Page:Holmes - World Significance of Mahatma Gandhi.djvu/13

 movement of revolt our age has known, and does it on the basis of a program of “resist not evil”! It is this program, or technique, of non-resistance as a method of social change, as the plan of campaign in what is literally a war for national independence, that constitutes Gandhi’s unique and immortal contribution to experience. Beginning with the elementary precept of “non-violence,” which pledges all Indians to abstain from use of force under all circumstances, Gandhi passes on to his second and basic principle of “non-co-operation.” This is only superficially a negative principle—a refusal to co-operate in any way with the English government, to accept favors or rewards, to use the courts, to send children to the schools, to buy English goods, to pay taxes, to recognize the laws. At bottom, it is a magnificently positive assertion of Indian self-sufficiency—the definite organization of a society which is politically and economically self-sustaining and therefore independent. What Gandhi is doing is teaching his people to do their own work, to manage their own affairs, to build and maintain their own institutions—and to endure in patience, not only without hatred or desire for revenge but with actual goodwill toward the enemy, whatever sufferings this policy may bring upon them from their alien rulers. He is organizing a vast program of social revolt on the basis of love—love one for another expressed in terms of mutual service, and love for the enemy expressed in terms of forgiveness and compassion. He is showing that no people needs to be helpless in the face of physical force, or to resist force with force to their own misery and destruction. All they have to do is to act together in ignoring it—to rise above it by discipline, to conquer it by suffering. “We must meet organization by greater organizing ability. We must meet discipline by great discipline, and we must meet sacrifices by infinitely greater sacrifices.”

It is in this program of non-resistance, applied on a vast scale to social issues, that I find evidence of a significance in Gandhi’s work which far transcends the borders alike of country and of race. If the Mahatma succeeds in his great venture, non-resistance will be made for the first time in history a universal principle of life. The reproach that it is nothing more than an eccentric rule of individual or sectarian life, will be removed. The charge that its feasibility is limited to the single life, or the unworldly habit of experience, will be answered. If Gandhi succeeds, we shall see that non-resistance is a sound method of social action,