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The Inner Government of the World
By Annie Besant
The Divine Plan; Its Sections; Religions and Civilisations; The Present Part of the Plan
FRIENDS:
In speaking yesterday, I had to leave out the last word of my original programme of the second lecture. I said nothing about the Buddhas. I must pause for a moment on that, for the Buddha-to-be, or the Bodhi¬sattva, is the Head of the Teaching Group. You re¬member how in the first lecture we had Rulers, Teachers and the Forces, the Activity. Now the Buddha-to-be holds to the great group of Teachers the same position that the Manu holds to the great group of Rulers. Just as the whole of the Inner Government of the world dealing with the evolution of Races, the configuration of continents, etc., of which I spoke yesterday, as the whole of that, is worked out by the great group of Rulers, of whom the Manu is the representative in every Root-Race, so we find in connection with the group of Teachers that one great figure stands out, the Buddha-to-be. Now He is not the Teacher of a Race, as the Manu is the Ruler of a Race. The last Buddha-¬to-be, for instance, the Lord Gautama, who became the Buddha in that incarnation, came to the world, as you know, in the fifth century before the Christian era, and that did not coincide with either a Race or a sub-race. He came in the middle, as it were, of a great Race period, for the finishing up. of His teacher¬-hood upon earth, and His position as Teacher - as the Bodhisattva - as the Buddhist call Him, as the Jagatguru as he would be called among the Hindus - His positions as Jagatguru stretches back right into the civilisation of the Fourth Root-Race. In this way then the Manus and Buddhas-to-be do not wholly coincide in time. The one specially deals with His own Race evolution of the type of men, and the other with the inner evo¬lution, the unfolding of the Spirit in man through the founding of some great faith. Now looking back over the previous life of the One who became a Buddha in His last earthly incarnation, we see Him appearing as a great Teacher right back, as I say, to the Fourth Race. I have no time to go into the incarnations. It is enough for me here just to remind you that He appeared here, as the Teacher of the Root-Stock, where the religion of the Hindus reigned, in the form known as that of the great Rishi Vyasa. It was His work, the division of the Vedas; His work the compiling of the Puranas and so on. And He is the one who outlined the religious side of Hinduism, just as the Lord Manu outlined the social and political side, the work, as you see, corresponding to the Group to which each belonged. Now the Bodhisattva comes not at regular intervals, if you measure by years, but at certain periods in the evolution of the Race; whenever a sub-race appears in the Race, the Jagatguru, the Bodhisattva, appears in the very early days of that sub-race. Vyasa then came to the Hindus for the outlining of their great religious polity, and then retiring into the Himalayas, to the great Brother¬hood of the Rishis. He came out publicly again in Egypt, as the Founder of that great scientific religion which made Egypt for some time the Light of the then world. He gave that religion of science which, like that of Hinduism, centred as it were in the Sun, but not so much in the Sun as the Life-giver as the Sun as the Light-bringer. So you find the central imagery in that religion turning round the divine Light. It is Ra, or Osiris - names of the Sun-God - that is thought of as the indweller in the hearts of men. He is “the Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world”, to quote the phrase which is found in the “fourth gospel”, and is found there because that Gospel is Graeco-Egyptian, belonging to that great stock of Mystics who united, under the name of the neo-Platonic School, the wisdom of Egypt and the wisdom of Greece. He was known among the Egyptians as Thoth. But he is better known in the Greek form Hermes, Hermes Trismegistos, the Thrice-¬Greatest, as He is named. In that capacity, embodied as that great Egyptian, He became the Founder of the magnificent Egyptian religion, whose remains are still being unburied, full of Occultism, written on the papyrus of Egypt, and found in fragments in the swathings of the mummies, and put together as the Book of the Dead. That great scientific and occult wisdom of Egypt came from Him who was Thoth, the Messenger, Graecised into Hermes, the Messenger. Then He came again to Persia as Zarathushtra, angli¬cised into Zoroaster, the Founder of the splendid Zoroastrian Religion, the Religion of the Fire. As regards the antiquity of this religion, it is rather interest¬ing that lately among the Parsis there arose a Parsi historian, who studied the history of his ancient religion and the polity that grew out of that religion, and he put the date of the Empire of Persia as about twenty thousand years before the Christian era - a date which is regarded as accurate in the Occult Record, which had been given by some of our own students before, on a historical basis, it was worked out by this Bombay Parsi. Then He came again as Orpheus to Greece, the founder of the Orphic Mysteries, whence the later Mysteries were derived; always the founding of Mysteries comes out in connection with the Jagatguru. In giving a religion, He always gives the inner hidden life, which is His Life, which keeps it in touch with the invisible world, which in the early days at least is the heart and strength of the religion. That was His last appearance as Jagatguru, until He has born in India to finish His great life of service on earth. You know He was born as the young Prince Siddhartha, who became Gautama the Buddha, and after He attained Illumination at Gaya, He taught for forty years up and down the land of India, doing the great work of a Buddha, turning, as they call it, the Wheel of the Law, proclaiming the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, and the