Page:Mahatma Gandhi, his life, writings and speeches.djvu/157

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Indians and their Employers

sentiments as themselves. Let them credit them to the fullest extent with their weaknesses, as also at least with the possibility of all the virtues. Would they not then treat their Indian employees even as brothers? It was not enough that they were well treated as they well treated their cattle. It was not enough that they looked upon them with a kindly eye merely; but it was necessary that employers should have a much broader view of their own position, that they should think of their employees as fellow human beings and not as Asiatics who had nothing in common with them who were Europeans, and they would also respond to every attention that might be given to them. Then they would have an intelligent interest not merely in the material or physical well-being of their men, but in their moral well-being. They would look after their morality, after their children, after their education, after their sanitation, and, if they were herding together in such a manner that they could not but indulge in hideous immorality, that they would themselves recoil with horror from the very imagination that the men who were for the time being under their control should indulge

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