extent of private property held by one person. The vast size of modern corporations and governments adds greatly to their power for evil and to the difficulty of preventing abuses.
Gandhi wants all large or expensive machinery limited in amount, controlled and probably owned by the State and operated only for the welfare of the workers and of society. He has no objection to small, inexpensive machinery that is adapted to family or individual use and obtainable by all.[1] Such a rule, if made effective, would go far toward ending the present evils of private ownership of the huge centres of production.
The emphasis of Gandhiism on the value of smallness, on the superiority of quality over quantity, and on simplicity of living, tends to control private property and to prevent its excessive modern evils. People can have most of the real advantages of science without enormous ma chines or huge corporations. Though private property needs limitation and reform, the evils of modern capitalism perhaps come more from the defects and misuse of money than from private property. We may admit the value of all the Socialist proposals, and yet add that they alone are not enough, and indeed probably cannot be attained and preserved without these other and subtler psycho logical changes.
It seems to me that Gandhi’s emphasis on small-scale, largely autonomous organizations (villages) is in the long run sounder, at least for India, than the large, highly centralized governmental organizations of the Russian
- ↑ In a conversation reported in Young India for Nov. 13, 1924, Gandhi said he would be glad for people to have many such machines as the Singer sewing machine, and in regard to the factories necessary to make such machines he said: “I am socialist enough to say that such factories should be nationalized or State controlled. They ought to be working under only the most attractive and ideal conditions, not for profit but for the benefit of humanity, love taking the place of greed as the motive.”
