Your letters always bring the atmosphere of Santiniketan round my mind with all its colour and sounds and movements, and my love for my boys, like a migratory bird, crosses back over the sea, seeking its own dear nest in the Ashram. Your letters are great gifts to me—I have not the power to repay them in kind. For now my mind faces the West, and all that it has to give naturally flows towards it. Therefore, for the time being, my direct communication with you has become thin like the stream of the Kopai in the summer. But I know Santiniketan will not bring forth its fulness of flower and fruit, if, through me, it does not send its roots to the Western soil. Stung by insult of injustice we try to repudiate Europe, but by doing so we insult ourselves. Let us have the dignity not to quarrel or retaliate, not to pay back smallness by being small ourselves. This is the time when we should dedicate all our resources of emotion, thought and character to the service of our country in a positive direction of duty.
We are suffering because of our offences against Shivam, against Advaitam; we spend all our energy in quarrelling with the punishment, and nothing of it is left for the reparation of wrongs we have done and are doing. When we have performed our part of the duties we shall have the fullest right and power and time to bring others to book for their transgressions.
Let us forget the Punjab affairs—but never forget that we shall go on deserving such humiliation over and over again until we set our house in order. Do not mind the waves of the sea, but mind the leaks in your vessel. Politics in our country is extremely petty. It has a pair of legs, one of which has shrunk and shrivelled and become paralytic, and therefore it feebly waits for the other one to drag it on. There is no harmony between the two and our politics, in its hoppings and totterings and falls, is comic and undignified. The entreaty and anger, which alternately are struggling to find expression in the ludicrously lame member of this tragic partnership, both belong to our abject feebleness. When Non-co-operation comes naturally as our final moral protest against the unnaturalness of our political situation, then it will be glorious, because true; but when it is another form of begging—it may be, the best form—then let us reject it.
The establishment of perfect co-operation of life and mind among ourselves must come first through tapasya of sacrifice and self-dedication, and then will come in its natural course the non-co-operation. When the fruit completely ripens itself, it finds its freedom through its own fulfilment of truth. Our country is crying to her own children for their co-operation in the removal of obstacles in our social life, which for centuries have been hampering us in our self-realisation. We need co-operation in the sacrifice of love, more than anything else, to prove to our country that she is ours; and then we shall have the moral right to say to others, “We have nothing to do with you in our own affairs.” And for this, all the moral fervour which the life of Mahatma Gandhi represents, and which he, of all other men in the world, can call up, is needed.
That such a precious treasure of power should be put into the mean and frail vessel of our politics, allowing it to sail across endless waves of angry recrimination, is terribly unfortunate for our country, where our mission is to revive the dead with the fire of the soul. The external waste of our resources of life is great owing to external circumstances; but that the waste of our spiritual resources should also be allowed to happen on adventures that are wrong from the point of view of moral truth is heart-breaking. It is criminal to turn moral force into a blind force.
Our time to go to Holland is drawing near. I have numerous invitations from over there to lecture. I am not yet fully ready. Just now I am busy writing. My subject is the Meeting of the East and West. I hope it will be finished before I leave Paris.