Page:Holmes - World Significance of Mahatma Gandhi.djvu/15

 exploitation of the many to the profit of the few. To Gandhi, release from this economic system of western capitalism is as important for India as release from the political system of British imperialism. If English rule is overthrown, only to leave behind it English railroads, English factories, English promoting companies, and so on, the Indian people will have gained only the substance and not the shadow of independence. They will still be enslaved, and enslaved to a system which is fatal to the best interests of humanity. At the heart of this western civilization of ours, Gandhi believes, is death and not life. We have created a vast machine which proves to be a Frankenstein which is devouring us. This monster has bound us to the wheel of labor, deceived us with the lure of wealth, degraded us to the base uses of materialism, leveled to the ground our standards of moral and spiritual idealism. Even in a physical sense it is a failure, for in the end it brings only such calamity as the Great War. It is this system of economic ruin which Gandhi sees coming into Asia, after having conquered and ravaged our western world. He sees it victorious in Japan, he sees it invading China, he sees it planted at the heart of India—and he declares war against it! He fights the opium trade, he battles against the liquor traffic, he substitutes the domestic spindle for the factory loom, he denounces the railroad, the automobile, and the machine in general. What Gandhi is attempting to do is to save India from the blight of western materialism by restoring her own native civilization and culture before it is too late. He is trying to preserve his land from the curse of commercialism, the horror of machine exploitation and production, the slavery of wage labor, the whole black system of capitalistic life. And he would do this not for its own sake, but for the sake of India’s soul. He would save the spirit of his people—their simplicity, their art, their religion, their mystic comradeship with one another and with God.

It is here, in this great service, that Gandhi becomes in very truth the great religious leader of whom I spoke in the beginning. It is in this work of spiritual redemption that he takes on a universal significance, for the West as well as for the East. For in saving India, Gandhi is saving the world. In staying the ravages of capitalism in his own land, he is starting a movement which, by process of reaction, will flow back into our world and restore to us those things of the spirit which we have lost. Our western civilization is in exactly the situation of Rome in the days of