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16

LETTERS FROM ABROAD

of the duties we shall have the fullest right and power and time to bring others to book for their transgressions.

Let us forget the Punjab affairs—but never forget that we shall go on deserving such humiliation over and over again until we set our house in order. Do not mind the waves of the sea, but inind the leaks in your vessel. Politics in our country is extremely petty. It has a pair of legs, one of which has shrunk and shrivelled and become paralytic, and therefore it feebly waits for the other ene to drag it on. There is no harmony between the two and our politics, in its hoppings and totterings and falls, is comic and undignified. The entreaty and anger, which alternately are struggling to find expression in the ludicrously lame member of this tragic partnership, both belong to our abject feebleness, When Non-co-operation comes naturally as our final moral protest against the unnaturalness of our political situation, then it will be glorious, because true; but when it is another form of begging—it may be, the best form-—then let us reject it.

The establishment of perfect co-operation of life and mind among ourselves must come first through tapasya of sacrifice and self-dedication, and then will come in its natural course the non-co- operation, When the fruit completely ripens itself, it finds its freedom through its own fulfilment of truth. Our country is crying to her own children for their co-operation in the removal of obstacles in