Page:Gandhi and Saklatvala - Is India different.pdf/18

 Then we come to the psychological value of the movement. This was great. It began well, and it almost became wonderful at a certain stage. But why create a psychology if you do not intend to mobilise the spirit so created, and if you do not intend immediately to form men and women into an organisation for a definite material object while they are under a psychological influence and before that influence passes away? That is exactly my complaint, and the bitter disappointment of your world-critics against you. You missed an opportunity and you only opened the eyes of the political opponents of India,- and by your inaction, after a certain psychology was aroused, you only brought India under a tighter grip of her opponents and made her enslavement a little worse than before. Not only that, but the position of India worsened that of Egypt and, for a time, of China, and at any rate became harmful in Turkey, Persia and Afghanis tan. All these people have a right to complain against us if we bungle our affairs in such a manner as to have an in directly harmful effect upon them.

Whatever may be the feelings of some of your ardent admirers, I hope you and I are both agreed that we are both very common and ordinary persons. The political world that lives, works and struggles consciously, can analyse you or me with the same completeness as dissecting an ordinary insect. After the year 1900 the world changed from what it was immediately before the year 1900. Before 1900 leaders who gave expression to submission and to legislative hypocrisy and worked to build up hopes of salvation on such instruments of legislation were popular leaders, as Gladstone was to the British, Bismarck to the Germans, or Parnell to the Irish, or Dadabhai or Pherozeshah and Surendra Nath to the Indians. By the year 1900 the masses of men got tired and sick and their hearts began to burn with fire. The change came on very rapidly and universally, and only such individuals as expressed the burning fire of the heart and the revolt of the suffering human beings were taken as leaders.

The first task of those leaders was to express boldly and fearlessly the unexpressed voice of the people. The second