Page:The Illusions of New India.djvu/16

Rh is more or less a shadow, a reflection of the Western mind. I find this passage in a work on Indian economics, by a distinguished Indian author, a work the popularity of which may be gauged by the fact of its having run through two editions in four years:—“The rise to a higher standard of life without which no advance in civilization is possible has begun in India.”

This is only an echo of the prevailing Western view, that we are just emerging from a lower to a higher state of civilization under Western tutelage. The Western-educated Indian does not pause to ponder whether this “rise” adds to our social efficiency, whether it does not rather diminish it—materially by attenuating to the vanishing point our meagre margin between sufficiency and privation, and morally by inordinately enhancing the stringency of the struggle for animal existence, and thereby leading to the scramble of individual against individual and of class against class and the consequent diminution of that spirit of benevolence and of social service which has so long cemented our society together, and to various other ethical obliquities.