russia's intentions ?
What are China's intentions? As diplomats, we should be pre-
pared for the worst. If China becomes independent and strong,
will that not set a bad example for India ? Are you so sure
China has no imperialist designs ? Do not be too sure, if China
has an air force of her own, and especially if Japan is com-
pletely eliminated. So let's see to it that she will not have even
a baby air force of her own when peace comes, and perhaps it
is even wise not to knock out Japan completely. What precau-
tions will the white powers have to take in Asia so that the
white man will not be completely driven out of the continent?
Besides, what will happen if by any mishap we defeat Japan
too early, before Hitler is liquidated and before Europe's
troubles are solved? Will not American influence predominate
in Asia as in North Africa at present? Will not the Dutch
Indies and Burma be left very much to themselves, and a little
truculent when we settle with Hitler? What will happen to
Singapore and to Hong Kong when the Japanese evacuate? . . .
The problem of the colonies is extremely complex. Must one
really decide now whether Britain is to keep India, Burma,
Malay, Hong Kong? Either "yes" or "no" to this question is
very awkward. And if the British must keep their colonies,
how are we to force the Dutch to give up theirs ? Is it not
better for war morale in this War for Freedom if we do not
talk about the problem of the colonies until the war is won,
when a fighting morale will no longer be necessary?
As a matter of fact, China and England are already heading
for conflict. Churchill has made it amply clear and definite
that he is not "grovelling," and that the "administration of
British colonies" will be the "sole responsibility" of Britain,
which is to tell America to keep her hands off. On the other
hand, Chiang Kai-shek has made it equally definite and clear
THE FUTURE OF ASIA 117
that China does not covet others' territory, but wants all her
own territory back. These two policies must come to a clash
around Hong Kong. China wishes to negotiate on Kowloon,
a leased territory opposite Hong Kong, like other leased terri-
tories in Shanghai and Tientsin. England refuses to open nego-
tiations. It is thought that dilly-dallying is the best way of treat-
ing the problem until it explodes by itself. I have no doubt that
if Britain does not return Hong Kong to China, this problem
of Hong Kong alone will burst the Peace Conference. I know
that the Chinese people are willing to go to war with England
over Hong Kong, even if the Chinese government won't. Chi-
nese people have freely expressed the opinion that five million
of our soldiers have not died to keep the British in Hong
Kong, the booty of the Opium War, and possibly the second
brightest jewel in the English Crown.
But really the picture is more complicated than you think.
There is Russia, the great bugbear of the democracies. Every-
thing is global nowadays, and we have to think globally. Rus-
sia refuses to declare war on Japan, and she knows what she
is doing. Japan will be her trump card, and she will not want
to play it, but keep it in her hand. What if Russia combines
with Hitler and Japan ? And what if it is to Russia's advantage
to keep Japan in the war while she dictates what she wants
to Europe? The thought occurs to us that if Russia can court
Japan, why should not some other ally do the same, because
after all Hitler is our immediate enemy? . . . Besides, if
Russia wants to keep Japan to knock us out, why shouldn't
we keep Japan to knock out Russia? Will not the elimination
of Japan enhance Russia's power in the East? * . . Will China
not double-cross us and negotiate with Japan? No, that is one
thing certain at least, thank God! China is honest and depend-
able, and therefore let's ignore her. . . . Shell have to take
what we choose to give her. ... If Russia would only say
something it keeps one on tenterhooks! Besides, there is the
possibility that Russia may combine with China and India and
n8 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
control the geopoliticians' Eurasian "Heartland" and half of
the world's population. That will be the geopolitician's night-
mare come true! Oh, why doesn't Russia say something?
And so like Alice in Wonderland,
the fears grow bigger and
bigger even as the tones
fall lower and lower
until the fears
themselves take
on the shape of
a mouse's tail
the ugly, filthy
thing. Anyway
look, Russia
is such
a big
power
China
also
is go-
ing
to be
a big
pow-
er
you
can-
not
af-
ford
to
let
Ind-
ia
go
THE FUTURE OF ASIA 119
But above all, China herself is the biggest problem. The
deeper tendencies of power-political thinking, or statesmanlike
foresight according to power politics, already pose an insol-
uble difficulty. As Professor Spykman warns us, "A modern,
vitalized and militarized China of 450,000,000 people is going
to be a threat not only to Japan, but also to the position of the
Western Powers in the Asiatic Mediterranean." "The preserva-
tion of the balance of power will then be necessary not only
because of our interest in strategic raw materials [rubber and
tin] but because of what unbalanced power in this region could
do to the rest of the world." 18 Hence, according to Professor
Spykman, in order to set up such a highly desirable balance of
power in the Far East, "the United States will have to adopt a
similar protective policy toward Japan" as she adopts toward
England. However, we are caught at present in the contradic-
tory and illogical position of helping China, our potential
enemy, to crush Japan, our potential friend in the Far East
This is confusion worse confounded. Hence we must help
China to be strong enough not to be completely knocked out
of the war, but not strong enough to stand on her feet after
the war and challenge others, while we must crush Japan
enough to win the war and not crush her enough so that she
cannot revive and recover her power.
If further confusion is desired, I can offer some. Even Profes-
sor Spykman's proposal of planning for a half-strong and half-
weak China and a half-strong and half-weak Japan does not
insure complete security. That these two nations may be so
cunningly manipulated that they will keep on fighting each
other and exhausting each other for the West's benefit is con-
ceded. It is conceivable, however, that decades from now, Japan
and China may one day stupidly wake up to the Professor's
clever trick, and realize that they have been set upon one
another by the Yale Professor. Nothing so unites two enemies
as the knowledge that they have been the common victim of a
18 Nicholas John Spykman, America's Strategy and World Politics, p. 46*9.
120 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
tliird mischievous party. By the time Professor Spykman's
high politics prevail in the postwar world, nations will so groan
in disillusionment and the spirit of true world cooperation
will be such a forgotten thing that economic and political
autarchy will be the basic policy of every nation.
The combination of two half -strong nations may neverthe-
less produce one fully strong power. In fact, writers who insist
on Anglo-American domination of the Pacific areas are pro-
ceeding upon this theory. They must see to it that no rap-
prochement between Japan and China will ever be permitted.
This, however, can only be done by putting China under mili-
tary surveillance. On the other hand, China will equally de-
mand putting England under military surveillance because a
rapprochement between England and Germany is much more
likely than a rapprochement between Japan and China. It is
China's business to see that England and Germany do not get
together, because every time that happens, a military Germany
is resurrected and another World War is produced. China has
as much right to demand security in Europe as England has to
demand security in the Far East. . . . The Chinese are cour-
teous, but not fools. They do not play power politics, but when
others play it they understand it very well.
Such are the necessary and inevitable consequences of think-
ing on lines suggested by our power-politicians. These are they
who pride themselves on "realism" and call us, the people, who
believe in the other simple picture of the future' of Asia, de-
luded fools or visionaries. That is what the picture of the
future of Asia looks like in terms of power politics, when we
transfer our power-political thinking to Asia.
Such may be the "f acts" the diplomats are referring to when
they say they "know" them, or they may not. One thing is
certain, viz., that none of the above "facts" are known or know-
able. In the dark, anything that moves may be a mouse's tail.
In any case, these are facts which are yet to be produced as
consequences of our own acts and created by our own choice*
PEACE BY POWER 121
They are not the objective facts of physical science, and should
not share the same scientific prestige. But it is exactly on this
type of facts that diplomatic thinking is based, diplomatic
fears are generated, and the gall of diplomatic courage is being
ruined. It is on the basis of such unknown and unknowable
facts that the policy has been established that China must be
kept away from any Allied War Council, must be given no
air force of her own, and Japan must not be defeated too early,
and that a year and a half have elapsed after Pearl Harbor
without the Allies coming to a formulated co-ordinated strate-
gic plan for fighting Japan. It is on the basis of such generated
fears that we are prevented from fighting together and dream-
ing together for a better world.
The illiterate shepherds of Asia Minor two thousand years
ago heard or related that "Good will toward men" had some-
thing to do with "Peace on earth/* but the twentieth-century
man has advanced scientifically so far that he cannot see the
connection, and has descended into confusion. Did Confucius
not warn us, "A nation without faith cannot stand"? The same
is true of the world.
Ill SYMPTOMS
14
PEACE BY POWER
FROM here on, we'll leave the problem of the future of Asia,
and delve into the problem of the future of the postwar world.
Or rather, we shall never leave it, for the world is one, and
nowhere can you escape Asia. We shall probe from the surface
techniques of the offered solutions, deeper and deeper down
122 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
into the sores of men's thinking, until we find the rot within,
the despondency of spirit which darkens men's minds in this
generation and hangs over it like a shroud, and see, as with an
X-ray machine, the leprous growths and misformations which
disfigure the spiritual physiognomy of man of this age.
Ultimately, the problem of peace is the problem of the na-
ture of man. The issues of peace and war revolve upon the
questions, what man has made of man, and what man can
make of man, as Professor Hocking puts it. 19
Lest I be accused of inventing an imaginary bugaboo with
no relation to actual current postwar thinking and planning,
I must substantiate the picture.
The material evidence exists in rather uncomfortable abun-
dance. The Clarence Streits and Norman Angells are all not
so much for world co-operation as they are against American
isolation. Security and freedom and co-operation have been
lugged in to make the case for Anglo-American domination of
the world picture. The Lionel Gelbers and Stephen King-
Halls are unashamed in proclaiming either that this is a "war
for power" or that the world police must be an Anglo-Ameri-
can "peace force/' while other nationals in that police must
swear allegiance to the Commander-in~Chief and therefore to
the King of England and the President of the United States.
Ely Culbertson revels in the mathematics of an international
omtract bridge, while Stephen King-Hall does the same with
hif Anglo-American "peace force." All agree in a regretful
tone that some concession must be made to the non-English-
speaking powers, so that it may have the appearance of an
"international" world order. But there is no hiding the tone
of patronizing concession and regret.
I am proud of Harvard postwar thinking, of Professors Wil-
liam Ernest Hocking and Ralph Barton Perry and President
Conant. I admire the clear thinking and broad vision of Vice-
President Wallace and Wendell Willkie. But for every concrete
w William Ernest Hocking, What Man Can Ma\c of Man (Harper). -
PEACE BY POWER 123
proposal for building a postwar world structure genuinely in-
spired by the conception of a world brotherhood, there are at
least twtf based on power politics and the tacit assumption of
Anglo-American domination by force over the entire world.
There is a war about the peace going on now. For the
United States and her Allies are now standing at the cross-
roads: one leading to a sound and stable world order based on
equality and co-operation of all nations, and the other leading
to world mastery or world domination through sheer military
force by America in the exclusive company of Britain. These
two tendencies are basic and contradictory, but on the surface
at least world mastery must be passed off as world co-operati<Mi
or world federation, and so the two tend constantly to m^rge
and work for the progress and happiness of mankind. w;/f
Only once in a while do we find a Lionel Gelber who couie^
out definitely for a "war for power": "In reality the mnr Is
one for power for power of the Democracies before it %$ a
power for democracy itself" 20 Mr. Gelber is for the Versailles
Treaty "No new Versailles? No new Versailles for whom?"
He is for maintenance of the status quo, and regrets that even
Sumner Welles joins in the "vilification" of the status quo. He
is even for the future of humanity "belonging" to the two
Anglo-Saxon powers: "What must settle the future of mankind
is to whom it belongs and how it is used. In the hands of Ae
west, even though they falter, power will be employed 1 oni
fashion; in German hands, it will be employed in.anotii0/
This contrast so pleases him that he exclaims, ". . . none but
the frivolous still can wonder what the war is all about." Finally
Mr. Gelber pretends not to understand the "paradox," which he
regards as exceptionally "odd," which is "the tacit assumption
by friend and foe alike that to call it a struggle between rival
imperialisms is to belittle the Allied cause. ... It all depends
upon whose imperialism you are talking about," he shouts,
20 For this and following quotations* see Lionel Gelber: Peace by Power, pp. io
58-60, 68, 130, 140.
BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
gently reminding his readers that while an Italian imperialism
"would be execrable, the reinforcement of American imperial-
ism , . . mil be acclaimed by all levelheaded, free men every*
where." I thought when he wrote the word "level-headed/ 5 it
was sufficient recommendation of his point of view; the juxta-
position of "free men" there seems at the least tautological,
for by definition "free men everywhere" would acclaim im-
perialism anyway.
Mr. Gelber, I suspect, is young, or he is inspired; other ma-
ture heads are more cautious. Concessions are made, and will
be made, for the participation of powers other than the United
States and Britain in the world government and this always
in & condescending tone. On this most agree* Mr, Stephen
|ybg-Hall is more circumscribed ia explaining the existence
of in Anglo-American "peace force":
The British and American Governments would not
wish to deny to any power of goodwill the privilege of
partaking in the chastisement of the aggressor* All they
intend to do is to make themselves responsible for the
maintenance of a force large enough and efficient enough
in all circumstances to do the job, with or without assist-
ance. 21
* '' *
f Prd|essor Spykman speaks with scholarly caution in words,
S^Jjjpis without scholarly caution in thoughts, on the hege-
mony of England and America:
Both in England and in the United States, there is talk
of a world order based on American-British hegemony.
The theme appears in several variations, from Mr Streit's
Anglo-American union to looser forms of alliance and
entente. The Anglo-American Federalists present their
program as a first stage in the creation of a world federa-
a Stephen King-Hall: Total Victory, p. 319.
PEACE BY POWER
tion and they concede that other states, upon certificate
of good behavior, will eventually be permitted to join. The
fact remains, however, that in the meantime the union
is expected to function as a hegemony. 22
Professor Spykman was not the first enlightened modern to
think of this hegemony-widiin-federation idea; the Delian Con-
federacy under Pericles carried it out two thousand years ago,
to the complete destruction of all Greece.
But this is getting into tiresome arguments on generalities,
which level-headed men hate. Let's have some wizard figures.
Figures cleanse the air of our thought, for we are told they
make our thinking mathematical and exact, and that is after
all what a college education is for. The editor of the famous
King-Hall News Letters goes to the trouble of working out
some clear and awe-inspiring figures for us. Article 3 of "The
Anglo-American Proclamation to Mankind," to be issued by
the President of the United States and the English King reads:
Therefore the President and the King have undertaken
to establish a joint British-American Fleet and Air Force.
The strength of the Fleet will be in all respects three
times that of the next largest fleet afloat at any given
moment and not less than twice as strong as any combina-
tion of any other three forces*
Article 4 reads:
The strength of the Air Force will be not less than four
times as great in all respects as the next largest air force
and twice as strong as any possible combination of two
other air forces.
Article 7 reads:
Eighty per cent of the personnel of the British-American
9 Nicholas John Spykman: America's Strategy m World Politics, pp. 458-459.
126 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
Fleet and Air Force will be British and American citizens.
Foreign subjects shall be eligible to enlist ... up to a total
of 20 per cent of the whole establishment of each force.
Foreign subjects desirous of serving in the Peace Force will
be required to take an oath of loyalty to the Commander-
in-Chief of the branch of the Peace Force in which they
enlist. 23
Soul of Pericles again!
Suppose the modern Sparta would not agree? Mr. King-Hall
has a ready answer, which seems as simple as Hitler's own
arithmetic.
Provided the American and British Governments make
it clear that whatever those countries decide to do, the
English-speaking peoples intend, as it were, "to double the
number first thought of," we doubt whether the other
great Powers would take up the challenge in an arma-
ments race in which they were bound to be defeated.
Tell that to the United States Congress; tell it to the Marines!
The cutting up of the world between "English-speaking peo-
ples" and "non-English-speaking peoples" is now perfect God
always works with opposites, like electrons and protons* The
world cannot be thoroughly annihilated except by dividing
it into two big armed camps. Neither Germans, nor French-
men, nor Italians, nor Spaniards, nor Swedes, nor Czechs, nor
Poles, nor Russians, nor Chinese, nor Indians, nor Turks hap-
pen to speak English. What a thought! What obscenity of
mind!
We cannot escape history, nor can we learn from history.
a Stephen Kktg-Hall, Total Victory, p. 215.
A PHILOSOPHY OF PEACE 127
15
A PHILOSOPHY OF PEACE
THAT grown-up men today, well educated and well informed,
should talk and think in such simple-minded fashion is alarm-
ing. Perhaps God cuts short the span of animal and plant
life in order that the world may be perpetually young. Repro-
duction is merely God's method of perpetual rejuvenation of
the species. My mind is young yet in spite of my years will
someone answer for me the puzzling question: How can there
be a pile of dry gunpowder, a well-connected fuse, a box of
burning matches near by, and no explosion? It is rather the
Sphinx that is asking that question, and when anyone answers
it she will jump into the sea. I am willing to be the hostage
for it. . * .
The question which we must solve once for all, by some
sort of new philosophy of peace, which we may not leave un-
solved, is really this: does Force work? All over the world
men and women should ponder this question. If Force is thor-
oughgoing, it arouses resentment and hatred in human beings
to whom it is applied and corrupts the human beings who
apply it: it therefore invites more use of Force and must end
in sheer brutality, as Nazi Germany has found out. If Force
is not thoroughgoing, does it not, according to the doctrine of
Force, immediately show signs of "weakness" which leaves
room for the politics of appeasement, cajolery, yielding, com-
promise, pacifying measures, buying loyalty from neutral pow-
ers in order to draw these into its own orbit of power in other
words, does it not imply the alternate use of firmness and con-
cession, which can be equally fatal in the re-arming of subject
nations as in the case of resurrected Germany after Versailles?
Be firm to the end and you hang yourself; be not firm to the
128 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
end, and you also liang yourself. The first variation in the use
of Force is destroying Japan and Germany. The second varia-
tion destroyed the League of Nations and Ancient Greece.
Who will make plain to the world the law of the spirit, and
demonstrate that Force generates Coercion, Coercion generates
Fear, and Fear generates Hatred, as definitely and as accurately
as one billiard ball sends another rolling? Who will write a
philosophy and psychology of Force and its reactions and
determine their characteristics ? Who will be the consummate
fatalist to tell the world in plain, convincing, forceful terms
that actions generate emotions and emotions in turn generate
actions, that the fruit of Force is Fear and Hatred, that thor-
oughgoing Force generates Fear and Hatred and unthorough-
going Force generates Hatred without Fear? Who will say,
even as in a classroom in physics, that the greater the Force,
the greater the Hatred, and that the greatest Force is the most
hated of all? And who will say, as clearly as the prophets of
the sky say that a thunderclap presages a storm, that Force is
inevitably followed by Hatred, and Hatred is followed by
Revenge? For Hatred divides, and the structure of power must
sooner or later fall.
In ignorance of such simple and self-evident moral laws,
Pericles alternately threatened by force and cajoled by oratory
the other Greek states. And after his death, Cleon the leather
merchant, Eucrates the rope-seller, and Hyperbolus the lamp-
maker babbled. They were all good democrats and Cleon was
a good general It was left only for the insolent public idol,
Alcibiades, to complete the suicide of Greece.
But such laws, being the laws of God, are manifest to the
mind of the simple man, requiring no proof. Therefore, he who
would be strong within must guard against the use of power,
for only then is he safe from corruption within and hatred
without. And only he who is free from corruption within and
hatred without can be strong eternally. Laotse says, "For love is
A PHILOSOPHY OF PEACE 129
victorious in attack and invulnerable in defense. Heaven arms
with love those it would not see destroyed." Therefore he says:
Of all things, soldiers are instruments of evil, /
Hated by men.
Therefore the religious man avoids them.
Soldiers are weapons of evil;
They are not the weapons of the gentleman*
When the use of soldiers cannot be helped,
The best policy is calm restraint.
