and the people were
grossly misled. But the plain fact remains that when India had emerged
from the trying ordeal of the war, not only with honour untarnished, but
having placed us under a great obligation, our first practical return
was to pass a repressive measure, for fear, forsooth, that if it was not
passed then it might be pigeon-holed and forgotten. India asked for
bread and we gave her a stone--a stupid, blundering act, openly
deprecated at the time by all moderate unofficial opinion in India. What
was the result? The Punjab disturbances and the preventive massacre of
the Jallianwala Bagh. I do not propose to dwell on this deplorable and
sadly mishandled matter, save to say that so far from cowing agitation,
it has left a legacy of hate that it will take years to wipe out; and
that the subsequent action of a number of ill-informed persons in
raising a very large sum of money for the officer responsible for that
massacre has further estranged Indians and emphasised in their eyes the
brand of their subjection.

THE RISE OF GHANDI

To India, thus seething with bitterness over the Punjab disturbances,
there was added the Moslem resentment over the fate of Turkey. I was
myself in London and Paris in a humble capacity at the Peace Conference,
and I know that our leading statesmen were fully informed of the Moslem
attitude and the dangers of unsympathetic and dilatory action in this
matter. But an arrogant diplomacy swept all warnings aside and scorned
the Moslem menace as a bogey. What was the result? Troubles in Egypt, in
Mesopotamia, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, and the Khilifat movement in India.
Hindu agitators were not slow to exploit Moslem bitterness, and for the
first time there was a genuine, if very ephemeral, _entente_ between the
two great rival creeds.

It was in this electric atmosphere that Ghandi, emerging from his
ascetic retirement, found himself an unchallenged leader. Short of
stature, frail, with large ears, and a gap in his front teeth, he had
none of the outward appearance of dominance. His appeal lay in the
simplicity of his life and character, for asceticism is still revered in
the East. But his intellectual equipment was mediocre, his political
ideas nebulous and impracticable to a degree, his programme archaic and
visionary; and from the start he was doomed to fail. The _Hijrat_
movement which he advocated brought ruin to thousands of Moslem homes;
his attack on Government educational establ