Page:Gandhi and Saklatvala - Is India different.pdf/21

 create this phase of abject submission of man to man, no wonder that you should yourself despair of obtaining civil disobedience from 3'our own followers. You now complain that the masses are not ready for any such self-assertion, but even if that were so, your whole procedure is certainly not making them more ready for it.

Then there is one thing that I witnessed at Yeotmal which has hurt me greatly, and I had slight evidence of it before. Your work regarding the removal of untouchability is grand in its aspiration, and is not bad in its success as it is generally carried on. However, I strongly object to your permitting my countrymen and countrywomen to touch your feet and put their fingers in their eyes. Such touchability appears to be more damnable than untouchability, and I would sooner wish that two persons did not touch each other than any one human being should be touched by another in the way in which you were touched.

The depressed classes were subject to a sort of general disability, but this new phase of a man of the depressed class worshipping the feet of his deliverer is a more real individual depression and degradation of life, and however much you misunderstand me, I must call upon you to stop this nonsense. It is no use saying that you don't like it ; it is a matter of your not stopping it when nothing is easier in the world for you than to stop it. Yon are ruining the mentality and the psychology of these villagers for another generation or two. You are preparing the country not for mass civil dis obedience but for servile obedience and for a belief that there are superior persons on earth and Mahatmas in this life at a time when in this country the white man's prestige is already a dangerous obstacle in our way. Politically this career of yours is ruinous, and from a humanitarian point of view its degenerating influence appears to me to be a moral plague.

As regards the organisation of industrial labour, you are not ready to give your share, when we know that your co operation would be of a higher value in inviting workers to the fold of the Trade Union Congress. You don't realise that by such co-operation you would actually help in preventing many preventable deaths, especially of poor, innocent babies. Then you go one step further, and you use your influence by frequent declarations which discourage others from taking up this most necessary and urgent work. Then at times you