Page:Fülöp-Miller - Lenin and Gandhi.pdf/14

viii fascination, and at the same time the disturbing and repelling arrogance, of a Gospel. Like two prophets they stand at the opening of the twentieth century. If we listen to them, their age will be the beginning of a new epoch in the history of the world. They desire to lead humanity to salvation in different ways and they point in opposite directions, each with the same gesture of most profound conviction. Lenin regarded the unlimited—though only temporary—use of violence as the means for bringing about an ideal world order, whereas Gandhi is trying to reach the goal by an absolute rejection of all violence. Lenin tried to free humanity by complete mechanization, Gandhi, by repudiating machinery in principle. The one regarded machinery as the salvation from all evil, the other as a delusion of the devil.

But in spite of these apparent antagonisms, the deep kinship and the common spiritual origin of the two may be seen at every turn, often more clearly in the differences between them than in the obvious resemblances in their lives. Lenin and Gandhi both sprang from the race of the great rebels, and what unites them in all their resemblances as well as in all their differences is that both were convulsed by one and the same great experience, that both belong to an age which was stirred to its deepest foundations, in which need and misery began to arouse not only an inactive or friendly and charitable pity, but that genuine sympathy which leads to consciousness of personal responsibility for every evil, and, therefore, necessarily to rebellion against the existing political and social order. It was their profound feeling of responsibility for the sufferings of all the disinherited that lent compelling force to the words of these two great leaders, gave weight to their actions, and was the cause of their overwhelming influence on the masses.

Lenin associated personally with the oppressed and shared their life, their sorrows, and their imprisonments. He formed his doctrine on the injustice they suffered