uth Africa should they ever become in his opinion unendurable.
Mr. Gokhale, before he died, obtained a promise from him that for at
least a year he would not attempt to give practical expression to the
extreme views which he had already set forth in the proscribed pamphlet
_Hind Swaraj_. At an early age Mr. Gandhi had fallen under the spell of
Tolstoian philosophy, and he has admitted only quite recently that for a
time he was so much impressed with the doctrines of Christ that he was
inclined to adopt Christianity; but the further study of the spiritual
side of Hinduism convinced him that in it alone the key of salvation
could be found, and all his teachings since then have been based on his
faith in the superiority of the Indian civilisation rooted in Hinduism
to Western civilisation, which for him in fact represents in its present
stage only a triumph of gross materialism and brute force. Nevertheless,
when the Great War broke out, he was prepared to believe that the ordeal
of war in the cause of freedom for which Britain had taken up arms might
lead to the redemption of Western civilisation from its worst evils, and
whilst in London on his way to South Africa he had already offered to
form, and to enrol himself and his wife in, an Indian Volunteer
Ambulance Corps. Yet he was not blind to the flaws of the civilisation
for which he stood. He conducted a temperance campaign amongst his
countrymen in South Africa, and, brought there into close contact with
many Indians of the "untouchable" castes, he revolted against a system
which tried to erect such insurmountable barriers between man and man.
Perhaps the best clue to the many contradictions in which his activities
have continually seemed to involve him was furnished by himself when he
said, "Most religious men I have met are politicians in disguise; I,
however, who wear the guise of a politician am at heart a religious
man," and the doctrine which he holds of all others to be the
corner-stone of his religion is that of _Ahimsa_, which, as he has
described it, "requires deliberate self-suffering, not the deliberate
injuring of the wrongdoer," in the resistance of evil.

Throughout the war Mr. Gandhi devoted his ceaseless energies chiefly to
preaching social reforms and the moral regeneration of his countrymen.
He was then an honoured guest at European gatherings, as for instance at
the Madras Law dinner in 1915, at various conferences on education, at
the Bombay Provin