by retaining the British connection we can purify ourselves and purify the British people, and those who have no such belief.”  He concluded on a more minatory note:  “The British people will have to beware that if they do not want to do justice, it will be the bounden duty of every Indian to destroy the Empire”—­which Mr. Mahomed Ali, however, with less diplomacy, declared to be already dead and buried.

That the “Non-co-operation” programme was reaffirmed at Nagpur except in regard to the propaganda amongst schoolboys as differentiated from students, and that threats were uttered of extending passive resistance to the non-payment of taxes and more especially of the land tax, were not matters to cause much surprise to those who had measured the sharply inclined plane down which “Non-co-operation” was moving.  But one hardly sees how Mr. Gandhi can reconcile the racial hatred which was the key-note of all the proceedings with his favourite doctrine of Ahimsa.  He has, however, himself, on one occasion, openly referred to a time when legions of Indians may be ready to leap to the sword for Swaraj, and though his appeal is to an inner moral force which he declares to be unconquerable, he does not always disguise from himself or from his followers the bloodshed which the exercise of that moral force may involve.  In an article in support of the “Non-co-operation” movement in his organ Young India the following pregnant passage occurs: 

For me, I say with Cardinal Newman:  “I do not ask to see the distant scene; one step enough for me.”  The movement is essentially religious.  The business of every God-fearing man is to dissociate himself from evil in total disregard of consequences.  He must have faith in a good deed producing only a good result; that, in my opinion, is the Ghita doctrine of work without attachment.  God does not permit man to peep into the future.  He follows truth, although the following of it may endanger life.  He knows that it is better to die in the way of God than to live in the way of Satan.  Therefore, whoever is satisfied that this Government represents the activity of Satan has no choice left to him but to dissociate himself from it.

Are there any limits to the disastrous lengths to which a people may not be carried away by one who combines to such ends and in such fashion religious and political leadership?

CHAPTER X

SIDE-LIGHTS ON THE ELECTIONS

On probably the last of seventeen visits to India spread over some forty years, I landed after three years’ absence in Bombay early in November 1920, on the eve of the first elections for the new popular assemblies created by the Act of 1919.