486 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
the combatants could not be achieved otherwise than by violence, i.e., without involving the sacrifice of other ends equally valuable for the stability of the world. True enough that violence cannot always be avoided and nonresistance can be adopted only when it is a better way of resistance. But the responsibility for an intelligent control of force rests on us all. In short, the point is that to achieve anything we must use force : only we must use it constructively as energy and not destructively as violence.
The length of this discussion of the philosophy of war as related to the principles of growth can be justified, if need be, by more extenuating circumstances than one. The present European war has brought into unmeasured and even thoughtless censure the philosophy of force and has ushered to the forefront the gospel of quieticism and the doctrine of non-resistance. The fact that Mr. Russell’s is an anti-war book, the author of which was sentenced to six months’ goal, not for writing the book under review but for being a pacifist crank, will be construed to lend its support to the lurking desire in many a mind for a passive life as a natural reaction from the turmoil of war. It was therefore necessary to know how far Mr. Russell shared in this condemnation of force. A second justifying circumstance is furnished by the bias in the minds of the Indian readers of Mr. Russell. It will be realized that what is advocated to take the place of the philosophy of force is essentially an Eastern philosophy or to be specific, Indian philosophy. It was therefore much more important to present Indian readers of Mr. Russell with a correct interpretation of his attitude. Their innate craving for a pacific life and their philosophic bias for the doctrine of non-resistance, I am afraid, might lead them to read in Mr. Russell a justification of their view of life, if not guarded against.
Is the Indian view of life a practicable view ? Nietzsche in his cynical mood said of Christianity that there was only one Christian and he was crucified-implying the impracticability of the Christian view of life. This remark, if it is true of the Christian, must be true, in a larger degree, of the Eastern view of life as well: for, though regionally Western yet Christianity in its origin as well in its content is essentially Eastern. Equally condemnatory, though not so severely, as shown above, is the attitude of Mr. Russell towards this philosophy of quieticism. One cannot however, fail to notice with dismay the persistence of this attitude towards life on the part of Indians notwithstanding its theoretical impossibility and the many vissicitudes through which the country has passed. Nay, in the present days of Indian Nationalism—which sadly enough is tantamount to justifying everything Indian—the attitude is likely to be upheld and continued. Note, that of the stock contrasts between the East and the West, thrown in relief by the war, the East is ever eager to give prominence in terms of self-glorification to one—that of its being free from the extreme