THE SOLOMON COMMISSION 73 up the hope that some way may be found out of the difhculty. In all this crisis, I wish to say before concluding, two things have greatly sustained and comforted us, one is the splendid courage and staunch advocacy of our cause by His Excellency the Vioeroy and the other is the hearty support which India has sent us. We shall do nothing now, till Sir Benjamin Robertson arrives and we shall receive him with all honour and trust both because you tell us we shall find in him a strong friend and also because he has been appointed by the Viceroy to whom we feel so profoundly grateful. But unless the Commission is made in some way more acceptable to us, I do not see how the renewal of Passive Resistance can be avoided. We know it will entail enormous suffer- ing, I assure you. we do not desire it, but neither shall we shrink from it, if it must be borne. At a meeting held under the auspices of the Natal Indian Association, Mr. Gandhi sketched his future pro- gramme. He said :-— He would have preferred to speak first in one of the Indian tongues, but in the presence of Messrs. Polak and Kallenbach, his fellow convicts, feelings of gratitude compelled him to speak first in the tongue they knew. They would notice he had changed his dress from that he had formerly adopted for the last Z0 years, and he had decided on the change when he heard of the shoot- ing of their fellow·countrymen. No matter whether the shooting was found to be justihed or not, the fact was that they were shot, and those bullets shot him (Mr. Gandhi) through the heart also. He felt ‘how glorious it would have been if one of those bullets had
