Reading of the Foreword

V

In accordance to his view that old things are being worked out with a new name, Sri Aurobindo makes a critical appraisal of the League of Nations. And the first thing he comments in this 1920 write-up is that "The League has been got into being by sacrificing the principles which governed the idea behind its inception." (SABCL 15, pg.579-580)

True the League had been providing a platform for leading nations to interact and condescend to consider the claims of the small free nations. True it could delay dangerous collisions or minimise them when they came. True it attempted to govern the nations which were not free. True it catered to subjects of successful empires under cover of a mandate instead of pushing through markets, colonies and dependencies. But the League could not run with any remarkable efficiency. It was necessary that all its imperfections should be exposed. More so to avoid the worst incidences of evils and dangers for the ideals it represented were turned into fiction.

But the ideals stand the test of time for they represent the greater aims of the spirit in man. The outer circumstances may be too strong and the Rudra powers of destruction seem to govern our destinies and the Lords of truth and justice and the Lords of Love have to wait for their reign "but if the light of the ideal is kept burning in its flame of knowledge and its flame of power, it will seize even on these things and create out of their evil its greater inevitable good". (Ibid, pg.580) A time will yet come when the Idea and the Word expressing all that is concealed in the spirit will be able to seize on the Force making it an instrument of a greater creation. The outward time taken will not matter for the human being has to live out the truth within oneself so that the "outward life be shaped in its image". (Ibid, pg.581)

Sri Aurobindo thus accepted as early as 1920 the end of The League of Nations and its replacement by something of a greater and wider dimension.

Date of Update: 31-Aug-25