Page:Holmes - World Significance of Mahatma Gandhi.djvu/9

 enemy of Gandhi, and almost at once he will mention the loin-cloth episode, and offer it as proof of the Mahatma’s insane fanaticism. What is this episode? Some months ago, in the prosecution of his non-cooperation campaign against the government, Gandhi ordered his followers to boycott all cotton goods imported from England, destroy whatever foreign cloth or clothing they had on hand, and spin what they needed on their own domestic spindles. It soon developed that obedience to this command would cause great inconvenience and even suffering, especially among the poor, by stripping them practically naked of the little that they had. At once Gandhi appeared in public, on the country highways and even in the cities, clad in nothing but a loin-cloth, that no man in all the land should be embarrassed by a poverty greater than his own. Such deeds are a commonplace in Gandhi’s life. His whole career reveals a positive passion for community of experience with mankind. When his people look upon him, therefore, they see not a leader merely but a comrade and a brother, one who is in all things like unto themselves; and of course they reverence him as one who is divine.

This deliberate kinship with the masses of his fellow-countrymen leads us to another quality which is fundamental in any estimate of Gandhi’s personality. I refer to his self-abnegation, his sacrifice, his capacity for suffering. Very early in his career Gandhi discovered what he called “the law of conscious suffering”—the truth that the mastery of the world waits upon the man who is willing not to make others suffer, but to suffer himself; and his whole life has been a discipline to its attainment. At the outset he sacrificed his property, his social standing, his profession, everything that could separate him from entire devotion to his fellow-men. In his personal habits he began and still continues to practice an asceticism that might well be the envy of a medieval monk. In his work as a reformer he has evaded no penalty, but has accepted gladly the punishments imposed upon him as only so many weapons to his hand. He has faced an assassin without flinching. Four times, in South Africa and in India, he has been imprisoned. Thrice he has been beaten by mobs, and once left prone in the gutter as one dead. His body bears the stripes of the whips with which he has been lashed, his wrists and ankles the marks of the chains with which he has been bound for hours together to the iron bars of his cell. Read Paul’s catalogue of sufferings, and you find it a less terrible array than Gandhi’s! “I have gone through the most fiery ordeals