Triple Gem. Strangely enough, it may seem, this religion was not intended chiefly for the land of His birth. For there was no reason why a new form of religion should be given here in India; and it appears that it was intended to spread chiefly among other Nations, who would not take up the metaphysics and philosophy of Hinduism, which need the peculiar subtlety of brain which belongs to the first sub-race, or the Root¬stock of the Aryans. Buddhism has also a splendid metaphysical and philosophical side, not studied by many of the Nations dwelling in Asia, for that was not the form best suited to carry on the great treasure of moral knowledge to those who belonged to the earlier Race, the Fourth. So His practical religion is specially based on and intended to spread the great laws of moral¬ity, and the Right Thinking on which He laid such stress; hence you find His teaching spreading over Ceylon, over Burma, over Siam, and then northward to Tibet, China and Japan, carrying the fundamental moral truths of religion in a form in which they appeal to the Fourth Race brain, rather than to the subtle Fifth Race brain of the Hindu. The Hindu did not need any new religion. He had everything in his own. It must not be forgotten that the Lord Buddha was a Hindu, the glory of Hinduism, verily the Light of Asia, as He is called, but even more truly the Light of the World. So He lived spreading his exquisite teachings among the people, with many a simile and illustration drawn from their daily life, and after forty years He passed away. But He has never quite left our world as former Buddhas had done, perchance because He was the first of all the Buddhas who was born of our humanity; and that seems to have made closer and tenderer the tie between Him and the earth that He loved and taught. And so we find that even still at the time of His great festival, what the Buddhists call the “Shadow of Buddha” appears for the blessing of the world; up in the far north, up near the Chinese frontier in Northern Tibet beyond the Himalayas, there, still once a year, the Buddhists tell us, the Shadow of Lord Buddha is yet seen. It is during the time of the great Vaishakha Festival, and many, many bodies of people travel to the place, in order that they may take part in that festival at that particular spot. And other incidents less well known, show that the Lord Buddha is still interested in the evolution of this globe.
Then there followed him as Jagatguru a great Rishi of India, the Rishi Maitreya. You may read about Him in your own books, appearing from time to time, ever endeavouring to keep peace, ever work¬ing through love. Then you have Him coming to the earth for the founding of a great religion, and he came to Palestine and there took the body of a disciple named Jeshua or Jesus, in order to give to the races of Europe a religion which suited their evolution, for that is the great work of the World¬-Teacher. He continually helps and blesses all the great religions of the world, and His love is all-embracing. But to each sub-race He comes visibly, to give it a religion best suited to its evolution. The sub-races are not as widely different from each other as are the Root-Races. If you take for instance a Chinaman belonging to the Fourth Root-Race and a Kashmiri Brahmana belonging to the Fifth Root-Race, you will at once see the very great difference of human type. You could not confuse the two. You would at once realise that in the latter, the Kashmiri Brahmana, you had a new type of humanity as compared with the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mongol and the Tartar of Central Asia. They are all different from the Aryan type. You have not in the Aryans the high cheek-bones of the Tartar or the Mongol; nor the setting of the eyes that you see in the Asian sub-races of the Fourth Root-Race. You do not have the same shape of the nose, nor the same shape of the head, nor the same type of the figure. These outer differences go hand in hand with the most important inner differ¬ences. And when you come to deal with the nervous system, it is there that you come across the most marked and the most important difference; for the nervous system of the Aryan is very, very much finer, is very much more delicately balanced than the nervous system of the Chinaman or the Japanese. You must have noticed that yourselves, if you have read the history of China, the extraordinary tortures through which a Chinaman can pass without dying, which, applied in the same way to the Aryan, leave him dead by mere nervous shock. That is a characteristic difference of the two. If you take the Russo-Japanese war and compare the death-rate of the Japanese soldiers who were wounded with those of the Russians, you will find that an enormous proportion of the Japanese recovered; that was not mainly due to the fact that they were better looked after and cared for. Rather, the point that I wish to lay stress upon is this, that what you would call a desperate wound, causing great laceration, would give a tremendous nervous shock and kill the Russian, whereas a similar wound inflicted on a Japanese would give him a far lesser shock and he might recover. The Red Indians of North America are of that type, and they can undergo a wound that would lay an Aryan prostrate and helpless and doomed to certain death; and yet two or three days after, they will be able to go into the battle-field again. This is very strongly marked in several sub-races of the Fourth, and some regard it as a great racial superiority. It is on that nervous difference that the special evolution of the Fifth Race depends. The inner texture of the brain, as it were, the capacity of the brain to receive impressions, and then of the mental forces to work on and carry them out in all directions, to argue upon them, make inductions and deductions, all these things are characteristic of the Fifth Race; it has a highly developed and unstable nervous system, and it has immense power in the concrete mind. All these differences necessarily govern the form of religion which is given by the Jagatguru, and hence the differ¬ence of religions. Sometimes people say: “Why should there not be one religion for all?” The answer is because of the great variety of the human types, because of these fundamental differences between man and man, because in the evolution of mankind you have to evolve together the physical, the emotional and the mental nature of the man, and then, corresponding with that and largely depending upon it, the spiritual unfolding of each Race in turn.
