"Imagine a happy little family. If this family is truly knit together in bonds of love and understanding, a stranger cannot enter it, he cannot disrupt it. But if the members of this family somehow come to nourish secret hates and fears against one another, then a stranger can easily set one against the other and destroy the family.
So long as we continue to think of ourselves as belonging to hostile groups stressing our artificial distinctions, we shall lie exposed to outside aggression in one form or another.
But if we can once again recognise that golden principle of unity, then there is no question concerning our ability to defend Asia.
Without delay we must evolve a framework by which nations of Asia may work together for a better future.
These great objectives cannot be attained at once.
Tolerance, utmost determination and an abiding faith will be necessary. We must choose now whether the future is to be one of stable progress or of chaos.
It is difficult to imagine the state of moral exhaustion, loss of ideals that would follow if we do not introduce, at once, the correctives.
It is for each Asian nation to remember that men and nations should not be made to serve selfish national ends. We must get united to save Asia and to serve humanity.
We may be defined as a people expedient for accomplishing a purpose by violence. What a strange idea: A man who would seek to assert a right or even to defend himself from wrong, by violence, would be regarded as an intolerable barbarian.
The laws of his country would hold him guilty of a capital offence, and he would suffer the severest penalty.
But surprisingly, when a collection of men, forming what is called a nation, have a right to be asserted, or a wrong to be redressed or perhaps only an opinion to be advanced, it is thought quite fair and reasonable that they should use violent means.
What is forbidden to individuals in every state is freely granted to "civilised nations".
There is nearly a perfect machinery for keeping individuals at peace; but scarcely any arrangement, whatever, for maintaining the same relations amongst states.
Although states are in no respect different, but in their being composed of a plurality of individuals.
Our being accustomed to see force resorted to by nations blind us very much to the real character of war.
A father might be seen taking the greatest pains to repress in his sons, the disposition to fight out any dispute.
It would, however, not be surprising to hear the same man asking one of these sons if he would like to join the army.
To become a part of the mechanism by which nations seek a bloody adjustment of exactly similar quarrels.
Bewildered be this wonderful contrariety, some would say there is a difference. A vast majority of people, within a given nation, cannot be wrong. But this is a fallacious reasoning.
We look coolly down upon a pair of combatants, and deplore their revenge, and its consequences.
As to national war, we are perhaps involved in it as parties, and therefore cannot look upon it from without.
We still are far from being able to take a wide and contemplative survey of it. To see it in exactly the same light, we should almost require seeing it as inhabitants of a different and happier planet.
If we were right in thus regarding war, it should follow that everything connected with it would be liable to exactly the same kind of reprobation as private outrages.
To wrack out a quarrel with another nation by war is precisely the same thing as to go to a neighbour who had injured or offended us, and break down his fences, put his house on fire, and slay him and his servants.
Surely, nations are fearfully wrong to put these to the arbitrament of the sword.
But in reality, even nations are not without some resources for peacefully adjusting their differences.
An arbitration may always be obtained from some third party within the bounds of a given family, if there be a sincere wish for it on both sides.
And any want might easily be remedied if nations of a given family were to come, as they ought to do, into greater union with each other, and, act more in a harmonious concert.
Some of the evils of war are so manifest, as to need only to be mentioned. Such as the destruction of life, always followed by misery.
The injury it does, by misapplying to national energies and funds, is less apt to be understood.
Yet this is one of its greatest evils. War destroys. It never creates or produces.
The men who become soldiers are laid idle from useful and productive employment; the money for their pay; accoutrement, and appurtenances of war, makes no return, and is gone forever.
The persons, who furnish the articles for war, have lived upon the profits of their work; but their work has been completely unproductive. Their talents and enterprising labour have all been lost. Thus, we can see the money spent in war is misspent.
But perhaps the most fatal effect of war is the lowering of the moral tone of a people. It sets all their sympathies into the wrong direction.
Men begin to worship what destroys; merit is estimated, not by the extent of good that a man does, but by his power of inflicting evil.
The great benefactors of their own community are over-looked; while praise is heaped upon him who has shown an unusual amount of, perhaps, animal courage and savage dexterity in inflicting suffering upon his fellow creatures.
The selfish feelings are called into powerful play. In such a state of things, all that conduces to moral progress is checked.
It is a great mistake in supposing that we can benefit, in the long run, by only consulting our own interest: a much greater mistake is it to suppose that we can, derive good from what does harm to our neighbours.
All our highest gratification's are found in the efforts we make to give happiness to others.
A nation, therefore, on the outlook for its own happiness, needs to promote the benefits of its neighbours; it should seek to form most friendly and warm relations with them, to promote a massive interchange of benefits by commerce and communication.
By these but by no other means can nations experience benefit from each other's neighbourhood.
It is to be lamented that this principle has not as yet been much acted upon but wherever it has in any degree, been put in to practice, it has succeeded.
After World War II, we witnessed a larger group of nations shrinking into little happy families.
This development promises to promote goodness and love in place of hatred, malice. EEC (European Economic Community) is the finest example of this emerging happy little family.
The Latin American group has also succeeded a great deal though not it is not the same level as the EEC family.
African states have made a zealous but unplanned attempt to create a happy little family out of dozens of states. A number of Arab states of the two continents - Asia and Africa - are making attempts to create a little happy family of their own.
However, there is one continent, which, though vast, energetic, has not yet realised why Buddha disappeared into distant territories, all by himself, only to weave the whole of Asia into a harmonious family.
And yet we see governments in Asia disposed to take precautionary measures against each other, as enemies. And thus a policy of suspicion, attended at immense expense, is established among Asian states.
Three-fourths of the men in the prime of their life, are obliged to go into discipline as soldiers.
Thus money of poor Asian nations is miss-expended, and her human labour misapplied from a mere sentiment of jealousy, error of prejudice.
What a pity no people have yet been found capable of the gallantry of saying to a related neighbour: We arm not for we mean no harm, and wish to apprehend none here. We offer you love instead of hostility.
No nation civilised, especially of Asian temper, would withstand a communication of this nature.
It would surely blush and hide its sword. There is nothing Quixotic in this approach.
For, it simply proceeds upon the most familiar principles in human nature; namely, that an honest goodwill generates the same in those to which it is addressed.
Love is the bond which connects not only, man with man, but with everything, which exists.
We love the flowers, the water, the sky. In the motion of the very leaves of spring, there is found a secret correspondence with our heart.
We are born into the world, and there is something within us, which from that instant thirsts after the likeness.
(This writer is director of Asian Research Centre, Karachi.)
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