when at the close of the Great War, Gandhi and his associates submitted their terms to the British Empire, Gandhi was at that time not seeking the full freedom of his country. All that he asked for and all that he expected in 1919 was a grant of dominion status to India. And how ironical it is to remember that had Great Britain been wise enough in 1919 to grant this dominion status, there probably never would have been any struggle for national independence. But it was a case at that time, as so often, of too little and too late. When Great Britain reached the time when she was ready to grant dominion status, Gandhi and the Great army of Indian liberators had moved beyond that point. It was now full liberty or nothing.
The real struggle began in 1921, with the opening of Gandhi’s first non-cooperative and non-violent campaign for freedom. It is the testimony of Lord Lloyd, the Governor at that time of the Province of Bombay, that in 1921 and 1922 Gandhi came within the breadth of an eyelash of securing the emancipation of his people. So unconquerable is the non-resistant, so powerful the man who wields not the sword of steel but the sword of the spirit! Remember, dear friends, that Britain, like the Roman Empire yesterday, knew exactly what to do with a man who came armed against her. Every empire, every military power, knows how to handle an attack of violence. They have fought the armies of their foes through so many years that they have nothing new to learn, no effective instrument of violence is beyond their knowledge and their use. But when a man, or rather an army of men, comes against an empire bare-handed and barefooted, armed not even with stones or staves, practicing not violence in any form but absolute non-violence, loving their enemies and seeking to serve them even as they love and serve their friends, the empire doesn’t know what to do. The New York Times, in its great leading editorial yesterday morning, spoke of the British Empire as being baffled by Mahatma Gandhi’s campaign of non–resistance. Of course the Empire was baffled! All that it could do was to take Gandhi and his associates and put them in prison. And behind the prison bars Gandhi learned that he was more powerful than he was anywhere else. In a moment of that charming humor which always characterized his life, he said that he early discovered that he could make the best bargains when he was in jail. So it was in 1921 and 1922 that he began his fight for India, and it was a fight such as the world had never seen before. There were certain things that Gandhi did that nobody else had ever done, or had ever thought of doing. This campaign was his campaign, marked by the peculiar genius of his life, and dominated by the sublime influence of his spirit.
For one thing, from the very beginning, Gandhi insisted upon identifying his life with the lives of the great masses of the people of India. There had been champions of Indian independence before Gandhi. He wasn’t the first! But these men were men far separated from the Indian masses. They were men who had been educated in the western world, who wore western clothes, who insisted upon talking the English language; and between these westernized Indians and the Indian people, there was a vast gulf that never was bridged. Then Gandhi came along and he identified himself with the common people, just as they were. This was the reason why he insisted upon wearing the loin cloth. For years here in the western world we simply couldn't understand why Gandhi did that grotesque thing. We thought it meant that he was a queer man, and probably, perhaps, a little cracked. But this Gandhi did deliberately, as a symbol of his
14
