Your Royal Highness has come not to end the system I have described but to sustain it by upholding its prestige.  Your first pronouncement was a laudation of Lord Wellingdon.  I have the privilege of knowing him.  I believe him to be an honest and amiable gentleman who will not willingly hurt even a fly.  But, he has certainly failed as a ruler.  He allowed himself to be guided by those whose interest it was to support their power.  He is reading the mind of the Dravidian province.  Here in Bengal you are issuing a certificate of merit to a Governor who is again from all I have heard an estimable gentleman.  But he knows nothing of the heart of Bengal and its yearnings.  Bengal is not Calcutta.  Fort William and the palaces of Calcutta represent an insolent exploitation of the unmurmuring and highly cultured peasantry of this fair province.  Non-co-operationists have come to the conclusion that they must not be deceived by the reforms that tinker with the problem of India’s distress and humiliation.  Nor must they be impatient and angry.  We must not in our impatient anger resort, to stupid violence.  We freely admit that we must take our due share of the blame for the existing state.  It is not so much the British guns that are responsible fur our subjection, as our voluntary co-operation.  Our non-participation in a hearty welcome to your Royal Highness is thus in no sense a demonstration against your high personage but it is against the system you have come to uphold.  I know that individual Englishmen cannot even if they will alter the English nature all of a sudden.  If we would be equals of Englishmen we must cast off fear.  We must learn to be self-reliant and independent of the schools, courts, protection, and patronage of a Government, we seek to end, if it will not mend.  Hence this non-violent non-co-operation.  I know that we have not all yet become non-violent in speech and deed.  But the results so far achieved have I assure Your Royal Highness, been amazing.  The people have understood the secret and the value of non-violence as they have never done before.  He who runs may see that this a religious, purifying movement.  We are leaving off drink, we are trying to rid India of the curse of untouchability.  We are trying to throw off foreign tinsel splendour and by reverting to the spinning wheel reviving the ancient and the poetic simplicity of life.  We hope thereby to sterilize the existing harmful institution.  I ask Your Royal Highness as an Englishman to study this movement and its possibilities for the Empire and the world.  We are at war with nothing that is good in the world.  In protecting Islam in the manner we are, we are protecting all religions.  In protecting the honour of India we are protecting the honour of humanity.  For our means are hurtful to none.  We desire to live on terms of friendship with Englishmen but that friendship must be friendship of equals in both theory and practice.  And we must continue to non-co-operate, i.e. to purify ourselves till the goal is achieved.