Page:Holmes - World Significance of Mahatma Gandhi.djvu/8

 the West. What is genuine eloquence in India may not be recognizable as such at all in the United States. But I might as well confess that Gandhi, so far as I can judge from his printed addresses, does not impress me as an orator. I find in his utterances no such magic of words as we are familiar with in the case of men like Edmund Burke and Patrick Henry. I had difficulty, for example, in selecting a passage from Gandhi’s writings which had the lilt and beauty, the soaring grandeur of style, which made it appropriate for reading as scripture in this service. That Gandhi can work a spell over an audience we know from abundant testimony, but it must be for reasons quite apart from eloquence of speech.

What is it that the Indians see when they look upon this man, and hail him as Mahatma? Not a great physical presence, not a gigantic intellect, not an inspired orator, but a personality or charater of transcendent spiritual beauty. What they see, first of all, is a man who has made his life to be at one with the great masses of the people. Gandhi was well born, of a family with ample means, and was given the best educational advantages both in his own country and in England. When he returned to Bombay, he began his career as a practitioner of the law. Then he did what so few men in any age have ever done! Instead of climbing up, up the ladder of achievement to wealth and fame, and thus away from the common people, he proceeded deliberately to move down—down to the depths of human misery and woe, down to where men toiled desperately and died miserably, down to the dark places of sweat and tears and blood. From the beginning he was resolved that there should be no suffering among men which he did not endure, no outrage which he did not feel, no cross which he did not carry. Even the “untouchables” should not be beneath his comradeship—to them he would descend, and with them share the bitterness of the world’s contempt! The experience of men, in other words, down to its remotest horror, he made his own; and always, in his long struggles for reform, met first himself the hazards to which he invited others. How beautiful, for example, is the story of his leading the Hinlu “coolies” in South Africa out on to the land, in revolt against the inequities of government! Here Gandhi was the first to sleep on the bare ground, beneath the stars; the first to practise the vow of poverty which he enjoined upon his followers; and the first to cultivate the land for sustenance! How impressive also the most recent and much more famous story of the loin-cloth! Talk with any