Page:Speeches And Writings MKGandhi.djvu/647

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and make common cause with the people of India whose salt you are eating. To seek to thwart their aspirations is disloyalty to the country.

I am,

Your faithful friend, M. K. GANDHI.

II

Dear friend, This is the second time I venture to address you. I know, that most of you detest Non-Co- operation. But I would invite you to isolate two of my activities from the rest, if you can give me credit for honesty.

I cannot prove my honesty, if you do not feel it, Some of my Indian friends charge me with camouflage, when I say we need not hate Englishmen, whilst we may hate the system they have established. I am trying to show them, that one may detest the wickedness of a brother without hating him. Jesus denounced the wickedness of the Scribes and the Pharisees, but he did not hate them. He did not enunciate this law of love for the man and hate for the evil in him for himself only, but he taught the doctrine for universal practice. Indeed, I find it in all the scriptures of the world.

I claim to be a fairly accurate student of human nature and vivisector of my own failings. I have discovered, that man is superior to the system he propounds. And so I feel, that you as an individual are infinitely better than the system you have evolved as a corporation. Each one of my countrymen in Amritsar on that fateful loth of April was better than the crowd of which he was a member. He, as a man, would have declined to kill those innocent English bank managers. But in that crowd, many a mar* forgot himself. Hence it is, that an Englishman in

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