Page:Holmes - World Significance of Mahatma Gandhi.djvu/14

 that resort to violence for any cause is no longer necessary, that for defence against aggression and in endeavors after liberty, there is “the better way” than force. If Gandhi succeeds, do I say? Gandhi has already succeeded; he has demonstrated this truth! His arrest was the final evidence of his triumph. More terrible to England than any sword, is the steadfast patience of this one little man, who in the true spirit of love, “beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.” In Gandhi, if men be wise, the era of force at last comes to its end, and the era of peace and brotherhood begins!

There is one final aspect of Gandhi’s universal significance of which I would speak before I end this address. I can best convey to you what I mean by referring to the charge most often brought against Gandhi by his enemies, that he is a fanatic who would destroy everything that civilization has achieved in the last three hundred years. Thus it is said that he would close the hospitals in India, rip up the railroads, smash the printing presses and cotton factories, scrap the whole intricate mechanism of modern life, in a vain endeavor to restore at one stroke the simpler ways of an earlier and more primitive day. Now, that Gandhi is thus a mad wrecker of the machinery of society as we know it today, is obviously disproved by the fact that he himself makes constant use of the various devices which are the commonplace of our time. Thus when he was so desperately wounded by the assassin in South Africa, he went to a hospital and was there nursed back to health by an Englishwoman who had come to know the kind of man he was. In India he travels constantly from place to place on the railroads. The other day, when extraordinary speed was necessary, he made the journey in a high-powered automobile. His use of the printing-press is constant and most effective.

There is truth, however, in the statement that Gandhi is fighting the machine of western civilization in India, and seeking to restore the native and therefore primitive culture of his people. It is just this which marks, to my mind, the culminating evidence of his genius as a spiritual leader. For Gandhi, as he looks upon his country today, sees it subjected to a two-fold yoke. On the one hand, there is the yoke of English government—the bondage of an alien political system, against which the nationalist movement is now being directed. On the other hand, there is the yoke of capitalism—that economic system which uses the vast machinery of modern invention for the