Page:Holmes - World Significance of Mahatma Gandhi.djvu/12

 at large. Occasionally, to be sure, there have appeared larger or smaller groups of men and women who have organized movements, and even whole communities, on non-resistant principles. Thus there were the Christians of the first two centuries of our era, various heretical sects of the Middle Ages, such as the Cathari, the Waldenses and the Albigenses, and such modern religious groups as the Quakers, the Mennonites, and the Doukhobors of Russia and western Canada. But these groups, like separate individuals of the Tolstoyan type, have been independent and self-contained. They have lived very largely in and for themselves, and thus are important as an example rather than as an influence. They show what non-resistance can do on a small scale, but teach nothing about its practicability as a general social principle.

The second difficulty, under which the non-resistant gospel has suffered in the past, has been its identification with a remote or other-worldly type of life. The non-resistant of the Middle Ages was the monk of the St. Francis type, who abandoned the world and went off to live alone by himself or with his group of disciples. The supreme non-resistant of modern times was Tolstoy, who characteristically cut himself off from his family, his country, his church, and lived like a kind of hermit on the land; and at the end fled away, like a wounded animal in the brush, to die alone. These men were sublime in their personal lives. The non-resistant in all ages has marked the highest attainment of inward purity and outward sacrifice. But with few exceptions—Garrison, for example!—they have achieved virtue at the expense of contact with the world of men. From the practical point of view, the non-resistant has again and again been an ineffective man. He has solved the problems of life by running away from them. Tolstoy is one of the sublimest characters in history, but he contributed nothing to the solution of those questions that vex most terribly the society of modern times.

It is these two disabilities which have left the advocate of non-resistance helpless to commend his doctrine as an adequate method for meeting the contingencies of the modern industrial struggle, for example, or of international war. Non-resistance may be all right, he has been told, as a personal idiosyncrasy or as a means of escape from social responsibility, but it has nothing to offer the man who has to meet things as they are! And now, behold, comes Gandhi, a new type of non-resistant, a man who leads his people in the