Even in victory, there is no beauty,
And who calls it beautiful
Is one who delights in slaughter.
He who delights in slaughter
Will not succeed in his ambition to rule the world.
The slaying of multitudes should be mourned
with sorrow.
A victory should be celebrated with the Funeral Rite;
24
Those who love America and England and wish them to be
strong forever must read Laotse again and again, for they will
gain thereby the secret of immortal strength, exempt from cor-
ruption within and invulnerable from attack without. Let
America be great, even as the great river of life:
The Great Tao flows everywhere,
(Like a flood) it may go left or right
The myriad things derive their life from it,
And it does not deny them.
When its work is accomplished,
It does not take possession.
84 For this and following quotations see Wisdom of China and India, pp. 600-602,
617, 622.
130 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
It clothes and feeds the myriad things,
Yet does not claim them as its own . .
Because to the end it does not claim greatness,
Its greatness is achieved.
How did the great rivers and seas become the Lords
of the Ravines ?
By being good at keeping low.
That was how they became the Lords of the Ravines.
Therefore in order to be the chief among the people,
One must speak like their inferiors.
In order to be foremost among the people,
One must walk behind them.
Thus it is that the sage stays above,
And the people do not feel his weight;
Walks in front,
And the people do not wish him harm.
Then the people of the world are glad to uphold
him forever.
Because he does not contend,
No one in the world can contend against him.
I am not worried lest America may not be able to assert a
leadership of force and power; I am worried lest she may. I
am concerned to see America assume a moral leadership, a
leadership of humility, so that the world may pay her glad
homage and uphold her forever. Like the great river that nour-
ishes life along its valley, she shall by the exuberance and
richness of her life be a blessing upon the peoples of the earth.
She shall stay above, and the world shall not feel her weight;
she shall walk in front and no one will wish her harm. For
she shall then lead in kindness and unselfishness and justice
and by that secret of unused power bring a new era of brother-
hood to mankind. No one can dethrone her because of her
A PHILOSOPHY OF PEACE 131
power for goodness, and no one can take away from her, be-
cause she does not take possession, She shall not contend, and
no one in the world can contend against her, and because she
takes no credit, the credit can never be taken away from her.
This is my Dream America. Will it come true?
Man has done it before. Abraham Lincoln did it. George
Washington did it. In a world of evil chaos, great men have
stood up and with the strength of their goodness and their
simplicity and the innocence of youth proclaimed that the
good in men can outweigh the evil, and they have acted upon
that assumption. For there are periods in history when the
Good Fairy ruled, while others were ruled by the Wicked
Fairy. Sometimes the good influence was in the air, and men
and women submerged their selfishness and felt as on the dawn
of another era, and the golden horizon was visible, when
faith caught their vision and warmed their hearts and
strengthened them. Then the good impulses of men prevailed.
And there were other periods, of chaos and cynicism and
despair, when the petty spirits of the age prevailed. Then faith
sounded hollow, and idealism bowed its head in shame and
seemed strangely out of place. Such periods presaged the ruin
of a regime or a culture. The moral strength to lift oneself
to a higher plane than mankind's predecessors was not there
because the moral fibers had become flabby and weakened by
a shallow cynicism. Then darkness fell. And between the two,
the difference was that between Faith and Despair.
But a spiritual softening of tone is necessary for this Age,
when men's minds are made in the image of steel. The harsh-
ness must go off, its crudities must be purged and purified as
in a crucible, and a mellower way of thinking and reasoning
must prevail. The leaven of the Sermon on the Mount has
softened man's ways in social living in the Christian world;
it is the only thing that holds the society of western men to-
gether whether in the country or the town, and softens the
hardness of aggressive men. Somehow the Bible at times
132 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
still terrifies the thug. But Christianity has no influence over
world politics. There are plenty of raw lumps in the dough of
Christendom, though it has been mixed for two thousand years
with the leaven of Jesus. A good housewife would perhaps add
a pinch of Laotse and hasten the process.
For man's spirit lives in a high nervous tension because
arterio-sclefosis has set in. The high-pressured march and con-
flict of forces has the terrific power of steam. The blast furnace
roars, molten, white-hot, gleaming, liquid steel flows over and
splatters about, and amidst the steady hum of booming, buzz-
ing, clicking and clanking machines, giant iron crab-pincers
snap and clang, huge drums slide and roll and swing overhead,
and the slightest false step may mean the loss of an arm or
a life. Metal, metal, metal liquid, glowing, hardening, black-
ening metal. In the roaring and clangor before the blast fur-
nace, man tries to think, furiously, at high temperature, and
his thoughts partake of the metallic ring, while he is afraid
of himself and of his power. A little reading of Laotse will do
him good and take the hardness out of his heart and the glint
out of his eyes.
When man is born, he is tender and weak;
At death, he is hard and stiff.
When the things and plants are alive, they are soft
and supple;
When they are dead, they are brittle and dry.
Therefore hardness and stiffness are the
companions of death,
And softness and gentleness are the companions
of life.
Therefore when an army is headstrong, it
will lose in battle.
When a tree is hard, it will be Cut down.
The big and strong belong underneath.
The gentle and weak belong at the top.
PEACE BY POINT RATIONS 133
16
PEACE BY POINT RATIONS
LET'S go back to the wizard of figures, Ely Culbertson. Per-
haps Euclid and Pythagoras can help us and with their figures
establish a peace for us. What charms me in Culbertson's plan
is his precise mathematical reasoning and the matching of a
clear mind against big problems. The question is what can be
done with sheer mathematics, with a peace-point-ration system.
It is fair to caution the reader against mixing up Mr. Cul-
bertson with those power politicians. He has studied mass
psychology, but he is not a professor of psychology* nor is he
a politician; he is an unpretentious thinking man like you and
me, and a man of uncommon intelligence and clear thinking.
If Euclid or Pythagoras could save us, Culbertson will* More-
over,, Mr- Culbertson has a lot of common sense. He is able
to see the inherent danger of international coercion and resent-
ment arising from the existence of an international police
force that serves as the cloak of sectional, national domination,
the greatest danger of all schemes for a police force, and he
is concentrating his thinking on the elimination of that psy-
chological danger. We feel here a sense of fairness and good
will to start with. His presentation of clilemmas, remedies,
and comments is clear, lucid, and precise* That is why I am
discussing it as one of the most attractive schemes of world
co-operation. Besides, playing a game of international bridge
is fun: it exercises the brains. 25
We are not going into a full examination of the "World
Federation Plan/' It has a "World Armament Trust," a "World
President," "World Trustees/' "World Judges/' and "World
35 Ely Culbertson, The World Federation Plan (The World Federation, Inc.). Dis-
tributed by Garden City Publishing Co.
134 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
Senators." It lias a "World Constitution" and plans for three
time periods: the "War Period/' the "Armistice Period/' and
the "Postwar Period/' the first two periods being under %
"Provisional Government." It has a "World Territorial Table/'
dividing the world into eleven "Regional Federations/' in-
cluding "sovereign two-way states" (like Switzerland, Danzig)
and "Autonomous Regional Federations" (the Indian and the
Malaysian).
But the most distinctive feature of the plan is the "Quota
Force Principle" which is mathematics. Each Regional Fed-
eration would have a "National Contingent/' and there would
be an additional "Collective Quota/ 5 the "Mobile Corps/ 1
owned by all the member Regional Federations, which is like
a "joker/' or better, like the "widow" at poker, that all hands
can count as their own.
The dilemma that Mr. Culbertson is trying to solve is how
to harmonize the existence of the "World Police" with national
sovereignty. He solves It by the interesting formula that while
the national contingents are all parts of the "World Police"
in time of war, in time of peace each is a national force polic-
ing its own territory, and no foreign national contingent may
step into its territory. Furthermore, since these "National Con-
tingents" form a "World Police" by pooling their strength,
each contingent is adequate for defense of its own territory,
and none is adequate for attacking others with any chance of
success*
THE QUOTA PRINCIPLE OF WORLD POLICE
Regional
National Contingent Federation
Quota oj Initiating State Where Stationed -Represented
20% United States United States; Leased American
Bases in Western Hemi-
sphere Islands and in
Malaysian Federation
15% British (including British Empire; leased British
English-speaking Do- Bases in Indian Federa-
minions) tion
PEACE BY POINT RATIONS
THE QUOTA PRINCIPLE OF WORLD POLICE Cont.
National Contingent
Quota of Initiating State
15% Russian
4% French
4% German
4% Polish
4% Turkish
4% Chinese
4% Indian (provisionally
selected under British
Command)
3% Malaysian (provision-
ally selected under
American Command)
2% Japanese
Mobile Corps
22% All member-states not
listed above (non-ini-
tiating states)
Where Stationed
Regional
Federation
Represented
U. S. S. R.
Russian
France
Latin-European
(Latin)
Germany
Northern European
(Germanic)
Poland
Middle European
Turkey
Middle Eastern
China
Chinese
India
Indian
Malaysian Federation
Japan
Two-way states and
strategic islands owned
by the World Federa-
tion
Malaysian
Japanese
All the member Re-
gional Federations
(Collective quota)
ILLUSTRATIVE TABLE OF THE QUOTA FORCE PRINCIPLE
Initiating
State
Quota
United States 20%
Britain ...... 15%
Russia 15%
Germany 4%
France 4%
Poland 4%
Turkey 4%
China 4%
India 4%
Malaysia 2%
Japan . . 2%
Mobile Corps 22%
(Collective Quota)
Total 100%
Battleships
National
or Aircraft
Troops
Planes
Tanks
Carriers
400,000
10,000
20,000
20
300,000
7,500
15,000
15
300,000
7,500
15,000
15
80,000
2,000
4,000
4
80,000
2,OOO
4,000
4
80,000
2,000
4,000
4
80,000
2,000
4,000
4
80,000
2,OOO
4,000
4
80,000
2,OOO
4,000
4
40,000
1,000
2,000
2
40,000
1,000
2,000
2
440,000
II,OOO
22,OOO
22
2,000,000
50,000
100,000
ICO
136 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
The cards being dealt out, let's sit down to play the inter-
national contract bridge game. The merit of this mathematical
distribution of forces, according to its author, is the following:
The quota mechanism not only eliminates military dic-
tatorships and wars between single nations; it eliminates
wars between alliances or coalitions of nations. On the
basis of the Quota Force Principle, it is impossible to point
out any politically conceivable combination of nations
which could conduct a war of aggression against the re-
maining nations of the World Federation without being
decisively outnumbered.
Let us assume the most powerful (although the least
likely) combination of nations some years after the World
Federation "is founded: The United States, Great Britain,
and Germany decide to rebel against the World Federation
and to conquer the World. Without the Quota Force Prin-
ciple, there is no question but that this coalition of powers
could easily dominate the world. With the Quota Force
Principle, the joint Quota of these three nations would be
only 39%* Against them there would be lined up Armored
Forces of planes, tanks, and warships totaling 61%, of
which 22%, the Mobile Corps, would be the Shock Troops.
Before England and Germany (19%) would have time to
develop their industrial potential into a military potential,
they would be overwhelmed, isolating the United States
with its 20%.
Let us reverse the situation and assume a communist-
dominated Europe and Asia, in revolt against the World
Federation and the Anglo-Americans. Without the World
Federation, a Communist Japan, China, Poland, Russia,
Germany, and France, lined up against the AngloAmeri-
cans, would automatically result in a Third World War.
With the World Federation, the Quotas of the rebel com-
munist nations would total only 33% against the 67%
PEACE BY POINT RATIONS 137
total of the Mobile Corps, the Anglo-Americans, and the
other Contingents of the World Police.
In other words, no one will have a grand slam. The cards
are, in f act, so dealt out that no one will bid at all. If mathe-
matics will give us a peace, this plan will do so. If the cat
can be belled, if Russia will accept the cards dealt out to her,
if no card-player nods, if all the players are equally skillful,
or equally reckless, or equally cautious, or equally honest, or
equally good at making passes to neighbors or slipping cards
from their sleeves, above all, if all the players love and trust
one another, there should be no bid and no play at all. If there
are no upsetting factors like different national psychologies,
national ambitions, and cultural traditions, if eternal vigilance
can be kept up, if the "World Government" is able to act
promptly and despatch the "Mobile Corps" instantly, if it will
not appoint another Lyttoa Commission to take a year to make
a report for the purpose of being filed, if it is easy to define
"aggression" and "defense/' if there is not the question of in-
dustrial potentials, if there is no question of commercial avia-
tion, if all people are equally aggressive or equally satisfied
with what they have, if no nation secretly rearms or openly
defies and denounces the quota system, if the different "Na-
tional Contingents" and the "Mobile Corps" are equidistant
from the point of conflict, if there are no questions of sea and
land transportation to distant continents, and if all are avail-
able at a moment's notice, if no state member hesitates or
remains neutral at the call of duty, if there are, for instance,
no internal factions in Czechoslovakia or between Czechoslo-
vakia and Poland when Russia or Germany rebels, if above all,
no single nation dominates the "World Government," if the
"World Judges" do not take orders from the big powers, if
the "World Senate" could not be captured from within, if the
big powers would refrain from manipulating the "World
Government" into their private machine as they did with the
I 3 8 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
League of Nations, if there are no problems of corruption and
failing enthusiasm and division of mind and even change of
mind among the powers, if there is no selfish disposition of
the "Mobile Corps," if there is no underhanded manipulation
and control of important strategic material, if there is no
progress in chemical industry, no development of new weapons
undefined, if there is a guarantee that national sentiments in
the different states will not change, if there is no selfish isola-
tionism, if economic autocracy does, not set in in any one state,
if there is indeed justice, and if there is no racial discrimination,
then we shall indeed have a fair prospect of peace by this
plan. In other words, if this is a mechanical game and the
cards are cards, and not quarrelsome, fickle-minded, and always
progressing human beings, the game will never be played and
the cards will remain as they are dealt out at the beginning.
Then, thank Heaven, we shall have no war!
We might conveniently take this quota table for the study
of how complicated psychological factors underlie plain arith-
metic. There is no question that the quota table will be accept-
able to the United States army and navy experts, and fairly
acceptable to British experts. But why should Russia, with a
greater territory and bigger population, accept a lower iquota
than the United States, particularly in view of the traditional
combination of England and America, and the English control
of the Indian Federation and the American control of the
Malaysian Federation? Who will bell the Russian cat?
It is clear that raising the common "collective quota" of the
international "Mobile Corps" and lowering the percentage of
the national contingents of the "Big Powers" would accomplish
every purpose Mr. Culbertson desires more surely and more
effectively than the low collective quota and high quotas for
certain particular powers in sharp contrast to the rest of the
nations. Equal quotas for the Regional Federations and a high
common collective quota for all would seem to represent the
principle of international justice and sincerity, and create
PEACE BY POINT RATIONS 139
greater confidence. It would be a simple idea to give that col-
lective quota 50 per cent, and then no matter what the com-
binations of "rebellious" "National Contingents" are, they
would still be less than the collective quota obeying the com-
mand of the "World Government/' unless the whole world re-
volts against the "World Government/ 5 which is an absurdity.
Even a 32-34 per cent for the collective quota would secure a
readier approval, on either of the following formulas:
(A) Collective Quota . . 34%
ii National Contingents
(averaging 6% each) 66%
(B) Collective Quota 32%
Russia, China, Britain, and U. S.
(10% each) 40%
7 other Contingents
(averaging 4% each) ...... 28%
Under the "B" plan, a U. S.-Britain combination or a Russia-
China combination would give only 20 per cent as against the
Collective Quota of 34 per cent, or against 80 per cent of the
World Police.
Why is this not suggested ? And here we come at once to the
root of the matter, which is psychological For the acceptance
of America and Great Britain the principle is consent, and -for
the acceptance of Russia the principle is coercion. "It would
have been desirable, perhaps, to lower the American and British
quotas even further. But in that event, it is unlikely that the
majority of the British Parliament would approve it, and highly
improbable that two-thirds of the American Senate would vote
for such a risky commitment." But why "risky," particularly if
there is a bigger collective quota? How about the risky com-
mitment for Russia? We read:
i 4 o BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
It is possible that Russia, mindful of her bitter pre-war
experiences with the capitalistic countries and suspicious
of their future intentions, might adopt a policy of total
isolation until convinced that the World Federation is de-
signed for her benefit as well as for that of other nations
. . * there could be no objection on Russia's part if the
World Federation should increase its own total armed
strength, parallel to Russian increases, so as to maintain
the Quota Force Principle.
We are back in the same rut again, the rut of armament race,
which is a risky matter, and of political coercion, which is still
riskier.
And here we receive a strong and clear hint from Sir Nor-
man Angell that Anglo-American conduct during the peace as
during tie war will be along the line of "unilateral" action.
Clarence Streit and all other advocates of Anglo-American
union or domination think in exactly the same way: The other
nations may takf it or leave it, the World Government will not
be based on consent of the world. For Sir Norman Angell said
in his New York Town Hall speech of March u, 1943:
Note this, the American elder statesmen in adopting the
Monroe Doctrine did not proceed first of all by drawing
up an elaborate Pan-American Constitution. They did not
even get in touch with the Latin-American Republics. The
Declaration was unilateral. This, it seems to me, is a preg-
nant hint for today ^
Sir Norman Angell is really getting more and more exasper-
ated.
But why the higher quota for the big powers and a low
quota for the other powers? Here we run into a series of in-
verted reasonings. Because, Mr. Culbertson says, the small
**As reported in the New York Times, March 12, 1943.
PEACE BY POINT RATIONS 141
powers would combine and attack the big powers! Where in
history have the small nations ever had the wit to combine in
defense, much less in attack? Does not history teach the exact
reverse? Was it Norway or Switzerland or Denmark that
threatened world peace? But we read:
The ideal distribution of the World Police might seem
to be the assignment of an equal Quota to each of the
eleven Regional Federations. But this would be unre-
alistic. In computing the Quotas one must keep in mind not
only the factors of territory and industrial capacity, but the
psycho-political factor as well. If each Region had an equal
Quota of the World's Armed Forces, then the poorer re-
gions (which are in great majority) might seek to combine
for an attack against the few prosperous ones.
It is the old story of Finland threatening the security of Rus-
sia. Why not seek safety in a bigger "Collective Quota'* and
have a litde more confidence in the "World Government"? It
would seem that the psycho-political principle should operate
against nations which have a historical record of aggressive-
ness rather than against the historically peace-loving small
nations.
In the case of China, the inverted reasoning is even more ap-
parent. I know Mr. Culbertson is well disposed toward China.
The inverted reasoning he employs one set of reasoning for
China, another for America and Great Britain is purely un-
conscious and profoundly human. A Lebensraum of conti-
nental dimensions is the reason for a higher quota in the case
of the United States, Britain, and Russia; the same fact is ad-
duced as the reason for denying it to China. And why? Be-
cause China "threatens" the other powers.
In the deeper sense of future reality, it is perhaps best
for the peace of the world that the United States, Britain
142 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
and Russia should be the ones with a preponderance of
Quota strength. Each has a lebensraum of continental di-
mensions, the economy of each is inwardly, not outwardly,
expanding [sic!]. Each is threatened by powerful rivals-
rump super-states like Germany, which lacks lebensraum,
or embryonic super-states like China, which lacks tech-
nology.
So the story is that, China, which lacks technology (or war
potential) is threatening either Russia or the United States
which have it!
