Gandhi

"The only obligation which I have the right to assume," Thoreau said in Civil Disobedience, "is to do at any time what I think right." He felt it more honorable to be right than to be law-abiding. He was writing in 1849 is protest against slavery and the invasion of Mexico. "There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and war," he declared. "who yet do nothing to put an end to them. There are nine hundred and ninety nine patrons of virtue to every virtuous man."

Like Gandhi “Thoreau believed in the ability of the determined moral minority to correct the evils of the majority. "I know this well," Thoreau wrote, "that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name--if ten honest men only--ay, if one HONEST man, in this state of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership (with the government) and be locked up in the country jail therefore, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be, what is once well done is done forever. But we love better to talk about it."

Emerson declared in his Essay on Politics, "I do not recall a single human being who has steadily denied the authority of the laws on the simple ground of his moral nature." Emerson died in 1882 and could not have known Gandhi who, at the very moment when he read Thoreau, was in jail for denying unjust laws on moral grounds and would do so steadily for the rest of his life.

In Gandhi word, creed, and deed were one; he was integrated. The truth shall make you free, and well through truth Gandhi set himself free in order to go to jail. Gandhi eliminated the conflicts in his personality and thereby acquired the power to engage in patient, peaceful conflicts with those whom he regarded as doing wrong.  He took words and ideas seriously and felt that having accepted a moral precept he had to live it then he could preach it.  He preached what he practices.    

"If we act justly India will be free sooner, " He asserted "You will see, too, that is we shun every Englishman as an enemy, Home Rule will be delayed. But if we are just to them, we shall receive their support." He neither blamed nor reviled the British yet hoped that free India would be unlike British India. "English rule without the Englishman? You want the tiger’s nature without the tiger? You would make India English?"
"My patriotism, " he said, "is subservient to my religion. "In politics he cleaved to moral considerations, and as a saint he though his place was not in a cave or cloister in the hurly burly of the popular struggle for rights and the right. Gandhi's religion made him political, and his politics were religious.

Saintly politician or political saint, and with all the added effectiveness which renunciation gave him, Gandhi could never have achieved what he did In South Africa and India but for a weapon peculiarly his own. It was unprecedented and has remained unimitated, indeed it was so unique he could not find a name for it until he finally hit upon "Satyagraha." Satya means truth, the equivalent of love, and both are attributes of the soul; agraha is firmness or force. "Satyagraha is therefore translated to Soul Force.
Satyagraha, Gandhi wrote, "Is the vindication of truth not by infliction of suffering on the opponent but on one's self." The opponent must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy." "Weaned, not crushed. Satyagraha assumes a constant beneficent interaction between contestants with a view to their ultimate reconciliation. Violence, insults, and superheated propaganda obstruct this end.

Gandhi never sought to humiliate or defeat the whites in South Africa or the British in India. He wished to convert them. He hoped that if he practiced the Sermon on the Mount, General Jan Christiaan Smuts would remember he was a Christian.
Satyagraha reverses the eye-for-an-eye-for-an-eye-for-an-eye- policy which ends in making everybody blind or blind with fury. It returns good for evil until the evildoer tires of evil. In South Africa and at times in India, Gandhi showed that ordinary human beings were capable of high-mindedness even under very irritating circumstances.

Gandhi was neither a conforming Hindu nor a conforming nationalist. No ism held him in its grip. He never hewed to a line. He was independent, unpredictable, and hence exciting to all and difficult for the British. "Do I contradict myself?" he asked. "Consistency is a hobgoblin." He had the rebel's courage to be true to himself today and different tomorrow. "My aim he once wrote, " Is not to be consistent with my previous statement on a given question, but to be consistent with the truth as it may present itself to me at a given moment. The result is that I gave grown from truth to truth..." His pacifism like social philosophy, was a slow growth. In 1914, en route from South Africa to India, he raised an Ambulance Corps of Indian students to serve the British Army, and admitted self accusingly that those who confine themselves to attending the wounded in battle cannot be absolved form the guilt of war. In India later he urged Indians to support the British war effort. "I discovered," he said in defense of this unpopular stand, that the British empire had certain ideals which which I have fallen in love, and one of those ideals is that every subject of the British Empire had the freest scope possible for his energy and honor."

A perpetual reformer of men, Gandhi nevertheless accepted them as they were. Love made him indulgent. He had an extremely strict code of conduct for himself and a lenient one for others.

"To trust is a virtue," he argued." "It is weakness that begets distrust," and he knew Indians did not want to be thought weak.

Gandhi's individualism fed on courage. Nonviolence, he said, requires much more courage than violence. No coward would sit still on the ground as galloping police horses advanced upon him or lie in the path of an automobile or stand without moving as baton-swinging policemen lad about them. This was active resistance of the brave. Gandhi applied a technique of combat which turned the traditional docility of the gentle Hindu into heroism. The method stemmed from his faith in common clay.

The ideals "that relate my life" he wrote " are presented for the acceptance of mankind in general...I have not the shadow of a doubt that any man or woman can achieve what I have if he or she would make the same effort and cultivated the same hope and faith. I am but a poor struggling soul yearning to be wholly good. I know that I have still before me a difficult path to traverse."

He recognized human weaknesses in himself and others and did not expect perfection in anybody, but he did believe in the individual’s corrigibility and endless capacity to climb. Refusing to concentrate on the bad in people, he often changed them by regarding them not as what they were, but as though they were what they wished to be, as though the good in them was all of them. Such creative optimism sometimes added inches or units to the heights of his associates, and even the casual visitor felt its potential benefits. A perpetual reformer of men, Gandhi.