And so looking at the great religions founded within the whole sweep of the Aryan Race, you find in your Hinduism what you may fairly call an all-embracing religion, although it has been, by its methods, practically confined to Hindus. But the peculiarities of all later religions are found in Hinduism. The same ideas that are brought out prominently in them are found also in Hinduism, less prominently. In every religion you have some special characteristic that is brought out by the World-Teacher, in order that on that a civilisation may be founded suitable for the evolution of the particular qualities which that sub-race is to contribute to the coming perfection of human-kind. You remember what I said yesterday about the different qualities which must be developed in different human types, if they are to be developed to the full, just as in the difference of sex. You recognise that in the two types of body, the masculine and the feminine, you find physical bases for different emotional and intellectual developments. So is this, in this question of Races and sub-races. If you ask physiologists what is the fundamental difference between the masculine and feminine bodies, they will tell you that the feminine body has a much larger development of the glandular system, while in the man there is a much greater development of the muscular system. And these fundamental physiological differences between man and woman are necessary, in order that the qualities corresponding to these may be developed in the Race. Remember the words of the Manu: “For fathers were men created, as for mothers women”. That is the mark of difference which governs the body of each. When you come to the emotional development, that goes with the glandular system, which nourishes; you find it greater than the corresponding system in man. Hence the great modern mistake of trying to make women into men, to carry her along exactly the same lines, to forget the difference and the value of the difference. You cannot make the man a woman, nor the woman a man at present. The effeminate man is no more attractive than the masculine woman. Now what are those differences? How do they show? In what you may call Motherhood and Fatherhood, the fundamental difference there of type; the woman the nourishing, the protecting, the helping, that is the special quality of the Mother - tender, gentle, patient and enduring - so that even if you take the masculine quality, the quality of courage, woman’s courage is very different from the courage of man. The courage of a man is the great impulse of his nature to assert himself as against opposition. The courage of woman springs from love, devotion, and she will be as brave, braver sometimes, than the bravest man; but it will be in defence of some one or some thing which she loves, and not with the mere desire of self-assertion, rivalry against an opponent. That runs all through. It is quite true that gradually those qualities will blend. It is quite true that sometimes you will find some of the opposite qualities developed in each - in the noblest man you will find much compassion, and you will find in the noblest woman great strength and courage. But still it is a blending of the opposites, where they are come together in order that the perfect human being, in whom all the qualities are developed, may gradually appear on our earth. But no premature attempt to force that is desirable. We have not yet reached the perfection of qualities. That awaits further evolution. Similarly, then, every sub-race has its own quality dominant in it. I have often pointed out in dealing with religions, how the religion of each sub-race brings out a particular tendency that is woven into the civilisation, and the qualities brought out by religion are the qualities that are wanted in the civil polity of the people. It is fairly familiar to most of you. Take your own great root-religion and you will find in it two ideas, which are really one, which stand out above all others. One of these is the Immanence of God. “I established this universe with one fragment of Myself” - so spake Shri Krsna. God in everything, one life pulsing in every form, one life at the back of every object. I used the western phrase, “Immanence of God”. That is gradually coming back to the West. They have had there a form of Pantheism, God in every¬thing, which has never attracted any except the highest thinkers of the West, like Spinoza; he was only half western, for he was a Jew. There was no room for worship, no room for devotion, no room for enthusiasm; because the presence of God in everything, God im¬manent in the world, that can only become real when the Inner God is realised. So it is with the devotee, that he is not worshipping the Inner God, Brahman, but he worships some divine manifestation. It may be Vishnu, it may be Shiva, Mahadeva, or it may be Shri Krsna. Always a form is necessary for the growth of devotion. Hence it is necessary that, in order to realise that idea of the immanence of God, He must be worshipped in many forms, loved in many forms, and it is that which gives the warmth of devotion to Hinduism, because not alone for the philosopher but for the devotee God is manifest through that sublime religion, and God shows Himself in many forms, so that He may attract the varying natures of men. So I must finish the shloka of the Gita, which I half-quoted: “I established this universe with one fragment of Myself, and I remain.”