Mr. Culbertson makes it quite clear that the size of China's
population, a territory easy to defend, and a homogeneous pop-
ulation are the reasons for China's being assigned 4 per cent,
while the same factors are the reasons for Russia and the
United States being give 15 to 20 per cent Mr. Culbertson ad-
mits the "seeming injustice," which he "explains" as follows:
In the case of China, it would seem that this heroic na-
tion of five hundred million people should be entitled to
more than 4%. Actually, the very size of her population is
the main reason for China's relatively low Quota. China
has not only a very low industrial capacity and territory
which is fairly easy to defend, but she possesses an enor-
mous homogeneous population. She will have trained
forces for internal policing at least four times the size of
that of the United States. Although such a police force will
have no heavy weapons, it will be in effect, a supporting
infantry. Hence her Quota of 4%. 27
I don't follow you, Mr. Culbertson.
27 The last sentence, "Hence her Quota of 4%,** appearing in the original mimeo-
graphed copy has been struck out in the printed and revised edition. This is interest-
ing. It was meant to clinch an argument, but Mr. Culbertson must have felt that in-
stead of clinching the argument, it weakened it.
PEACE BY POINT RATIONS 143
The psychological reason is deeper than that. Mr. Culbertson
really would not want China to lay herself open to the sus-
picion of imperialism and invite the fear of the world. It is only
later that we read the real reason, as suggested in a world with-
out the "Quota Force Principle."
Furthermore, the World Federation enables China to
develop industrially without exciting the fears of other
great nations. Without the World Federation, power-
politics might dictate that other nations should sooner or
later strike at China, to prevent her five hundred million
people from becoming too powerful industrially and there-
fore militarily.
But even within the World Federation, the same dilemma
really exists: either strangle China industrially or allow her to
develop until she will demand a revision of the quota for equal-
ity with the other nations, and this demand for revision will
have to be kept down by coercion at the point of the bayonet,
or by stubborn manipulation of the "World Government.'* It
will be the story of the "5:5:3," in altered forms the basis of
the present war with Japan. Such complications always arise
when we get "realistic" and forsake the principle of equality.
That China may be coerced into acceptance or remain out-
side is another matter. If she does accept 4 per cent, it will not
be because of coercion, but because of the old rogue's Laotsean
philosophy of the wisdom of appearing foolish, the advantage
of lying low, the strength of gentility, and the victory that
comes from not inviting the fear of the world. I am sure of it.
The fear is that the younger nations will not live by the wis-
dom of avoiding fear and hatred and ruin by insolence. "To
pretend to be a damn fool" is such a common phrase in Chi-
nese that I constantly forget it isn't an English idiom. Who but
a Chinese scholar would call himself "Guard Stupidity" or
144 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
"Embrace Folly"? But I 'know eventually it is white insolence
that will ruin any world co-operation.
No, the problem of peace is not a problem of mathematics,
but a'problem of the psychology of the big powers. The prob-
lem, of world peace is no more a problem of mathematics than
the problem of conducting a campaign is the problem of dis-
position of troops and topography; very often, given the troops
and the tanks, it is only the problem of the commanding gen-
eral's personality, his mind, his courage, his quick decision, his
capacity to get along with his officers, and his attitude toward
his superiors, his rivals, and his enemy-
Battles have been lost because the general was thinking of
his mistress in the enemy camp, and peace has been lost be-
cause the Lavals were busily traveling to Berlin and Rome.
And while the conception of power politics remains what it is
and the statesmen of the leading powers still sit in their mo-
ronic complacency, with no mental comprehension of how the
war arose and what it is being fought for, except certain colo-
nial possessions and the status quo, peace will forever remain
an elusive hope and the blood of our children and grandchil-
dren must flow.
May I suggest a simple solution? May I claim and demon-
strate that peace has been possible? May I substantiate it by
history and point out that peace has not been an empty dream,
but a reality, an accomplished historic fact, in many quarters of
this earth? Without a convention, and without quotas, peace
has already been achieved between Canada and the United
States. Without a convention, or federation, or the "Quota Force
Principle/' peace has been achieved in the continent of South
America already. And may I also suggest that there was peace
in Asia in the centuries preceding the coming of the white
man? That there has been peace in Tahiti and Bali and the
Samoan Islands? Peace, too, in Greenland and Iceland.
And may I point out why ? There is peace in South America
and in the Caribbean Sea because the Spanish and Portuguese
PEACE BY POINT RATIONS 145
Empires have collapsed. There have been civil wars, but we
are not interested in local civil wars; we are speaking of the
large patterns of world history. There will be peace in the
world only when the English, French, and Dutch Empires col-
lapse. I know this war is not big enough to reverse the process
and wipe out the Empires, and I hope World War III will do
it. If the imperialist powers will not worry overmuch about the
"capacity for self-government" of the Filipinos, the Javanese,
the Indians, and Burmese, there will be peace, too, in the Phil-
ippines, the Dutch Indies, India, and Burma. But if they do not
stop worrying overmuch about the capacity for self-government
of the colonies, wars will continue to be fought in the home
countries themselves.
Civil wars are necessary in a nation until an equilibrium is
restored. Revolts against empires are necessary until the invader
is driven out. The only stable equilibrium in the world is the
equilibrium of equality. Only when such equilibrium is reached
can we have peace. Small countries have the right to fight, per-
haps to settle an old boundary dispute. Big countries have no
right to fight, ever, because when they fight they involve the
whole world. When small countries fight, it is at least their
own business; when the big powers fight, it is always because
they want to interfere with someone else's business. Small coun-
tries do not fight, because they always have enough territory.
Big countries fight, because curiously what they have is never
enough they need Lebensraum. Finally, all countries, whether
big or small, do not fight because they are contented, and all
countries, whether big or small, fight because they are discon-
tented. As Laotse says, "There is no greater curse than the lack
of contentment, no greater sin than the desire for possession.
Therefore he who is contented with contentment shall be al-
ways content."
And so Mr. Culbertson is putting the cart before the horse
when he puts arithmetic before psychology. Of all the fifty or
sixty nations in the world, only three or four big powers are
146 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
upsetting the peace of the world. These powers have run over
this earth, kicking down people's fences in bad temper and
worse manners, robbing them of their liberty and independ-
ence, and taking possession of their goods and have then
fought wars among themselves for these goods. First they
fought among themselves, and then they called upon the entire
world to fight for them to keep what they have. This makes
little sense, and it makes still less sense to say that we can have
peace only by giving greater power to the big powers and dis-
arming the small powers, on the plea that the small powers
may combine to attack them!
Big Powers, at least behave as if you were not scared! But
now we suddenly hear about policing the world, as if the
Greenlanders and Samoans and Formosans and Burmese were
threatening the world peace, while the big powers don their
uniforms, strutting about to club the small powers on their
heads with a baton if they do not behave. It would seem that
we could well police the big powers for a while and leave the
poor Samoans and Balinese and Eskimos alone. But, no, we
cannot disarm the big powers, because the big powers will not
be disarmed, after having so heroically fought and triumphed
in this war. Very well, then, let's have wars eternally. The first
thing we know the police will start shooting among them-
selves and scare us poor humble neighbors out of our wits.
17
THE SCIENCE OF THE BLOODY EARTH
NO, the root of war lies deeper. Mr. Culbertson is the oppo-
site, of the power politicians. He is on our side. Those on the
other side are legion, and their sores are touchy. Probe gently,
THE SCIENCE OF THE BLOODY EARTH 147
for it hurts and it is a case requiring the greatest surgical skill.
"He who has an ugly disease shuns the doctor/' says a Chinese
proverb. The leprous growths are many and spread in all di-
rections, for power politics is an old, old disease, and we shall
not do our job until we have slashed open the patient and cut
out the toxin-secreting tumors of Naturalism, Determinism,
and Despair.
And while we are approaching the pseudo-scientific ground
of geopolitics, which speaks of states as "organisms," let us
remember that disease is also an organism. Disease fights to
survive as much as life itself. It feeds upon the blood and tissues
of the patient and fights hard to maintain its ground- It buries
itself in the body, builds itself a fortress, and fights back. So
has the disease of power-politics built itself a beautiful man-
sion called the Hall of Geopolitics, before whose portals stands
the statue of a naked lady, Science, stolen from the Natural
Museum, and on whose frieze stand the sacrilegeous inscrip-
tions of Bacon, Linnaeus, Leibnitz, Humboldt, Hegel, Wagner,
and Darwin. It has shining corridors and a bright library and
a sea of archives in well-numbered dossiers, and clean, white-
tiled latrines. For anything worthy of the name of science now
has clean, white-tiled latrines. How Darwin and Linnaeus and
Humboldt ever became scientists and discovered things without
these latrines is still one of the unsolved mysteries of modern
scientific history.
We can now well let alone the special champions of Anglo-
American dominion, for there is sufficient material on every
hand, and one does not usually try to show a whole desert, after
showing a corner of it. Rather should we hurry our steps and
examine where the deep-rooted sores of our spirit lie, and dili-
gently search until we have found the source of infection. We
may conveniently take geopolitics as such an affection of the
spirit; we shall turn it about until we see what makes modern
men think the way we do.
For geopolitics is, after all, a kind of philosophy and Wdtan-
148 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
schauung, a thing of the mind, where Nazi scholars and anti-
Nazi scholars meet and shake hands in profound admiration
of one another. It is out of such minds, out of the character of
modern scholarship, that modern power politics grows, flour-
ishes, and has its being. In Professor Nicholas John Spykman
we have the foremost geopolitician in America today and there-
fore a fair specimen, not of all college minds, but of some of
them, where the dehumanization of scholarship has reached
the ultimate process, and science and the conscience of man
part ways.
Professor Spykman is frankly a serious exponent of world
power politics. The subtide of America's Strategy in World
Politics is "The United States and the Balance of Power." He
believes profoundly in power politics and exhibits all its symp-
toms. He holds that:
Basically, the new order will not differ from the old, and
international society will continue to operate with the same
power patterns. It will be a world of power politics in
which the interests of the United States will continue to
demand the preservation of the balance of power in Eu-
rope and Asia. 28
Consequently, he is for an Anglo-American-Japanese he-
gemony of the world. He is against unity in Europe, by either
federation or dominion by one power, for:
A federal Europe would constitute an agglomeration of
force that would completely alter our significance as an
Atlantic power and greatly weaken our position in the
Western Europe. // the peace objective of the United States
is the creation of a United Europe, we we fighting on the
^America's Strategy in World Politics, p. 461, For following quotations, see
pp. 460, 466, 470.
THE SCIENCE OF THE BLOODY EARTH 149
wrong side. All-out aid to Mr. Hitler would be die quick-
est way to achieve an integrated trans-Atlantic zone.
X
In other words, we are fighting really to preserve a disunited
Europe. We are fighting on the right side because we are fight-
ing against that unity and integration of Europe, and we are
helping the English to fight for no other reason than to keep
Europe embroiled so that the United States may be a more
"significant" Atlantic power. Therefore, he is for American
hegemony in Asia, Europe, and America. And in order to do
this, the United States must "continue the struggle" until she
has annihilated the power of Russia and China, after defeating
Germany and Japan. 29 To accomplish all this and keep it up,
however, she must restore power to Germany and Japan and
plan the ruin of Russia and China. "Washington might become
convinced of the British argument that asks for the continued
existence of a powerful Germany." "If the balance of power
in the Far East is to be preserved, the United States will have
to adopt a similar protective policy toward Japan [as toward
England]. The present inconsistency in American policy will
have to be removed." "A Russian state from the Urals to the
North Sea can be no improvement over a German state from
the North Sea to the Urals." "A modern, vitalized, and mili-
tarized China of 450 million people is going to be a threat not
only to Japan, but also to the position of the Western powers
in the Asiatic Mediterranean."
There is more concentrated international poison for dealing
with the future of the world in the last fifteen pages of his
book than in the whole of Mein Kampf. Is Professor Spykman
raging mad? No, he is talking science, a science that has noth-
ing to do with human values or human beings. He is com-
pletely objective, thoroughly detached, hermetically sealed, and
sterilized of all normal human sentiments. If anyone can see
m lbid., pp. 460-461. See the exact quotation already given in the section "The
Emergence of Asia,** (pp. 20-21).
150 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
any difference in Weltanschauung between Spykinan and
Haushofer or Hitler, I should like to be told. Professor Spyk-
man is intellectually a Nazi, but of course scientific labels carry
no stigma in scientific circles. The distinction between a skunk
and a squirrel is pure uneducated prejudice. Unless we can
come up to this austere intellectual plane of natural science, we
cannot understand Professor Spykman.
The American public woke up last year to the realization of
the presence of a new word, "geopolitics," or Geopoliti\, as the
Germans say. Connected with it is the name of Major-General
Professor Doktor Karl Haushofer (born 1869), its great apos-
tle, who is credited with having exerted a profound influence
over Hitler, almost as Rasputin was pictured as an influence on
the last of the Russian Czars. Anyway, Chapter XIV of Vol. II
of Mem Kampf is thought to be pure or adulterated Haushofer.
His position in relation to World War II seems to be like that
of Treitschke in relation to World War I.
The public belatedly rubs its eyes and then finds that there
was an Englishman before Haushofer, Sir Halford MacKinder,
who, as far back as 1904, enunciated the central dynamic geo-
political concept of the Euro-asiatic "Heartland," and whose
book, Democratic Ideals and 'Reality, published in 1918 #nd
completely forgotten, was recently resuscitated in a 1942 re-
issue. Then we discover further that the whole biological and
dehumanized concept of a "state organism" with "organic
lusts," growing and expanding like a plant in its struggle for
"living space," was already given its sharp contours by a Swed-
ish professor, Rudolf Kjellen (died 1922), who had learned it
from his German master, Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904), in the
eighteen-nineties. The importance of the international origin
of this peculiarly European science will be explained later.
What gives geopolitics its dangerous character is, however,
the fact that it is called "science," in whose name many crimes
have been committed. It must be remembered that the very
thing that distinguishes German geopolitics from political ge-
THE SCIENCE OF THE BLOODY EARTH 151
ography is that geopolitics is "a guide to political action." Po-
litical geography is primarily geography, whose functions are
descriptive and analytical, while geopolitics is primarily politics,
the politics of world conquest or at least of world struggles,
consciously built on strategic concepts of geography. As the
German geopolitician Otto Maull well puts it:
concerns itself with the state, not as a static
concept, but as a living being. It is not interested like its
mother science, political geography, in the state as a phe-
nomenon of nature in its situation, size, form, or bound-
aries as such. Geopolitics . . is a discipline that weighs
and evaluates a given situation and by its conclusions seeks
to guide practical politics. 30
It has therefore the definite character of an applied science.
Since the only professed application of this science is the
struggle of states for living space through wars for the control
of the globe, geopolitics is not the innocuous political science of
relations of state organisms to the "soil," but necessarily the
science of blood and soil combined. Not that the geopoliticians
themselves ever cared a twopence about human blood. That
lies outside the "precincts" of this "exact science." But when
they talk about the "earth" or the "World Island," I see it dyed
pinkish-purple with human blood. It is not the science of the
"soil," of land-mass and "Heartland" and "Rimland" and living
space and expanding space, but the Science of the Bloody
Earth, as different from political geography as slush is different
from snow. Its only scientific aspects are its accumulation of
factual data, its strictly biological conception of "political space
organism" (the state) as a tree growing on the soil or dying for
lack of it, and, last of all, that godlike indifference to, and god-
less contempt for, moral judgments and values which we call
complete scientific "objectivity." Populations may be trans-
80 Andreas Dorpalcn, The World of General Haushojer, pp. 24-25.
152 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
planted like carrots, and the "World Island" may be cut up,
examined, and redisposed to the advantage of the expanding
state like a melon. Whether a few dozen schoolchildren have
to be bombed or a million inhabitants slaughtered in the proc-
ess is unworthy of the concern of such globe-cutters. It is
exactly that detachment from human values, that mechanistic
concept of physical forces determining human events., and that
"naturalistic" view of the human world as a jungle which
give it its scientific character.
It is particularly unfortunate that not only does geopolitics
arrogate to itself the attitude and terminology of a natural
science, but that it is known as German science. I cannot say
that the Americans have exactly an inferiority complex with
regard to German science. American cameras are probably as
good as German cameras, and the American bomb sight is just
a damn sight better than the German bomb sight. Nevertheless,
German science has always enjoyed a high prestige, for which
American academic circles show great respect. German influ-
ence in American universities in certain branches of study, as,
for instance, in the teaching of literature, is to be deplored and
still weighs heavily on our postgraduate schools. The fact that
geopolitics goes under the name of German science imme-
diately commands the respect of certain American professors
and soon finds it a host of camp followers.
Life reported at the end of 1942: "This year some 1500
courses in geopolitics are being given in United States colleges.
On campuses all over the country musty old geographers are
blossoming out as shiny new geopoliticians." But there are also
first-class minds among American geopoliticians, like President
Isaiah Bowman, of Johns Hopkins University, Father Walsh,
of Georgetown, Nicholas Spykman, of Yale, Derwent Whittle-
sey, of Harvard, Edward Mead Earle and Harold Sprout, of
Princeton, "Science" it is called, and science it will be. How
American common sense will modify Haushof erism remains to
be seen, but there, is no thought on the part of American pro-
THE SCIENCE OF THE BLOODY EARTH 153
fessors of disclaiming the scientific title, and we cannot laugh
it off as a German poison which will be automatically neutral-
ized as soon as it reaches American soil.
How deeply influenced by this German Weltanschauung and
by Darwinian naturalism American geopoliticians are, is best
seen in Professor Spykman, in whose book this German aus-
terity of the "natural science of power politics" with no room
for human values finds a complete, unmitigated reflection.
How does a quotation like the following strike the reader?
The statesman who conducts foreign policy can concern
himself with the values of justice, fairness and tolerance
only to the extent that they contribute to or do not inter-
fere with the power objective. They can be used instru-
mentally as moral justification for the power quest, but
they must be discarded the moment their application
brings weakness. The search for power is not made for
the achievement of moral values; moral values are used to
facilitate the attainment of power.
Nine out of ten readers would think that this was from Mcin
Kampf; but, no, this is from Spykman's America's Strategy in
World Politics, page 18. This is the book of which an Ameri-
can university president, Isaiah Bowman, of Johns Hopkins,
says, "It should be read in not less than a million American
homes. Every government official responsible for policy should
read it once a year for the next twenty years/'
This moral prostitution of the academic point of view may
be further seen in the fact that when Dr. Hans W. Weigert
wrote a heartrending appeal for restoration of human values in
the last chapter of his new book on geopolitics, Generals and
Geographers, a reviewer in the ISiew Yor% Times said, "The
last fifteen pages of the book on 'Geopolitics and Humanity*
should never have been written." He declared that the book
"concludes with an outlook .' . . which is as cloudy and con.-
i 5 4 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
fused as anything Haushofer has ever written " What makes
it "cloudy and confused" to the reviewer, I assume, is the intro-
duction of human values of right and wrong into the austere
plane of objective science. I shudder to think that American
academic reaction to Dr. Weigert's appeal is dead.
On the other hand, the recent books on the subject by
Strausz-Hup4 Derwent Whittlesey, and Andreas Dorpalen, 31
as well as the one by Hans W. Weigert, have been sanely
critical of Haushoferism. German geopolitical thought de-
serves to be studied carefully, even as Mem Kampf deserves to
be studied carefully. (Dorpalen's The World of General Haus-
hofcr gives the original source material rarely accessible to the
American public.)
To me, however, geopolitics, Haushoferian or otherwise, is
50 per cent factual data, 30 per cent pseudo-science, and 20 per
cent German metaphysics or "Faustian longing." Since far too
many definitions are being offered, some made purposely in-
nocuous with an air of scientific objectivity, one should accept
Haushofer's own: "Geopolitics is the scientific foundation of
the art of political action in the life-and-death struggle of state
organisms for Lebensraum" S2 Take away from it the natural-
istic warring concepts of "life-and-death struggle" and "state
organism" and "Lebensraum" and it no longer serves any pur-
pose as a guide to political action. Take away from it the dy-
namic concept of the Eurasian transcontinental bloc based on
the Asiatic Heartland, and it is worth less than a penny to
Haushofer or Hitler himself.
