caste-system! 'India's doom was sealed,' he wrote, 'the very day they invented the word
mlechcha and stopped from communion with others.' When he saw in New York a
millionaire woman sitting side by side in a tram-car with a negress with a wash-basket
on her lap, he was impressed with the democratic spirit of the Americans. He wanted in
India 'an organization that will teach the Hindus mutual help and appreciation' after the
pattern of Western democracies.
Incessantly he wrote to his Indian devotees about the regeneration of the masses. In a
letter dated 1894 he said:
Let each one of us pray, day and night, for the downtrodden millions in India, who are
held fast by poverty, priestcraft, and tyranny — pray day and night for them. I care
more to preach religion to them than to the high and the rich. I am no metaphysician,
no philosopher, nay, no saint. But I am poor, I love the poor.... Who feels in India for
the three hundred millions of men and women sunken for ever in poverty and
ignorance? Where is the way out? Who feels for them? Let these people be your God
— think of them, work for them, pray for them incessantly — the Lord will show you
the way. Him I call a mahatma, a noble soul, whose heart bleeds for the poor;
otherwise he is a duratma, a wicked soul.... So long as the millions live in hunger and
ignorance, I hold every man a traitor who, having been educated at their expense, pays
not the least heed to them.... We are poor, my brothers we are nobodies, but such have
always been the instruments of the Most High.
Never did he forget, in the midst of the comforts and luxuries of America, even when
he was borne on the wings of triumph from one city to another, the cause of the Indian
masses, whose miseries he had witnessed while wandering as an unknown monk from
the Himalayas to Cape Comorin. The prosperity of the new continent only stirred up in
his soul deeper commiseration for his own people. He saw with his own eyes what
human efforts, intelligence, and earnestness could accomplish to banish from society
poverty, superstition, squalor, disease, and other handicaps of human well-being. On
August 20, 1893, he wrote to instil courage into the depressed hearts of his devotees in
India:
Gird up your loins, my boys! I am called by the Lord for this.... The hope lies in you —
in the meek, the lowly, but the faithful. Feel for the miserable and look up for help — it
shall come. I have travelled twelve years with this load in my heart and this idea in my
head. I have gone from door to door of the so-called 'rich and great.' With a bleeding
heart I have crossed half the world to this strange land, seeking help. The Lord is great.
I know He will help me. I may perish of cold and hunger in this land, but I bequeath to
you young men this sympathy, this struggle for the poor, the ignorant, the oppressed....
Go down on your faces before Him and make a great sacrifice, the sacrifice of the
whole life for them, for whom He comes from time to time, whom He loves above all
— the poor, the lowly, the oppressed. Vow, then, to devote your whole lives to the
cause of these three hundred millions, going down and down every day. Glory unto the