Mohandas K. Gandhi

“ It is no use saddling the Municipality with responsibility for the conditions in which we find not only the central parts of Madras, but the conditions in which we find the central parts of every city in India without exception—and I have gone now to almost every city of importance in India. I feel that no Municipality in the world will be able to override the habits that a class of people may have in them, and have been handed down to them from generation to generation. It is work that can be done only by patient toil and guidance, with those two immutable weapons in our hands. ”

“ Gandhi a favourable journey to his native land and to congratulate him upon the triumphs he had achieved. Nor did they forget Mrs. Gandhi—hear, hear—who had also suffered in the good cause. Those labours and those sacrifices were over. Mr. Gandhi had practically won the battle he had been fighting and was returning to India to resume as they all hoped, the practice of his profession under happier auspices than it had been his fate to enjoy in South Africa, and to meet the thousands of his countrymen by whom his name would never be forgotten. ”

“ And from this point of view it surely realised its purpose in a measure that the great protagonists of the movement themselves could not at first have dreamed of. The struggle was the means, the struggle was the end. To those who have known the intensity of aspiration and elevation of character that made the fight possible the talk of material results must ever seem a pitiful meanness. Such have received the initiation of the highest self-knowledge. They have been face to face with that mood of the soul which sights nothing but endless horizons of spiritual endeavour and achievement. ”

“ Gandhi at least nothing is or ought to be more practical. To turn the left cheek when the right is beaten; to bless those that curse; to suffer for righteousness' sake; these are the very ideals to which he has surrendered his whole being. And by impassioned devotion to them he has developed a character before which men stand in awe. To the self-discipline of the ascetic he adds the sweetness and simplicity of a saint. The hero's will is in him wedded to the heart of a child. The service of man answers to the love of God. ”

“ With regard to affairs in South Africa, Mr. Gandhi paid a noble tribute to the devotion of his followers. It was to the rank and file that their victory was due. Those who had suffered and died in the struggle were the real heroes. He acknowledged the splendid help rendered by their fellow countrymen in India, especially that saintly politician Mr. Gokhale. Their noble Viceroy, Lord Hardinge had been a tower of strength to them. But their success would have been impossible had they not quickened the conscience of the people of South Africa by their passive resistance movement. ”

“ I found through my wanderings in India that all educated India is seized with a paralysing fear. We may not open our lips in public. We may not declare our confirmed opinions in public. We may hold those opinions, and we may talk about them secretly, and we may do anything within the four walls of a house, but those opinions are not for public consumption. If we took a vow of silence, I would have nothing to say, but when we open our lips in public we say things which we really do not believe. ”

“ Experienced teachers say that what takes sixteen years to learn through English can perfectly be acquired in ten years at the most through the vernaculars. If thousands of our students save six years each of their precious life, what a great national saving it would be.
The excessive burden of having to learn through a foreign medium has sapped the strength, enthusiasm and vitality of our young men. Sickly and pale they can at best be mere imitators. All power of initiative, originality and enterprise; courage, discrimination and fearlessness dwindle away as years pass by. ”

“ The banks do not pry into his moral character: they are satisfied that he meets his overdrafts and promissory notes punctually. The credit system has encircled this beautiful globe of ours like a serpent's coil, and if we do not mind, it bids fair to crush us out of breath. I have witnessed the ruin of many a home through the system, and it has made no difference whether the credit was labelled co-operative or otherwise. The deadly coil has made possible the devastating spectacle in Europe, which we are helplessly looking on. ”

“ Jesus, Mahomed, Buddha, Nanak, Kabir, Chaitanya, Sankara, Dayanand, Ramakrishna were men who exercised an immense influence over and moulded the character of thousands of men. The world is the richer for their having lived in it. And they were all men who deliberately embraced poverty as their lot.
I should not have laboured my point as I have done, if I did not believe that, in so far as we have made the modern materialistic craze our goal, in so far are we going down hill in the path of progress. I hold that economic progress in the sense I have put it is antagonistic to real progress. ”

“ I hope that leaders of public opinion in India will, therefore; take their stand on the one impregnable rock of not wanting any emigration whatsoever to the Colonies. It might be argued that we, as a component part of the Empire, are bound to consider the wants of our partners, but this would not be a fair plea to advance so long as India stands in need of all the labour she can produce, if, therefore India does not assist the Colonies, it is not because of want of will, but it is due to want of ability. ”

“ Gandhi is full of courage and what is more he is full of hope. He has planned his campaign carefully and whether he succeeds or fails he will push on like a hero to the end. The struggle this time, as I have already pointed out, is not confined to one province but extends to the whole of South Africa and not only men but women are taking part in it. From what I have seen of Mr. Gandhi's hold over our countrymen in South Africa, I have no doubt in my mind that thousands will be glad to suffer under his banner and his spirit will inspire them all. ”

“ Under this plan of life, in seeming to serve India to the exclusion of every other country, I do not harm any other country. My patriotism is both exclusive and inclusive. It is exclusive in the sense that in all humility I confine my attention to the land of my birth, but it is inclusive in the sense that my service is not of a competitive or antagonistic nature. Sic utere tuo ut alienum non leedas is not merely a legal maxim, but it is a grand doctrine of life. ”