Obviously geopolitics has its contributions. The first is the
notion that political planning of the world for war or for peace
must be based on sound knowledge of geography, just as war
31 Robert Strausz-Hupe, Geopolitics; the Struggle for Space and Power (Putnam);
Derwent Whittlesey, German Strategy of World Conquest (Farrar and Rinehart),
with interesting illustrations of geopolitical maps; Andreas Dorpalen, The World of
General HausAofer (Farrar and Rinehart).
33 Quoted by Dr. Hans W. Weigert, Generals and Geographers (Oxford) p. 14,
See also the many "official" and unofficial definitions in Dorpalen's book, pp. 23*25.
THE SCIENCE OF THE BLOODY EARTH 155
plans require good maps. Vice-President Wallace's proposal
for air highways, taking account of the arctic regions, is an
excellent geopolitical concept. In a true sense anybody who
ever reflected upon the political significance of the Panama
Canal or the Suez Canal was thinking geopolitically. The sec-
ond is that it teaches a global concept of the war and the peace
as nothing else can, a concept in which the Germans and the
Japanese excel and in which the western democracies are woe-
fully left behind. The best argument for Nazi "war guilt/' if
one is needed, is the evidence of their preparedness and the
dismal political confusion of the democracies with regard to
Asia a year after Pearl Harbor. The Germans and the Japa-
nese were excellently prepared in global political strategy,
while Anglo-Americans were and are still muddled about
Asia. Incidentally, there is also great profit to be derived from
the art of drawing dynamic maps and reading them, which
can be learned from geopolitics. Haushofer's great complaint
when he started the Munich "institute was that the German
generals did not know how to read maps.
We are pretty well agreed that Rosenberg's racial myth of
Aryan superiority is pseudo-science. The question comes closer
to the human heart. We do not even bother to disprove it,
because our heart denies it. That geopolitics is a pseudo-science
is less obvious, because the geopoliticians are apparently talk-
ing of land-mass and the contours of the "World Island." That
it is nevertheless a pseudo-science arises from the fact that it
deals with world politics, and by its very nature world politics
cannot be treated with the cold objectivity of, say, mineralogy.
There is simply no objectivity possible in dealing with human
values. Somewhere a human choice has to be made, and when
that choice is made, subjective elements come in. Then geo-
politics is as little objective as the Aryan race myth. The hope-
less confusion of moral values and the undependableness of
such opinions immediately become apparent.
A curious example of this is Professor George T. Renner's
156 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
proposal to exterminate the Swiss Republic on geopolitical
grounds. The proposal is not only unjust; it is untrue to a
human fact, because the Swiss Republic has demonstrated its
ability to hang together as a human community living in peace
for seven hundred years by certain democratic values beyond
the ken of Professor Renner, and in flagrant defiance of the
geopolitical "law of expanding space." In the same way, Pro-
fessor Spykman is geographically fascinated by the similarity
of Japan's and England's positions on the map and therefore
advocates co-operating with Japan on the same terms as with
England, disregarding the human fact that English mentality
is not essentially warlike, while Japanese mentality is. Such
confusions and contradictions are inevitable. What I object to
is that such romantic nonsense, such lack of grasp of world
political realities, should seek refuge under the name of science.
To contradict common sense does not necessarily indicate a
scientific mind*
That geopolitics is a pseudo-science is less easily recognizable
because the roots are deeper and fall in line with nineteenth-
century naturalism, which is the transferring of the Dar-
winian concept of life-and-death struggle to the humanities*
This naturalism was a characteristic of European thought in
the latter part of the nineteenth century. I have referred to the
international European character of the origins of geopolitics.
It started with Ratzel's conception of r 'state organism" as a
struggling, living thing, and Kjellen's The State as Living
Form. Unmistakably drawing its inspiration from the Dar-
winian interpretation of the animal world, the naturalistic
tendency was to transpose the laws of the animal world to the
human world in the name of science. In his essay ^Living-
space: A Bio-Geographical Study" (1901), Ratzel clearly used
Darwinian terms of the animal world and made no bones about
it.
The danger lies in the fact that unless one denied the free-
dom of the human will and talked of physical forces and me-
THE SCIENCE OF THE BLOODY EARTH 157
chanical "laws of expanding space" and "organisms/* with
the nature o topography as a god determining the growth
and death of nations, one could not appear "scientific" at all.
Furthermore, science wants to predict, and only determinism
enables us to predict. In the realm of geopolitical thought
Oswald Spengler, whom Haushofer quoted implicitly, ex-
pressed most clearly the view of human culture in terms of
plant morphology as something rooted in the "soil" and grow-
ing and dying with it. His pessimism is a direct result of his
determinism, which is again a result of his naturalism. It is be-
cause its roots are deep in European thought and in European
power politics that we cannot think of Haushofer's develop-
ment as a local German aberration.
We cannot therefore say that geopolitics has no values; it
has a clear set of naturalistic values, the values of power poli-
tics or of the law of the jungle. If we accept naturalistic values,
we must end up in Spenglerian pessimism; from it there is no
escape. Unless we are willing to make a clean break with
power politics and with this naturalistic Weltanschauung,
Spengler *s pessimism is justified. Perhaps the western civiliza-
tion will go down in eternal wars.
The trouble with naturalism is that too many things are
becoming natural. The law of the jungle has become natural
to our academic minds. Manslaughter has become scientifically
natural. The bombing of schoolchildren has become natural
also. We have had enough of naturalism. To be inhumanly
scientific has ceased to be a reproach with us.
Somewhere we must stop, before we come to the brink of
the catastrophe. Unless we are willing to take many things on
faith and abjure the false cloak of science, this era of human
civilization is doomed* Unless we renounce the intellectual
code which has led us to 1914 and to 1939, and render unto
natural science what belongs to science and render unto man
what belongs to man, I do not see how the western civilization
can escape destruction. There are too many things we cannot
158 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
be scientific about because we can never "prove" them or even
measure them. The equality of men and peoples can never be
proved. The possibility of world co-operation can never be
proved. These things have to be taken on faith. In place of
naturalistic values, we have to set up human values. Our very
standard and notion of truth itself must be changed. The
standard of Confucius is still not far wrong. "Truth must not
depart from human nature. If what is regarded as truth de-
parts from human nature, it may not be regarded as truth."
That is the Confucian answer to naturalism.
Geopoliticians call themselves "realists," by which they
mean they have no patience with ideals. Many of our intel-
lectuals belong to a cynic generation, while the Munich men
and other appeasers are regarded as "realists." Those who
speak for the freedom of India are laughed at. Those who plead
for a complete break with power politics are laughed at. Those
who choose to believe that sincere co-operation and good will
between the western democracies and Russia are possible by an
act of human will, if we will make the effort, are laughed at.
Those who are telling the world to go down the bloody path
of national suspicions and balance of power call themselves
"realists,"
At bottom it is only a question of the freedom of the human
will versus determinism, the question whether good will has
the power to change the world we make for ourselves. Peace
on earth, I repeat, is an act of faith, and without faith we
shall not be saved. It boils down almost to this: Jesus, the
Prince of Peace, was a liar or He was not. We've got to make
up our minds.
THE INTELLECTUAL'S DILEMMA 159
18
THE INTELLECTUAL'S DILEMMA
IT SEEMS that we are the inheritors of a sick and dying
tradition in modern thought, from which these professors of
geopolitics are not able to lift themselves. In geopolitics and
its professed disciples, we see a deep-seated cynicism, a stupid
belief in force and necessary struggle, a total absence of appre-
ciation of a moral point of view, and above all, a haughty threat
of force in the form of an overwhelming air and sea power
with which the world is going to be policed for the world's
own good.
If the voice of the professors prevails over the voice of the
common people and there is every evidence that it prevails
strongly in certain influential and official sections of the west-
ern democracies the blood of millions of American boys will
have to be shed in a future war. For even they themselves do
not tell you that, following the pattern of world domination,
there will be a world peace, but only that the Anglo-American
sword will be ground so sharp and suspended so ominously
low over the rest of the world that no revolt will be possible.
In other words, while force cannot succeed in Hitler's hands,
it can succeed in Anglo-American hands. If this is the sum of
wisdom that guides men's actions in politics, then the picture
is dark indeed. It simply means the assumption that after the
war, the world must be frightened by 50,000 Anglo-American
planes and 200,000 pilots. But suppose China refuses to be
frightened, Russia refuses to be frightened, and the world re-
fuses to be frightened. Then what? Go out and bomb them
after the war ? What childish simplicity !
How many millions of American boys must shed their blood
in order to crush both China and Russia never concerns the
ifo BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
learned professor. If it did, he would cease to be a scientist
and would make a disgraceful display of such human emotions
as the sense of right and wrong and the revulsion against kill-
ing fellow men. Professor Spykman has forgotten about God,
His reply is that his subject is strictly geopolitics, and God and
geopolitics are separate. My reply to that is that they should
not be separate, or we would be debasing the human intellect
in the name of science. I know I am a heathen and Professor
Spykman is a Christian, but still a heathen can believe in God,
and I like to argue with the Christian professor on this point.
The dilemma exists everywhere and must be faced quickly.
The academic dilemma in modern scholarship, that in order
to be "scientific" we must reject moral judgments and cannot
even properly handle human sentiments in other words, the
enforced amorality of the academic point of view had better
be quickly solved by western thinkers, or we must have as a
natural result international amorality in human relations. The
elimination of conscience has come from the top, not from
below, from the educated, not from the uneducated. Conse-
quently, if we are to continue to live safely together, we must
rely upon the judgment of the New York taxi-drivers, and not
on that of a Yale Professor of International Relations.
For we are getting closer to the deep-seated sores of a curious
modern intellectual malady. I accuse western scholarship of
being amoral, which is a splendid attitude in the natural sci-
ences, but downright decadent and obscene in the sphere of
human studies. I maintain that the academic attitude, deprived
of warm emotions for our fellow men, is a dangerous attitude
to teach in our college classrooms. I maintain that this trend of
thought has produced a Hitler, and will produce more Hitlers
wherever this type of moral prostitution prevails. I maintain,
further, that this method of strict objectivity, useful in the
natural sciences, is unreliable and dangerous in the human
sciences. I maintain that objective thinking in human relations
is an impossibility and never exists. Consequently, I maintain
THE INTELLECTUAL'S DILEMMA 161
that no human science,, in the sense of a true natural science,
is possible, except physiology and its related studies, medicine
and anthropology. I believe that the scientific technique is in-
adequate in the so-called human sciences and must be supple-
mented by insight and simple wisdom, and that, unless we
do so, we are heading for disaster. Particularly is this true of
world problems. In a later chapter, I shall try to make this clear.
I maintain this because, first of all, in the final weighing of
conclusions, after the assemblage of facts, the decision is always
a subjective process, involving evaluation of imponderable fac-
tors, never reducible to facts and figures. An example of the
failure of the objective method is the isolationist position of
Charles A. Beard. In the final weighing of divergent facts, to
arrive at an isolationist or an anti-Axis stand, the emotions
not only do, but also should enter into our considerations, or
we are debasing the intellect and the conscience God has given
us.
Secondly, in the realm of human affairs, psychological facts
and factors could never be assessed with anything like the
accuracy found in the scientific measurement of electric volts
or radio waves. Outstanding cases are Russian and Chinese
morale. If anybody took the trouble to assemble facts, the Ger-
mans certainly did. So did the Japanese. The odds looked all
in their favor; the odds do not look that way now. If the Ger-
mans could be wrong, so could we.
Thirdly, we all place different values upon human facts,
making objectivity impossible. The fact that the Japanese are
a warlike nation and the English are a peace-loving nation has
a certain significance for me, but not for Professor Spykman.
The fact that the Japanese are warlike and aggressive while
the Chinese are peace-loving and essentially democratic in their
way of life should be the deciding factors in choosing our part-
ners for the postwar world; but it does not seem so to Professor
Spykman, who only looks at the map spread out before him
and is intellectually intrigued by the similarities in geograph-
ifa BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
ical position between England and Japan. Who is really objec-
tive, and who can say that he alone is correct and wise ?
Fourthly, he fools only himself who thinks he is free from
prejudice. Emotional bias inevitably steps in. Professor Spyk-
man notes that China's position in regard to the Asiatic Medi-
terranean (Malaysia, etc,) is similar to that of the United States
in regard to the American Mediterranean (the Caribbean Sea).
Nevertheless, he thinks of the necessity of creating a strong
Japan to check China, while he would never for a moment
think of creating a strong Mexico to check the United States.
That final decision is pure emotional prejudice.
Fifthly, back of all such fascist thought is the fashionable
determinism of modern scholarship. Determinism always spells
irresponsibility, as if we were by necessity helpless to create a
better world to live in. The taxi-driver has the courage to say,
"This world of eternal wars is bad; let's change it." The de-
terminist has not the courage to say so, but must say, "It is
bad, and will continue to be bad." There is a curious intel-
lectual delight in such satanic predictions, but it is not going
to help build a better world. The elimination of conscience
from western scholarship has gone far enough.
Sixthly, the world is not so simple as these pseudo-scientists
like to imagine. What the unpredictable effects of Anglo-
American domination by an overwhelming force will be, the
best geopoliticians cannot tell us. Only one thing we know
definitely: the greatest force produces the greatest hatred. The
normal human reaction against all threats of force, the cor-
ruption that will set in with power, and the guilty conscience
that follows corruption, the dilemma of sending American boys
to help England fight a native insurrection in New Delhi or
Calcutta, the absolute certainty of the willingness of Russians,
Chinese, and Indians to be bombed to pieces and continue
sullen resistance, the meeting of violence with nonviolence,
which should burn Christian cheeks but doesn't, the groaning
under the crushing burdens of taxation for armaments, and the
CHARACTER OF THE MODERN AGE 163
final wise and happy intuition of the Kansas farmer, "Damn
it all, why should I police the world for others!" all such
things are bound to follow in its wake, resulting in a violent
reaction such as followed the Versailles Treaty.
The advocates of such sheer domination by force have not
even the wit to see these things. In any case, the guilt of arm-
ing against Russia and China will lie heavily upon the Ameri-
can conscience, and moral defeatism will set in long before
an actual war between the races sets off the final and greatest
conflagration of the world.
IV. DIAGNOSIS
19
THE CHARACTER OF THE MODERN AGE
WHY all this disillusionment? Evidently man's way of think-
ing has changed. The meaning and value of life have changed.
Man's conception of himself has changed. Our idea of the
nature of man has changed, and when that changes, the world
itself goes through an upheaval. Let us make this historically
clear.
A world tragedy seems a convenient time and compelling
ground for assessing the character of an age and taking count
of appreciations and depreciations of our spiritual stocks. Our
complacency about European civilization is gone. Every time
I think of Europe, I think of a photograph of three Poles
hanged by the Germans, the ropes around their necks sus-
pended from a common rack, their bodily frames unduly
stretched and gaunt and long. It doesn't matter to me whether
the Germans are hanging Poles, or the Poles are hanging Ger-
164 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
mans: what this means to me is simply this, that Europeans
are hanging Europeans. That photograph is a comment, a
profound comment, on modern European civilization.
When you survey the march of the last four centuries since
the coming of the Modern Age, you are dismayed at the
appreciation and depreciation of certain intellectual currencies,
called "ideas." Do not forget the social and economic unrest
in Europe that preceded this war the disintegration and col-
lapse of democratic values, the search for sheer security, the
security in mere making of a living, which caused the rise of
Fascism, Nazism, Socialism, Communism, and all forms of
collectivism. Against this background picture, let us take the
following inventory, with "dep.," "app.," "s.q.a.," "w.o.," and
"si." standing for depreciation, appreciation, status quo ante,
mped out, and slight respectively:
Indus' Social Eco~
Free- Educa- trial Wei" Human nomic
God Soul dom tion Wealth jare Rights Rights
U. S. S. R. dep. s.q.a. dep. app. app. app. dep. app.
Germany w.o. s.q.a. w.o. app. app. app. w.o. s.q.a.
France dep. dep. dep. app. app. ? dep. ?
England sl.dep. sl.dep. s.q.a. app. app. app. s.q.a. app,
On the whole, God and freedom fare the worst and educa-
tion and industrial wealth fare the best. It is interesting to note
that the notion of the soul (Seele) has not at all depreciated in
modern Germany, but is a driving force in the German war
machine. "Freedom" is contrasted with regimentation, and
stands for the rights of the individual, or the "Human Rights,"
which column is therefore redundant except as a convenient
visual contrast with the "Economic Rights." We are talking
more and more about the right to a job, right to an income,
right to security against unemployment and old age, the
rights covered by the Beveridge Plan, the right of the soldier
to come back and find work, etc., and are talking less and
less about the right to be free, the right of national sov-
CHARACTER OF THE MODERN AGE 165
ereignty, and the right of the individual. "Industrial Wealth"
stands for the nation's industrial productivity and does not
refer to the distribution of wealth. Volume of wealth in itself
without relation to its distribution means nothing to the indi-
vidual and cannot indicate progress, but is only a measure of
war potential to the nation. In fact, industrial overproductivity
starts the race for markets and must end in the war for mar-
kets; it is highly questionable whether it is a factor contribut-
ing toward peace rather than the reverse. Industrial nations
start wars, agricultural nations don't witness Japan and China.
It has no relation to social peace or unrest, but rather tends,
when its products are unevenly distributed, toward unrest
Confucius says, "I have heard that the heads of states and fam-
ilies do not worry about the shortage of people, but worry
about inequality of distribution. They do not worry about
poverty, but about social unrest. For with equal distribution,
there is no poverty, with social unity, there is no shortage of
people, and with social peace, there is no danger of collapse."
The old man sometimes does hit the nail on the head even in
economics!
The off-hand table above is not entirely representative of the
progress of Europe, for many of the most socially advanced
countries, like Denmark and Holland, are not represented. In
Catholic countries God tends to keep his ground; I am not
a Catholic, but one has to admit it. But on the whole it is an
unhealthy picture, an unsound balance sheet. God and free-
dom are losing ground. That is why the people of Germany
and Italy put up with the suppression of liberty under Fascism,
and the very liberals in America are better advocates of eco-
nomic security than disciples of eighteenth-century freedom.
What does this mean? Man's minds naturally concentrate
on the more pressing problems of the age. A man who has
an ulcered stomach thinks and talks about nothing but his
stomach; I never give mine a thought. The problems of the
nineteenth century happened to be economic. The nineteenth
i66 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
century, therefore, talked of economics, as the eighteenth cen-
tury talked of Reason, and the seventeenth century talked of
Divine Purpose. The twentieth century is now talking only of
security. Isn't this ominous ?
Economic security, by all means; the Beveridge Plan, by all
means. Economic unrest is threatening the collapse of capi-
talist society and, I take it, the Allies are fighting to preserve
capitalist society. The war started with social and economic
unrest and the collapse of democracy in Europe; when the
war is over, naturally we shall pick up from there, and have
to plan for it now that is "postwar planning," which is oc-
cupied with full employment, social insurance, etc. These ideas
fill our thoughts to the exclusion of everything else. From
domestic economics, we go on to international economics, and
we confuse international peace with a satisfactory international
balance sheet. The school of Cordell Hull seems to think that
the maintenance of world peace is merely a matter of readjust-
ing the tariff tables, and that good will, justice^ liberty,, and
human brotherhood simply flow from a prosperous interna-
tional business year.
