the machinery of administration was destructive rather than constructive, and that, confident as he might feel of substituting better things ultimately for those that he had destroyed, construction must always be a much slower process than destruction; and in the meantime infinite and perhaps irreparable harm would be done.  “No,” he rejoined—­and I think I can convey his words pretty accurately, but not his curious smile as of boundless compassion for the incurable scepticism of one in outer darkness—­“no, I destroy nothing that I cannot at once replace.  Let your law-courts with their cumbersome and ruinous procedure disappear, and India will set up her old Panchayats, in which justice will be dispensed in accordance with her own conscience.  For your schools and colleges, upon which lakhs of rupees have been wasted in bricks and mortar for the erection of ponderous buildings that weigh as heavily upon our boys as the educational processes by which you reduce their souls to slavery, we will give them simpler structures, open to God’s air and light, and the learning of our forefathers that will make them free men once more.”  Not that he would exclude all Western literature—­Ruskin, for instance, he would always welcome with both hands—­nor Western science so long as it was applied to spiritual and not to materialistic purposes, nor even English teachers, if they would become Indianised and were reborn of the spirit of India.  Indeed, what he had looked for, and looked in vain for, in the rulers of India was “a change of hearts” by which they too might be reborn of the spirit of India.  He hated no one, for that would be a negation of the great principle of Ahimsa, on which he expatiated with immense earnestness.

As I watched the slight ascetic frame and mobile features of the Hindu dreamer in his plain garment of white home-spun, and, beside him, one of his chief Mahomedan allies, Shaukat Ali, with his great burly figure and heavy jowl and somewhat truculent manner and his opulent robes embroidered with the Turkish crescent, I wondered how far Mr. Gandhi had succeeded in converting his Mahomedan friend to the principle of Ahimsa.  Perhaps Mr. Gandhi guessed what was passing in my mind when I asked him how the fundamental antagonism between the Hindu and the Mahomedan outlook upon life was to be permanently overcome even if the common cause held Hindus and Mahomedans together in the struggle for Swaraj.  He pointed at once to his “brother” Shaukat as a living proof of the “change of hearts” that had already taken place in the two communities.  “Has any cloud ever arisen between my brother Shaukat and myself during the months that we have now lived and worked together?  Yet he is a staunch Mahomedan and I a devout Hindu.  He is a meat-eater and I a vegetarian.  He believes in the sword, I condemn all violence.  But what do such differences matter between two men in both of whom the heart of India beats in unison?”