AFTER I had left his village, Gandhi sent me a letter for President Roosevelt. In a handwritten note accompanying this letter, Gandhi wrote: “If it does not commend itself to you, you may tear it to pieces. If it is something else you want, you may tell me.” Gandhi has little vanity.
Gandhi never hesitates to admit error, and by preference he does so publicly. In May, 1942, as a consequence of the failure of Sir Stafford Cripps’s mission, Gandhi announced that “The British Must Go.” They must withdraw their troops, he said, or else he would start a campaign of civil dis obedience. In June, however, he altered this demand. “There was obviously a gap in my first writing,” he confessed in an article Harijan, his weekly magazine. “I filled it in as soon as it was discovered by one of my numerous interviewers. Non-violence demands the strictest honesty, cost what it may. The public have therefore to suffer my weakness, if weakness it be. I could not be guilty of ask-
