Page:Works of Tagore from the Modern Review, 1909-24 Segment 1.pdf/242

636 step by step, with a stiff gait and hard sound. On the swift current of the river, flooded by the heavy rain, a faint streak of moon-light was visible.

The skeleton descended to the river, and Bhusan, following it, placed one foot in the water. The moment he touched the water, he woke with a start. His guide was no longer to be seen. Only the trees, on the opposite bank of the river, were standing still and silent; and overhead the half-moon was staring as if astonished. Starting from head to foot Bhusan slipped and fell headlong into the river. From the midst of dreams he had stepped, for a moment only, into the borderland of waking life,—the next moment to be plunged into eternal sleep."

Having finished his story the schoolmaster was silent for a little. Suddenly, the moment he stopped, I realised that except for him the whole world had become silent and still. For a long time I also remained speechless, and in the darkness he was unable to see from my face what was its expression.

At last he asked me, "Don't you believe this story?"

I asked, "Do you?"

He said, "No,—and I can give you one or two reasons why. In the first place Dame Nature does not write novels, she has enough to do without all that."

I interrupted him and said, "And, in the second place, my name happens to be Bhusan Shaha."

The schoolmaster, without the least sign of shame, said, "I guessed as much. And what was your wife's name?"

I answered, "Nritya-Kali."

HE sore need for man-power, or Human Capital, is not a sequel to the present-day perturbations, but an economic phenomenon, persisting from generation to generation, and strikingly manifest in a very modern form.

The Population problem in the East, and the Depopulation problem in the West, are not two diametrically opposed propositions, but two peculiar aspects of one and the same root-question, which going deeper than Malthusianism, Neo-malthusianism, Eugenism, or other Reform movements,—surface-effects all:—shakes to the rock bottom all the stratifications of accepted society.

The question turns upon the Conservation of society.

The principle of Conservation is the counter-pole to the principle of Preservation or of purely active or passive defence. This second principle has, by now, secured uncontested recognition, even under the most adverse conditions:—where the Individual Unit, through heredity, tradition and training, would normally have chafed against the unrestricted enforcement of this, or of any, principle. But the Individual Unit emerges from Egoism, accepts the Collective Cause, and welcomes conscription in advocacy of that Cause.

The second principle of Conservation is reached by the same chain of reasoning. If Man-power is conscribed in the interests of the Defence of Society, why should not all the human capital be equally conscribed in the interests of the Perpetuation of that Society? If it is a duty to defend the Country of the Present, it is a still higher duty to defend the Country of the Future. If want of preservation is a crime, want of perpetuation is a sin, &c.

Such, and many more, in varying language, are the variants on the same central theme.

It is precisely from the view-point of the future country as against the present country—of the people-that-is as against the people-that-shall-be—that the problems of population and depopulation sink into their proper places and admit of a study in the right perspective:—the perspective namely of two homologous aspects of a much larger issue.

This fusion of aspects is not fortuitous, but correspond to the bi-polarity of the subject. Where there is a population problem, there is also a depopulation problem: and inversely. The two can be enunciated in terms of a common factor:—

The population problem is briefly this:

They continually drift down the scale of comfort.

They tend towards the margin of subsistence.

They pass beyond that margin into the region of Elimination through pauperism, starvation, disease and death.

The depopulation-problem, in the same language, runs: