The rising temper of the East sounding the human note in the world-wide cry for land and liberty

Front matter

Class Book

H ^

GopyriglitKi

Preface

I HAVE called this book The Rising Temper of the East because in it I have attempted to show not only the awakening of a billion backward peoples of the Old World but to sound a note of warning to the white Christian East. I have tried to tell the human story of the rising winds of new freedom, the coming of new ideas, the birth of new hopes, the whole renaissance of the ancient East.

The white man's domination of the billion men of the East hy force must cease. No longer can our culture and our civilization be carried to backward, ancient peoples on the vehicle of force. If there is a "white man's burden" it must in the future be borne on other shoulders than those that carry bayonets.

Everywhere throughout the East there are danger signals flashing their warning to the conquering West. The ruling, the domineering, the looting, must cease. If the West were wise it would shift its course now while there is still time. If it blindly stumbles on, ignoring these danger signals, the day will soon come when the work and the profits of four hundred years will be swept away.

There are many men, wise to the East, who to-

PREFACE

day not only feel that this will happen but that once freed from the heel of the white West, and with the adoption of the science and culture of modem warfare, these billion men will seek race revenge, and that again black, brown and yellow hordes may swoop over white Europe and its great outposts of white culture.

But they fail to take cognizance of a great new power that is abroad in the world — the power of the universal social unrest that is working within the borders of each country. Labor leaders in Calcutta are dreaming exactly the same hopes as labor leaders in Manchester ; social revolutionists in Tokyo are preaching the same doctrines as the revolutionists of Rome ; organizers of the cotton spinners of Shanghai are using the same arguments as organizers among the cotton workers of Fall River.

The world unrest is world-wide unrest. No Great "Wall of China can exclude it : no desert is too wide for it to cross, or no ocean too deep. New winds of freedom are blowing over every country and into every corner of the globe.

For the moment these winds in the East are winds of nationalism — self-determination — apolitical freedom. They will bring an end to the physical, political rule of the white West over the East. And then they mil change to winds of social unrest — and the energies and hopes of these billion men will be turned from white hate to internal struggles. There will be no time for con-

PREFACE

quest or revenge, no heart for wars of aggression.

This is the story that I would tell in these following chapters — stories of common peoples and their leaders struggling up toward the light. I have no theories to prove — no pet ideas to advance. I would set down between covers these pages of world news — facts of progress, garnered in years of travel and investigation.

I saw a great new East being born before my very eyes. It was a new East of hope emerging from a tired, ancient, hopeless world. It was a restless, moving world that I saw. Books have been written about The Unchanging East, but that is not what I found ; it was a Changing East that greeted me everywhere.

Its leaders interested me and its people fascinated me. Its revolt against the West and against its own traditions and time-worn customs thrilled me, just as the Eussian revolution first thrilled me in North Russia and then in Petrograd and Moscow and later in Siberia. Everywhere it has been the same story — ^millions awakening from the slumber of centuries.

I have tried to chronicle things here just as I found them — ^to tell simply, directly and honestly the great pulsing, human story of Gandhi and India, of the Near East, China, Japan, Korea, Siberia, the Philippines — and, as well, the story of our own imperialistic ventures in Haiti and Mexico, I have tried to tell of Gandhi, the Man,

PREFACE

as well as Gandhi, the Leader ! I have attempted to paint Kagawa, the young liberal leader of Japan, just as vividly and humanly as he appeared to me that December day when I talked to him. I have tried to tell of common peoples and common hopes rather than of great international movements and world politics.

If I have even partly succeeded in lifting the veil that is drawn over the hidden East and have shown that here are common peoples living and fighting and dreaming of better things, then I will be more than satisfied.

Contents

CHAPTER

PAGE

I Gandhi and His India IS

Chapter I

To TELL about Gandhi is to tell about India. Gandhi is India, and India, restless, determined and race conscious, is the real spirit of the awakening East.

This that follows is the plain story of Gandhi — the hero and saint of India's struggling three hundred million, to-day little known to the outside world but to-morrOw to be recognized as the insurgent figure leading the great coming revolt of the East against the white man's domination.

To ninety-nine per cent, of the people of America and Europe the idea of a violent repudiation of white mastery by the black, brown and yellow men of the East is still a wild phantasy. But it is no longer a wild phantasy to me — ^for I have seen Gandhi and myself felt the rising temper of Asia.

For hours I sat with this strange, shrunken little man whom three hundred million worship, and talked with him as freely as I would with an old friend. There was no fencing or parrying.

