such necessary commodities with other villages where
they are not locally producible. This may all sound nonsensical. Well,
India is a country of nonsense. It is nonsensical to parch one's throat
with thirst when a kindly Mahomedan is ready to offer pure water to
drink. And yet thousands of Hindus would rather die of thirst than drink
water from a Mahomedan household. These nonsensical men can also, once
they are convinced that their religion demands that they should wear
garments manufactured in India only and eat food only grown in India,
decline to wear any other clothing or eat any other food. Lord Curzon
set the fashion for tea-drinking. And that pernicious drug now bids fair
to overwhelm the nation. It has already undermined the digestive
apparatus of hundreds of thousands of men and women and constitutes an
additional tax upon their slender purses. Lord Hardinge can set the
fashion for Swadeshi, and almost the whole of India forswear foreign
goods. There is a verse in the Bhagavad Gita, which, freely rendered,
means, masses follow the classes. It is easy to undo the evil if the
thinking portion of the community were to take the Swadeshi vow even
though it may, for a time, cause considerable inconvenience. I hate
legislative interference, in any department of life. At best it is the
lesser evil. But I would tolerate, welcome, indeed, plead for a stiff
protective duty upon foreign goods. Natal, a British colony, protected
its sugar by taxing the sugar that came from another British colony,
Mauritius. England has sinned against India by forcing free trade upon
her. It may have been food for her, but it has been poison for this
country.

It has often been urged that India cannot adopt Swadeshi in the economic
life at any rate. Those who advance this objection do not look upon
Swadeshi as a rule of life. With them it is a mere patriotic effort not
to be made if it involved any self-denial. Swadeshi, as defined here, is
a religious discipline to be undergone in utter disregard of the
physical discomfort it may cause to individuals. Under its spell the
deprivation of a pin or a needle, because these are not manufactured in
India, need cause no terror. A Swadeshist will learn to do without
hundreds of things which today he considers necessary. Moreover, those
who dismiss Swadeshi from their minds by arguing the impossible, forget
that Swadeshi, after all, is a goal to be reached by steady effort. And
we would be making f