In my recent years of stay in the United States, I have met
only one thinking American, at least the only one thinking
about peace whose values agree with mine. That man is a
Negro. Several months ago I was talking with a Negro porter
at the Union Station in Washington. His face was very intel-
ligent and very sad. I learned he had finished three years of
high school in the Middle West. He was making about $150
a month, with which he had to keep a family with four
children. I started talking with him because there was some-
thing deep in his eyes. I said he was doing well in wartime,
but he said it was hard and his wife and the eldest daughter
had to go out to work. Then we started talking about the
war. Sadly he remarked, "Conditions may change perhaps
after the war. But it isn't the money I'm complaining about.
I don't mind working for little money. It is that we want to
CHARACTER OF THE MODERN AGE 167
be treated and thought of as human beings/' His words, spoken
simply and sincerely, stung me. Are you going to give him
relief by some American Beveridge Plan? But a point like that
is what we cannot solve by mathematics and what the western
thinkers are entirely unaware of in their postwar planning.
They are thinking very hard about his economic rights, and
not thinking at all about his human rights. They assume he
-will be happy with his economic rights.
On the other hand, we are told to give up more and more
freedom; that arouses the true democrat's blood. The economic
remedy is for curing certain economic ills, it is not a cure-all.
The cure for the ills of economic progress is not more eco-
nomic progress. Man has still to go on and so live that he finds
life both good and enjoyable. What if we win the war and lose
the soul ? Civilization after all must have a content.
Yet the matter goes deeper than that. It reaches down to the
roots and fiber of our thinking and has something to do with
the temper of the age. And I make the categorical statement:
With our way of thinking, we cannot create or devise a world
peace. Modern thinking is increasingly mechanical. May I
point out how the very phraseology of the modern tongue has
changed ? We are today scared of the old simple words, like
"goodness," "justice," and "mercy." These are still possible to
use, but, for instance, a phrase like "human brotherhood"
would at once condemn its user to the charge of empty rhetoric
and unclear thinking. It is something this age simply doesn't
believe in, at least in the highbrow circles. Contrast it with
the French word 'Tr#/m2Z/<f'; once upon a time, it was capable
of arousing intense emotions even among the intellectuals.
They just believed in it; we moderns just don't. This age shuns
moral platitudes, and goodness, justice, and mercy seem like
overused coins. We create euphemisms for these words and
would rather speak of them as anything but goodness, justice,
and mercy. A girl with a Victorian name like "Faith," "Pru-
dence" or "Patience" would be the laughingstock of her school-
168 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
mates. Educators, preachers, and publicists generally evade
these words by using a more modern term; they call them the
"spiritual values" or the "social values." But this particular
use of the word "value" is strange, for it derives from eco-
nomics. It has some relation to the ledger and therefore has
a good, old, reassuring tone, reminding one of the "good
values" that a housewife admires on a bargain counter. Other
words derive from the social sciences. Educators speak of
prostitutes and prostitution as "anti-social beings" and "anti-
social behavior." Such phrases have a queer, dehydrated, syn-
thetic flavor and suggest that the bones of our morality have
been picked pretty clean. We don't reform a drunkard any
more, we just "readjust" him to society as we readjust a watch,
or even possibly "acclimatize" him to a new environment. A
successful or unsuccessful man is an "integrated" or "divided"
or "maladjusted" personality. The words of the modern tongue
are getting increasingly mechanical. Both a political party and
a motor-car are a "machine." Public sentiments are "response'*
or "reactions," diplomatic communications are "pressure,"
and a popular attitude is just "habitual mass-conditioning,"
Pride is "inflated ego," bravado is a "defense mechanism,"
criticism is an "outlet," and something or other is a "safety
valve," and somebody out of a job is just a "dislocated" indi-
vidual.
I am choosing very general terms that have nothing to do
with a personal style, and I exclude such specific academic
jargon of sociologists and psychologists as "processes of equal-
ization of satisfaction value," "emotive reaction," "ideational
reorientation," and "associative memory response." The plain
fact is, we are scared not only of moral judgments, but of all
normal emotions. Our morality is getting a little synthetic and
is served up to the public in dehydrated essences. But if any-
body tells me that psychologists who talk of "associative mem-
ory response" can educate good human beings or sociologists
who talk of "equalization of satisfaction value" can help the
CHARACTER OF THE MODERN AGE 169
society o man, I simply refuse to believe him. In an interesting
article on this type of "pedagese" in The American Scholar
(Winter, 1942-1943), the writer quotes such interesting curiosi-
ties from teachers who are supposed to teach our young and to
communicate some kind of enthusiasm for learning. "The
Reduction of Data Showing Non-Linear Regression for Cor-
relation by the Ordinary Product-Moment Formula; and the
Measurement of Error Due to Curvilinear Regression" was the
tide of a paper read before the Psychology Section of the
American Association for the Advancement of Learning! The
development of a child's interest in history or geography or
wit or wisdom is to be discovered by "an extension o the
Kelley-Wood and the Kondo-Elderton Tables of Abscissae of
the Unit Normal Curve, for Areas (%a) between 4500 and
.49999 99999." When I see such teachers, shall I not say like
Jesus, "Suffer the little children to come unto me"? The ma-
chine has been substituted for the man, and one could feel
from the use of these mechanical terms that the human mind
itself is being changed and that a kind of scientific formalin
is taking the place of human blood in our blood vessels.
Through the Funeral Directory of Science we must go and
have our blood replaced by formalin before we can come out
as university professors and teachers of this age. The human
mind itself is a "track," single or double. God Himself is a
sort of Center of Gravity. Only the dollar is still a dollar, unless
it is fifty-nine cents.
And so, before we can understand ourselves and this age,
we must understand the roots of our present thinking, and see
how we came to think in this curious twentieth-century way
at all. Why have the standards changed? Why has our con-
ception of man changed? Why has the meaning of life gone?
Why, in particular, do we come to be the cynics, pessimists,
and hard-boiled "realists'* that we are even in .the midst of
a war for democracy? Materialists must fight to the end of
170 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
eternity. Materialists cannot end war or create peace. They have
not the brains for it. Why, then, are we materialists?
Let us take the idea of Freedom, and see how its basis is
failing. We shall see how the very content of Freedom has
changed, because the idea of man's "rights," on which Free-
dom is based, has changed.
But first I must make clear that two of the Four Freedoms
are not freedoms at all, and one of them has no meaning for
me* A study of the Four Freedoms reveals that there are two
'"doubles" masquerading as Freedom that the Devil Economics
has put there. Freedom from fear is not freedom, but political
security* Freedom from want is not freedom, but economic
security. Both may be achieved at the cost of human freedom,
and probably will, i we think too much about animal security.
Nothing gives such a feeling of perfect freedom from want
and fear to a dog as a collar around its neck. Its next meal is
guaranteed. A bird in a cage has exchanged its freedom on
the wing for freedom from the preying hawk and freedom
from starvation in the snow. But a bird which deliberately
flies into a cage cannot be said to be fighting for its freedom
except by the most caustic casuistry. It is a mere trick of the
English language, and "freedom from want" or "fear" is
untranslatable into Chinese or French. What is "libertc de
misere" or "liberte de peur"? We may, if we like, easily add a
few more freedoms, like "Freedom from Disease," which is
health, and "Freedom from Dirt," which is cleanliness, and
"Freedom from the Telephone/* which is peace and rest,
ad infinitum. The Indians might add "Freedom from Eng-
land," which is genuine human and political freedom. And
so when we speak of freedom, we must stick to the original
meaning of the term, without **of" and without "from"
just plain good old freedom human freedom. It is possible
for man to have all the Four Freedoms the freedom to talk
and think as he pleases and to be fed and sheltered in security
and yet be a slave.
CHARACTER OF THE MODERN AGE 171
The freedom of belief has a peculiarly American and
seventeenth-century context, for the people of the Thirteen Col-
onies were pilgrims or religious refugees, who came to America
that they might worship the God they chose and in the way
they chose. But freedom of belief does not have such a ring
in Chinese ears; it has absolutely no meaning to a Chinese, and
it is not what the Chinese are fighting for. In the absence of
religious wars and persecutions, freedom of belief is just ac-
cepted in Chinese national life; to fight for it is like taking
an oath to fight for and maintain the blueness of the sky.
Freedom of speech has been interfered with in certain periods
of Chinese history, as in western democracies, and therefore
it has still some meaning. But it is not broad enough,
and is distinctly less comprehensive than just human freedom.
I would not go to war with anybody just to protect freedom
of speech; I could do with silence, or get around it to say
all I want to say without landing in jail. I would consider as
a worthy objective of this war only good old freedom, the
freedom of all races and all peoples on this earth. On this
issue we may not evade. Nor may we be less explicit about
the freedom of the individual.
Nevertheless, the word "Freedom" has still a beautiful ring
in America and the world. It means that the common people
still believe in it in plain old, human freedom. It is a slightly
overused coin, but it is still a good penny. You can still set
not only Americans, but Hindus, Chinese, Greeks, Negroes,
and Finns fighting for it, with the blood surging in their
veins. And that is what the majority of the peoples of the
world are fighting for. To me it is a sort of come-down and
sounds a little comical, as it must sound to the humorous
American soldier, to say "Kill the Japs! Kill the Germans!
So that you may come back and only work 40 hours a week
at $75.00, with medical insurance and time and a half for
overtime!" My blood reaction would not register. Something
must be wrong with the economic view of man.
172 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
But how did the idea of "freedom." arise? How did the
Rights of Man arise? How did that word happen to have
that fine, revolutionary ring to it? It was created as an answer
to oppression and a call to rebellion. When circumstances of
political oppression exist, the word "freedom" always recovers
that rousing, revolutionary ring. When Patrick Henry shouted,
"Give me liberty or give me death/' it reached depths in the
hearts of the American people, because the oppression was
there. When Jawaharlal Nehru shouts, "Give me liberty or
give me death," it leaves the Bertrand Russells and Norman
Angells cold because they don't happen to be the oppressed*
Even to the Americans, it is something so remote that it is
less important than diplomatic etiquette; silence is preferable
to breaking the punctilio between the august governments. To
intervene on the principle of a nation's freedom would be
almost as bad as putting the wife of the British Ambassador
below the wife of the Brazilian Minister at a Washington dip-
lomatic dinner* It would be almost uncivilized. Dr. Wellington
Koo is said to have intervened on behalf of the Chinese Gov-
ernment for India before his departure. But it was such a
hideous faux pas that Winston Churchill is reported to have
told him that if the Chinese Government did not stop inter-
vening in the matter, British-Chinese relations would be seri-
ously endangered! That is how far the word "freedom" has
fallen in the thinking of man in the twentieth century!
In the eighteenth century freedom came in with the human
"rights." Now it happens both "human rights" and the mod-
ern "economic rights" are myths, from a philosophical stand-
point. They were, and are, simply things that men strongly
believed or believe in. Like God and the soul, these "rights"
could never be proved. If we want them badly enough, we say
God gave them to us. Like the Divine Right of Kings, they
were categorical statements* Heine called the Divine Right of
Kings "the twaddle of tonsured quacks," And so the Rights
of Man had also a theological basis. Thomas Jefferson held
CHARACTER OF THE MODERN AGE 173
these truths to be "self-evident." Moreover, we were "created
equal" and "born free" and these rights were "unalienable,"
so that metaphysically neither King nor God could take them
away from us. But how did we know that we were "created
equal," or "born free"? We simply chose to believe so. But
Rousseau's naive picture of the savage and the natural man has
long been exploded by science. That man is "born free" was
merely a statement of passionate belief. Like the Divine Right
of Kings, it had no rational or scientific basis, and when men
were ready to discard them, they simply withdrew the theo-
logical structure from underneath. Historically, different na-
tions have spoken of "rights of commerce," "rights to trade"
in other countries, and simultaneously the rights to exclude
others from trade or labor in their own country; conquering
nations speak of "the right to expansion" or to "living space";
a few go further and discover a Divine Destiny to Rule a par-
ticular region, and fishing nations speak of the "right to take
salmon."
Similarly, when we want the right to a job or employment
badly enough, we shall also be speaking of the "divine right
to work," or to a salary or pension, or that men are "born em-
ployed," and at times it may even look more important to be
"born employed" than to be "born free" or "born equal." If
we don't look out, someday we may discover that we are "born
to a coupon," with the "inalienable right to a coupon" that
no one shall metaphysically be able to take away from us.
Fundamentally, that is why we are forsaking the human
rights and switching over to the economic rights.
So then the spiritual "values" are slipping and leave a
vacuum. Liberte, egalite, jraternite have lost their prophetic
Messianic ring. Equalitarianism seems to have fallen into dis-
repute. Democratic values, economic values, security values are
being thrown into a witches' cauldron from which arises only
a steam stinking with a strong totalitarian smell. Into this
vacuum rush the confusing ideologies, and Communists, Social-
174 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
ists and Democrats exchange blows in the dark, not knowing
who is fighting whom. Stalin is calling the U.S.S.R. a "democ-
racy," and the Archbishop of Canterbury may be properly
classified as a "red" by the N. Y. Journal-American. As for
Petain, he needs no ideology for his regime at all; it is neither
Fascist, nor Socialist, nor Republican; he is neither Fuehrer, nor
Duce, nor Dictator, nor President. For his ideology, he merely
gasps "Work, Home, and Country!" No, it does not look as if
there is going to be peace in Europe. The good old values
have gone.
But while we are arguing about the content of freedom and
raising the question whether the concept of human freedom
has not changed, we are threatened with another more serious
and more fundamental matter, which has come about entirely
unnoticed, and that is, Freedom of the Will has disappeared.
Unless we recapture freedom of the will, we shall not have the
strength to restore human freedom, and unless we restore
human freedom, we shall accomplish nothing with the Four
Freedoms, even if we attain them. Why has the Freedom of
the Will disappeared?
20
ORIGINS OF THE MECHANISTIC MIND
SUPPOSE we put the matter this way. Power politics is gun-
powder politics, and gunpowder politics must end in an explo-
sion. Power politics works with the balance of power, like two
supercharged carbons, steadily approaching each other from a
distance. As the machines advance, power accumulates, and
the final explosions inevitably grow bigger and bigger. We
have now reached the stage when explosions of power politics
are global in scope. Playing with power politics today is play-
ORIGINS OF THE MECHANISTIC MIND 175
ing with fire. Meanwhile, our moral development lags behind;
our thinking is national and not global The fact must be faced
at this moment that world politics is power politics and it is-
the only politics we \now or can conceivably practice, and that
we are in certainty heading for still greater wars and conflicts,
however the combination? of power may alter. And we are
accepting this fact with a sense of fatalistic resignation. We
have to admit that all our statesmen are power politicians, that
both the conduct of the war and the conception of the peace
are based on the principle of power politics. We believe that
force will continue to rule the world. Professor Spykman is
probably right in saying that after the war we shall start where
we left of?, and world politics will continue to be based on a
power pattern. If we accept this thesis, it means that we are
heading for greater and greater world struggles until finally
one tyrant power dominates all the rest, or European civiliza-
tion goes down in ruins before that point is reached*
But if you ask, why must we go on with power politics, even
though we clearly see the end, the answer is a mechanistic
conception of human life that there is a sort of mechanical
inevitability about it, and that we can do nothing about it,
much as we would wish to. There is the naturalistic view of
the struggle of nations for survival, there is the fundamental
materialistic background, and there is the determinism of
human aflf airs which we have unconsciously borrowed from a
deterministic view of the physical universe as governed by
mechanistic laws. All these viewpoints smack of "science" and
give them a certain respectable character. From this point on,
power politics assumes not a divine sanction, but a kind of
scientific sanction, and political "realism" is identified with
clear scientific thinking, while any form of sentimental ideal-
ism is suspect of being "moronic." This mechanistic conception
of human life naturally ends in despair: after all, human
society is a jungle fight for survival. It is almost as if one would
say, "We would rather walk with our eyes open to Hell in this
176 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
life-and-death struggle of nations for power, than be senti-
mental idiots that dream about a heaven of peace that nowhere
exists and may the Devil take the hindmost!"
How did the modern man come to think this way? Psycho-
analytic patients are told to go over their childhood history
and search the hidden corners of their souls for frustrations,
fixations, and complexes, and thus come to understand them-
selves. Reminiscence brings detachment and understanding
and understanding brings emancipation. A little reminiscing
across the centuries will do the world a lot of good. The mod-
ern world will then understand itself. How did we come to
be naturalists, determinists, and materialists?
The dead hand of Science Is upon the West. Science or the
objective study of matter has colored man's thinking and
brought us all three, Naturalism, Determinism, and Material-
Ism. Science therefore has destroyed the human values. Natu-
ralism has destroyed the belief in the power for good and
co-operation. Materialism has destroyed subtlety and insight
and faith in things unseen. Determinism has destroyed the
capacity for hope.
I know that the natural scientists will not be offended; in
fact, they will all agree with me and protest the loudest that
their method and their point of view have been stolen and
applied to illegitimate fields, for which they are entirely without
responsibility. The line between natural sciences and the human
studies must be sharply redrawn; the very standards of truth
in both branches of study must be kept distinct. Science deals
with facts, and the human studies deal with values, and neither
need ape the other's technique. Science deals by definition with
exact, classified knowledge, and there is a large realm of im-
portant human knowledge that cannot be exact or classified.
If science cannot with its test tubes and chemical agents, pro-
duce an answer to such a simple question as "why I like you/*
how can it possibly deal with the question of human relations?
But we have now confused the two groups: human and
ORIGINS OF THE MECHANISTIC MIND 177
natural studies, and a dangerous result follows. The natural
scientist says merely, "God, freedom, and the goodness of man
are not exact knowledge, and do not lie in my field." But the
unnatural scientist, the professor of human studies, says, "God,
freedom, and the goodness of man lie within my department,
but they cannot be handled scientifically, and if I wish to be a
scientist, which certainly I do, I am compelled to ignore them
and look somewhere else for mechanical laws. Only in that
way can I hope to be modern and keep my job. Furthermore,
since science cannot discover God, the soul, and the goodness
of man, perhaps they do not exist at all." There the confusion
begins. The natural scientist says, "I am only interested in facts.' 5
It is the unnatural scientist, compelled to deal with human
values but nevertheless feeling bound to ape the scientist's tech-
nique, who says, "I am interested in facts also. Neither God,
nor freedom, nor the soul is a demonstrable fact. We simply
have no means of handling them, and therefore must ignore
them, except insofar as they have a body, if any." The natural
scientist says, "I measure electric volts and radio waves and
plot curves." The unnatural scientist says, "I want to measure
and to plot curves also. I want to measure hope, aspirations,
ideas, God, and freedom, and I cannot do so. But I can measure
populations, birth-rates, food supplies, mechanical response to
stimuli, the consonants and vowels of poetry, export and import
figures, and the influence of physical environment. In that
direction alone lies my hope of being called a scientist."
Since the human studies had to.be "sciences," they had to
deal with those physical factors of man and of human history
which the scientific technique could handle, and it could han-
dle always only the material. The outstanding contributions
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the human studies
have therefore been along the lines of the influence of physical
factors, of climate upon history (Huntington), of occupation
upon outlook (Marx), of heredity upon character (Lombroso),
of race upon history (Houston Stewart Chamberlain), of en-
178 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
vironment upon ethics (Westermarck), of eyestrain upon
genius (some German doctor), and I shall not be surprised if
some historian is able to prove the influence of African beetroots
on die Napoleonic war., or if some new prophet is able to
demonstrate the influence of nutrition on good morals, or of
riboflavin on optimistic thinking. It will be typically modern,
and it will sound immensely wise. Many of these are contribu-
tions to human thought; some are illuminating, some are laud-
able, but all of them seem to suffer from a mental squint,
It is easy therefore to understand the direction of intellectual
development of the past century, characterized by this tech-
nique borrowed from the natural sciences. But along with the
change of technique came inevitably a change in Weltanschau-
ung, which is a materialistic view of man and of human history
and the forces governing our lives. Each little contribution
emphasized this aberration slightly, but the total result has
turned out to be frightening, as we can see now.
