LETTERS FROM ABROAD
instantly obey. I was emphatic in my refusal to do so, and they went away angry, doubting the sincerity of my love for my motherland, And yet long before this popular ebullition of excitement, I myself had given a thousand rupees, when I had not five rupees to call my own, to open a Swadeshi store and courted banter and bankruptcy,
The reason of my _ refusing to advise those students to leave their schools was because the anarchy of a mere emptiness never tempts me, even when it is resorted to as a temporary measure. I am frightened of an abstraction which is ready to ignore living reality. These students were no mere phantoms ‘to me. Their life was a great fact to them and to the All, I could not lightly take upon myself the tremendous responsibility of a mere negative programme for them, which would uproot their life from its soil, however thin and poor that soil might be. The great injury and injustice, which had been done to those boys, who were tempted away from their career before any real provision was made, could never be made good to them. Of course that is nothing from the point of view of an abstraction, which can ignore the infinite value even of the smallest fraction of reality. I wish I were the little creature Jack, whose one mission is to kill the giant Abstraction, which is claiming the sacrifice of individuals all over the world under highly painted masks of delusion.
