Page:Krishnakanta's Will (Chatterjee, Roy).pdf/7

12 Krishnakanta slept in a room half way between the inner and the outer part of his house. He called and dropped off into sleep again. Within this short space of time his will was removed, and a false will was substituted in its place.



HESE are cataclysmic times threatening to take the world back to the midnight of barbarism. We are witnessing the most horrible man-made calamity since the world began, the Christian nations of Europe are rending one another with the fury of the wild beasts of Africa. It is such a savage brutalizing struggle that it beggars all description. With cannon and rifle fire, with flaming liquids and poisonous gases, countries have been devasted [sic], towns and cities left in black ruins, thrones shaken in the dust, nations trampled down, and peoples wiped out like so many figures on the board. Sacred treaties between governments have been blown away in the blast as if they were but shreds of paper. The whole fabric of international relations is tottering, and is on the verge of collapse, and the end is not yet.

Dreadful as is the catastrophe, it promises to inaugurate an enlightened era for Europe. If the French Revolution achieved only a partial emancipation of European nations, who can deny that the present war will complete the process? Men who are intimately in touch with the inner European political circles do not hesitate to say that whoever wins Poland will be free. Indeed, the Czar of Russia has already declared his intention, apparently with the approval of the allies, to restore the ancient boundaries of Poland, and give its inhabitants a complete autonomy. The Czar has also suspended the Russianizing campaign against Finland, and promised a more liberal policy towards the Finns. Thus Russia, the strongest citadel of reaction, has "started full speed on a process of entire renewal." This is only a small beginning. The war will also produce many beneficent results for France and England. They will have—to quote Lincoln's phrase of other days—a new birth of freedom. And what of Germany? "Nowhere will the ideals of democracy," assures Count Herman Keyserling, the distinguished Russian philosopher, "gain more grounds than on German soil." It may be, therefore, that even such a frightful disaster as this war is a blessing in disguise for Europe.

But what will be the destiny of India after the war? In the terrible tempest of blood and iron which has burst upon Europe, India, as a member of the British empire, has found herself ranged on the side of England. And already India has contributed mightily with immense sacrifices of blood and treasure to English success. Indeed, the gold, the blood, the spirit of Hindustan, as it appears at this distance, have become essential to the triumph of allied arms. No nation can, however, afford to be led into a war for empty sentiment, for mere motives of self-abnegation and self-denial. The days of the knight-errant are over. Wars of sentiment do not belong to the twentieth century world-life; they belong to the time of King Arthur's Round Table. The modern war can find its justification in the protection and advancement of national interests. And since Indians may not be particulary [sic] keen about constituting themselves as an evangelist agency, the questions to be asked in India are: What will Hindustan obtain as the equivalent of her great contributions? How should her sacrifices be transformed into substan-