to be appropriate.’ Pathans, Patels, ex-indentured men, Indians of all classes and ages surrounded her, sought her advice and followed it. Europeans in South Africa would generally never travel in the same railway compartment as Indians, and in the Transvaal they are even prohibited from doing so. Yet Miss Schlesin would deliberately sit in the third class compartment for Indians like other Satyagrahis and even resist the guards who interfered with her. I feared and Miss Schlesin hoped that she might be arrested some day. But although the Transvaal Government were aware of her ability, her mastery over the ‘strategy’ of the movement, and the hold she had acquired over the Satyagrahis, they adhered to the policy and the chivalry of not arresting her. Miss Schlesin never asked for or desired an increase in her monthly allowance of £6. I began giving her £10 when I came to know of some of her wants. This too she accepted with reluctance, and flatly declined to have anything more. ‘I do not need more, and if I take anything in excess of my necessities, I will have betrayed the principle which has attracted me to you,’ she would say, and silence me. The reader will perhaps ask what was Miss Schlesin’s education. She had passed the Intermediate examination of the Cape University, and obtained first class diploma in shorthand etc. She graduated after the struggle was over, and is now head mistress in a Government Girls’ School in the Transvaal.
Herbert Kitchin was an English electrician with a heart pure as crystal. He worked with us during the Boer War and was for some time editor of Indian Opinion. He was a lifelong brahmachari.
The persons I have thus far mentioned were such as came in close contact with me. They could not be classed among the leading Europeans of the Transvaal. However, this latter class too was very largely helpful, and the most influential of such helpers was Mr Hosken, ex-President of the Association of Chambers of Commerce of South Africa and a member of the Legislative Assembly of the Transvaal, whose acquaintance the reader has already