Hence arise the conscientious, diligent fact-finding and fact-
verification of Niebuhr and Ranke and the economic inter-
pretation of history of Charles A. Beard, the physiological
psychology of Wundt and the behaviorist psychology of J. B.
Watson, the "experimental novel" of Zola and the postmortem
"realism" of Dreiser and Farrell, the literary criticism of Taine
and the research into "origins" of Renan, the "social physics"
of Comte and the "materialistic dialectic" of Marx, the "onto-
logical criticism" of poetry of some academic professor and the
"comparisons" and "influences" of comparative literature of our
postgraduate schools, the incestuous complex of Freud and the
looking for the soul (Psyche) in the a&us-tomons-veneris area
of the psychoanalysts. The whole structure of psychoanalysis
falls if there is no seat to our pants. And symbolizing this uni-
versal break-up, we have the coterie small talk of T. S. Eliot,
the lugubrious self-dissection and exhibitionism of Joyce, and
the retreat from harmony of Stravinsky, the retreat from beauty
of Picasso, the retreat from logic and sanity of Dali, and the
ORIGINS OF THE MECHANISTIC MIND 179
retreat from grammar of Gertrude Stein. In world politics it
emerges as the "cultural morphology" of Spengler, the geo-
politics of Haushofer, and the economic panacea of Cordell
Hull In the conduct of this war, it becomes the absence of
spiritual principles in dealing with Asia and North Africa.
Every one of these tendencies smacks of the "scientific." But
good taste has vanished, and the meaning of life, apart from
assurance of the next meal, has become zero. The only whimper
we can hear now is, "Give me security, or give me death! Put
me in a collectivistic jail if you want, but give me a meal ticket
and an old-age coupon!" What a come-down for a revolu-
tionist! What amazing contrast to the hope of man in the
eighteenth century!
For having dealt so successfully with matter, man has be-
come a part of matter. The idea of the nature of man has
changed. The force of "ideas" itself has been rejected in history.
The study of potsherds has replaced that of the ambitions and
loves and hatreds of man in history. Homer is getting better
understood, or at least verified, by measurements of broken
tiles in ancient Trojan ruins. Historians are more interested in
the chamber pots used by Egyptian queens than in their pas-
sions and wiles. The search for facts and verification of facts
goes on. And a professor of history, holding a precious broken
Etruscan jar, exclaims with satisfaction, "We know history."
The search for verifiable facts goes on. While historians
measure potsherds, educators measure man's intelligence, crim-
inologists measure human skulls, psychologists measure our im-
pulses and response, geographers measure inches of rainfall,
and geopoliticians measure the supply of oil in the Caucasus.
If potsherds are understood, history is established; if units of
knowledge are properly measured, education is successful; if
skulls, jaws, and ears are measured, criminals are as under-
standable as a washing machine; if impulses and response are
properly studied, the whole of man's psyche, his intellect, imag-
ination, will, and ambition and idiosyncrasies are revealed; if
i8o BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
rainfall is measured, the rise and decline of civilizations are
accounted for; if the control of oil supply is assured, the war
is won.
And man has become an atom in a whirling machine, made
from the star-dust of some exploded universe* Glands, vessels
and liquids make up our bodies, as mechanical inhibitions,
conditioned reflexes and complexes make up our minds. Of
physical hunger, we know a great deal, of spiritual hunger we
know next to nothing. Desires are urges, over which we have
as little control as the shape of our skulls* Man is a chemical
compound, acted upon by secretions from within and environ-
ment from without The elusive Psyche, unknown, unverifiable,
and uncared for, has taken wings and gone. The rainbow has
been successfully dissected, the childhood wonder and fancy
have gone, and the world has grown gray with us.
Professor Hocking, in one of the most intuitive passages of
modern writing, has summarized it well:
It is not strange that with the complete victory, scientific
method overshot its mark. Instead of saying, "We have
no place for the purposes or values of things in our labora-
tories," it said in effect, "We have now dismissed purposes
and values from the universe." There was a certain satis-
faction in a clean sweep: the tedious announcements of
the precise purposes of God by pious moralizers could not
come back. And so long as science was mainly occupied
with the stars and the atoms, this vacuum of value caused
no uneasiness.
But the time was to come when science turned its well-
trained objective eye on living things and on man. The
sciences of psychology and sociology rose like tropical suns,
endowed with the initial momentum of an inherited
method. Psychology was to be a sort of physics of the
passions and thoughts; and man was to be a thing of fact
and law. This seemed to be a little hard on freedom, for
ORIGINS OF THE MECHANISTIC MIND 181
it inserted the human body exactly and without remainder
into the mathematically perfect, and therefore calculable,
channels of physical necessity. But, after all, one must yield
to the combined force of fact and method; man may quite
well retain his feeling of freedom, without actually 'being
free from the laws of nature. So it was assumed.
What was not at first noticed is that man had become
meaningless. He had become an integral part of the astro-
nomical machine, which had already been renovated and
all lurking values thrown into the rubbish heap. The
universe was not going anywhere, it was just going! And
if the whole show has no purpose, then the human part of
ithowever it may feel to itself is again just a fact, a
complex and interesting fact, but a transitory fact, together
with all its achievements and so-called civilizations. While
it is going on, it may glow with subjective light and
warmth: but the truth lies with the final sum, and the
final sum is a zero of meaning. 33
It has never been sufficiently pointed out that Hitler's ethics
and politics had something to do with this century and a half
of European development. Nor has it been pointed out that
Hitler's glorification of the irrational (subjection of reason and
glorification of the primitive) coincided exactly in time with
the glorification of the irrational in Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein,
Dali, and Epstein. In fact, it went back to the Romantic revolt
against reason, the restoration of the brute will in Nietzsche,
and the postmortem picture of the nineteenth century in Max
Nordau. Any analysis of the origins of Nazi thought as ex-
clusively Germanic, which excludes the elements of general
decay in all western Europe, is self-deceptive. The zero of
meaning had been reached: the intellectual atmosphere had
been sufficiently purged of classical concepts by a host of scien-
tific researchers; the last glow of Mid-Victorian ethics had gone
85 William Ernest Hocking, What Man Can Makf of Mm (Harper), pp. 31-32.
182 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
out; man had in Europe's mind become a mechanistic animal
fighting in a fury of blind atoms governed by blind forces.
Hitler merely stepped into the vacuum. Otherwise the question
"How come Hitler?" can never be answered.
I have written elsewhere:
It can be proved that the world has gone to pieces as a
direct result of scientific materialism invading our litera-
ture and thought. The professors of the humanities are
reduced to the position of finding mechanistic laws govern-
ing human activities, and the more rigorous the "natural
laws" can be proved to be, and the more freedom of the
will is proved to be a chimera, the greater is the professor's
intellectual delight . . . For scientific materialism must
spell determinism and determinism must spell despair. It
is therefore no accident that the most admired spirits of
our times, not the greatest, but the most in vogue, are
pessimists. Our international chaos is founded upon our
philosophic despair. 84
So now when we ask the professor of the humanities, "What
are you yourself? 7 ' the professor can only reply, brows knitted
and head low, "I am a fact also." Where is the call for moral
effort, the ringing voice of St. Paul to enter the good race, and
the rousing, resounding call of Buddha to achieve the highest
of freedoms, the freedom of the spirit? Buddha at least under-
stands the freedom of the will> the power of the human spirit
to overcome and transcend the wheel of the material world:
Rouse thyself by thyself, examine thyself by thyself; thus
self-protected and attentive wilt thou live happily, O Bikk-
shu!
For self is the lord of self, self is the refuge of self; there-
fore curb thyself as the merchant curbs a noble horse.
34 The Wisdom of China and India, p. 574.
ORIGINS OF THE MECHANISTIC MIND 183
By one's self the evil is done, by one's self one suffers;
by one's self evil is left undone, by one's self one is puri-
fied. The pure and the impure stand and fall by them-
selves, no one can purify another*
You yourself must make an effort. The Tathagatas
(Buddhas) are only preachers. The thoughtful who enter
the way are freed from the bondage of Mara. 35
Perhaps we have the freedom of will and of effort From this
belief in the power of the spirit and the human will come the
faith and strength and joy of Buddha in man's struggle against
the Evil ("Mara") and the bondage of illusion ("Maya").
If anything is to be done, let a man do it, let him attack
it vigorously! A careless pilgrim only scatters the dust of
passion more widely.
If a man commits a sin, let him. not do it again; let him
not delight in sin: the accumulation of evil is painfuL
If a man does what is good, let him do it again, let him
delight in it: the accumulation of good is delightful.
Earnest among the thoughtless, awake among the sleepers,
the wise man advances like a racer, leaving behind the
hack.
He whose conquests cannot be reconquered, into whose
conquest no one in this world enters, by what track can
you lead him, the Awakened, the Omniscient, the track-
less?
He whom no desire with its snares and poison can lead
astray, by what track can you lead him, the Awakened,
the Omniscient, the trackless?
Who knows but Buddha may be scientifically more correct
than J. B. Watson? Fatalism, in the form of scientific deter-
minism, is perhaps the world's last modern superstition. A
** Dhammctpada. See Wisdom of China and India, pp. 321-326.
184 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
fellow can at least have the courage of his convictions, and
stand alone, if necessary.
If a traveler does not meet with one who is better, or
his equal, let him keep to his solitary journey; there is
no companionship with a fooL
I, for one, shall not join the international fellowship of fools.
Perhaps the world of power politics is only an illusion, in
Buddhist terms a "Maya." Perhaps determinism in human
affairs is a mirage we create to delude ourselves. Perhaps the
prophecy of necessary conflict of power and ruin is such an
illusion, and we are merely in the temporary grip of its power,
coming barely a century after the fashion for the talk of me-
chanical laws began. Perhaps we can change the world we
make for ourselves. Is this a sermon? No, it is a prayer*
Or, the world shall progress from power to greater agglom-
eration of powers, from conflict to greater conflicts. The politics
of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy are known; the poli-
tics of a world state are not yet even born. The first principles
of world democracy, which must be like those of a state democ-
racy; based on the consent of the governed, are not yet estab-
lished. The world state shall be shaped like a plutocracy, or an
oligarchy of the rich, and shall be as insecure as an oligarchy,
with a caste of citizens and a caste of slaves. Government shall
be based essentially on coercion, and not on consent. There will
be rebellion of the masses and bloodshed, and a tyrant shall
take the place of the oligarchs, when they are exhausted after
fighting the masses and fighting among themselves. For after
every revolution and period of chaos appears a tyrant. After
the oligarch nations shall have exhausted themselves in a series
of wars, a world tyrant, bidding for the support of the masses,
shall arise and dominate the world. Is this a prophecy? No*
it is a warning.
But some of our leaders have misconstrued the nature of
ORIGINS OF THE MECHANISTIC MIND 185
the world conflict and the present world revolution. The cen-
tral issue of empire versus world freedom remains unrecog-
nized and unsolved. Some imagine they can fight for empire
and freedom at the same time. Winston Churchill is proceeding
upon the principles of Pericles. Judged by the principles of the
empire, England could have no better and stronger premier.
He has the firmness of Lord Clive and Warren Hastings, the
singleness of purpose of William Pitt, the astuteness and sense
of timing of Disraeli. At a time of national unpreparedness he
galvanized the nation with an iron will; in the hour of danger
he stood firm; toward rebellions he showed uncompromising
strength; when public convictions were failing, he restored
impeccable faith in the good old British Empire. But while
Disraelis and William Pitts may have been good enough for
the Great Britain of the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries,
they are not good enough for the modern world. For Churchill
has misread the signs of the times. Is this the voice of hostile
criticism? No, it is the voice of a friend.
If I do not misinterpret Winston Churchill, he is fighting a
twentieth-century war in order to take off his boots after the
war and climb back into a nineteenth-century bed, comfortably
mattressed in India, Singapore, and Hong Kong. He has the
admirable tenacity of the English bulldog, and also its intelli-
gence. Judged by Empire standards, he is a giant; judged by
some future and better world, he is no better and no worse
than Cato shouting, "Delenda est Carthago T 'He may even
emerge as Scipio the Younger himself, but I seemed to see the
Punic Wars being fought all over again, as Rommel and Mont-
gomery struggled in Tunisia for the ancient site of Carthage.
To me at present, this seems like the Fourth Punic War. Some
Hannibal may invade Italy via Spain with tanks instead of
elephants, but the struggle for supremacy over the Mediter-
ranean is neither modern nor ancient. What makes war is still
the same.
186 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
21
SCIENCE TO THE RESCUE
SO WE can understand ourselves and this age when people
say that it is materialistic. The taunt about "a quart of milk a
day for Hottentots" is a canard thrown in Vice-President Wal-
lace's face by isolationists: but basically it is true of all modern
thinking. I am for Wallace and for world co-operation, but not
for "a quart of milk " For there could be no better vision of
world peace for this Age than a quart of milk a day for every-
body, particularly pasteurized milk. Raising the standard of
living is the utmost we can conceive of. It almost seems to say,
"Give a fellow a quart of milk a day, and he will be a good
man, a Just man, and a free and contented man. Give the
world a quart of milk a day, and it will be a good world, a
just world, and a free and contented world. If there are only
enough cows and timothy grass, the problems of world peace
are solved."
So now the money-changers have converted God's temple
into a Stock Exchange, and the smell of metallic lucre has
blended with the smell of the cedars of Lebanon. That was
what so annoyed Jesus and made him take out his whip of
cords. I wonder that it does not annoy the followers of Christ.
I know that there is a philosophy of living among the people
of any land, with or without Christianity; no nation ever ex-
isted, or could exist, without its mores, or its body of moral
tradition. The Chinese believe, "The four moorings of the ship
of state are: courtesy, justice, integrity and sense of honor." m
In Christian lands, this body of moral tradition takes the form
of Christianity. But the world is shifting; scientific materialism
^Saying by Kuantse, seventh century B.C. The book ascribed to Hm was prob-
ably composed or interpolated several centuries later.
SCIENCE TO THE RESCUE 187
has cut Christian faith from under. Christianity has nothing
to do with modern politics or business, and it is politics and
business that are shaping our lives. The case of the world is
a case of belief versus disbelief.
The search for belief is everybody's business, for in a world
of international chaos following the disappearance of belief,
the scientist is affected as much as the preacher. In a shipwreck
the engineer sinks with the stoker. It is as much the scientist's
business to inquire about man's faith as it is the preacher's to
inquire about science, for both are merely searching for some
meaning in life, some sustaining faith. The restitution of the
values of human life is die first job of modern man's intelli-
gence.
The rainbow has been dissected, the childhood wonder and
fancy have gone, and the world has gone gray with us. Yet
has the wonder gone ? The public as little understands science
as it understands the vitamin pills which it takes every day.
In a great scientist, curiosity has never killed wonder. For
today it is science itself that has opened up the world of
wonder, and curiosity arouses a greater, unquenchable curiosity.
Great knowledge always brings humility. Today it is great
doctors who confess to you privately that they don't know how
diseases are cured, and it is the greatest scientists who tell you
they don't know what is matter and why it behaves the way it
does. The verification of processes has not helped the inquiry
into primary causes or objectives. The study of the color of
butterfly wings has only made the problem more complex
than before; electron microscopes have shown tiny skyscrapers
erected on the wings' surface with floors built 50 that their
height corresponds with the wave length of blue or violet rays.
Science never tells you who builds these microscopic sky-
scrapers, or who tells the butterfly to do so. The arrival of the
fittest seems harder than ever to explain, and the Darwinian
concept of chance variations must sound unconvincing and fall
to the ground. Today it is science that will teach us humility.
i88 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
On the basis of humility alone will science and religion be
reunited.
But more than that, science is destroying matter and there-
fore destroying materialism itself. Science starts out with
mathematics to examine the universe and is now returning
the universe to mathematics. The wise scientist has pretty well
washed his hands of matter. He has reduced liquids, solids,
light, color, smell, sound, and all the physical properties of mat-
ter to certain mathematical formulas beyond which there exists
nothing that he knows, or claims to know. A solid table has
become empty space; an atom is like a half-mile-long jai-alai
stadium without walls in which tiny balls swirl about, and a
molecule is like a series of open-air jai-alai stadiums, held to-
gether without visible or material adjoining walls. A conglom-
eration of matter is only a "field" of action, and the balls
themselves have neither mass nor volume. Matter itself has
been spirited away, and the laws of matter no longer operate
in the core of things of this universe. The universe is more
like a ghost than like a machine. And so the scientists them-
selves have become less "materialistic" than the great of the
Stock Exchange.
But the destruction of the conventional notion of matter at
once involves also the destruction of the nineteenth-century
mechanistic concept of the universe. It is interesting to note
that Sir James Jeans, in his latest book, Physics and Philosophy,
also strikes upon the problem of determinism versus free will
as influenced by the changing concepts of matter itself. While
his attitude is strictly "scientific" and he is hesitant in drawing
conclusions about the end of "materialism" and "determinism,"
calling it mainly a question of terminology, he does say,
At least the new physics has shown that the problems
of causality and free-will are in need of a new formula-
tion. . . . The classical physics seemed to bolt and bar the
door leading to any sort of freedom of the will; the new
SCIENCE TO THE RESCUE 189
physics hardly does this; it almost seems to suggest that
the door may be unlocked if we could only find the
handle. The old physics showed us a universe which
looked more like a prison than a dwelling-place. The new
physics shows us a universe which looks as though it
might conceivably form a suitable dwelling-place for free
men, and not a mere shelter for brutes a home in which
it* may at least be possible for us to mould events to our
desires and live lives of endeavor and achievement . . *
[Whether we continue to call matter "matter" or not]
what remains is in any case very diff erent from the full-
blooded matter and the forbidding materialism of the
Victorian scientist His objective and material universe is
proved to consist of little more than constructs of our own
minds. In this and in other ways, modern physics has
moved in the direction of mentalism. 37
If scientific materialism and Darwinian naturalism of the
nineteenth century colored man's mind and produced in the
course of time political and economic materialism, so it is in-
evitable that today science's repudiation of the conventional
notion of "matter" must also in the course of time color man's
mind, cause a slump in materialistic values, and completely
alter the mechanistic qualities of the thinking of this age*
Someday we shall speak of "fields" of moral action and attrac-
tion and the "time-space-continuum" of historical development,
in which not a particle of matter ever operated in history's
judgment In such a world, only "ideas" without mass or
weight or volume will be accounted as real. So must man's
mind be made in the image of the universe he knows. Science
is spiritualizing the whole universe, but it takes years to pro-
duce the philosophic effect.
But science has not only destroyed the traditional concept
of matter; it has produced a concept of relativity, whose full
37 Physics and Philosophy by Sk James Jeans (Macmillan, 1943) pp. 215-216.
igo BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
philosophic import will not be made plain until decades from
now. Relativity is merely the road to mysticism through math-
ematics. By grappling with the ultimates of time and space
and motion, it has struck at their very foundations; by holding
or assuming that space is curved and time probably the bor-
rowed embodiment of motion in our minds, both being in fact
mathematically interchangeable with motion itself, it has
brought us closer to a theory of the rhythm of life.
At last, the pulse beat of the universe is better understood.