“ But to men born for great ends such crises of the soul come only to find them prepared. The South African Indian community were like a flock of sheep without a shepherd, surrounded by ravenous wolves, and Mr. Gandhi chose to be the shepherd. South Africa was the vine-yard of the Lord in which he was called upon to dig and delve, and he chose to be the labourer. ”

“ Amid this conflict of duty, I could only throw the responsibility of removing me from them on the administration. I am fully conscious of the fact that a person, holding in the public life of India a position such as I do, has to be most careful in setting examples. It is my firm belief that, in the complex constitution under which we are living, the safe and honourable course for a self respecting man is, in the circumstances such as that face me, to do what I have decided to do, that is, to submit without protest to the penalty of disobedience. ”

“ For it had been decreed that the baptism of fire through which the Indian Community had been passing during these long years should now be bestowed on the only two classes which had hitherto remained outside it—the women and the indentured labourer. The Indian women in the Transvaal had indeed already played a memorable part, by the fine understanding they had displayed of the purposes of the whole movement, and by the whole-hearted sympathy and encouragement which they had given to their men-folk. But the time had now come for the women themselves to step into the flaming breach. ”

“ These young men deserve all these adjectives that you have so affectionately, but blindly, lavished upon us. It was not only the Hindus who struggled, but there were Muhammadans, Parsis and Christians, and almost every part of India was represented in the struggle. They realised the common danger, and they realised also what their destiny was as Indians, as it was they, and they alone, who matched the soul-force against the physical forces. ”

“ Life without religion, I hold, is life without principle, and life without principle, is like a ship without a rudder; and just as a ship without a rudder will be tossed about from place to place, and never reach its destination, so will a man without this religious backing, without that hard grasp of religion be also tossed about on this stormy ocean of the world, without ever reaching his destined goal. ”

“ For many years the Government of India have tried patiently to secure justice for the Indians in South Africa by diplomatic methods and they have failed. And now that matters have been brought to a dangerous crisis and all India is ablaze with a fiery indignation, time has come to put aside the soft phrases of diplomacy, to call a spade a spade and to tell the politicians of South Africa plainly how their action in this matter is regarded in India. ”

“ They were willing to sacrifice everything for sentiment, but it was a noble sentiment. It was a sentiment that had to be cherished as a religious sentiment. It was a sentiment that bound people together; it was a sentiment that bound creatures to the Creator. That was the sentiment for which he asked them, advised them, if necessary, to die. Their action would be reflected throughout the British Dominions, through the length and breadth of India, and they were now upon their trial. There was no better and no fear for a man who believed in God. ”

“ A few days after the release of these last women, two gave birth to children, and another, a young girl of about twenty, passed away, and a third hovered between life and death for months, but the goal was won. To-day, all these women are back in their homes and are busy in the usual routine of an Indian woman's life. There is absolutely none of the pride of heroism about them. They are the same patient, dutiful women that India has produced for centuries; yet they endured the publicity, and no one who does not know India can understand how terrible to the Indian woman such publicity is. ”

“ They endured the physical hardship, the mental sorrow, the heartache; for nearly all who did not take young children with them left young ones at home, endured hunger strikes, because they were deprived of fat to eat and sandals to put on—endured it all without harshness or bitterness. India has many things to be proud of, but of none more than the part the Indian women of South Africa took in the uplifting and recognition of a people here despised. ”

“ And down to the remotest generations will linger the pride of how the forefathers braved the fury of the persecutor and staked their all for nothing but their own honour. Nay shall not the motherland herself treasure for ever the story of the deeds of the humblest of her children in a far away land as it has treasured the legend of Rama and Sita, or that of the Pandava brothers? Will not humanity itself the world over feel a quickened sense of its own divinity as it peruses the same golden record? ”

“ And I claim it to be perfectly honourable and consistent with the above profession to advise my countrymen not to submit to the Asiatic Act, as being derogatory to their manhood and offensive to their religion. And I claim, too, that the method of passive resistance adopted to combat the mischief is the clearest and safest, because, if the cause is not true, it is the resisters, and they alone who suffer. I am perfectly aware of the danger to good government, in a country inhabited by many races unequally developed, in an honest citizen advising resistance to a law of the land. ”

“ I have now to learn what Hinduism really is. In so far as I have been able to study Hinduism outside India, I have felt that it is no part of real Hinduism to have in its fold a mass of people whom I would call "untouchables," If it was proved to me that this is an essential part of Hinduism, I, for one, would declare myself an open rebel against Hinduism itself. ”

“ No one has ever suggested that grinding pauperism can lead to anything else than moral degradation. Every human being has a right to live, and therefore to find the where withal to feed himself and, where necessary, to clothe and house himself. But for this very simple performance we need no assistance from economists or their laws.
"Take no thought for the morrow" is an injunction which finds an echo in almost all the religious scriptures of the world. In well-ordered society the securing of one's livelihood should be and is found to be the easiest thing in the world. ”