means independence of outside help, it means effort from within.  It would not be non-co-operation to insist on visiting prohibited areas.  That may be civil disobedience if it is peacefully carried out.  But I have found to my cost that civil disobedience requires far greater preliminary training and self-control.  All can non-co-operate, but few only can offer civil disobedience.  Therefore, by way of protest against Hinduism, the Panchamas can certainly stop all contact and connection with the other Hindus so long as special grievances are maintained.  But this means organised intelligent effort.  And so far as I can see, there is no leader among the Panchamas who can lead them to victory through non-co-operation.

The better way, therefore, perhaps, is for the Panchamas heartily to join the great national movement that is now going on for throwing off the slavery of the present Government.  It is easy enough for the Panchama friends to see that non-co-operation against this evil government presupposes co-operation between the different sections forming the Indian nation.  The Hindus must realise that if they wish to offer successful non-co-operation against the Government, they must make common cause with the Panchamas, even as they have made common cause with the Mussalmans.  Non-co-operation with it is free from violence, is essentially a movement of intensive self-purification.  That process has commenced and whether the Panchamas deliberately take part in it or not, the rest of the Hindus dare not neglect them without hampering their own progress.  Hence though the Panchama problem is as dear to me as life itself, I rest satisfied with the exclusive attention to national non-co-operation.  I feel sure that the greater includes the less.

Closely allied to this question is the non-Brahmin question.  I wish I had studied it more closely than I have been able to.  A quotation from my speech delivered at a private meeting in Madras has been torn from its context and misused to further the antagonism between the so-called Brahmins and the so-called non-Brahmins.  I do not wish to retract a word of what I said at that meeting, I was appealing to those who are accepted as Brahmins.  I told them that in my opinion the treatment of non-Brahmins by the Brahmins was as satanic as the treatment of us by the British.  I added that the non-Brahmins should be placated without any ado or bargaining.  But my remarks were never intended to encourage the powerful non-Brahmins of Maharashira or Madras, or the mischievous element among them, to overawe the so-called Brahmins.  I use the word ‘so-called’ advisedly.  For the Brahmins who have freed themselves from the thraldom of superstitious orthodoxy have not only no quarrel with non-Brahmins as such, but are in every way eager to advance non-Brahmins wherever they are weak.  No lover of his country can possibly achieve its general advance if he dared to neglect the least of his countrymen.  Those non-Brahmins therefore who are coqueting with the Government are selling themselves and the nation to which they belong.  By all means let those who have faith in the Government help to sustain it, but let no Indian worthy of his birth cut off his nose to spite the face.