You may not be able to reach and redeem by your generous thoughts and designs such persons as have injured you, but a hundred others may learn from you the law of redeeming love. Let your children grow to know you as a man of love. Let your employees and fellow citizens think of you as a man of peace and good will, a builder and not a destroyer. Let your fireside be ever cheered by the music of love. When the shadows of night fall and you come to enter into the unknown land of sleep, let loving thoughts be your companions; let them course into the deepest recesses of your nature and leaven your entire being. Be a man of love! Love even your blind and misguided enemies!
The Oriental's juvenile temperament and his partial disregard for concrete facts have led his Anglo-Saxon cousin to consider him as essentially unveracious. "You cannot believe what an Oriental says." "The Orientals are the children of the 'Father of Lies.'" "Whatever an Oriental says, the opposite is likely to be the truth"; and so forth.
I do not wish in the least to undertake to excuse or even condone the Oriental's unveracity, any more than to approve of the ethics of American politicians during a political campaign. I have no doubt that the Oriental suffers more from the universal affliction of untruthfulness than does the Anglo-Saxon, and that he sorely needs to restrict his fancy, and to train his intellect to have more respect for facts. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to say that a { 108} clear understanding of some of the Oriental's modes of thought will quash many of the indictments against his veracity. His ways will remain different from the ways of the Anglo-Saxon, and perhaps not wholly agreeable to the latter; but the son of the East--the dreamer and writer of scriptures--will be credited with more honesty of purpose.
It is unpleasant to an Anglo-Saxon to note how many things an Oriental says, but does not mean. And it is distressing to an Oriental to note how many things the Anglo-Saxon means, but does not say. To an unreconstructed Syrian the brevity, yea, even curtness, of an Englishman or an American, seems to sap life of its pleasures and to place a disproportionate value on time. For the Oriental, the primary value of time must not be computed in terms of business and money, but in terms of sociability and good fellowship. Poetry, and not prosaic accuracy, must be the dominant feature of speech.