time: the refreshing river 



Christians." Back to primitive paganism, says Klages. The essay of 

 Karl Polanyi in Christianity and the Social Revolution is a perfect 

 museum of such regressive movements. One may well feel depressed. 

 Then one's eye catches the following, written without doubt in all 

 sincerity — "If at any time we feel discouraged, we should remember 

 that behind our comradeship there stands the wider comradeship of 

 which the British flag is for us the symbol — a symbol alike of righteous 

 and humane dealing, and of the fearless power that lies behind it. 

 Let us never allow the fickle waves of passing public sentiment to 

 obscure our vision of that wider comradeship." How the women and 

 children immolated in the early industrial age in the pits of those 

 mining districts that Haldane knew so well would have reacted to 

 such words, it is hard to say. The Irish victims of the Black-and-Tan 

 regime, the cheated native miners of South Africa, the Chinese 

 mandarins vainly trying to stem the import of opium into China by 

 British trade and finally forced to fight unequal wars over it, the 

 Indians struggling against a rule of censorship and concentration- 

 camp could hardly cherish such emotions. The fact is that the flag of 

 no existing national state dare claim to be the symbol of the world- 

 comradeship of humanity. It was with profound insight that the 

 pioneers of the workers' movement chose the colour of blood for 

 the banner of world community and solidarity, for the blood of 

 animals and men is, after all, the internal medium which assures the 

 co-operation of all the cells in that society of cells which is the body. 

 And in the history of every people there have been inspiring times 

 when they made their contribution to human progress. The British 

 flag must remind us, not of the Factory Children and the Opium 

 Wars, but rather of the Spirit of 1381, the New Model Army, the 

 Floating Republic, and the Dorset Martyrs. 



What a paradox that Haldane should have chosen materialism as 

 the cause of all the trouble. Capitalist economics may indeed be 

 inseparable from a mechanistic and atomistic sociology; the two arose 

 together historically; Descartes and Boyle on the one hand. Petty 

 and Gresham on the other. But the dialectics of nature, and dialectical 

 materialism, are quite another matter. 



The West and the East. 



And so I come to the last paragraph of the last paper written by 

 one of my principal teachers. "Materialism," he had written, "is a 

 form of naive belief which is easily understood by all nations, both 



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