of Mussulmans, the minimum required by religious obligation* I would certainly love to be told that there was a phenomenal demand for spinning wheels and that all workers who did not know hand- spinning had commenced it in right earnest. The more I think over our future programme, and the more news I get about the spirit of violence that has silently but surely crept into our ranks, the more convinced I am that even individual civil disobedience would be wrong. It would be much better to be forsaken by everybody and to be doing the right thing than to be doing the wrong thing for the sake of boasting a large following. Whether we are few or whether we are many, so long as we believe in the programme of non-violence there is no absolution from the full constructive programme. Enforce it to-day, and the whole country is ready for mass civil disobedience tb-morrow. Fail in the effort, and you are not ready even for individual civil dis- obedience. Nor is the matter difficult. If all the members of the All-India Congress Committee and Provincial Congress Committees are convinced of the correctness of the premises I have laid down, it can be
done. The pity of it is that they are not so convinced.
A policy is a temporary creed liable to be changed, but while it holds good it has got to be pursued with apostolic zeal.
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