economically disturbing, by their own different standard of living, the countries of Asia? Are they willing to give up their hold on India? For every country of Asia, which has been made dependent upon the British Empire for its governance, has been profoundly affected, in its own standards of living, by this foreign invasion and disturbance. If the "White Australia" policy is to hold good in Australia, is not the parallel policy of self-determination in all internal affairs to hold equally good in India?

Australia cannot have it both ways. She cannot herself exploit India and alter the standard of Indian living on the one hand, and at the same time refuse to allow India to exploit Australia and alter the standard of living in Australia. At present Australia is treating India throughout on the principle of "Heads I win, and tails you lose." But this is entirely contrary to the theory of the " just price" between two parties who are making a bargain. It is a doctrine of force, not of Christian justice.

This one example may help to show how vital and truly progressive in their character these mediaval Christian principles are. Again and again, I have considered the two special doctrines here discussed, when trying to find some light on a modern economic problem. Just as the "redistribution of wealth" has been a fruitful thought, so also the principles of a " just price" and the "sin of usury" have been to me full of practical meaning.

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CHAPTER V

THE MODERN WORLD

THE REFORMATION

ORD Acton used to tell us, in Cambridge, at the

outset of his wonderful series of lectures on

European History, that Modern Europe began with the Reformation. From the political point of view it needs no prolonged scrutiny to see how right he was; and from the side of science also, there is a remarkable leap forward, when the Middle Ages are left behind and the age of experiment begins,-the scientific age. And it is no less true of Europe, that a new chapter in the history of Labour begins with the Reformation.

It is of first-rate importance for the study of Indian labour problems in the modern age to understand exactly the spiritual conflict which underlay the great change in Europe, as the Western peoples left the Middle Ages behind and plunged along that headlong course of world exploitation which is still proceeding even to-day. I shall deal in the present chapter chiefly with religious forces. These will help us most clearly of all to find the clue to the strangely mixed problems of modern labour in the West,-its sordid aspect penetrated ever and anon with gleams of nobility,

self-sacrifice and courage for the truth and for the right.

On the one hand, we shall see a selfishness, a hardness, a cruelty, a mean and sordid lust for gold, which have hardly been paralleled in human history before. On the other hand, we shall see this very cruelty and meanness and lust, redeemed and purified and often utterly transformed by the radiant beauty of selfsacrificing love. The whole panorama is of absorbing interest to a Western thinker who desires to serve the East; because the current of these new world-forces has become so strong that it is sweeping like a floodtide over the world. At times, even, it would almost appear as if,-whether the East wished for it or not,— the civilization of the West, along with all its unsolved labour problems, must perforce be passively accepted, even if not actively welcomed, in all Eastern lands.

The chief point to bear in mind, when dealing with the subject of the Reformation in Europe, is this: It brought to the West, at the end of the Middle Ages, with their guilds and their crafts and their monasteries and their religious and social orders of the most varied. kinds, an entirely new atmosphere of individualism,— an individualism so strong and unrestrained and at times so rampant in its licence, that it has again and again appeared to earnest men of faith and religion only to lead to war and destruction and to world unrest. Even the iron will of Cromwell could not check it.

"The great end of your meeting," he said to the Parliament which he had summoned, “is healing and settling. But nothing is in your hearts but overturn, overturn." On another occasion he stated, "Dissettlement and division, discontent and dissatisfaction, have been multiplied more in five months than in some years before."

Europe in the Middle Ages had possessed a very closely interwoven texture of social organization. There were the various degrees in Church and State, clergy and laity, feudal baron and feudal squire, yeoman and serf, burgher and apprentice, master and servant. All was ordered and regulated both by birth and custom. It was a system so rigid in many of its aspects as to be not altogether unlike the caste system of Mediæval India. Like the caste system, it maintained an almost absolute control over each man and woman and child.

To take one example,-Villeinage bound down the mediæval serf to the soil by birth as surely and rigorously as caste has bound down the Sudra and Namasudra to certain functions from which they can never be released. Men and women, that is to say, in Medieval Europe were born in a certain position. They did not stand alone, and they could not altogether stand outside society unless they became hermits. They had the caste instinct very strongly pronounced, but as yet they had not developed to any great or common extent the instinct of the individual.

Thus, as I have already said, the Reformation in Europe (with its central doctrine of justification by individual faith, and not through membership in a church) brought into the foreground the individual. The plea of the individual conscience to be listened to with a divine authority was its central message. Men rushed from a credulous reliance on the social organism to an extreme reliance upon the infallibility of the individual conscience. All else in the world seemed unimportant to the new religious mind in comparison with the direct relation of the individual soul to God. God and the soul were the two tremendous realities.

The new ideal of the religious life, which practically dominated men's minds for many generations, was that which is set forth, with unsurpassed imagery and simplicity of language, in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. The single soul fleeing from the City of Destruction struggled on its lonely pilgrimage through the Valley of Humiliation past countless obstacles and temptations till it reached the River of Death and the heavenly mansions beyond. Not even wife and child can accompany the soul on its dreadful, lonely course. They follow in their turn.

Towards the close of the seventeenth century a reaction set in all over Europe. The fires of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation had almost burnt themselves out. Wars of religion had made cruelly sordid the idealism with which the Reformation had