Page:Mahatma Gandhi, his life, writings and speeches.djvu/230

M. K. Gandhi recesses of Madras and do the same kind of work, the things which I have noticed in Madras will be conspicuous by their absence when I next pay my visit to this great city. It is not enough that we clean out the villages occupied by our Pariah brethren. If they are amenable to reason, to persuasion, shall we have to say that the so-called highest classes are not equally amenable to reason, to persuasion and are not amenable to the hygenic laws which are indispensable in order to live a city life? We may do many things with impunity when we have got vast acres of open ground to surround us, but when we transport ourselves to crowded streets where we have hardly air space enough to give our lungs the proper quantity of air, the life becomes changed and we have to obey another set of laws.

It is no use saddling the Municipality with responsibility for the conditions in which we find not only the central parts of Madras, but the conditions in which we find the central parts of every city in India without exception—and I have gone now to almost every city of importance in India. I feel that no Municipality in the world will be able to override the 110