Page:Speeches And Writings MKGandhi.djvu/869

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East. If the past struggle has produced even a few Indians who would dedicate themselves to the task of becoming passive resistors as nearly perfect as possible, they would not only have served themselves in the truest sense of the term, they would also have served humanity at large. Thus viewed, passive resistance is the noblest and the best education. It should come. not alter the ordinary education in letters of children, but it should precede it, It will not be denied that a child, before it begins to write its alphabet and to gain worldly knowledge, should know what the soul is, what truth is, what love is, what powers are latent in the soul. It should be an essential of real education that a child should learn that, in the struggle of life, it can easily conquer hate by love, untruth hy truth, violence by self-suffering. It was because I felt the forces of this truth, that, during the later part of the struggle, I endeavoured, as much as I could, to train the children at Tolstoy Farm and then at Phoenix along these lines, and one of the reasons for my departure to India is still further to realise, as I already do in part, my own imperfection as a Passive Resistor, and then to try to perfect myself, for I believe that it is in India that the nearest approach to perfection is most possible.


ON SOUL FORCE AND INDIAN POLITICS

[The following is a translation of the original in Gujarati published during the agitation against the internment of Mrs. Besant and her two colleagues in June, 1917:—]

The English expression °Passive Resistance" hardly denotes the force about which I propose to write. But Satyagraha, i.e., Truth-force, correctly conveys the