From the beginning of history the higher human will has been consistently striving to bring about perfect fellowship, or at least mutual harmlessness, among human beings. The poets of the race have sung of it, prophets have preached it, and even legislators have often pretended it. But the construction of human society has been such that all their efforts could only appeal to the intellects and emotions of a few classes, who had to be content with regarding the higher teachings as ideal counsels which yet could never be made practical in ordinary human life.

So the Will of Man, aspiring towards the heights has ever been defeated by the old animal custom of treating human life as a theatre of “competition”- that is to say, mutual injury and endless strife for securing physical necessities and luxuries. Competition is said to be the declared rule of life among animals, but human “civilization” has aggravated that evil principle into such terrible forms that we are worse than the lower animals in certain respects. There are plenty off crows in the town where I am living. But I find that the crows do not fight each other a thousand part so badly as men have ever been and are doing, for food and shelter.

What the Westerners call socialism is not clearly understood here. But still for the West as well as the East, there is only one decent way of living, viz., to make the earth common property and live on it as fellow-workers and co-partners. We have a tradition that in the Krita-yuga, men lived like that in this country. That may or may not be true.

But human will shall yet succeed in bringing about that Krita-yuga in all countries and in a not very far-off future. The higher will of man has been baulked till now because for some reason or other it could not direct the main part of its energy towards rectifying the root of all our social ills. Justice must be made to triumph in the very formation of human society. And then she will naturally triumph in all human affairs and relations. So long as the principle of competition holds away over the structure of human associations, so long as land and water do not belong commonly to all human beings, men are bound to behave worse than brutes in their “economic” relations at any rate. They are fools, who think that the sages had no knowledge of political economy. The Rishis were wise not merely in their teachings about the other world, as certain people imagine; they were equally wise in their teachings about this world. When the majority of men realize this fact fully, we shall have taken the next step in our upward evolution.

New India
21.05.1915