The straight line, square space, and rectilinear time are the
last conventions of thinking to be exploded by science, follow-
ing the explosion of the myth of the flat earth. If the universe
is not infinite, it must be round, and cannot be square. But if
the universe itself is round, there can be no absolute straight
lines, for every straight line curves invisibly. Briefly, this
"roundness" is as incomprehensible to us as the roundness of
the earth must be to two ants crawling on two parallel longi-
tudinal lines somewhere in Wisconsin, both making for straight
north. With the roundness of the earth, the Far East has actu-
ally become the Far West of America, and an Eskimo going
steadily north will strike upon Australia or New Zealand. The
same thing must be true of the lines and directions of a round
universe, of which the earth is considerably less than a sugges-
tion of a microscopic speck.
The universe therefore consists only of circles and their
modifications. Any "circulist" picture (my own term) will
present a better and truer picture of life and motion and ma-
terial objects than a cubist picture. Cubism is scientifically
incorrect; even light impulses move in waves. In the very
pointed lines of cubism, I see only the harshness of the modern
spirit.
And so the true historian can draw a picture of human his-
tory only in curves also, with constant emerging and submerg-
ing and blending of cycles. The Chinese Taoists knew this
well; the whole yin-yang concept was based upon the wave the-
SCIENCE TO THE RESCUE 191
cry. Emerson in his essay on "Circles" understood this principle
of life also. The ultimate mysticism of the universe is the
rhythm of life which annihilates all distinctions, or as Chuang-
tse put it in his famous essay, "the levelling of all things" As
East and West and North and South lose their absolute mean-
ing through perception of the roundness of the earth, so life
and death, growth and decay, strength and weakness, big and
small, and all hard-and-fast distinctions become relative in an
all-comprehensive all-levelling philosophy of relativity.
The winter begins strictly on summer solstice, when the days
begin to shorten, and the summer begins strictly on winter
solstice, when the days begin to lengthen: this is the philosophy
of alternate cycles and the hidden "germ," on which the whole
Confucian "Philosophy of Mutations" (Yifyng) is based. The
hidden germ (chi) and the manifest (chu) merely alternate,
and the wise can foretell the future from the present alignment
of proceeding and receding, or dominant and recessive, forces.
The apple tree begins to die when it reaches its greatest flower-
ing splendor, and the prime of power is the beginning of decay.
The generations of men are not joined to each other like a
string of sausages, but one begins while the other is in its prime,
merging with it like the invisible curves of a woman's body.
So also rise and decline in waves the generations of the thoughts
of men. All life is like the ocean waves on a seashore to one
who observes them closely; they recede while appearing to
proceed and the water goes up when the crest begins to fall.
From this arises the contempt for all philosophic absolutes.
Such a philosophy destroys all Euclidean mathematics. Rela-
tivity is a philosophy of life as well as a mathematical formula
for explaining the universe. Only recently has science grown
big enough for the theory of Relativity. But thousands of years
ago Taoist sages, particularly Laotse and Chuangtse, jumped
the mathematics, and by sheer breadth of vision and profundity
of insight reached and anticipated its philosophic meaning
the relativity of all standards.
i 9 2 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
For this may be regarded as a summary of the cold skeleton
of Chuangtse's philosophy regarding Relativity. "Dimensions
are limitless; time is endless. Conditions are not constant; terms
are not final" ss All standards are relative to the point of view
of the onlooker.
In regard to distinctions, if we say that a thing is great
or small by its own standard, then there is nothing in all
creation which is not great, nothing which is not small.
To know that the universe is but as a tare-seed and the
tip of a hair is [as big as] a mountain this is the standard
of relativity. In regard to function, if we say that some-
thing exists or does not exist by its own standard, then
there is nothing which does not exist, nothing which does
not perish. If we know that east and west are convertible,
and yet necessary, terms in relation to each other, then such
[relative] functions may be determined.
The exact words for "relativity of standards" are "levelling
of standards or gradations," but the philosophic meaning of
the dependence of standards is quite apparent. The distinctions
of high and low are likewise annihilated; the nadir is the be-
ginning of the upward curve and therefore philosophically the
highest point, the zenith is the beginning of the descending
curve and philosophically the lowest. "To Tao, the zenith is
not high, nor the nadir low; no point of time is long ago; nor
by the lapse of ages has it grown old." The distinction between
this (subjective) and that (objective) is relative, both being
dependent on the speaker.
Hence I say, "this" emanates from "that," and "that" also
derives from "this." This the theory of the interdepend-
ence of "this" and "that" . . . when "this" (subjective)
38 Wisdom of China and India, p. 683. For following quotations from Chuangtse,
see pp. 6853 636, 637, 631.
SCIENCE TO THE RESCUE 193
and "that" (objective) are both without their correlates,
that is the very "Axis of Tao." And when that Axis passes
through the center at which all Infinites converge, affirm-
ations and denials alike blend into the infinite One. . . .
[Therefore] only the truly intelligent understand this
principle of levelling of all things into One. They discard
the distinctions and take refuge in the common and ordi-
nary things. The common and ordinary things serve cer-
tain functions and retain the wholeness of nature. From
this wholeness, one comprehends, and from comprehen-
sion, one comes near to the Tao.
Hence there is a Balance of Heaven according to which
parallels meet.
A keeper of monkeys said with regard to their ration of
nuts that each monkey was to have three in the morning
and four at night. At this the monkeys were very angry,
Then the keeper said they might have four in the morning
and three at night, with which arrangement they were
well pleased. The actual number of nuts remained the
same, but there was a difference owing to [subjective eval-
uations of ] likes and dislikes. It also derives from this
[principle of relativity]. Wherefore the true Sage brings
all contraries together and rests in the natural Balance of
Heaven. This is called [the principle of following] two
courses \at once].
Hence all values are submerged, all distinctions are leveled,
all judgments are relative to the onlooker's point of view, and
all "material transformations** (wu-hua, an important concept
in Chuangtse) are part of the cycle of life. The frog in the well
is proud of his little puddle, the River Spirit is proud of his
little autumn flood, the summer insect who knows not winter
discusses ice, the lake sparrow cannot understand why the giant
i 9 4 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
roc has to fly five thousand miles, Peng Tsu is proud of his
long life of eight hundred years, the screech owl is proud of
the dead rat in its claws, and little men are proud of their
power and success! Therefore it is said, "The perfect man ig-
nores self; the divine man ignores achievement; the true Sage
ignores reputation." From such an understanding of the rela-
tivity of all standards and of the cycle of life, the basis for con-
tention and the belief in force is destroyed. Man finds his final
repose in Tao, or knowledge of this cycle. "The Great [uni-
verse] gives me this form, this toil in manhood, this repose in
old age, this rest in Death. Surely that which is such a kind
arbiter of my life is the best arbiter of my death." 39
Such a spiritual softening of man's thinking and wisdom
must come about; the crudities of a mechanistic belief in ma-
terial, rectilinear absolutes must be worn off and made to dis-
appear; action must be judged in waves and ripples and emerg-
ing and submerging cycles, and to do this, a longer range must
be taken, so that what appears to be a straight line may be seen
to be a curve, and what appears a curved line may turn out to
be the shortest route between two points. Nature herself is gen-
tle and travels by waves, in the figure "S," circle interpenetrat-
ing continuing circles, and in spite of obstacles goes on. Nature
always bends. Believers in power and direct action who think
that they are "thinking straight" are poor students of Nature.
Therefore, following nature, according to Laotse:
To yield is to be preserved whole,
To be bent is to become straight.
To be hollow is to be filled,
To be tattered is to be renewed. 40
**lbid., p. 659. Emerson's essay on "Circles'* is worth very careful study. His de-
ductions about the rhythm of life and his difficulty in facing the practical outcome of
"inaction" are very similar to Chuangtse's. He was the first American relativist.
**lbid., p. 594. For following quotations from Laotse, see pp. 587, 586, 623, 608,
609, 599, 600, 615, 623, 6 1 8, 60 1, 624, 623.
SCIENCE TO THE RESCUE 195
Believers in brute force, like Hitler, always take the logical,
direct line, and this is why they run counter to nature and
when a material obstacle meets their path, they have no escape
and are destroyed. Laotse and Chuangtse have the knack of
making Hitlers and would-be Hitlers of the world appear un-
philosophical and foolish. Every structure of force crumbles,
irrespective of who builds it.
Stretch [a bow] to the very full,
And you will wish you had stopped in time.
Temper [a sword-edge] to its very sharpest,
And the edge will not last long.
Thus it is easy to see that from such a relativist and "circulist"
philosophy, as against western traditional absolutism, certain
remarkable changes will follow in man's outlook upon life.
Such a philosophy has already produced changes in Chinese
daily behavior to an extent that justifies its being called "ways
that are dark" by westerners. It seems strange that whether you
are a circulist or a believer in the impossibly naive rectilinear
values of the West should make such a vast difference in your
mental outlook, but it does. It affects your view of yourself,
your fellow men, the way you meet fortune or disaster, and
politics and peace itself.
The first result is that it immediately abolishes the goosestep,
and you learn to travel in the figure S, like a skater. You de-
velop a certain deviousness of approach to problems, like a
desire to hide in obscurity and avoid the spotlight, but you also
gain a certain inner strength in meeting contingencies, on the
belief that "Disaster is the avenue of fortune, and fortune is
the concealment for disaster." You learn to be a little less direct
and more subtle; you feel even a little happy when you know
you are being taken advantage of, because you know that the
man who likes to take advantage of others is bound to end up
196 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
by being friendless. You develop an enormous patience with
fools.
The second result of this relativism is that you end up in
Laotsean paradoxes. From the Chuangtsean "levelling of all
distinctions/' you naturally reach the Laotsean inversion of all
values. You begin to lose your faith in power and force and
insolence and arrive at the Doctrine of Weakness as the strong-
est thing in the world. And you begin to believe the following
Laotsean paradoxes and imbibe a little of the Laotsean humor:
The best of man is like water;
Water benefits all things
And does not compete with them.
It dwells in (the lowly) places that all disdain,
Wherein it comes near to the Tao.
That weakness overcomes strength
And gentleness overcomes rigidity,
No one does not know;
No one can put into practice.
The greatest cleverness appears like stupidity;
The greatest eloquence seems like stuttering.
Movement overcomes cold,
(But) keeping still overcomes heat.
The good ones I declare good;
The bad ones I also declare good.
That is the goodness of Virtue.
The honest ones I believe;
The liars I also believe.
That is the faith of Virtue.
The third result, which follows from the above, is that you
develop a contempt for force and conquest, because the strong-
est army breaks first, even as Hitler's or Napoleon's did. As an
SCIENCE TO THE RESCUE 197
ancient Chinese proverb says, "The violent man shall die a
violent death." If Nature is soft and goes in curves, the man
who believes in force and direct action does not comprehend
even the laws of the universe he is living in. Therefore:
When the world lives in accord with Tao,
Racing horses are turned back to haul refuse-carts.
When the world lives not in accord with Tao,
Cavalry abounds in the countryside.
Therefore a good general effects his purpose and stops.
He dares not rely upon the strength of arms;
Effects his purpose and does not glory in it;
Effects his purpose and does not boast of it;
Effects his purpose and does not take pride in it;
Effects his purpose as a regrettable necessity;
Effects his purpose but does not love ^violence. /
(For) things age after their prime.
That (violence) would be against the Tao.
And he who is against the Tao perishes young.
I have no doubt therefore that Laotse's solutions for the
problems of the relationship between big and small powers and
for the peace settlement are the only ones that are basically
sound and lasting:
A big country (must be like) the delta low-regions,
Being the concourse of the world,
(And) the Female of the world.
The Female overcomes the Male by quietude,
And achieves the lowly position by quietude.
Therefore if a big country places itself below a small
country,
It absorbs the small country.
198 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
(And) if a small country places itself below a big
country,
It absorbs the big country.
Therefore some place themselves low to absorb
(others),
Some are (naturally) low and absorb (others).
What a big country wants is but to shelter others.
And what a small country wants is but to be able
to come and be sheltered.
Thus (considering) that both may have what they
want,
A big country ought to place itself low.
In a truly civilized peace treaty, the "guilt clause" will be
abolished. For according to Laotse:
Patching up a great hatred is sure to leave some
hatred behind.
How can this be regarded as satisfactory ?
Therefore the Sage holds the left tally,
And does not put the guilt on the other party.
The virtuous man is for patching up;
The vicious is for fixing guilt
But "the way of Heaven is impartial,
It sides only with the good man."
Only at a peace conference where both opponents insist on
fixing the guilt on oneself will there be permanent peace.
The fourth and last result is that, knowing the law of the
cycle of life, man would seek to live in harmony with that uni-
versal law, thus avoiding ruin for himself and reaching that
truly religious level which comes from comprehension of the
universe itself.
SCIENCE TO THE RESCUE 199
I have Three Treasures;
Guard them and keep them safe:
The first is Love.
The second is, Never too much*
The third is, Never be the first in the world.
Through Love, one has no fear;
Through not doing too much, one has amplitude
(of reserve power) ;
Through not presuming to be the first in the world,
One can develop one's talent and let it mature.
For love is victorious in attack,
And invulnerable in defense.
Heaven arms with love
Those it would not see destroyed.
Curiously, through such a world outlook, which is the very
antithesis of the doctrine of power, Laotse arrived at an abso-
lutely identical position with Jesus, not only with regard to
"not requiting evil with hatred," but also in the following truly
religious perceptions:
The Heaven and Earth join,
And the sweet rain falls,
Beyond the command of men,
Yet evenly upon all
He lives for other people,
And grows richer himself;
He gives to other people,
And has greater abundance.
Who receives unto himself the calumny of the world
Is the preserver of the state.
Who bears himself the sins of the world
Is the King of the World.
200 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
Somehow the laws of the moral universe have been discovered
independently in Asia Minor and Asia Major and ultimately
agree. And both seem to revel in paradoxes a little too subtle
for the goose-stepping modern scientific man.
A hurricane cannot last long, says Laotse; modern civiliza-
tion is a hurricane. Only by some such dulling of the edges and
softening of the corners of man's thinking can the present civi-
lization, faced with growing sharp conflicts, be saved. The
"dregs and tumors of virtue'' have to be cut out. They are dis-
gusting in the sight of Tao.
22
THE SEARCH FOR PRINCIPLES
WE HAVE strayed far into the field of Nature. It is time that
we come home and remember that we are men. The only im-
portant philosophical question of today is: what are we, and
what is man?
When Confucius heard that a stable had burnt down, he
asked if any man was hurt, but "did not inquire about the
horses/' I am such a "humanist" that I do not care if the whole
species of horses and dogs and cats and rabbits are wiped out,
if man hereafter can live in peace. This may sound a little
Oriental and heathenish, but there are, on the other hand, men
whose minds are almost as limited in compass as mine, and
who, while very much devoted to the very lovable dogs, have
not yet any conception of the brotherhood of all men. I am
sure horses think the same way, too. The white horses are de-
voted to man, but have nothing but contempt for brown and
bay horses, and the brown and bay horses have nothing but
contempt for the spotted ones. Horse love, I understand, is only
THE SEARCH FOR PRINCIPLES 201
skin deep* The most inconceivable barriers of pigment exist. In
the same way, a bulldog will patronize a human being,, but
must persecute his brother, the Irish terrier, because his own
tail is straight and smooth while the other dog has a wiry tail
and somewhat too much of a mustache. How the westerners
laugh at Chinese high cheekbones and almond eyes and how
the Chinese laugh at the westerners* hairy chests and arms!
But this state of things is not funny any more. We are start-
ing out on an era of compulsory world living with all the
tribalistic traits of a past epoch and the psychology of the bull-
dog-terrier racial prejudices. We talk lightly of world co-opera-
tion and world government without realizing the immense
complexities of the new problems, not only in respect of their
size, but also in respect of their nature.
Perhaps Aristotle's Politics is broad enough, or perhaps it
isn't, but a modern Aristotle, his analytical mind exercised over
the new problems created by a world state, would ponder very
deeply and seek for certain cardinal principles. Aristotle would
be what we call a "realist," but his realism would be profound,
and he would not necessarily potter around with "expedien-
cies" in ignorance of first principles. He would still classify the
three possibilities of the government of the world, Hke those of
a state, as being the rule of the one, the rule of the few, and the
rule of the many, but taking the nations instead of individuals
as the units. He would still postulate the good and bad forms
of each: the good being monarchy, aristocracy, and timocracy;
the bad being tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. And he
would picture how these different principles would operate,
and speculate how each might degenerate and how each might
evolve into, or be replaced by, another form. And he would
still apply his psychology of motivation, and would maintain:
In considering how dissensions and political revolutions
arise > we must first of all ascertain the beginnings and
causes of them which affect constitutions generally. . . ~
202 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
The universal and chief cause of this revolutionary feeling
has already been mentioned; viz., the desire of equality*
when men think that they are equal to others who have
more than themselves; or again, the desire of inequality
and superiority, when conceiving themselves to be superior
they think that they have not more but the same or less
than their inferiors; pretensions which may or may not be
just. 41
He would find the two desires, for equality and for inequal-
ity or superiority, still operating today in respect of a World
Federation and as causing all dissensions or revolutions that
may consequently come up. And he would not conceive of any
one form of World Government as so perfect, so good, so just,
that it would not undergo internal transformations from psy-
chological causes, or even evolve from one form to another by
a series of world revolutions. He would rather try his best to
see that the best and the most just form be adopted to ensure
the greatest stability. Being a knower of human nature and its
corruptibility, he would be realistic and would probably de-
spair of a Utopian settlement. But his would be a less media--
nistic mind than ours, and he would certainly not agree with
Ely Culbertson's international contract bridge, or trust a me-
chanical elaboration of a World Police Force and say to him-
self "There is the basis of an enduring peace." On the other
hand, having read Locke now, he would at once plunge into
a discussion of the principles of coercion and consent, and their
manifold reactions. In addition to the forms like world tyranny
(rule of one nation), world oligarchy (rule of a few rich na-
tions), and world democracy (rule of the many nations), he
would also postulate the collapse of all and a reversion to na-
tional autarchy, which in view of the present state of nation-
alistic psychology, might most likely result,
Aristotle would, I am sure, agree with the general principle
41 Aristotle Politics, tr. by Jowett (Oxford), p. 14$.
THE SEARCH FOR PRINCIPLES 203
that world peace must be enforced by a world police. But he
would analyze the problem further in respect of three points:
what to police, who are to police, and who are to be policed,
and why. Such a dispassionate examination would reveal that
certain things can be policed and certain things not. For in-
stance, he would believe that only such laws and traditions as
command the general public approval can be enforced by the
police, that police power derives from public approval and sense
of justice and not from tear-gas bombs or tommy guns, and that
policing an unjust order would be the maintaining by force of a
state of things due for a change. So he would be careful to point
out that before we decide to police and maintain by force some-
thing, we have to make clear what that thing is. Whether, for
instance, it will be constrained to defend the status quo against
"acts of rebellion against the World Government." Secondly,
he would closely examine the area and the neighborhood to be
policed. He would not try to police too much a peaceful neigh-
borhood, but would concentrate on certain gangster sections
that in the past have repeatedly upset public order, where the
most "muggings" have been going on. Only the principle of
historic experience would seem to serve as safe guidance in
regard to those to be policed and those selected to do the po-
licing. And in equity, he would be forced to the conclusion that
those nations which have in the past most disturbed others,
have been most aggressive, most imperialistic, ought to be the
policed nations, and those that have observed the principles of
good neighbors ought to be the policing nations. Thus he
would probably arrive at the astounding conclusion that Eski-
mos, Javanese, Samoans, Chinese, and Americans, Danes,
Swiss, etc, ought to police the Japanese, the Germans, the Eng-
lish, the French, and the Italians. The Spaniards and Portu-
guese, though having been once in their time bloodthirsty
pirates, ought to be given liberal consideration on parole and
good behavior.