He remains “transcendent”, as the philosophy of the West would say, not only as the life in every form, but Himself a Life transcending the whole universe; He, the higher Object of devotion, the Ishvara of the worlds. So you find in this religion that idea predo¬minant, the unity of life, the Immanence of Deity, and as the other side of that, the Solidarity, the Brotherhood, of Man. That is not a different doctrine, but another phase of the same. The Will aspect of man is only the other side of the Immanence of God, and it is expressed in the characteristic word of Hinduism, the charac¬teristic idea of Dharma. You cannot translate that word. No western language can translate it. You may call it, as you do, sometimes religion, sometimes duty, sometimes obligation, but no one word of a foreign tongue can convey everything that that word conveys to the Hindu. It is that great idea which it is the work of Hinduism to preach and to establish in the whole world, the binding nature of Duty; and that for a reason which you will see in a few minutes.
Leaving Hinduism and coming to the religion of Egypt there you had a religion of science, a religion of deep study of the outer world, of the phenomena of nature, and the “magic” of Egypt, based on that scientific study, was the wonder of its day. Egypt has passed away, and her remains must be sought in her sepulchres. No one now worships Thoth, or Hermes, the Greek name of that mighty Jagatguru. The civilisa¬tion of Egypt is dead and buried, and is only unburied by being brought out by the investigations of archaeo¬logists and mythologists. I ask you to mark that dis¬appearance, for it is vital for the appreciation of our subject. If you go to Persia, there you will find another note, that of Knowledge and Purity. That has come down to our own day - pure thought, pure word pure deed. You must not defile the elements of nature. You must not defile the Earth, the Water, or the Fire. So the
Zoroastrian will not bury or burn or drown his dead, because it will be polluting one of the elements. So he leaves his dead to be torn into pieces and be carried away by the birds. It also has perished save for the modern Parsis. The old Persia has disappeared. The modern Persia is feeble compared with that mighty kingdom which spread over large parts of Asia in the far-off days of its glory. When you come to the fourth sub-race, where is Greece? Gone. Greece gave such wonderful Beauty to the world, beauty of music, beauty of form, beauty of colour, beauty of language, all embodied in the civil polity of the Nation. Humanity to the Greek consisted of the Greeks and the barbarians, and everything outside Greece was to him savage. To him the supreme duty was his duty to the State. His religion sacrifices to the State, his civil polity was his all. Then came Christendom, with Christianity as its creed, the religion of the concrete mind and the individual. It was with the fifth sub-race that the value of the individual was imprinted on the mind of humanity. That was the work given to Christendom, to develop the concrete mind, and show the value of the individual, the worth of the individual. Therefore from Christianity was gradually withdrawn the key-doctrine of reincarnation, because reincarnation lessens the value of the individual - the individual life, how small a part of the long, long, series that stretches behind us and stretches in front of us; one life seems so little, so small, so insignificant; what does it matter what happens to it? So that key-doctrine was withdrawn from Christendom and hidden away for a time, and all stress was laid on the value of the one life. Has it ever struck you how extraordinarily exaggerated it is that so much stress should be laid upon one little life, and the ever¬lasting future of man be made to depend on that one life? If in that life he believed in Christ, it was well, everlasting Heaven was his reward; and if in that life he was an unbeliever, then everlasting hell was his doom - the most irrational doctrine ever heard. For so many centuries people believed it; people seem able to believe in an absurdity, when, so to speak, the Spirit of the Time forces it upon them. They lose their reason and sense of proportion. All Christendom believed quite comfortably in it. Such things are not rational, and can never recommend themselves to the keen intellect of thinkers. So educated men gradually slipped out of Christianity and the word Agnostic became the favourite word of the scientists and thinkers. But Christianity had an enormous value. It developed the vigour and strength of the individual which are necessary for the further progress of the human race. It also developed competition and strife everywhere, strife between Nation and Nation, strife between class and class, the struggle between the rich and the poor, between the learned and the ignorant - one great story of struggle is the history of Europe. It thus developed strength, developed vigour and strength of mind as well as strength of body, and progress in scientific thought. It has done its work and its share in human evolution. It has had its natural consummation in a world-war. And slowly has been arising the second great teaching of Christianity - forgotten at that earlier period. “He that is strong should bear the infirmities of the weak.” “Let him that is greatest be as he that doth serve; behold, I am among you as he that serveth.” That is the second great inspiration of Christianity, the yoking of the strong to the service of others; that is beginning to show itself amid all the struggles. You will find in Christendom that what is called public spirit is much stronger than here: the willingness to help others, altruism as they call it. The duty of service has been recognised there, however partially.
