Page:Speeches And Writings MKGandhi.djvu/683

 VIOLENCE AND NON-VIOLENCE.

[At the time of the Moplah outbreak in August 1921, Mr. Gandhi was in Assam. Within a week of the outbreak, Mr. Gandhi wrote as follows to the Young India undes the heading, " The Two Incompatible*"

Violence and non-violence are two incompatible forces destructive of each other. Non-violence for its success therefore needs an entirely non-violent atmosphere. The Moplah outbreak has disturbed the atmosphere, as nothing else has since the inauguration of Non-Co-oper- ation. I am writing this at Sylhet on the 29th August. By the time it is in print, much more information will' have reached the public. I have only a hazy notion of what has happened. I have seen only three issues of daily papers containing the Associated Press messages. One cannot help noting the careful editing these mes- have succeeded in taking half-a-dozen lives and have given already a few hundred. Malabar is under mar- tial law. The reprisals on the part of the Government are still to follow. The braver the insurgents, the sterner the punishment. Such is the law of Govern- ments. And I would not have minded the loss of ten times as many lives as the Moplahs must have lost, if only they had remained strictly non-violent. They would then have brought Swaraj nearest. It is any day worth all thd price we can pay in our own lives. For the Moplahs it would have meant too the immediate redress of the Khilafat wrong. God wants the purest sacrifice. Our blood must not contain the germs ot
 * sages have undergone. But it is clear that Moplahs

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