great religions of the world. We earnestly hope that your work in India may be blessed
in further promoting this noble end, and that you may return to us again with
assurances of fraternal regard from our distant brothers of the great Aryan family, and
the ripe wisdom that comes from reflection and added experience and further contact
with the life and thought of your people.'
Another letter from Detroit, signed by forty-two of his friends, said in part: 'We
Western Aryans have been so long separated from our Eastern brothers that we had
almost forgotten our identity of origin, until you came and with your beautiful presence
and matchless eloquence rekindled within our hearts the knowledge that we of
America and you of India are one.'
Swami Vivekananda, after his strenuous work in South India, needed rest. On the
advice of friends, he decided to travel to Calcutta by steamer. Monday, February 15,
was the date of his sailing. Several devotees boarded the steamer to see him off, and
one of them, Professor Sundararama Iyer, asked the Swami if his mission had achieved
lasting good in America and Europe. The Swami said: 'Not much. I hope that here and
there I have sown a seed which in time may grow and benefit some at least.'
Swami Vivekananda's lectures delivered during his progress from Colombo to Madras
were inspiring and enthusiastic. He yearned to awaken the masses of India from the
slumber of ages. He had seen the dynamic life of the West; he now felt more deeply
the personality of India, which only needed his fiery exhortation to assert itself once
more among the nations of the world. Again one is reminded of Krishna's admonition
to Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra: 'In this crisis, O Arjuna, whence comes
such lowness of spirit, unbecoming to an Aryan, dishonourable, and an obstacle to the
attaining of heaven? Do not yield to unmanliness, O Arjuna. It does not become you.
Shake off this base faint-heartedness and arise, O scorcher of enemies!'
In his famous lecture 'My Plan of Campaign,' delivered in Madras, he called upon the
people to assert their soul-force:
My India, arise! Where is your vital force? In your Immortal Soul. Each nation, like
each individual, has one theme in this life, which is its centre, the principal note round
which every other note comes to form the harmony. If any nation attempts to throw off
its national vitality, the direction which has become its own through the transmission
of centuries, that nation dies....In one nation political power is its vitality, as in
England. Artistic life, in another, and so on. In India religious life forms the centre, the
keynote of the whole music of the national life. And therefore, if you succeed in the
attempt to throw off your religion and take up either politics or society, the result will
be that you will become extinct. Social reform and politics have to be preached through
the vitality of your religion.... Every man has to make his own choice; so has every
nation. We made our choice ages ago. And it is the faith in an Immortal Soul. I
challenge anyone to give it up. How can you change your nature?