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JAINISM AND WORLD PROBLEMS
them as fodder for guns, which they are certainly forced to become during wars.
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Machinery, I may point out in this connection, becomes one of the most objectionable of things when it exceeds the proper limits. Our present depression is entirely due to men having been displaced by machinery. No doubt, to a certain extent men have been displaced by girls in offices. But the principal cause of unemployment is machinery. Here also the law of retributive reaction is slow to be observed; but it is sure and unrelenting in its operation. The man who starts a factory to-day, and boasts of his having found employment for so many thousands of men, is ignorant of how many times more that number will be rendered idle two hundred years hence by his example, if not actually by himself. In the Science of Salvation, machinery and the cultivation of materialistic sciences beyond the limit of prudent utility are condemned. The Founders of our Religions could also have given us a civilization equally (or even more dazzlingly) attractive than our own; but they knew the consequences of the cult of Mammon. It is true that Materialism is to be credited with the many inventions which enable us to enjoy life with greater ease and comfort. But modern science must also be credited with the discovery of such things as dynamite, the bombshell, the long-range gun, the poison gas, and other forms of the weapons and means of destruction galore, that is, on a wholesale scale. And when all is said and done, the aim of life is not to dissipate the time in the pursuit of luxury and comfort, but to train oneself for the hardships of the Path that leads to Life Eternal, Joy Unabating, Knowledge Infinite. What value can we put upon the procuring of a few comforts for a short span of existence as compared with the things mentioned ? Science has given us a very comfortable conveyance, the motor car, that travels at times faster than the speed of a railway train. The motor car is a wonderful thing in more respects than
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