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needs to make her a fighting force, when India seeks to form, out of an imposed educational system, a political consciousness of her own; when Persia and Turkey are in the act of creating constitutions on the Western model, that we in the West come to realize that the stages of progress, as we understand them, are not obligatory. Some of them may be skipped.

So it is with industry, and the conditions of life induced by industrial machinery, much of it may be skipped. And it is the continuous existence of an order like the Indian village community, which, when brought into relation with Western progress, seems to prove this. We in the West have passed through the condition of the Aryan village community. The conditions Dr. Coomaraswamy describes in India and Ceylon are very similar to the conditions that prevailed in medieval England, Germany and France; they did not seem nearly so strange to Knox, writing in Stuart times, as they do to us. The 500 years that have passed between our middle ages and the growth of the great cities of machine industry may have proved that the destruction of the Western village community was inevitable, but it has not proved that where the village community still exists it need necessarily be destroyed. Indeed, we are finding out in the West that if the village tradition were still living

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it could still be utilized; we are even seeking to set up something like it in its place. For the great city of mechanical industry has come to a point when its disintegration is inevitable. There are signs that the devolution has already begun, both in England and America. The cry of "back to the land," the plea for a "more reasonable life," the revival of the handicrafts, the education of hand and eye, the agricultural revival, the German "ackerbau," the English small holding, our technical schools, all these things are indications of a need for finding something, if not to take the place of the village community, at least to bring once again into life those direct, simple, human and out-of-door things of which mechanical industry has deprived our working population. These things are necessary to our life as a people, and we shall have to find them somehow. Dr. Coomaraswamy does well to show how they still exist in great measure in the East, and it may be that the East, in her wisdom, and with her profound conservative instinct, will not allow them to be destroyed. She has, as Sir Geo. Birdwood puts it, let the races and the peoples for 3,000 years come and pass by; she may have taken this from one and that from another, but the fundamental democratic order of her society has remained, and it appears improbable, on the face of it, that we

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English shall materially change it when so many others before us have left it undisturbed.

Indeed, there seems to be no reason, on the face of it, why we should aspire to do so. Some change we are certainly bringing, and bringing unconsciously, but it is a curious and suggestive thought that the spiritual reawakening in England, which goes now by the name of the higher culture, now by the name of Socialism, which has been voiced in our time by Ruskin and Morris, which has expressed itself in movements like the arts and crafts, or is revealed in the inspired paintings of the PreRaphaelites, demands just such a condition as in India our commercialisation is destroying. The spiritual reawakening in the West is appealing for a social condition in which each man shall have not only an economic but a spiritual status in the society in which he lives, or as some of us would prefer to put it, he shall have a stable economic status in order that he may have a spiritual status as well.

It is such a condition that still exists in India, where society is organized, as Dr. Coomaraswamy shows, upon a basis of "personal responsibility and co-operation," instead of, as with us, upon a basis of contract and competition. Even if we admit that the change in the Aryan of the West from the one basis to the other has been necessary in order

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to produce the conditions of modern progress, the scientific results of our civilization, in short, the great ships, it may yet be that the spiritual reawakening that is beginning to stir the dry bones of our Western materialism may yet leave the ancient East fundamentally unchanged, and bring us once again into some kindred condition through our contact with her.

In the profoundly interesting address of the English artists in 1878, which bore the names of Morris, Burne-Jones, Millais, Edwin Arnold, Walter Crane and others, there is an appeal to the Government on behalf of Indian Arts and Crafts against the effects of English commercialism upon the production of Indian craftsmanship.

"At a time," say the signatories, "when these productions are getting to be daily more and more valued in Europe, these sources are being dried up in Asia, and goods which ought to be common in the market are now becoming rare treasures for museums and the cabinets of rich men. This result seems to us the reverse of what commerce ought to aim at."

But has commerce any aim? Is it as yet more than a blind force? The experience of 30 years has shown that this appeal of the English artists might have been as eloquently made on behalf of English as of Indian craftsmanship. For, indeed,

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the appeal is less against English Governmental action than against the conditions imposed upon the world by the development of industrial machinery, directed by commercialism. Industrial machinery which is blindly displacing the purpose of hand and destroying the individuality of human production; and commercialism, which is setting up one standard only, the quantitative standard, the standard of saleability.

To compass the destruction of commercialism and regulate and delimit the province of industrial machinery for the benefit of mankind, is now the work of the Western reformer. The spiritual reawakening with us is taking that shape.

It is probable that in this effort of the Western artists, workmen, and reformers for the reconstruction of society on a saner and more spiritual basis, the East can help us even more than we shall help the East. What would we not give in England for a little of that "workshop service" which Dr. Coomaraswamy describes, in place of our half-baked evening classes in County Council Schools? What, in our effort at the revival of handicrafts in the decaying country-side, for some of those "religious trade union villages" of which Sir George Birdwood speaks?

There has come over Western civilization, in the last 25 years, a green sickness, a disbelief, an unrest;