His examination of the social and political condition of
Russia seems to have left him much more hopeful than was the common
feeling of liberal-minded people during the years of depression that
followed the revolution of 1906, and it was upon the race question
that his attention concentrated.
The Swadeshi outbreak drew him from Russia to India. Here in an
entirely different environment was another discord of race and
culture, and he found in his study of it much that illuminated and
corrected his impressions of the Russian issue. A whole drawer was
devoted to a comparatively finished and very thorough enquiry into
human dissensions in lower Bengal. Here there were not only race
but culture conflicts, and he could work particularly upon the
differences between men of the same race who were Hindus, Christians
and Mahometans respectively. He could compare the Bengali Mahometan
not only with the Bengali Brahminist, but also with the Mahometan
from the north-west. "If one could scrape off all the creed and
training, would one find much the same thing at the bottom, or
something fundamentally so different that no close homogeneous
social life and not even perhaps a life of just compromise is
possible between the different races of mankind?"
His answer to that was a confident one.
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