CHAPTER XXVIII - PEACEMAKING

Summary

The contrast between life and work in India and life and work at home is so marked as to be keenly felt by the official, the merchant and the missionary when they bid a final farewell to the East. There the governing class, whatever be the motives of individuals among them, live for others; here the mass struggle for themselves. There the contact of differing civilizations, the conflict of civilization with barbarism, the light and the colour of oriental peoples and customs, the exhilaration caused by the fact of ruling, call forth latent powers, suggest great ideas, kindle the imagination into creative action, and of middle-class Englishmen make an aristocracy in the highest or ethical sense of the word. Here, on the plane level of stay-at-home life, varied only by occasional glimpses at the parallel civilization of the continent of Europe, there is no elbow-room, there are few careers save those in pursuing which the finer powers are blunted by the struggle for success. Competition in its worst as well as best forms sours the nature, starves the fancy, and obstructs the energies of the men whom it helps above their fellows. Men who would be statesmen and rulers abroad remain narrow and unknown at home. And if this contrast is in the main true of the professional and trading classes of our country, as they are abroad and at home, it is emphatically so of the clergy, of ministers and missionaries.