He had nothing to conceal. He had hit upon a way of breaking the British power in India and cracking the greatest empire history has ever seen, and all without bombs or bloodshed. It was no secret and he wanted to tell me about it.

This was down in Cawnpore. Early that morning I had gone to the station to see him come in. The Indian city was still sleeping in the filth of its mud doorways. The heat of the night was dead and this was the cooling hour before a blazing sun jumped like a jack-in-the-box high into the sky.

We jogged through a semi-European street. In another part of the city— a clean part with wide streets and great la^vns — the white sahibs from England live.

**You go Delhi?" my driver asked.

"No. I'm going to see Gandhi arrive at the station. ' '

He turned in his seat.

*' Saint Gandhi?" he questioned, as one pronouncing a sacred name. ''He is very wonderful. . . . He is poor like I am. His wife weaves his clothes for him. . . The English are afraid of him. They would like to put him in prison and kill him but they don't dare. He is very wonderful. ..."

He had to pull his horse up sharp to keep from hitting a lazy, old sacred cow ambling across the road. Hitting a cow in India is no laughing matter. It might be some one's grandmother or great-great-grandfather. It is the superstition of five thousand years' standing.

We passed two men, wearing dirty patches of cotton around their loins, straining at a great cart. They were thin men with their ribs showing.

"Do they know who Gandhi is?" I asked my driver. I was anxious to find out what different types of Indians thought of this leader.

"Shall I ask them, sahihf"

I nodded yes.

He stopped them and spoke to the taller of the two, in a native dialect. The man was eager to talk.

"He says Gandhi will give them freedom from the white men and ..."

The smaller fellow who had kept silent so far stepped forward then and broke into the conversation.

"They have worked all their lives like beasts," he says, "and all they got is half enough food and a pig pen to sleep in. Gandhi will change everything for them."

We drove on. An old man stretched on a ropebed in front of a doorway in the street was dying; my driver explained that old ones were always brought outdoors to die.

We turned into a narrow crooked street smelling of the rotted East. Early though it was, it was noisy with unwashed children, so filthy that one stopped idly to wonder whether the street got its dirt from the children or the children from the street. Most of them were naked: there was not even a rag to tie around them. They ran after me screaming for coppers. I told my driver to whip up his lazy horse.

**Do they know about Gandhi?*' I asked him.

"They get him now from their mother's breast," he answered.

He was a talkative man, but it took all his attention now in order not to run over some naked baby playing in the dust, or brush into some woman, toothless and barren at forty — or crash into some blind beggar picking his way through the eternal night with his staff.

In another five minutes we drew up at the station. Only a few local leaders were supposed to be there to welcome Gandhi, for the committee in charge of the great mass meeting to be held in the evening had given out word that there was to be no demonstration when Gandhi arrived. But that did not keep them away. They had come by the hundreds on foot and donkey-back and in western motor-cars.

There must have been eight thousand there — • and I was the only white man among them. It gave me a creepy sensation of half fear. I felt like some thoughtless tourist peering into a strange temple during the hour of worship. For

Gandhi was their priest and this was as holy to them as a sacrament. I imagine many of them thought I was a government agent or secret service man as I made my way through the great crush that filled the railway platform and overran into the little square in front of the station. I decided I would be less conspicuous and enjoy myself more in some modest niche so I elbowed to a place by the door of the station-master's office, on the outskirts of the crowd.

The station agent, a pleasant Indian in European uniform, came from his office and addressed me in English. I imagine he too thought I was an English official.

**I'm an American writer." I explained immediately. "I've been hearing a lot about your man Gandhi so I've made a special trip here from Calcutta to see him."

"You're an American!" he questioned.

When I finally convinced him that I was, he was only too willing to answer my questions.

"Gandhi is the man who is going to free India from the British," he whispered. "He has three hundred million Indians back of him. He's the only thing in the world the British are afraid of. They don't dare touch him. If they'd put him in jail or try to stop him there 'd be a revolution here within twenty-four hours. Just look at this crowd — there's every type of man in India here."

It was a wonderful group of worshipers.

Here and there scattered through the crowd you could see a man in western dress, but the great majcrity wore very plain white cotton garments with gay colored headgear. They were mostly poor clerks or laborers.

Gandhi was a dream and a hope for them. They were tired of it all — the ignorance, and poverty, and caste, crowned now with white supremacy. They were blaming the white man for everything. It was unfair but very human.

