of a definite “Non-co-operation” movement to demonstrate the finality of the breach.  Mr. Gandhi appealed in the first place to the educated classes to set the example to the people.  He called upon those on whom the State had conferred honours and titles to renounce them, upon barristers and pleaders to cease to practise in the law-courts, and upon parents to withdraw their children from the schools and colleges tainted with State control and State doles.  If parents would not hearken to him, schoolboys and students were exhorted to shake themselves free of their own accord.  To the people he opened up simpler ways of “Non-co-operation” by abstaining from tea and sugar and all articles of consumption and of clothing contaminated by alien hands or alien industry.  If all would join in a common effort he promised that India would speedily attain Swaraj—­the term mentioned was generally a year—­and, quit of the railways and telegraphs and all other instruments and symbols of Western economic bondage, return to the felicity and greatness of Vedic times.  All this, however, was to be done by “soul force” alone and without violence.

In the course of the only long conversation I had with Mr. Gandhi I tried to obtain from him some picture of what India would be like under Swaraj as he understood it.  In a voice as gentle as his whole manner is persuasive, he explained, more in pity than in anger, that India had at last recovered her own soul through the fiery ordeal which Hindus and Mahomedans had undergone in the Punjab, and the perfect act of faith which the Khilafat meant for all Mahomedans, and that, purged of the degrading influences of the West, she would find again that peace which was hers before alien domination divided and exploited her people.  As to the form of government and administration which would then obtain in India, he would not go beyond a vague assurance that it would be based on the free will of the people expressed by manhood suffrage for which Indians were already ripe, if called upon to exercise it upon truly Indian lines.  When I objected that caste, which was the bed-rock of Hindu social and religious life, was surely a tremendous obstacle to any real democracy, he admitted that the system would have to be restored to its pristine purity and redeemed from some of the abuses that had crept into it.  But he upheld the four original castes as laid down in the Vedas, and even their hereditary character, though in practice some born in a lower caste might well rise by their own merits and secure the deference and respect of the highest castes, “such as, for instance, if I may in all modesty quote my own unworthy case, the highest Brahmans spontaneously accord to me to-day, though by birth I am only of a lowly caste.”  I tried to get on to more solid ground by pointing out that, whatever views one might hold as to his ultimate goal, the methods he was employing in trying to break up the existing schools and colleges and law-courts and to paralyse