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"Raging Breast." In 1921 Mr. Gandhi was launched, as he was last week, upon a "recpolic" struggle of this kind: Shame the Christians! Refuse to buy their cloth! Die unresisting at their hands! Nauseate them and drive them mad! However in 1922 the Indian followers of Mr. Gandhi were not as thoroughly saturated as he believed with his mass-martyr ideology. They began to riot at Assam, to strike in Bengal, to massacre at Malabar. The nation was unquestionably roused to such a pitch of fervor that, at one word from "Recpolman" Gandhi, the most terrible grapple and insurrection of modern times would have begun. George V knows how many of his subjects' lives Mr. Gandhi saved by dramatically withdrawing the seven-day ultimatum he had sent to the Viceroy, Lord Reading, demanding independence for India within that time. Mr. Gandhi chose to rebuke Indians for what he called their folly and breakdown of discipline, canceled his whole movement, became temporarily unpopular and, as Baron Lloyd says: "Then we put him in jail. You know the rest."
As he stood in the dock Mr. Gandhi— like Socrates with the bowl of hemlock— delivered perhaps his greatest oration.* At his British judge the saint thundered:
"The only course open to you, the Judge, is ... either to resign your post or inflict on me the severest penalty . . . for [doing] what in law is a deliberate crime, and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen. ... I do not expect [acquittal and the judge's resignation] but by the time I have finished with my statement, you will perhaps have a glimpse of what is raging within my breast!"
Salt & Opium. As he painfully kept up his 200-mile walk, last week—not like an imaginary Statesman Stimson trudging to London—but as the unique "Recpolman" Gandhi, breathless spectators watched.
When Mr. Gandhi should reach the sea, when he should defy the British salt monopoly,* when he should break British law by scooping up a little sea water and publicly evaporating it to recover a mere pinch of salt—what then? Would enough Indians respond to this, the agreed signal for nonviolent, mass civil disobedience? Would they obey the Mahatma, abstain from paying taxes, abstain from all obedience to British employers or superiors,† buy no British cloth, and pray that they may meet Death all innocent and nonresisting at British hands?
In London the stock exchange was steady at zero hour last week, though Indian securities have gradually declined during the past three months (TIME, Jan. 13 et seq.).
Because he made a "seditious utterance" in praise of Mahatma Gandhi, the Mayor of Calcutta, Mr. J. M. Sengupta was sentenced to ten days' imprisonment last week, while he sat mute and motionless in court, refusing to make any defense. When the Mahatma came to the village of Ankhi on his walk he rebuked the inhabitants for their passive refusal to allow the local British police to buy food. "It is against religious principles to starve anyone," said the saint. "I would suck snake's poison even from General Dyer, should he be bitten."**
Trudging along with Mr. Gandhi, trying their best to follow him in act, word and thought, ten disciples were stricken with fever.