faith and of his life. Since unnumbered millions of Indians could wear nothing but the loin cloth, then he would wear that loin cloth himself, that he might identify himself the more closely with the great masses of men and women whom he would serve. This was the reason also why he made himself propertyless, stripping himself of practically every possession in the world. The reason was very simple. The multitudes of the Indian people owned nothing, and that being the case, he would be one with them, and himself own nothing. I think I can say that when he died, as through all these years gone by, Gandhi owned only two or three loin cloths, and a shawl or two, a pair of spectacles, a one dollar Ingersoll watch, a fountain pen, and a few sheets of paper. That’s all the property he owned or wanted to own, just that he might be identified with the life of the Indian people. This was the reason he organized his Ashram and for years lived with his followers in this Ashram. The Ashram was really nothing in the world but a kind of a duplicate of a typical Indian village. And since there were seven hundred thousand of these villages in India, in which hundreds of millions of his fellow countrymen lived, he also would live in such a place, that he might be the more close to the people whom he loved and whom he sought to lead.
In the last letter that I received from the Mahatma, a letter awaiting me on my return from India, he expressed, in his humorous way, some little regret that I had traveled so fast and so far in India, by planes on the one hand and railroad trains on the other. He reminded me that India was a land of the bullock cart, and that if I hadn’t been so much of an American, I might wisely have chosen to travel by this native vehicle from place to place. A little suggestion, perhaps, that I hadn’t come so very close to the Indian people when flying in an airplane! Gandhi, when so traveling, would certainly have gone in the bullock cart, but for years he chose to walk. For since the majority of the Indian people always walked, sometimes hundreds of miles when they journeyed from one place to another, so also did Gandhi choose to walk, a kind of a pilgrim into the hearts of his people, living their lives and cherishing their destiny.
Another thing that Gandhi did in his great campaign for freedom! He taught his people for the first time the secret of personal dignity and self-respect. For nearly two hundred years the Indian people had lived subject to the alien rule of the British Empire. They had become as slavish and subservient in spirit as they were subject under the operation of British law. They bowed obsequiously before the westerner, daring not even to say or to show that perhaps their souls might still remain their own. And then Gandhi came along, dowered first of all with his own supreme sense of dignity and his belief in the integrity of his people, and conveyed to the unlettered and illiterate millions of his fellow-countrymen, that same sense of dignity and honor, of power and right, that lived within himself. It was under the influence of the Mahatma that the Indians raised themselves from out the dust, dared for the first time to stand erect and look an Englishman straight in the face. When, after years of teaching and of discipline, he thus lifted up the people from debasement and subjection, and had taught to them the dignity and honor of their own manhood, he knew that his fight was won. For once self-respect was achieved within the masses, their power was of course supreme.
In the third place, Gandhi organized the Indian people unashamedly around his own personality. For years Gandhi spent most of his time just traveling
15
