Page:Speeches And Writings MKGandhi.djvu/648

 558 NON-COOPERATION

is different from an Englishman outside. Similarly an Englishman in India is different f r )m an Englishman in England. Here in India, you bel >ng to a system that is vile beyond description. It is possible, therefore, for me to condemn the system in the strongest terms t without considering you to be bad and without imputing bad motives to every Englishman. You are as much slaves of the system as we are. I want you, therefore, to reciprocate, and not impute to me motives which you cannot read in the written word. I give you the whole of my motive when I tell you, that I am impatient to end or mend a system, which has made India subservient to a handful of you and which has made Englishmen feel secure only in the shadow of the forts and the guns that obtrude themselves on one's notice in India. It is a degrading spectacle for you and for us. Our corporate life is based on mutual distrust and fear. This, you will admit, is unmanly. A system that is responsible for such a state of things, is necessarily satania You should be able to live in India as an integral part of its people and not always as foreign exploiters. One thousand Indian lives against one English life is a doctrine of dark despair, and yet believe me, it was enunciated in 1919 by the highest of you in the land.

I almost feel tempted to invite you to join me in destroying a system that has dragged both you and us down. But I feel 1 cannot as yet do so. We have not shown ourselves earnest, self-sacrificing and self-restrained enough for that consummation.

But 1 do ask you to help us in the boycott of foreign cloth and in the anti-drink campaign.

The Lancashire cloth, as English historians have shoffn, was forced upon India, and her own world-famed manufactures were deliberately and systematically ruined. India is, therefore, at the mercy not only of Lancashire but

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