For one hundred and seventy years the British had been running things in India. Unquestionably they had accomplished much that was good for India — ^but they had only gone half-way. They had painted a veneer of western civilization on the soiled and outworn East when what was needed was a real renovation. The common man had not been touched. There 'd been no effort to educate him — ^that was too dangerous because with education comes new demands and fresh assumptions.

So these laborers and petty clerks were ready for their chance in the world. They were gaining it, too, through their own fighting. Everywhere over India an epidemic of strikes had broken out. There was hardly a city of any importance that did not face serious labor troubles. These very nights Bombay was dark on account of a strike of the men of the gas works, while the postal and telegraph men had been striking for weeks and twelve hundred street-car men were out. In another part of India a great walk-ont of thousands of railroad men had taken place and word had just been received of a dangerous labor situation on a number of tea plantations.

I recalled the filth of Calcutta's streets. The sweepers were fighting for four cents more a day. Only recently a hundred thousand laborers employed in the great cotton mills of Bombay had struck for a thirty per cent, increase in wages and a ten-hour day. They were now earning about thirty cents a day.

The birth of the labor movement in India has been even more spectacular than the political awakening. Two and a half years ago there was not an effective labor organization in the whole country. To-day there is a great central organization known as the All Indian Trades Union Congress with several hundred thousand members enrolled in scores of trade unions. In the city of Madras alone there are twenty-seven distinct unions with a membership of more than eighty thousand — and the work is just started.

The organizers of the national body plan to enroll more than two million workmen within a year. While it is all basically economic this powerful young organization is to be swung as a political club, in the battle for home rule. It is, with the Mohammedan organizations, the most powerful of the fighting bodies supporting

Gandhi and his non-cooperation. Its leaders plan to use all the methods of direct action, go-slow strikes and simple non-cooperation in order to gain their political ends.

It is all tremendously picturesque. One leader outlined to me his plan for enrolling the cooks of Bombay. He explained there were fifteen thousand of them mostly employed in foreign homes, who already had a working organization. Any organized effort on their part to boycott British homes would simply demoralize the whole foreign life — ^for the servant is all-powerful and all-necessary in India. Modest households, which in America would have one maid at the most, must have from six to ten servants in India.

Besides growing race conscious, these millions were becoming class conscious as well. To-day they were blaming the white man for their condition. But to-morrow they will find that their newly born unions are not being checked by British power alone. Some day they will discover that Calcutta's jute mills and Bombay's cotton factories and the steaming tea plantations and the scorching fields are not all owned by Englishmen.

They will discover that the caste system that chains them to the mud-holes they were born in was thought out and working long before — thousands of years before — ^the British Empire was ever dreamed of. Some day the fifty-seven million '^untoucliables" — ^the pitiful human animals of the lowest depths and the bottom caste, living worse than swine — will Hft up their heads and tear to pieces the system that has cheated them for so long. To-day in some parts of India, if they walk within sixty-four feet of a Brahmin of the sacred highest caste, or throw their shadow on him, they might be beaten to death. To-morrow they will wield the clubs themselves.

Our own Christian foreign missions, often sneered at and made fun of by the unknowing, are reaching down and touching these poor "untouchables. ' ' They are bringing them out of their wallow holes. Most of the Christian converts in India are from this God-forgotten class. And strange to tell, the simple single baptism of these abused people makes them step forward real men, who shake off all the fear and superstition of their beaten caste as they shake the water from their dripping heads.

And this same thing is coming true of the numberless other castes of the lower orders. They blame the British to-day for their poverty and ignorance. But when they do break the British power they will discover they have other things to break before they can come up into the sunlight. And one by one they will smash their castes and superstitions and traditions and their man-made religions.

The revolt of the East against the West is only a prelude to the greater revolt of the East against the East itself. But foreign masters come first, and so here these thousands were on this seething platform offering themselves to Gandhi — their saint and hero-leader.

Standing near me was a beggar in a bit of grimy sack cloth: in the bazaars and the great whispering galleries of the East he had caught the magic of Saint Gandhi. He had quit his stand and hidden his beggar's bowl for the moment, to shout the name of Gandhi.

The train was late but the crowd was patient; for thousands of years they had been waiting and so an hour or two more didn't make any difference. Several women were in the crowd and I noticed a number of boys; but they lacked the irresponsibility and spontaneity of our own boys ; they were born old.

Then the train came in, and from a third-class wooden coach a little figure in white — a pathetic little figure — alighted. With a sense of shock I realized that this insignificant shrunken figure was the man I had heard so much about — the great Gandhi. He was thin, shrunken, almost emaciated, and there was no look of the leader about him.

