I ask Your Royal Highness and through you every Englishman to appreciate the view-point of the non-co-operationists.

I beg to remain,
Your Royal Highness’s faithful servant,
(Sd.) M.K.  GANDHI.
February, 1921

THE GREATEST THING

It is to be wished that non-co-operationists will clearly recognise that nothing can stop the onward march of the nation as violence.  Ireland may gain its freedom by violence.  Turkey may regain her lost possessions by violence within measurable distance of time.  But India cannot win her freedom by violence for a century, because her people are not built in the manner of other nations.  They have been nurtured in the traditions of suffering.  Rightly or wrongly, for good or ill, Islam too has evolved along peaceful lines in India.  And I make bold to say that, if the honour of Islam is to be vindicated through its followers in India, it will only be by methods of peaceful, silent, dignified, conscious, and courageous suffering.  The more I study that wonderful faith, the more convinced I become that the glory of Islam is due not to the sword but to the sufferings, the renunciation, and the nobility of its early Caliphs.  Islam decayed when its followers, mistaking the evil for the good, dangled the sword in the face of man, and lost sight of the godliness, the humility, and austerity of its founder and his disciples.  But, I am not at the present moment, concerned with showing that the basis of Islam, as of all religions, is not violence but suffering not the taking of life but the giving of it.

What I am anxious to show is that non-co-operationists must be true as well to the spirit as to the letter of their vow if they would gain Swaraj within one year.  They may forget non-co-operation but they dare not forget non-violence.  Indeed, non-co-operation is non-violence.  We are violent when we sustain a government whose creed is violence.  It bases itself finally not on right but on might.  Its last appeal is not to reason, nor the heart, but to the sword.  We are tired of this creed and we have risen against it.  Let us not ourselves belie our profession by being violent.  Though the English are very few, they are organised for violence.  Though we are many we cannot be organised for violence for a long time to come.  Violence for us is a gospel or despair.

I have seen a pathetic letter from a god-fearing English woman who defends Dyerism for she thinks that, if General Dyer had not enacted Jallianwala, women and children would have been murdered by us.  If we are such brutes as to desire the blood of innocent women and children, we deserve to be blotted out from the face of the earth.  There is the other side.  It did not strike this good lady that, if we were friends, the price that her countrymen paid at Jallianwala for buying their safety was too great.  They gained their safety at the cost of their humanity.  General Dyer has been haltingly blamed, and his evil genius Sir Michael O’Dwyer entirely exonerated because Englishmen do not want to leave this country of fields even if everyone of us has to be killed.  If we go mad again as we did at Amritsar, let there be no mistake that a blacker Jallianwala will be enacted.