“I wish I could see the solution of world misery in a little Virginia cottage with vines and flowers. I wish I could share the surging happiness which you find there; but I cannot, I am too far from there. I am far in miles, and somehow I seem insensibly to grow farther in spirit. I agree that America is the place for my work, and if America, then Chicago; for Chicago is the epitome of America. New York is a province of England. Virginia, Charleston, and New Orleans are memories, farming and industrial hinterlands. California is just beyond the world. Chicago is the American world and the modern world, and the worst of it. We Americans are caught here in our own machinery; our machines make things and compel us to sell them. We are rich in food and clothes and starved in culture. That fine old accumulation of the courtesies of life with its gracious delicacy which has flowered now and again in other lands is gone-gone and forgotten. We push and shoulder each other on the streets, yell, instead of bowing; we have forgotten ‘Please,’ ‘Excuse me,’ ‘I beg your pardon,’ and ‘By your leave’ in one vast comprehensive ‘Hello!’ and ‘Sa‑ay!’
“Courtesy is dead—and Justice? We strike, steal, curse, mob, and murder, all in the day’s work. All delicate feeling sinks beneath floods of mediocrity. The finer culture is lost, lost; maybe lost forever. Is there beauty? Is there God? Is there salvation? Where are the workers so rich and powerful as here in America, and where so arid, artificial, vapid, so charmed and distracted by the low, crude, gawdy, and vulgar? I can only hope that after America has raped this land of its abundant wealth, after Africa breaks its chains and Asia awakes from its long sleep, in the day when Europe is too weak to fight and scheme and make others work for her and not for themselves—that then the world may disintegrate and fall apart and thus from its manure, something new and fair may sprout and slowly begin to grow. If then in Chicago we can kill the thing that America stands for, we emancipate the world.
“Yes, Kautilya, I believe that with fire and sword, blood and whips, we must fight this thing out physically, and literally beat the world into submission and a real civilization. The center of this fight must be America, because in America is the center of the world’s sin. There must be developed here that world-tyranny which will impose by brute force a new heaven on this old and rotten earth.”
It was almost mid-January when Kautilya’s reply to this letter came. It was as ever full of sympathy and love, and yet Matthew thought he saw some beginnings of change.
“If the world is aflame,” said Kautilya, “and I feel it flaming—the place of those who would ride the conflagration is truly within and not behind or in front of the Holocaust. Where then is this center, and what shall we who stand there do? Here are my two disagreements with you, dear Matthew. America is not the center of the world’s evil. That center today is Asia and Africa. In America is Power. Yonder is Culture, but Culture gone to seed, disintegrated, debased. Yet its rebirth is imminent. America and Europe must not prevent it. Only Asia and Africa, in Asia and Africa, can break the power of America and Europe to throttle the world.
“And, oh, my Matthew, your oligarchy as you conceive it is not the antithesis of democracy—it is democracy, if only the selection of the oligarchs is just and true. Birth is the method of blind fools. Wealth is the gambler’s method. Only Talent served from the great Reservoir of All Men of All Races, of All Classes, of All Ages, of Both Sexes—this is real Aristocracy, real Democracy—the only path to that great and final Freedom which you so well call Divine Anarchy.
“And yet this, dear Matthew, you yourself taught me—you and your struggling people here. In Africa and Asia we must work, and yet in Africa and Asia we are outside the world. That is the thing I always felt at home. Outside, and kept outside, the centers of power. Even to us in Europe, the closed circle of power is narrow and straitly entrenched; the stranger can scarce get foothold, and when he gets in, Power is no longer there. It is flown. In America your feet are further within the secret circle of that power that half-consciously rules the world. That is the advantage of America. That is the advantage that your people have had. You are working within. They are standing here in this technical triumph of human power and can use is as a fulcrum to lift earth and seas and stars.
“But to be in the center of power is not enough. You must be free and able to act. You are not free in Chicago nor New York. But here in Virginia you are at the edge of a black world. The black belt of the Congo, the Nile, and the Ganges reaches by way of Guiana, Haiti, and Jamaica, like a red arrow, up into the heart of white America. Thus I see a mighty synthesis: you can work in Africa and Asia right here in America if you work in the Black Belt. For a long time I was puzzled, as I have written you, and hesitated; but now I know. I am exalted, and with my high heart comes illumination. I have been sore bewildered by this mighty America, this ruthless, terrible, intriguing Thing. My home and heart is India. Your heart of hearts is Africa. And now I see through the cloud. You may stand here, Matthew—here, halfway between Maine and Florida, between the Atlantic and the Pacific, with Europe in your face and China at your back; with industry in