In view, however, of the "desire of inequality" of the "Big
204 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
Powers/' suck a scheme is obviously unacceptable. There would
probably be a sort of compromise, excluding none and based.
on complete equality for all nations, or it would lose its police
character and have the characteristics of an agglomeration of
powers. Following such a principle of common consent and
common equality, the best solution would be for the World
Police to "belong" to no particular nation, as no community
police belongs to any socially prominent members of the com-
munity. Such a community police may now and then dis-
tribute small, private favors to the socially prominent members,,
such as better lighting on certain streets or shifting "no park-
ing" signs in their favor, since they pay more taxes, but this
must be underhanded and the state of things must not become
unbearable to the other poorer members of the community or
enrage the public sense of justice.
And over all these questions must stand the philosophic ques-
tion whether the World Government is to be preponderantly
laissez-faire * according to Rousseau, or preponderantly regi-
mentalizedj according to Hobbes; whether it is to be a govern-
ment by Polizei, according to Prussian Nazism, or government
by self-government according to Jeff ersonian democracy and the
old-roguish Chinese. There is so much trouble that could be
avoided if we did not poke our nose into it. The point imme-
diately suggests itself, that the greater the area of government,
and the more scattered the populations, the less can force be
relied upon in government
The Chinese, having governed their country for four thou-
sand years without lawyers or police, and having had some
experience in the matter of governing large areas, would in-
stinctively incline toward JefFersonian democracy. After all, a
nation that believes in government by worship and song, by
rituals and music, must be a little stunned by the idea of gov-
ernment by Polizei. The Chinese would probably lead the re-
volt against the Polizei, and they have certain ways of dealing
with the police. They believe it is their duty to corrupt them
THE SEARCH FOR PRINCIPLES 205
by sending the police sergeant a present when his wife gives
birth to a baby because he is so obliging as to stand and guard
our doors. They have no idea that he is there to guard public
order, since public order is already guarded by scrolls of prov-
erbs and public laughter at transgressors the thief has a
bad mother but they understand he is there to open limou-
sine doors for rich men arriving at sumptuous hotels* They are
not rich themselves, but they can also buy the policeman's
small favors by pulling him into their house on a hot day and
giving him a cup of tea. Just by sheer human experience, they
have found that no policeman in the world can .resist such cor-
ruption. And the Burmese, the Javanese, the Eskimos, the Sa-
moans, the Caucasian villagers, and the Brazilians and the
Chileans would join with the Chinese and shout to the French,
the English, the Germans, and the Americans: "What the hell!
Why do we require your police ? We ain't got Krupp guns or
parachutists here. Why don't you police yourselves? Why don't
you try to police Moscow?"
One may make here also a parenthetical remark about Amer-
ica. America has a fair record, not a blameless, but a fair rec-
ord, in respect of imperialism. The American is too good a
democrat to be a successful imperialist He pats the foreigners
on the back and American doughboys pull rickshaws for Hin-
dus out of sheer fun. That is the last thing an imperialist should
do. You haven't got the imperialist instinct. You can't frater-
nize with "natives" and be their masters. The fellows whose
backs you pat today will think tomorrow that they are as good
as you are, and good-by to your empire! It's rather odd, isn't it,
the way humans think? But America has developed enough
power, and power is a dangerous thing, and I am winking and
blinking to see what she is going to do with that power. Amer-
ica, having come of age, is like a research doctor who suddenly
finds himself married to a socialite. "It's the war," the doctor
says, trying to explain his marriage. To go on with the research
or move in with his socialite wife to cure corns and misshapen
206 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
nails for the rich is now this doctor's central spiritual problem
and this is the only important problem that faces America
today. For America today stands at the crossroads. Be a re-
search doctor, I say.
23
THE COMMON STANDARD FOR MEN
WE HAVE not yet decided what is the nature of man. We
cannot set up a World Federation of man without knowing
what are the constituent units. So far we know only that they
belong to five categories: White, Black, Red, Yellow, and
Brown. What about the White, Black, Red, Yellow, and Brown ?
We know next to nothing. Then without a common denom-
inator, how do we expect to put them together and expect such
a conglomeration to work ?
The question of racial and nationalistic antagonisms in the
world state must be solved. Apart from its size, World Govern-
ment faces a problem that no national government faces to the
same degree. Apart from racial and religious differences that
do often exist inside a nation, there is a disrupting force of
well-entrenched and growing modern nationalism, which
would be comparable only to active racial antagonisms in
groups inside a state. But the principles that hold with respect
to racial and religious antagonisms inside a peaceful state can-
not be different from the principles for a World Government
torn by competitive nationalisms. The Swiss Republic has been
able to exist with all its internal racial and linguistic groups on
the principles of equity, justice, and freedom for all. Evidently,
common beliefs make a common nation, and only common
beliefs make a common world. Religious beliefs may differ in
THE COMMON STANDARD FOR MEN 207
a nation, but at least the Jews and Catholics and Protestants in
America have certain fundamental beliefs in democratic values
and the values of living as a whole, and, furthermore, they are
willing all to believe that no one is better than anybody else.
I/ the world is to junction as a unit, the faith must ultimately
develop equally that no nation is better than any other nation.
But what do we mean by "better"? Where is the common
standard for all men? Such a faith must first establish that
races are equal as human beings, and secondly indicate wherein
humanity as such can be distinguished from the beasts. As with
individuals, so with nations, equality cannot be proved by
standards of intelligence or creative ability or moral integrity.
It will have to be a mystic standard, a bland assertion that we
are all equal just because we are all men.
In other words, we revert to the somewhat unprovable as-
sumption of "human dignity" if we want to be spiritual, or, if
we want to be "realistic," say that we are equal because we
happen to be all tail-less bipeds. Whether you believe in the
version of "human dignity" or in the version of "tail-less bi-
peds" depends upon your approach, since one is scientifically
verifiable and the other not. For one, the voice of the heart is
proof itself of "human dignity"; for the other, it is sheer senti-
mentality which explains why the believer in the biped version
is always so cynical in other problems of national and world
politics. So even the basis of agreement that we are all "born
equal" has a practical bearing on other problems. It would
make no sense for the biped to be particularly noble to his
neighbors. The believer in the innate dignity of all men would
scorn the biped's naturalism, while the biped believer would
call the other's theory moronic sentimental rubbish. What is
to be our standard, and which is right?
It happens there is a tremendous amount of "moronic sen-
timental rubbish" in the Chinese philosopher, Mencius, who
not only believed in the innate goodness of man, but believed
also in man's essential spirituality and that on this basis of
ao8 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
spirituality alone, all men are equal Mencius was therefore
able to evolve a theory of the common dignity and humanity
of man, which the Chinese nation as a whole has accepted, for
he ranks next only to Confucius. Mencius clearly and ade-
quately established the common standard for all men. The
"equality" of man was not mystical, or based on a theological
structure. It had even nothing to do with over- or under-pig-
mentation.
Mencius wanted to establish the common standard of all
men and distinguish man from the beasts, a difference which,
he pointed out again and again, consisted of an extremely small
margin. Since the margin is admittedly so perilously small,
even in modern days, we have reason to listen carefully. I am
in fact a little desperate and am willing to listen to any theory
of any other philosopher who can tell us in clear, unmystical
and nontheological terms why he thinks man is not a beast.
All the scientific learning of the past century has tended rather
to make us think or strongly suspect that in fact, after all,
we are beasts and little else, and we are clinging to the notion
of human "dignity" obstinately just by ignoring our professors
and refusing to listen to reason. Can anyone give a good, non-
theological reason ?
Mencius was puzzled by the behavior of a beggar, and by a
curious human phenomenon: that all animals love life as the
highest value, but men sometimes spurn it. (Mencius, I think,
is wrong about the animals.) His inference was that there was
a higher value for man than animal survival, and furthermore
that all men shared this value.
A man's life or death may sometimes depend upon a
bamboo basket of rice and a bowl of soup, but if you say
to a starving man passing by, "Hey, Mister!" and offer it
to him with insults, he will refuse to take them; or if you
offer them to a beggar with a kick, the beggar will not
receive them.
THE COMMON STANDARD FOR MEN 209
Therefore, Mencius says,
I love life, but there is something that I love more than
life, and therefore I would not have life at any price. I
also hate death, but there is something that I hate more
than death, and therefore I would not avoid danger at any
price. If there is nothing that man loves more than life,
then would he not permit himself to do anything in order
to save it? And if there is nothing that man hates more
than death, then why does he not avoid dangers that could
be avoided ? And so there are times when a man would
forsake his life, and there are times when a man would
not avoid danger. It is not only the good men who have
this heart (or feeling) that there are times when they
would jorsakf life and would not avoid danger. All men
have this heart, only the good men have been able to pre-
serve it**
The Mencian standard of common humanity is,, in one word,
that there is a common heart in man, or in our phraseology,
all races have essentially the same hopes, aspirations, joys, and
sorrows, and that it is these common feelings that unite us,
and establish our essential equality. Then he goes on to prove
how men as a species are psychologically the same, which
makes a common standard in tastes, sounds, and the sense of
right and wrong possible. Proceeding from the analogy of
wheat, Mencius says,
Therefore all who belong to the same species are es-
sentially alike. Why should you doubt that this holds true
also of human beings ? The Sages belong to the same spe-
cies as ourselves. As Lungtse says, "A man who proceeds
to make a pair of shoes without knowing the foot meas-
43 } Wisdom of Confucius (Modern Library), p. 285. For following quotations from
Mencius, see Ibid., pp. 281-282, and Wisdom of China and India, pp. 724, 762-763.
210 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
urements will at least not end up by making a wicker
basket." Shoes are alike because the people's feet are alike.
There is a common taste for flavor in our mouths. Yiya [a
famous cook] is but one who has discovered our common
taste for food* If, for instance, one man's taste for flavors
should differ from that of another man, as the tastes of
dogs and horses who belong to a different species differ
from the human taste, then why should the whole world
follow the judgment of Yiya in regard to flavor? Since in
the matter of food the whole world regards Yiya as the
ultimate standard, we must admit that our tastes for flavors
are alike. The same thing is true of our ears. The whole
world regards Master K'uang [famous musician] as the
ultimate standard, and we must admit that our ears are
alike. . * , Therefore I say there is a common love for
flavors in our mouths, a common sense for sounds in our
ears, and a common sense for beauty in our eyes. Why
then do we refuse to admit that there is something com-
mon In our hearts? What is that thing that we have in
common In our hearts? It is reason and a sense of right.
The Sage is one who has -first discovered what is common
in our hearts. Therefore, reason and the sense of right
please our minds as beef and pork and mutton please our
palates.
Mencius then proceeds to point out four things common to
the hearts of men, which establish first the equality of all men
with the Sages, secondly the essential identity of all humanity,
and thirdly disqualify one from being regarded as "a man"
as soon as he loses them.
The heart of mercy is in all men; the sense of shame is
in all men; the sense of courtesy and respect is in all men;
the sense of right and wrong is in all men.
THE COMMON STANDARD FOR MEN 211
Mencius proves it in the following manner:
Even now-a-days, when men suddenly see a child about
to fall into a well, they will all experience a feeling of
alarm and distress. They will feel so, not that they may
thereon gain the favor of the child's parents; nor that they
may seek the praise of their neighbors and friends; nor
from a dislike of the sound [of the falling child]. Hence
it is that he who has not a heart of mercy is not a man;
who has not a sense of shame is not a man; who has not
a sense of courtesy and consideration for others is not a
man; who is without a sense of right and wrong is not a
man.
Mencius conveniently forgot about pigment, although there
were enough racial differences in China to justify his referring
to some tribes as talking a "bird language." In fact, he pointed
out that two of the most illustrious rulers of China, Emperor
Shun and King Wen, were one "an Eastern barbarian" and
the other "a Western barbarian," but that both rose to universal
leadership through a "common standard" (i-J^uet) of moral
power. Such convenient forgetfulness about pigment seems to
make it easy for the nations of the world, whether "United" or
not, to develop some fundamental faith in racial equality. He
did not even mention the standards of industrial capacity or
the modern standards of living. By these standards of pigment,
industrial capacity, and standards of living we can never be
equal.
For what are the standards of living and are they not chang-
ing almost every decade? Did the Barretts of Wimpole Street
have enamel bathtubs? Did Dr. Johnson ever use a flush toilet
or have any idea of a sanitary latrine? Did Charles Dickens ever
hear a radio? Did Goethe ever handle a camera? Did Hum-
boldt ever wash from hot and cold water taps? Did he not
wash from an earthen basin and water jug? Was Dryden's
212 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
room ever steam-heated or air-cooled or electric-lighted? Did
Charles Lamb ever see Ginger Rogers or use a plastic tooth-
brush? Did Wordsworth ever cross in the Hudson tunnel or
drive on the Merritt Parkway? Did Will Shakespeare ever in
his life read one newspaper, not to speak of going to a movie
once a week or listening to Flagstad? Did he have a copy of
the first English Dictionary, which Dr. Johnson compiled a
hundred and fifty years after him? Did his school bench at
Stratford-on-Avon have a collapsible seat, and was the school-
room well lighted ? Did he ever see a dentist on Park Avenue ?
And did the "second best bed" he so ungenerously bequeathed
to his wife have Simmons springs? To come down to modern
times, did Thomas Edison ever see Errol Flynn? Did Luther
Burbank ever see Radio City? Did Elinor Wylie see a television
broadcast or Will Rogers see a Flying Fortress? Has Albert
Einstein ever really spoken on a transatlantic wifeless tele-
phone? As we laugh at the costumes and manners of the
eighteen-nineties, so posterity will laugh at us only twenty or
thirty years from now. Why must we be the mirror to the
universe? Where are the standards?
The invalid assumptions must fall away, and some common
standard for all humanity must be rediscovered. Mencius
repudiated the biped theory and re-established the common
standard of man by the identity of spiritual values. This stands
as a challenge to this mechanical age. k
We have covered some important ground, ignoring the
swine-and-slop economic statistics of a thousand postwar plans,
revealing their utter futility in preventing World War III, and
relating the present world chaos to the disintegration of moral
values and ideas in the modern world. I have tried to show that
this world chaos and inevitable wars and conflicts are related
to our changing ideas of the nature of the universe and the
nature of man. I have tried to show that war is inseparably
related to power politics, power politics to the naturalistic view
THE COMMON STANDARD FOR MEN 213
of human society, and the naturalistic view of human society
to the influence of scientific materialism and determinism upon
the human studies and modern thought. The deeper question
of war and peace hinges upon what we think of man, whether
he is a chemical compound and therefore a slave of mechanical
laws of struggle, or whether he has the freedom of the will of
which Buddha and all teachers of the past spoke. But the chains
of materialism, naturalism, power politics and war are forged
so fast that from them the modern man finds no escape. The
only knowledge available to us in swine-and-slop economic
postwar planning is merely the rearrangement of these chains
so that they shall rest a little more easily on the ankles or
shoulder blades of the mechanical slave. There is a great deal
of scientific specialized knowledge which is very impressive,
but the best scientist of peace today is merely an expert in
anatomy who in his infinite wisdom tells you where the tactile
nerves are the least sensitive and where your hide is the thickest
so that when the whip descends, you shall be able to bear it
with the least self-pity, and even with some fatalistic cheer un-
der the inevitable mechanical laws of necessity. No scientist
pretends to break these chains that are binding the spirit of
modern man.
Curiously we have stumbled upon Mencius who, in recover-
ing for us a spiritual concept of man, has provided us with a
doctrine of equality of all men, a basis for world co-operation
among the races of mankind, and the possibility of freedom.
He has given us a more flattering view of man than that of
mechanical robots which the thousand scientific idiots of the
past century have been trying to tell us that we are. At the cost
of repetition, I must say that materialists must continue to fight
wars eternally. Materialists cannot end wars or devise a peace.
They have not the brains for it Materialists have not the cour-
age to hope. They are not hoping now.
Funny little man, how he conquers the world and is afraid
of a little idea, determinism, as if from it he had no escape! A
214 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
subtle thought might one day seep into man's mind and lend
him an escape. It will be just a little idea, come like a tiny key,
which the angels shall send us and which shall gently and
easily open the chains of mortal man, and that little key is
called Free Will Then, with that little key, Prometheus shall
be unbound.
EPILOGUE
WHAT I have written I have written. In every age, Liberty
and Reaction go side by side, and he who would be a soldier
of peace had better have discerning eyes. And he who has
visions of Peace and sees how she is pushed out of our doors
and denied entrance, even though she lingers so close beside
our doorsteps, will see her turn her steps, bend her head, and
silently walk away. Peace and Power are two jealous women
and always refuse to stay in the same house. Our rulers are
courting and cavorting with the harlot, and while Peace sees
them through the window and hears the mad laughter* the
bawdy noisiness, and the clinking of champagne glasses inside,
she will turn her steps away and never come. For Peace is a
lady, and she comes to our house only when she knows she
is loved. But those who are guiding the nations' destinies are
hypocrites; they love not her but the wench Power, and she
knows it. Therefore her face will be hidden from us until she
knows that we love her truly and not the harlot Power,
Therefore I hate the harlot and the men cavorting in her
company, because I am thinking of their children. Peace is
near, but she will never enter. For a great feast is going on
and the champagne flows. My friends are having great dreams,
the most fabulous dreams, of their life. Despise not the harlot,
either, for she has magic. Men can be drunk with her opulence
and her beauty, which set their blood coursing and their nerves
EPILOGUE 215
tingling, and then imagine themselves poets or kings while
the intoxication lasts. They are counting the extent of their
empires and the glory of their power. "Why," they say to
themselves, "this time we shall roll up the world and put it
in our pockets." The wine of the harlot Power is intoxicating;
there is a drug in it.
And then the morning will come. The madness of the night
before will have become plain. It was the last night of Nebu-
chadnezzar. The world will collapse around them, bankruptcy
will be declared, and these things they shall see with their own
eyes. An auctioneer will come in to tag numbers on the ances-
tral portraits; there will be much confusion and noise and a
rough lad will sit and test the bed where the mistress slept the
night before. Then furniture-movers will come in and step
on the carpets with their heavy boots caked with mud; no
heirloom will be spared; the ancestral portraits will be thrown
together higgledy-piggledy with wash pails and mops and sent
to the auction shop. After all is gone and the walls are bare,
their children will walk hand in hand out from the front door,
poor orphans, and leave the door ajar, the disinherited. A new
tenant will move in and start repapering the walls and setting
new chairs by the fireside and say, "A new day begins."
But, Peace, go not away. We have not yet made up our
minds. The men are only beginning to drink the champagne
of Power. Some are slightly tipsy, but others are not. Cry
loudly, soldiers of peace, perhaps she may listen. She may yet
change her mind, if we say to her, "We all want you to stay,
whatever your terms. This is our unconditional surrender. For
we want you to live with our children and bless them with
your gentleness and your plenty."
These are simple words. But, as Emerson says, "The simplest
words we do not know what they mean except when we love
and aspire." It seems that this cynic generation of power
politicians and intellectual critics, struck by an invisible malady,
has lost the capacity for love and the courage to hope. There-
216 BETWEEN TEARS AND LAUGHTER
fore they are impotent and cannot bring us peace. But when
the world shall have felt a passion for peace and another gen-
eration of men shall have recaptured their courage to love
and to aspire, then Peace shall steal unaware into our room,
and putting her hands across our eyes from behind, whisper,
"Guess who?" And before we know it, when we least expect
her, she is there to remain by our fireside and bless us and our
children with her presence.