Now the point that I want to bring out of all this is that, up to the present time, every religion and every civilisation born of religion has perished; until now, except Hinduism, the root-stock, everything has disappeared. Contemporary with Babylon and Egypt, it is contemporary today with England, France and America. Take the civilisations that existed. Where is Egypt? Where is the civilisation of Egypt? Dead. The civilisation of Persia? Dead. The civilisations of Greece and Rome? Dead. Nothing remains but their ruins, and their literature and their art. And Christendom had a thousand years of ignorance behind it before it took up the discoveries of Greece and Egypt, and carried them on afresh. That is what has happened through all the past. The question is: “Is it going to happen over again? Is this fifth sub-race civilisa¬tion to be swept away as the other civilisations have been?” Why did they perish? Because they had exhausted all their strength, and were confined to the old forms instead of passing to the new. They were destroyed, and ignorance followed. Is that to be the same in Europe? That is the, as yet, unanswered problem of today.
Now in the great Plan, the Plan of Ishvara for His solar system, its seven sections are divided among the Rulers of the system. Those are sometimes spoken of as the “Seven Spirits before the Throne”, or the “Planetary Logoi”. Each of these superintends the evolution of seven successive Chains, in each of which the component parts, the seven globes, evolve, the wave going round them in order seven times, or making seven Rounds. The Ishvara is like a great Architect. He gives a section of His Plan to each of His Overseers the Planetary Logoi. Each Logos subdivides His section into seven successive stages or Chains, and each globe in the Chain has its own part of the Plan to work out. Thus a subdivision comes down to the Lord of a world, the Head of the Ruler Group, for His particular phase of the world-story, and that given to Him He divides up among the Manus, so that every Manu shall carry out His own Race in consonance with the general Plan, which is the evolution of humanity as a whole in the solar system. The Lord Vaivasvata Manu has His section to work out in the Fifth Root¬-Race. In that Plan there has been empire after empire, which has risen, flourished and fallen, has been destroyed and brought to an end. Is the present to follow that Plan, which has been worked out all through by destruction, before a new step forward could be taken? That has been the problem of our own day and the problem of the War. Why did that world-shaking war break out in our own day, breaking out about so small a thing and yet entailing principles and changes so vast? Some of you must have wondered when you saw in the news coming from Europe all the thrones of Europe crumbling one after another in a brief space of time, except the throne of Britain. They all broke down one after another. There was a regular breaking and falling down of Kingdoms and kings. The German Emperor, where is he? The Austrian Emperor died, and then all those small kingdoms in Europe which had him as a crowned head over them - all fell. We could not open a newspaper without seeing some King becoming an exile. It is an extraordinary thing when you see it day after day. It may not even strike you as a big picture of destruction. Now we find the outcome of it, the destruction of that form of Government characteristic of the fifth sub-race, but the form whose work is over. So it is to be broken to pieces. War was the easiest way to do it. It broke into pieces before a higher form of Government, a Government where freedom was the ideal. And so you have had at intervals the Republic of France, the free United Italy, the limited Monarchy of the Italian Kingdom, Great Britain with its constitutional King, a King hedged in on every side with restrictions, and a people growing stronger and stronger every day; so you have The United States, the great Republic of the West, and everywhere in the world Freedom, Liberty, is the breath of the New Era and the death-stroke of the old. So far as the war went, the question is over. There auto¬cracy is slain. The new sub-race, which is coming to birth and being born, received an immense rein¬forcement in the war by that great slaughter of the young that took place, those that were willing to give even their lives in order that the people of the