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"Shame upon you, Christians!" the mute nakedness of the Mahatma cries louder than words—for Englishmen know that they as individuals have not, and that he as an individual has, obeyed the command: "Sell all thou hast, and give it to the poor." He built up as a young man one of the most lucrative legal practices in India, then devoted all his possessions except the last wad or two of rags to succoring the needy. During the Boer war he turned the other cheek to Great Britain by organizing Indian Red Cross units, served with such passive, non-violent gallantry at the front that he wrung a medal for bravery from the Empire. For his pro-British speeches during the World War he drew another medal.
"Mother India." The pagan of so many Christlike virtues is not however a Christian. His followers have gone to the extraordinary length of setting up their country as their goddess. She, the actual land and map of India, is frequently represented today by paintings which show the goddess superimposed upon the map, her head always depicted among the Himalayan Mountains, her arms stretched out to embrace the east and west extremities of the map, her feet always close together resting upon Cape Comorin.
The name of this astonishing goddess— at once political and religious—is of course "Mother India." The political anthem and the religious chant of her devotees is Bande Mataram ("Hail Mother").
Taboo and Spinning. Up to the time Alfred Emanuel Smith ran for President, U. S. journalists were prevented by taboo from writing religious facts into political despatches, even if they thought them paramount. Taboo keeps off the front page Mr. Gandhi's use of Christian acts as a weapon against men with Christian beliefs. Only in exceptional publications like Asia (U. S. monthly) has the religious side of India's passive battle with England been described at graphic length by men like "Upton Close" (pseudonym of Joseph Washington Hall, probably the greatest historian of contemporary Asia, certainly the one closest in tune with Asians), and C. F. Andrews, an Englishman who used to be St. Gandhi's secretary. In the daily press, taboo keeps Gandhi to the fore as a sort of quaint fool with spinning wheel, who for no good Anglo-Saxon reason is followed with blind fanaticism by gibbering millions. The wheel (every one of the saint's followers and he himself must spin at least 6,000 ft. of cotton thread per month, 200 ft. per day) is indeed a strange weapon.
Everyone vaguely understands that textiles are one of England's key industries, that India is this industry's key customer, and that if Mr. Gandhi could fire his countrymen with a sufficient resolve to buy not one snippet more of English cloth but to spin and weave their own, the result would be even more poverty-pinched faces in Lancashire than one sees there already (TIME, Aug. 12, et seq.).
But many a U. S. citizen assumes that, supposing England could be laid low by this stab in her economic vitals, Mr. Gandhi would then stop spinning and buy a decent suit of clothes from his Asiatic fellowmen, the Japanese. Not at all: a mistaken idea. Well, then, surely he would stop if he could put a wall around India, behind which Indians could set up their own efficient textile mills and produce cloth cheaper than it can ever be made by hand. By no means! The spinning crusade is an economic war, first against England, second against Japan, third against Indian textile men, and the final victory is to be the destruction of the Machine Age.
With compassion and bitter sorrow, St. Gandhi imagines he has seen the Christian world brutalized and its morals stultified by the Machine. He knows that in Japan (the sole Asiatic nation which has mechanized itself) women now work all night in the textile mills (a scandal against which Lancashire bitterly protests), and in India itself Mr. Gandhi has seen enough of the Machine Age and Big Business to convince him that these things must be destroyed if mankind would save its immortal soul. Yet Historian Upton Close, sympathetic though he is with Asians, acutely as he realizes the difficulty of their adjustment to mechanization, believes that upon this point St. Gandhi is butting against a stone wall which may smash him if he butts too hard.
Of paramount significance ard: these facts, in the last 13 years Japan has risen from supplying 3% of India's imported textiles to 13.6%; Great Britain has declined from 97.1% to 82%. Indian textile mills—anathema to St. Gandhi—now produce 45.2% of the national consumption.
"Recpolism." As an economic weapon the spinning wheel may be mere butting against a wall, but it is also the symbol of Statesman Gandhi's political program of "non-cooperation." The man is in fact a triple personality: Saint, Anti-Machinist, Statesman. He insists upon mixing up Religion, Economics and Politics into something before which the Anglo-Saxon stands puzzled and aghast, unwilling and unable to give it an English name. If Englishmen were Germans they would call what Mr. Gandhi is driving at "recpolism" (R—eligion, EC—onomics, Pol—itics).
As a "recpolman," Mr. Gandhi is driving at something which can best be illustrated by stating an extreme case. A naked Indian steps up to an English policeman and says: "Either get out of my country or kill me." The policeman kills him. Another Indian steps up and the process is repeated, another and another and another and another and another. After several Indians, the English policeman perhaps suddenly realizes that he is a murderer, remembers the Divine command ''Thou shalt not kill!" He throws away his pistol, bursts into sobs of penitence, scuttles out of India. Or perhaps he goes on coolly shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting—but Mr. Gandhi does not believe that possible.
It was with his large mind obsessed by this strange ideology that Mahatma Gandhi made to Indians his recent terrible, mystic appeal (TIME, March 24): "Money alone will not win self-government. If money could win, I should have obtained it long ago. What is required, therefore, is your blood."