Page:Speeches And Writings MKGandhi.djvu/822

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MESSAGE TO CO-WORKERS.


[In the course of a letter addressed to the General Secretary of the Congress a couple of days before his arrest, Mr. Gandhi wrote as follows . ]

You ask me for my future programme. I have just sent you a telegram as follows :

" In Ahmedabad till Saturday; Surat Sunday; Monday; Bardoli Tuesday."

But that is ' Government willing, 'for I have per-sistent rumours being thrust upon me that my leave is now more than overdue, and I am also told that I shall be relieved of my burdens inside of 7 days. Subject, therefore, to that happy contingency, you have the foregoing programme. If 1 am arrested, I look to you and all who are out to keep absolute peace. It will be the best honour that the country can do me. Nothing would pain me more, in whatever jail I may find myself, than to be informed by my custodians that a single head has been broken by or on behalf of non- co-operators, a single man had been insulted or a single building damaged. If the people or the workers have at all understood my message, they will keep exemplary peace. I would certainly be delighted if in the night following my arrest, there was throughout the length and breadth of India, a bonfire of all foreign cloth voluntarily surrendered by the people without the slightest compulsion having been exercised, and a fixed determination to use nothing but khaddar, and till then in the glorious weather of India to wear nothing but a piece of loin-cloth, and in the case