world might live - a magnificent spectacle, if you think of it from that standpoint, the youth of all Nations going to death, and to mutilation worse than death, for the sake of a splendid ideal. And among these, Lord Vaivasvata Manu found the souls that He needed for His sixth sub-race-those who cared for an ideal more than for self, those who cared for the liberty of the people more than for the triumph of individual rulers. That splendid vision of the war has been very much blurred in the later struggle. Much of the spirit that has been destroyed in Germany seems to have come over to the victors, and they have been contaminated by the military spirit which is at present very high in the West. The present part of the Plan that is working out is the passage towards what men call Democracy, the rule of the people, to pass on later not into the Socialism of Hate that was preached by Karl Marx, but into the Socialism of Love, which expressed itself in that famous maxim in which the State was again seen as founded on the family, of which the rule is, “From everyone according to his capacity, to every one according to his needs”. That is the rule of the higher Socialism. It is only the family extended to the Nation. Part of the work of India, and her mission to the rest of the world, will be to bring back to the world the ideal of the Nation as the family, enlarged civic virtues as the virtues of the family, made general and permanent. In that remarkable book of Babu Bhagavan Das Sahab, The Science of the Emotions, he dealt, practically for the first time, with the two great root emotions of Love and Hate, and showed how the love in the family, which grows out of kinship and blood, turns in the State into virtues and the State becomes a great family. That is the right idea, the old Indian idea that the family is the unit, and not the individual. This is one of the parts of the work which India has to preach to the whole world. The stage of the Plan at the moment is practically this: You have the European countries in a state of wild unrest; wherever there has been tyranny there has been revolution, and the revolution of the ignorant and angry people can only work out in a dictatorship, which takes the place of the autocracy which they destroyed. Looking over the Nations of Europe, there is one Nation which is in a peculiar position of advan¬tage, and that Nation is Britain. The Plan which has been marked out may, or may not, be at once carried out, because it is always subject to the changes in human beings and the wills of men. Though ultimately it is carried out, it has sometimes to be carried out by widespread destruction, and after much delay.
When I was last in Britain a new phase had come up there. I was accustomed to the old Trade Unionism, that had taught so much discipline to the masses that they were able to carry out even widespread strikes without riots, or disturbance, or trouble of any sort. There was a wonderful sight in London when the Railway strike took place - thousands of men walking in procession out of work. There was no rioting, no trouble, no fear for anybody, the whole State going on its way. The spectre of starvation stared at the Government. You had the strange sight of all the railway people walking in the streets with nothing to do, and a number of nobles and people of gentle birth working in the stations, some of them rolling the milk¬-cans, some of them driving the engines, and so on, until the strike was over. Another thing talked about was “Direct Action”. What it means is this: One single trade or a combination of trades, who have in their hands the lives of the people, what they call the key-industries, like coal and transport, and those that supply the necessaries of life in great towns, like water, electricity and so on, these organisations combine and strike for some common purpose, outside trade and industry, and then they say: “If you don’t yield to our views, we will starve you into submission”. The old plan of the employer is now being used by the employed, a section of the people tyrannising over the whole people, over a people represented in the House of Commons, and over members elected by the people. Direct Action comes from a class or section of the people claiming to impose their own will upon the Nation by threat of starvation. It is valuable in one sense. It teaches the higher classes how dependent they are upon the workers, and how badly they have used them in the past. But it would be fatal, if successful. The one country in Europe which is capable of making the transition to democracy possible, and that without revolution - ¬though she has had in earlier days revolutions of a minor kind - is Great Britain. She has won practically universal suffrage, suffrage for the whole of her popula¬tion. The way is open before her, if she can keep her head, and she may make the transition to a mighty British Commonwealth with India, a great Indo-British Commonwealth of free Nations, self-ruling, self-governing, but linked together by bonds of mutual service. That is the Plan that the Manu is striving to work out.
