Jews the Poles, the Finns, etc.?[1] What aid to Turkey and to China in their efforts towards regeneration? Sixty years ago, China, poisoned by Indian opium, wished to free herself from the deadly vice. But after two wars and a humiliating peace, she had to accept from England this poison, which is said during a century to have brought to the East India Company profits amounting to £440,000,000. Even in our own day, when China, by a heroic effort, had within ten years cured herself of this disastrous sickness, the sustained pressure of public opinion was requisite to compel the most highly civilised of the European states to renounce the profits derived from the poisoning of a nation. The facts need hardly surprise us, seeing that this same western state continues to draw revenues from the poisoning of its own subjects.
"On the Gold Coast," writes M. Arnold Porret, "a missionary once told me how the negroes account for the European's white skin. God Almighty asked him, 'What hast thou done with thy brother?' And he turned white with fear."[2]
European civilisation stinks of the dead-house. "Jam foetet.…" Europe has called in the grave-diggers. Asia is on the watch.
On June 18, 1916, at the Imperial University of Tokyo, Rabindranath Tagore, the great Hindu, spoke as follows: "The political civilisation which has sprung from the soil of Europe and is overrunning the whole world, like some prolific weed, is based upon exclusiveness. It is always watchful to keep the aliens at bay or to exterminate them. It is carnivorous and cannibalistic in its tendencies, it feeds upon the resources of other peoples and tries to swallow
- ↑ Numerous issues of "Cahiers de la Quinzaine" have been devoted to castigating the crimes of civilisation. I may mention:
(a) Sur le Congo, by E. D. Morel, Pierre Mille, and Félicien Challaye ("Cahiers de la Quinzaine," vii, 6, 12, 16).
(b) Sur les Juifs en Russie et en Roumanie, by Bernard Lazare, Elie Eberlin, and Georges Delahache (iii, 8; vi, 6).
(c) Sur la Pologne, by Edmond Bernus (viii, 10, 12, 14).
(d) Sur l'Arménie, by Pierre Quillard (iii, 19).
(e) Sur la Finlande, by Jean Deck (iii, 21).
- ↑ Arnold Porret, Les causes profondes de la guerre, Lausanne, 1916.
