-65_Preface to the first Edition of The Ideal of Human Unity.htm

SUPPLEMENT  TO VOLUME  15

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

Preface to the first edition (1919) of THE IDEAL OF HUMAN UNITY
 

Preface  *  

                                  THE chapters of this book were written in a serial form in the pages of the monthly review, Arya, and from necessity of speedy publication have been reprinted as they stood without the alterations which would have been necessary to give them a greater unity of treatment. They reflect the rapidly changing phases of ideas, facts and possibilities which emerged in the course of the European conflict. The earlier chapters were written when Russia was still an Empire and an autocracy, the latter parts after the Russian revolution and when the war had come nearer to its end, but the dramatic circumstances of the issue, in itself inevitable, could not be foreseen. The reader may guide himself in regard to the references to contemporary conditions by observing that the first four chapters cover the close of the year 1915, the next twelve 1916, the seventeenth to the twenty-eighth 1917, while the remaining seven extend to July 1918. The rapid change of circumstances reflected will serve to bring home
the swiftness of the evolution by which what was a hesitating idea and a doubtful possibility at the commencement has become a settled necessity awaiting speedy formulation.
        Subsequent events have rendered certain speculations and balancings out of date, for they have been solved by the logic of events. Austria is a name of the past, the Empire of the Hohenzollerns has disappeared like a dream of the night, all Europe between the Rhine and the Volga is republican. Finally, most important of all, the League of Nations has now been decided upon, the American idea having triumphed at least in principle, and is in travail of formation. But the main suggestions put forward in the book remain unaffected, or rather acquire a more pressing actuality. The two great difficulties which attend the incipience of this first stage of loose world-union will still be, first, be difficulty of bringing into one system the few great Empires

        * Preface to the first edition of The Ideal of Human Unity published by Sons of India, Madras in 1919.

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remaining, few but immensely increased in power, influence and the extent of their responsibilities, and the greatly increased swarm of free nations which the force of events or the Power guiding them rather than the will of nations and Governments has brought into being, and the approaching struggle between. Labour and Capitalism. The former is only a difficulty and embarrassment, though it may become serious if it turns into a conflict between the imperialistic and the nationalistic ideas or reproduces in the international scheme the strife of the old oligarchic and democratic tendencies in a new form, a question between control of the world-system by the will and influence of a few powerful imperial States and the free and equal control by all, small nations and great, European and American and Asiatic peoples. The second is a danger which may even lead to disintegration of this first attempt at unification, especially if, as seems to be the tendency, the League undertakes the policing of the world against the forces of extreme revolutionary socialism. On the other hand, the conflict may accelerate, whatever its result, the necessity and actuality of a more close and rigorous system, the incipience at least of the second stage of unification.

        The main contentions advanced in these pages also remain unaffected by the course of events, - the inevitability of the unification of the life of humanity as a result of those imperative natural forces which lead always to the creation of larger and larger human aggregates, the choice of the principles which may be followed in the process, the need for preserving and bringing to fullness the principle of individual and group freedom within the human unity, and the insufficiency of formal unity without a growth of the religion of humanity which can alone make it a great psychological advance in the spiritual evolution of the race.

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