Page:Gandhi - Young India, Viking Press, 1924-1926.pdf/771

Rh sions. More than that no man has any right to impose or expect. The heart of man only God knows. An ill-dressed Panchama may have a much cleaner heart than a meticulously dressed high-caste Hindu.

In spite of the weakness of body to which the Poet himself referred in his address at the Abhoy Ashram, it was a good thing for Dr. Suresh Banerji, the manager of the Abhoy Ashram, at Comila to have drawn Dr. Tagore there. The reader knows that the Abhoy Ashram was established for the purpose of khaddar development. The Poet’s acceptance of the address and such association as it may imply on his part with the khaddar movement, dispels if any dispeller was necessary, the superstition that the Poet is against the spinning wheel and the khaddar movement in every shape or form. In the epitome of his address published in the ‘Servant’, I find the following reference to the movements:

“The country is not one’s own by mere accident of birth but becomes so by one’s life’s contribution. An animal has got its fur but man has got to spin and weave because what the animal has got, it has got once for all and ready-made. It is for man to rearrange and reshuffle for his purposes materials he finds placed before him.”

But there are other pregnant facts in the address which are helpful to workers for Swaraj, this is what the Poet has to say:

“That we were so long kept from realising India in her true self is due to the fact that we have not by daily endeavour created her by moment and momemaking her healthful and fruitful.”

Thus he adjures us each one individually to make daily