But I knew it was Gandhi as quickly as the crowd did. He was pathetic but there was a touch of tremendous spiritual power about him.

Here was the man who was shaking the world with a new idea. Here was the man who was fighting a new kind of warfare — who was enlisting the souls and hearts of men to break machine-guns.

This was the man who twenty-five years ago, a young English trained lawyer of good family and high caste, had given up everything to fight for his countrymen.

Eeturning to India from his law school in England he had been sent by his firm to South Africa to conduct an important case. With the case settled he was preparing to go back to India when his sympathies were enlisted in a fight that was being made to improve the condition of thousands of contract Indian laborers employed in South Africa by the Boers and English.

It was a fight that extended through twenty-five years and this thin, anemic weakling led it. He spent not a little of that time in prison and in disgrace but he stuck to his guns and in the end saw the worst of the injustices swept away and his countrymen in much better condition.

Time and again he had been roughly handled, but he had never lost faith in the right and justice of the British Empire. When the Boer War came along he promptly organized an ambulance corps for the English Army and actively engaged in helping the British cause.

When this last great war broke out, Gandhi had only just arrived in England from South

THE RlSIXa TEMPER OF THE EAST

Africa, but he promptly organized another ambulance corps. In 1915 he went to India and for three years was active in his support of the British cause.

At the same time he was quite willing to throw himself into dangerous labor situations when he made certain that his people were being mistreated by the government or their employers or their landlords. He made no discrimination here between the English and his own people. Slowly he gained the great confidence of all India. His life of sacrifice and unselfish devotion had won him the title of *' Saint'* Gandhi. Like most of India's beloved heroes of the past, he was a hero of the soul and not of the sword.

Through it all he kept his faith in the British Empire. Others faltered and lost faith, but he kept his bright. He insisted that India must help England in her hour of need and then when the war was won England would do the square thing. He would not countenance anything that even hinted at revolt.

Then one steaming April day at Amritsar in the north of India, when a British general pumped steel into a vast crowd of unarmed Indians, killing four hundred and injuring another one thousand — and England didn't seem to care — ^he lost this faith. Not many people in the western world remember anything about the incident, but there are few dates in India's thousands of years of history that are more important — and few days in the annals of the British Empire that are blacker or promise to be more costly.

It turned Gandhi from a strong believer in the Empire to a great hater. And when Gandhi turned India turned. All India turned — Moslems, Hindus, Sikhs — all India.

For centuries India has quarreled and fought within herself. Different sects, castes and religions have kept the great country in a turmoil. England had only to fan the fire of these differences to make her rule a comparatively easy one. It has been her famous "divide and rule" policy.

The Indian army is a good illustration of this policy. Each brigade will be composed of entirely different and distinct units — one Mohammedan battalion, one Hindu battalion, one Sikh battalion with one British white battalion to control the whole thing. Each has different customs, dialects, religions and superstitions. There has been no chance of developing any unity of opposition among all these widely separated groups.

Now it is different. The Mohammedans and the Hindus have buried their ancient grudges and the leaders of the seventy million Moslems and the two hundred million Hindus are at last working hand in glove. In 1906 a Moslem League was formed and in 1915 held its first joint session with the great All Indian National Congress — an unofficial body representing the hopes and de-

THE ElSma TEMPEE OF TKE EAST

mands of all India. Tighter and tighter the bonds binding the two great bodies have been drawn so that to-day they are fighting side by side.

These seventy million Mohammedans, incidentally, are the real fighting force of the home rnle agitation. As a leaven and ferment their unrest has been pnt upon a religions basis, with a fonndation that goes down to the very depths of the Moslem faith.

These Moslems, besides fighting for home mle, demand that England rewrite the TnrMsh peace treaty and give back to the snltan of Turkey the control over all the sacred Mohammedan shrines- To the simple believer it is a pure matter of religion, but to the shrewd Moslem leaders, this religious element is the steel in their swords of revolt.

The terrible killing that April day in Amritsar helped forge these same swords. And quite as important, it broke the faith of Gandhi in the justness and fairness of England. And when Gandhi's faith went, India too lost her faith.

With faith in England gone Gandhi showed them how to draw a great new faith in their own India. They could break this power that was overshadowing them by the invincible forc^ of their spirits. They would withdraw from everything that was British. They would cease all cooperation: they would boycott British goods; they would pull the fires from the British engine in India. They would leave England in India prostrate and helpless. They would beat the British Empire by simply not playing baU. They TTould break the British Empire by taking away India.

