you are talking with your host, who may be a governor of a province, a vice chancellor of a university, or something of the sort, you discover that this man has a prison record, and that he’s very proud of it. By the time I left India I had the feeling that everybody who was worthwhile in India had a prison record. I knew this because they referred to it so easily, and were so glad to tell me of the experiences they had in prison. So different from our country! When a man has a prison record in America, he does not say anything about it. He keeps it quiet. But here was a noble service that Gandhi taught the Indian people they could offer on behalf of their great cause. And so I say to you that by supreme creative and imaginative genius, Gandhi found great answers to the question as to what the humblest of Indians could do to help his country.
Lastly, Gandhi gave to the Indian people the weapons wherewith to carry on their fight, weapons of unimaginable power, weapons that guaranteed eventual victory, and in Gandhi’s own time, praise be to God, won the victory that he could see. Gandhi’s program of non-violent resistance is unprecedented in the history of mankind. The principle itself, resist not evil and love your enemies, is nothing new. It is at least as ancient as the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth in the Sermon on the Mount. But Gandhi did what had never been done before. Up to his time the practice of these non-resistant principles had been limited to single individuals, or to little groups of individuals. Gandhi worked out the discipline and the program for the practicing of this particular kind of principle by unnumbered masses of human beings. He worked out a program, in other words, not merely for an individual, or a small group of individuals, but for a whole nation, and that, I say to you, is something new in the experience of man.
I can best sum up the significance of this second period of Gandhi’s life, which ended on the 15th day of August, 1947, with the triumph of Indian freedom, by quoting to you a remarkable paragraph from a book entitled The Tragedy of Europe written by a great scholar, Dr. Francis Neilson. This is the way he puts it. “Gandhi,” he says, “is unique. There is no record of a man of his position challenging a great empire. A Diogenes in action, a St. Francis in humility, a Socrates in wisdom, he reveals to the world the utter paltriness of the methods of the statesman who relies upon force to gain his end. In this contest, spiritual integrity triumphs over the physical opposition of the forces of the state.” That was Gandhi’s triumph. That was his achievement. That marks his place in history.
The third period of Gandhi’s life began on the 15th day of August, 1947 and ended only at the moment when he died on Friday last. This was the period when it seemed as though India was about to exercise the prerogatives of freedom by plunging into the terror and horror of a civil war. What happened is understandable enough. Here was where partition operated, and partition meant the vivisection of a nation, and those people who were called upon to suffer the agony of vivisection, in Bengal and also in the Punjab, went momentarily crazy with pain and grief. As violence and massacre swept these provinces, it seemed for a moment as though all Gandhi’s teaching were in vain. I have heard people say that Gandhi in the end failed in his great mission. Gandhi himself encouraged that idea, for in the supreme humility of his spirit, he was moved to talk about his failure as well as about his sorrow. But I have insisted from the beginning, as I would insist today, that this last period in Gandhi’s life was
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