When there is
a panic of fire in a crowded building men are suddenly tested as to
character. Some will become frenzied madmen, fighting and trampling
their way out. Others will act nobly, forgetting themselves. They have
no time to think. What they are in their total make up as human beings,
overbalanced either for good or evil, appears in an instant. Even so,
some time in the heroic future, some nation in a crisis will be weighed
and will act nobly rather than passionately, and will be prepared to
risk national extinction rather than continue existence at the price of
killing myriads of other human beings, and it will oppose moral and
spiritual forces to material forces, and it will overcome the world by
making gentleness its might, as all great spiritual teachers have done.
It comes to this, we cannot overcome hatred by hatred or war by war, but
by the opposites of these. Evil is not overcome by evil but by good;
and any race like the Irish, eager for national life, ought to learn
this truth--that humanity will act towards their race as their race acts
towards humanity.
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