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14 LETTERS FROM ABROAD

principle of education we must realise in Santiniketan. We must know that only he can teach who can love. The greatest teachers of men have been lovers of men. The real teaching is a gift; it is a sacrifice; it is not a manufactured article of routine work; and because it is a living thing, it is the fulfilment of knowledge for the teacher himself: Let us not insult our mission by allowing ourselves to become mere school-masters—the dead feeding- bottles of lessons for children who need the human touch lovingly associated with their mental frod.

I have just received your letter, and, for some time, I have felt myself held tight in the bosom of our Ashram, I cannot tell you how I feel about the prolonged separation from it, which is before me, but at the same time I know that unless my relationship with the wide world of humanity grows in truth and love, my relationship with the Ashram will not be perfect. Through my life, my Ashram will send its roots into the heart of this great world to find its sap of immortality. We who belong to Santiniketan cannot afford to be narrow in our outlook and petty in our life’s mission and scope. We have seen, in Tiretta Bazar, thirty or more birds packed in one single cage, where they neither can sing nor soar in the sky, but make noise and peck at each other. Such a cage we build ourselves for our souls with our petty thoughts and selfish ambition and then spend our life quarrelling with each other clamouring and scrambling for a small