To me this oneness of all men has become a conviction, the one religious doctrine which I hold with a scientific dogmatism; for I know Chinamen, whose slanting eyes do not prevent them from seeing the world just as I see it; Hindoos who, removed from their imprisoning system of caste, take this human view of man. I have met Japanese the travail of whose soul is akin to mine, and Negroes whose souls are so white that one might envy them their purity.
Knowing every shade of Slav, Teuton and Latin, the Aryan and Semitic peoples, I have found them all alike at their best and at their worst. Dissimilar they are in their various environments, reflecting all the differences of climate, food, religion and government; but let them climb the heights to which the soul aspires or let them sink to the level to which fleshly lust drags them, and they are brother angels or brother brutes.
Yes, one other thing I learned from Tolstoy and learned repeatedly; it is, perhaps, of more value than all the other things he taught me. It was the initial lesson and the hardest. “Give everything and ask nothing in return.”
I have ceased to demand brotherhood or even to expect it. I am giving it, and that is often hard. To yield to every man the fraternal feeling is even harder, I think, than it is not to feel slighted or hurt when one is left out; but even that is difficult enough. When one has finally yielded himself to all men of all races and classes, when one can be unconscious of hampering barriers between, when one does not feel anything but pity for the tainted, a desire to include the halt and the halting rather than to exclude them, then one has reached the highest point of spiritual experience. Towards that point I am travelling, and repeatedly that which has buoyed me has been Tolstoy’s words as he pressed my hand at every good-bye.
“Young man, you can’t make this world right unless you are right.” “The kingdom of God must be within you, if you want to hasten its coming into the world.” “Give everything and ask nothing in return.”
XXVII
AWAKENED JUDAISM
WHEN I saw fifty lifeless bodies of men, women and children, beaten into pulp, lying in a heap on the floor of the synagogue in Kishineff, I said to myself, “Blood is thicker than water”; for my breast laboured and I wept for the “slain of the daughter of my people.” But I felt these pangs no less when I saw three times as many native Russian youth put to death by fierce Kosaks as in their untamed fury they slew all who obstructed their path. I have felt the same terrible emotions when I tried to comfort Polish and Lithuanian women, who mourned over the shapeless bodies of their husbands and sons, mutilated by falling rock and burned by fierce fires.
I have watched by the bedsides of the dying of many races and have tried to guide the souls of men into some secure haven, feeling for all that deep compassion which a brother’s heart alone can feel.
For the coarse, blatant Jew or Jewess, who offends against good taste at summer resorts in America, I have the same feeling of pity, bordering on contempt, that I have for the strident, irreverent, sharp-voiced Yankee who disturbs the quiet of picture galleries and cathedrals in Europe, and is persona non grata with all thoughtful travellers. I feel for all those who offend by accentuating or ridiculing race peculiarities, and am no less repelled by the vulgar caricature of the stage Irishman than by that of the Jew or the Italian.
I have long been protesting by voice and pen against the categoric judgment passed upon races, and feel keenly for the child, whether it is called in derision, “Nigger,” “Sheeny,” or “Dago.” In the steerage, the mine, and on the playground, I have stood between the bully and his victim, never asking which was Jew or which Gentile, and have tried to defend every “underdog,” no matter what his pedigree.