all the ages, all the classes,
and all the races. Those belonging to the remote civilisations of Egypt
and the east; the Socrates' and the Lucians of the modern age, such as
Thomas More, Erasmus, and Voltaire; those belonging to a distant future,
a future which will perchance (looping the loop of time) return to the
thought of Asia--the great and the simple, but all free spirits and all
brothers, we are but one people. The centuries of the persecutions, the
wide world round, have linked us heart and hand. It is this unbreakable
chain, encompassing the clay image we term civilisation, which keeps the
frail structure from falling to pieces.

"Le Carmel," Geneva, December, 1916.

III

TO THE MURDERED PEOPLES

The horrors that have taken place during the last two and a half years
have given a rude spiritual shock to the western world. No one can ever
forget the martyrdom of Belgium, Serbia, Poland, of all the unhappy
lands of the west and of the east trampled by invaders. Yet these
iniquitous deeds, by which we are revolted because we ourselves are the
sufferers--for half a century or more, European civilisation has been
doing them or allowing them to be done.

Who will ever know at what a price the Red Sultan has purchased from his
mutes of the European press and European diplomacy their silence
concerning the slaughter of two hundred thousand Armenians during the
first massacres, those of 1894 to 1896? Who will voice the sufferings of
the peoples delivered over to rapine during colonial enterprises? When a
corner of the veil has been lifted, when in Damaraland or the Congo we
have been given a glimpse of one of these fields of pain, who has been
able to bear the sight without a shudder? What "civilised" man can think
without a blush of the massacres of Manchuria and of the expedition to
China in 1900 and 1901, when the German emperor held up Attila as an
example to his soldiers, when the allied armies of the "civilised world"
rivalled one another in acts of vandalism against a civilisation older
and nobler than that of the west?[7] What help has the western world
given to the persecuted races of eastern Europe, to the Jews, the
Poles, the Finns, etc.?[8] 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,
whi