This thin, half broken figure worming his way gently through the crowd was the torch-bearer of aU tlis.

It was raw drama. It was all new for the West — ^this power of spiritual force. This man was pleading and begging for peace, for non-violence, and yet he was enlisting the millions of sleeping India for war. It was a paradox that only the East could understand. It was his weak thin voice that was calling millions of native Indians out of the past.

He had finally awakened them and here they were, thousands of them, cheering from the very depths of their hearts.

Men fought to kiss his hands and to touch his skirt with their lips. One patriarch with a great white beard clutched his hands and buried his face in them and sobbed in them. He was a Messiah to them all.

Two hours later Gandhi was sitting at my feet talking to me in soft low voice. It was in a great bare room without furniture. There was no one there when I entered, but presently a door opened and Gandhi stepped forward with hand outstretched.

He had eyes that were deep with pity and love, and burning bright with a great purpose. You forgot that he was a frail little man with a funny shaved head and hollow sallow cheeks, with most of his teeth gone, and that he wore coarse homespun clothes, and that his feet were bare. It was his eyes that held you.

Some one brought a single chair and he insisted that I sit on it while he squatted cross-legged on the floor beside me. Possibly twenty of his local disciples came in noiselessly and seated themselves on the floor in a semicircle about us. Certainly not half of them could understand English, but they could look at Gandhi.

"What can I tell you?" he asked in soft, perfectly spoken English,

"The story of how you are going to break British power in India," I replied.

A ghost of a smile that seemed to hurt him trailed across his face like a moving shadow. "During the Boer War I had great faith and confidence in the British and raised a stretcherbearer corps to help them," he began. "In 1914 I reached London two days after" war was declared and immediately organized an ambulance corps. Later I came on here and when I found the Mohammedan leaders worried about the future of the sultan, who is the head of the Church and the guardian of their shrines, I told them that Lloyd George would keep his promise, that he would treat Turkey fairly. But they said no.

**I was insistent that we must do all we could to help England in this great hour of her need. I pleaded for army enlistment — ^we raised more than a million men in India for the British Army,

"Then the war ended and I said that now we would gain our reward, we would he given at least practical home rule and be permitted to work out our own destiny. I still had faith ! ' '

Always it was this great faith that he came back to, time and again. Faith, he believed, would move empires.

"But there was nothing but promises and a half-hearted reform bill. They call this bill the Montague-Chelmsford Bill and they hold that it fulfills their pledges. But it gives us only the cheapest imitation of self-government, of home rule. It allows ieertain Indian assemblies and local administrations, but it is all circumscribed by a system of checks and balances that leaves all the real power in the hands of the British. It is a great subterfuge — and we are sick and tired of subterfuges.

"While this bill was being discussed and prepared the Punjab disturbances broke out. Those were terrible days, but I was sure that the British would be just and fair so I still held faith."

At great length Gandhi explained all about these terrible days. Over all the cities of Northem India there was in that spring of 1919 a growing feeling of unrest and dissatisfaction. About half the population are Moslems, and already there was at work the religious ferment that was expressing itself in the KJialifat questions. But more important than this religious aspect was a pure demand for nationalism. This demand and the unrest that went with it were intensified by the Rowlatt Bill which gave special and drastic power for the handling of all kinds and phases of rebellious actions.

This Rowlatt Bill was a pure war-time measure kept in force after the war. It gave the government tremendous powers over the press and gave to police and judiciary practically autocratic authority over everything that seemed so much as flavored with any demand for home rule and freedom.

As a protest against this law, hartals — complete closing of all stores and shops — ^began to be called by the natives toward the last of February, 1919. Meetings were held everywhere and a tenseness against the British began to be felt. Gandhi, who attempted to visit the Punjab, was turned back to the border, intensifying the feeling. Inflammatory speeches and seditious notices were of almost daily occurrence.

On the morning of April 10, 1919, Doctor Satyapal and Doctor Kitchlew, the two most powerful local leaders in the north, were deported by motor from Amritsar. As soon as this news spread a crowd collected in Amritsar and attempted to marcli to the deputy commissioner's to protest. At HaU Gate Bridge it encountered a patrol of soldiers; stones were thrown and the troops replied with fire, killing several. At this the crowd became a wild mob, completely out of the hands of its leaders. It burned all European and government property in the city and kiUed three English bank managers, and Miss Sherwood, a mission worker, was assaulted, the railway station was attacked and an English guard killed.