Page 6 - All India Magazine May-2024

living according to the right and free law of his and its being is
therefore the ideal. But in the actual condition of humanity, its
ignorant and devious nature subject to perversions and violations
of the true individual and the true social dharma, there has to be
superimposed on the natural life of society a State, a sovereign
power, a king or governing body, whose business is not to inter-
fere unduly with the life of the society, which must be allowed to
function for the most part according to its natural law and custom
and spontaneous development, but to superintend and assist its
right process and see that the Dharma is observed and in vigour
and, negatively, to punish and repress and, as far as may be,
prevent offences against the Dharma. A more advanced stage
of corruption of the Dharma is marked by the necessity of the
appearance of the legislator and the formal government of the
whole of life by external or written law and code and rule; but
to determine it — apart from external administrative detail—was
not the function of the political sovereign, who was only its ad-
ministrator, but of the socio-religious creator, the Rishi, or the
Brahminic recorder and interpreter. And the Law itself written
or unwritten was always not a thing to be new created or fabri-
cated by a political and legislative authority, but a thing already
existent and only to be interpreted and stated as it was or as it
grew naturally out of pre-existing law and principle in the com-
munal life and consciousness. The last and worst state of the so-
ciety growing out of this increasing artificiality and convention
must be a period of anarchy and conflict and dissolution of the
dharma, — Kali Yuga, — which must precede through a red-grey
evening of cataclysm and struggle a recovery and a new self-
expression of the spirit in the human being.
CWSA 20: 403-04

6 All India Magazine, May 2024