Page:Speeches And Writings MKGandhi.djvu/699

 after the war is over, the lawyer will have occasion to go to his law books when people have time to fight among themselves. When a house is on fire, all the in- mates go out, and each one takes up a bucket to quench the fire. When all about me are dying for want of food, the only occupation permissible to me is to feed the hungry. It is my conviction that India is a house on fire, because its manhood * is being daily scorched, it is dying of hunger because it has no work to buy food with. Khulna is starving not because the people cannot work but because they have no work. The Ceded Dis- tricts are passing successively through a fourth famine. Onssa is a land suffering from chronic famines. Our ciiies are not India. India lives in her seven and a half lacs of Villages, and the cities live upon the villages. They do not bring their wealth from other countries. The city people are brokers aiwi commission agents for the big houses of Europe, America and Japan. The cities have co-operated with the latter in the bleeding process that has gone on for the past two hundred years. It is my belief, based on experience, that India is daily grow- ing poorer. The circulation about her feet and legs has almost stopped. And if we do not take care, she will collapse altogether.

To a people famishing and idle, the only acceptable form in which God can dare appear is work and promise of food as wages. God created man to work for his food, and said that those who ate without work were thieves. Eighty per cent, of India are compulsorily thieves half the year. Is it any wonder, if India has become one vast prison ? Hunger is the argument that is driving India to the spinning wheel. The call of the spinning wheel is the noblest of all, because it is

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