Indians have already demonstrated their willingness to recognise accomplished facts and to accept in practice any reasonable settlement which does not strike fatally at the principle laid down by Mr. Srinivasa Sastri, not only on behalf of his fellow-countrymen, but in the name of the Government of India, which here again has acted as a national Indian Government.  South Africa, it may be, will nevertheless persist in subordinating to a narrow conception of her own interests the higher interests of Imperial unity, which, if it ever ceased to include India, would assuredly be a much poorer thing.  It is all the more essential that if India’s faith in the Empire is not to be, perhaps irretrievably, shaken, South Africa should remain, in her refusal to honour the pledge of partnership given to India on behalf of the whole Empire, a solitary exception amongst the self-governing Dominions, and that the United Kingdom, whose responsibility to India is most directly involved, should insist that the pledge be redeemed to the full in the Crown Colonies which are under the immediate and direct control of the Imperial Government.

FOOTNOTES: 

[4] August 1921.

CHAPTER XV

THE INCLINED PLANE OF GANDHIISM

Those who have persistently derided the “Non-co-operation” movement and announced its imminent collapse have been scarcely less wide of the mark than Mr. Gandhi himself when he began to predict that it would bring Swaraj to India by a date, not always quite the same, but always less than a year distant.  The original programme of “Non-co-operation” has hitherto failed egregiously.  Only very few lawyers have abandoned their practice in “Satanic” law-courts at his behest, still fewer Indians have surrendered the distinctions conferred on them by Government.  A mischievous ferment has been introduced once more into Indian schools and colleges.  Some youths have foolishly wrecked their own future, or seen it wrecked for them, by attempts to boycott and obstruct the examinations on which their career so often depends.  But neither have Mr. Gandhi and his followers destroyed the schools and colleges against which they have waged war, nor created in anything more than embryo, and in extremely few places, the “national” schools and colleges that were to take their place.  Even Rabindranath Tagore, whose poetic imagination was at first fired by Mr. Gandhi’s appeal to renounce the title of knighthood awarded to him in recognition of his literary genius, has had enough practical experience of education, as he himself has conceived and carried it into execution on his own quite original lines, to be driven at last to admit that Indian youths are asked to bring their patriotic offering of sacrifice, “not to a fuller education, but to non-education.”  With his craving for metaphysical accuracy of expression, he has even