Page:Mahatma Gandhi, his life, writings and speeches.djvu/383

 under the forms of law; and when that is unhappily the case, resistance to law becomes not a crime, but a virtue. I shirnk from saying anything that may even seem to encourage lawlessness; bat I think that it is necessary to say quite plainly and openly that the Indians in South Africa are now resisting not law but tyranny. They have been very patient. For twenty years or more they have pleaded for justice, and it is only after exhausting every other possible means of securing redress for their cruel wrongs, that they have at last taken the step of passive resistance to unjust laws. For the South African Government, therefore, to appeal to the duty of obedience to the law seems to me to ignore the obvious fact that the just complaints of the Indians for the last twenty years has been that the law has been made an engine of tyranny and injustice. It is all very well for the South African Government to say, 'we cannot consider your grievances till you cease your resistance to the law.' The Indians can say with far more reason: 'we will cease our resistance to your laws when you cease to make them Instruments of oppression.' In saying this, I do not for a moment condone any acts of unprovoked violence that may have occurred on the part of the Indians; I must repeat with regard to these outbreaks what I have already said elsewhere, that the responsibility for them must rest mainly upon