Page:Report on the Memorial Meeting for Mahatma Gandhi.djvu/25

 in words. You have heard many distinguished speakers here this afternoon. The time is late, so I shall confine myself to one or two very simple observations.

“The first is that I believe that there is a significance for the peoples and the nations of the world who have gone mad during recent generations over theories of racial superiority, that it was a slender brown man in far-off India who has become the greatest moral and spiritual leader of the world since the days of Jesus Christ, and he did not worship force and materialism — not the mass murder of war, but a spirit of love and the gentleness of non-violence and peace.

“It may be that he will become even greater; in fact, I believe he will become even more powerful in death than he was in life, especially in view of the fact that he died from the very violence which he had spent his life in opposing.

“Perhaps Pakistan and India will learn the lesson that in disharmony and violence, there is the way to death; that in peace and non-violence, there is the way to lasting life for all human beings.

“I have listened to these distinguished representatives of the United Nations who struggled in the face of what seemed to be at times almost insuperable odds to find the kind of peace which Gandhi advocated. Perhaps we of the world, white and black, Jew and Gentile, Catholic and Protestant, believer and non-believer, may become as wise as the man who died but a few days ago, and learn that unless we can find that kind of peace that there is going to be only destruction for all of civilization.

“I stand here humbly this afternoon to pay tribute in my most simple fashion to one of the greatest leaders of mankind of all time, and I believe that his spirit would rest even more in peace if, instead of merrily sitting here this afternoon and making and listening to speeches, we went down