Page:Mahatma Gandhi, his life, writings and speeches.djvu/292

M. K. Gandhi where passengers always leave some dirt where they go and take more on leaving?

On Indian trains alone passengers smoke with impunity in all carriages irrespective of the presence of the fair sex and irrespective of the protests of nonsmokers and notwithstanding a byelaw which prevents a passenger from smoking without the permission of his fellow passengers in a compartment which is not allotted to smokers.

The existence of the awful war cannot be allowed to stand in the way of removal of this gigantic evil. War can be no warrant for tolerating dirt and overcrowding. One could understand an entire stoppage of passenger traffic in a crisis like this but never a continuation or accentuation of insanitation and conditions that must undermine health and morality.

Compare the lot of the 1st class passengers with that of the 3rd class. In the Madras case the 1st class fare is over five times as much as the 3rd class fare. Does the 3rd class passenger get one fifth, even one tenth, of the comfort of his 1st class fellow? It is but simple justice to claim that relative 172