The South African stage of Mr. Gandhi’s career is of great importance, as it goes far to explain both the views and the methods which he afterwards applied in India.  He brought back with him from South Africa a profound distrust of Western civilisation, of which he had unquestionably witnessed there some of the worst aspects, and also a strong belief in the efficacy of passive resistance as the most peaceful means of securing the redress of all Indian grievances in India as well as in South Africa should they ever become in his opinion unendurable.  Mr. Gokhale, before he died, obtained a promise from him that for at least a year he would not attempt to give practical expression to the extreme views which he had already set forth in the proscribed pamphlet Hind Swaraj.  At an early age Mr. Gandhi had fallen under the spell of Tolstoian philosophy, and he has admitted only quite recently that for a time he was so much impressed with the doctrines of Christ that he was inclined to adopt Christianity; but the further study of the spiritual side of Hinduism convinced him that in it alone the key of salvation could be found, and all his teachings since then have been based on his faith in the superiority of the Indian civilisation rooted in Hinduism to Western civilisation, which for him in fact represents in its present stage only a triumph of gross materialism and brute force.  Nevertheless, when the Great War broke out, he was prepared to believe that the ordeal of war in the cause of freedom for which Britain had taken up arms might lead to the redemption of Western civilisation from its worst evils, and whilst in London on his way to South Africa he had already offered to form, and to enrol himself and his wife in, an Indian Volunteer Ambulance Corps.  Yet he was not blind to the flaws of the civilisation for which he stood.  He conducted a temperance campaign amongst his countrymen in South Africa, and, brought there into close contact with many Indians of the “untouchable” castes, he revolted against a system which tried to erect such insurmountable barriers between man and man.  Perhaps the best clue to the many contradictions in which his activities have continually seemed to involve him was furnished by himself when he said, “Most religious men I have met are politicians in disguise; I, however, who wear the guise of a politician am at heart a religious man,” and the doctrine which he holds of all others to be the corner-stone of his religion is that of Ahimsa, which, as he has described it, “requires deliberate self-suffering, not the deliberate injuring of the wrongdoer,” in the resistance of evil.