i went again to ceylon to look into the conditions of coolie importation, and then i was going back into assam once more, still in the wake of indentured labor, when i chanced upon a misadventure. i had my first and only experience of big game shooting in the garo hills, i was clawed out of a tree by a wounded panther, he missed his hold and i got back to my branch, but my shoulder was put out, my thigh was badly torn, and my blood was poisoned by the wound. i had an evil uncomfortable time. my injury hampered me greatly, and for a while it seemed likely i should be permanently lamed. i had to keep to vehicles and reasonably good roads. i wound up my convalescence with a voyage to singapore, and from thence i went on rather disconnectedly to a number of exploratory journeys—excursions rather than journeys—into china. i got to pekin and then suddenly faced back to europe, returning overland through russia.
i wanted now to study the conditions of modern industrialism at its sources, and my disablement did but a little accelerate a return already decided upon. i had got my conception of the east as a whole and of the shape of the historical process. i no longer felt adrift in a formless chaos of forces. i perceived now very clearly that human life is essentially a creative struggle out of the usage of immemorial years, that the synthesis of our contemporary civilization is this creative impulse rising again in its latest and greatest effort, the creative impulse rising again, as a wave rises from the trough of its predecessors, out of the ruins of our parent system, imperial rome. but this time, and for the first time, the effort is world-wide, and china and iceland, patagonia and central africa all swing together with us to make—or into another catastrophic failure to make—the great state of mankind. all this i had now distinctly in my mind. the new process i perceive had gone further in the west; was most developed in the west. the lighter end lifts first. so back i came away from the great body of mankind, which is asia, to its head. and since i was still held by my promise from returning to england i betook myself first to the pas de calais and then to belgium and thence into industrial germany, to study the socialistic movement at its sources.
and i was beginning to see too very clearly by the time of my return that what is confusedly called the labor problem is really not one problem at all, but two. there is the old problem, the problem as old as zimbabwe and the pyramids, the declining problem, the problem of organizing masses of unskilled labor to the constructive ends of a great state, and there is the new modification due to machinery, which has rendered unskilled labor and labor of a low grade of skill almost unnecessary to mankind, added coal, oil, wind and water, the elementary school and the printing-press to our sources of power, and superseded the ancient shepherding and driving of men by the possibility of their intelligent and willing co-operation. the two are still mixed in every discussion, even as they are mixed in the practice of life, but inevitably they will be disentangled. we break free from slavery, open or disguised, just as we illuminate and develop this disentanglement....
i have long since ceased to trouble about the economics of human society. ours are not economic but psychological difficulties. there is enough for everyone, and only a fool can be found to deny it. but our methods of getting and making are still ruled by legal and social traditions from the time before we had tapped these new sources of power, before there was more than enough for everyone, and when a bare supply was only secured by jealous possession and unremitting toil. we have no longer to secure enough by a stern insistence. we have come to a plenty. the problem now is to make that plenty go round, and keep it enough while we do.
our real perplexities are altogether psychological. there are no valid arguments against a great-spirited socialism but this, that people will not. indolence, greed, meanness of spirit, the aggressiveness of authority, and above all jealousy, jealousy for our pride and vanity, jealousy for what we esteem our possessions, jealousy for those upon whom we have set the heavy fetters of our love, a jealousy of criticism and association, these are the real obstacles to those brave large reconstructions, those profitable abnegations and brotherly feats of generosity that will yet turn human life—of which our individual lives are but the momentary parts—into a glad, beautiful and triumphant co-operation all round this sunlit world.
if but humanity could have its imagination touched——
i was already beginning to see the great problem of mankind as indeed nothing other than a magnification of the little problem of myself, as a problem in escape from grooves, from preoccupations and suspicions, precautions and ancient angers, a problem of escape from these spiritual beasts that prowl and claw, to a new generosity and a new breadth of view.
for all of us, little son, as for each of us, salvation is that. we have to get away from ourselves to a greater thing, to a giant's desire and an unending life, ours and yet not our own.
