GANDHI’S ELOQUENCE.

Wairarapa Age, 16 March 1922, Page 4

GANDHI’S ELOQUENCE.

Gandhi, the Indian agitator who has at length been placed under arrest, first came into prominence a number of years ago by his advocacy of the demands of the Indians fii the Transvaal. Failing to obtain from the Brit ish Government what he considered to bo justice for these people, he became embittered against British rule, an l be has developed amongst his countrymen very much the same sort of doetrine that the “King" movement preached in New Zealand. Gandhi’s policy is to have nothing whatever to do with (he British, either their rule oi their civilisation. His ideal is the simple life and the self-sacrifice of the old Hindu, and, being an idealist, he sees no obstacles to the adoption of this doctrine even in the complex: world of to-day. He would reject European civilisation entirely, including its railways and its drains, and revert to the sort of life that Samuel Butler outlined in his “Erewhon." Of course we believe this to be absurd and impractical, hut Gandhi does not, and he has such influence over his country men, both Hindu and Mohammedan, that high-caste Brahmins look upon him as a mahatma and vast concourses of many-tongued Indians are swayed and thrilled by the polished English phrases of the little agitator. “A small, spare, stooping ascetic figure." he is said to be, “naked except for a pair of dotis no bigger than football shorts; a strange-looking man so small and emaciated that you wopder how hi- is able to send his voice to the edge of the crowd," and he speaks “in a style which any cultured Englishman night envy*"