nd, and
leave the Chinese free to pursue humane ends, instead of the war and
rapine and destruction which all white nations love. It is perhaps a
slender hope for China, and for ourselves it is little better than
despair. But unless the Great Powers learn some moderation and some
tolerance, I do not see any better possibility, though I see many that
are worse.

Our Western civilization is built upon assumptions, which, to a
psychologist, are rationalizings of excessive energy. Our industrialism,
our militarism, our love of progress, our missionary zeal, our
imperialism, our passion for dominating and organizing, all spring from
a superflux of the itch for activity. The creed of efficiency for its
own sake, without regard for the ends to which it is directed, has
become somewhat discredited in Europe since the war, which would have
never taken place if the Western nations had been slightly more
indolent. But in America this creed is still almost universally
accepted; so it is in Japan, and so it is by the Bolsheviks, who have
been aiming fundamentally at the Americanization of Russia. Russia, like
China, may be described as an artist nation; but unlike China it has
been governed, since the time of Peter the Great, by men who wished to
introduce all the good and evil of the West. In former days, I might
have had no doubt that such men were in the right. Some (though not
many) of the Chinese returned students resemble them in the belief that
Western push and hustle are the most desirable things on earth. I cannot
now take this view. The evils produced in China by indolence seem to me
far less disastrous, from the point of view of mankind at large, than
those produced throughout the world by the domineering cocksureness of
Europe and America. The Great War showed that something is wrong with
our civilization; experience of Russia and China has made me believe
that those countries can help to show us what it is that is wrong. The
Chinese have discovered, and have practised for many centuries, a way of
life which, if it could be adopted by all the world, would make all the
world happy. We Europeans have not. Our way of life demands strife,
exploitation, restless change, discontent and destruction. Efficiency
directed to destruction can only end in annihilation, and it is to this
consummation that our civilization is tending, if it cannot learn some
of that wisdom for which it despises the East.

It was on the Volga, in the