from village to village throughout all the vast area of continental India. When he had lived in a village for a few days and then had gone upon his way as a pilgrim to the next village, he left behind what we have learned to call in this day a kind of a cell, an organized group of men and women, just a few of them in each village, who understood and were ready to act. They knew what Gandhi meant by non-violent non-cooperation. They had been taught the discipline of that kind of a life, and there they were as his representatives and his followers to obey his word and do his work. It can be said that, after a period of years, Gandhi had organized the whole Indian people around himself in the great undertaking of national independence, and the power of such organization, led by such a personality, was indeed, as it proved to be, irresistible.
Another thing that Gandhi did, and a supreme evidence of his imagination and creative genius! Gandhi was able to give to the masses of the Indian people something to do in their great struggle for liberty. You know how often the question is asked in matters of reform—What can I do? I think I can almost say that I never made a speech before a public forum about any problem of reform but what somebody got up and said, What can I do? And I have always been baffled by this question. I haven’t got imagination enough to conceive a right answer. And so I usually suggest, as other Americans do in answer to such an inquiry, that we write our congressman, or perhaps the President. But Gandhi was an intellectual as well as a spiritual genius. Gandhi had an answer to this question. Why do you suppose, years ago, that Gandhi equipped himself with a spinning-wheel, and devoted a couple of hours of every day for a period of years to spinning khaddar cloth upon this wheel? This seemed to me, as it did to others, a waste of precious time and strength. But what was Gandhi really doing? He was teaching the unnumbered millions of his fellow-countrymen that here was something that they could do for independence. That if everyone would make a spinning-wheel to whirl within the home, and all of them give themselves thus to the manufacture of cotton cloth, India upon the instant would be delivered from the economic tyranny of the British cotton trade, and economically if not politically, would be free. He gave the Indians something to do, and millions of spinning-wheels have turned and turned for years, in obedience to the example of the Mahatma. Then there was the famous march to Dandi, when Gandhi and his followers walked dramatically across the Indian countryside to the seashore, and Gandhi, in almost melodramatic fashion, waded into the sea, lifted up a pail of the sea-water, and brought it to the shore that it might be distilled into salt, and therewith delivered the people from the tyranny of the iniquitous salt tax imposed upon them by the Empire. Gandhi was not only himself resisting the rule of Britain by this act, but he was teaching the millions of his fellow-countrymen that here was something that each one of them could do. They could wade into the sea, distill the salt, and therewith prove themselves rebels against the British crown and the British law.
Gandhi was the man who found out comparatively early in his career, that one thing that everybody could do was to go to prison. He chose to go to prison, and herewith he proved the enormous effectiveness of serving a sentence behind bars. And since Gandhi had done it, then everybody could do it, and English prisons became so flooded that English authorities didn’t know what to do with the men, women and even children who volunteered for service. You know, when you go to India today, you have a curious experience. Sooner or later when
16
