Bhagat Singh Jail Note Book page 38
"Capitalism and Commercialism"
Rabindra Nath's address to an assembly of Japanese students:
You had your own industry in Japan; how scrupu|ously honest and true it was, you can see by its products - by their grace and strength, their
conscientiousness in details where they can hardly be observed. But the tidal wave of falsehood has swept over your land from that part of the world where business is business and honesty is followed merely as the best policy. Have you never felt shame when you see the trade
advertisements, not only plastering the whole town with lies and
exaggerations, but invadlng the green fields, where the peasants do their honest labour, and to hilltops which greet the first pure light of the mornlng?
. . . This commercia|ism wlth its barbarity of ugly decoratlons is a terrible menace to all humanity, because it is setting up the ideal of power over the perfection. It is making the cult of self-seeking exult in lts naked shamelessness. Its movements are violent, its noise is discordantly loud. It is carrying its own damnation because it is trampllng lnto distortton . . . the humanity upon whlch it stands. It is strenuously turning out money at the cost of happiness . . . The vital ambition of the present clvllisatlon of Europe ls to have the excluslve possession of the devil.
