isturbances which may call for strong action
just when on broad grounds of policy any resort to force must be
specially undesirable. One of the retributions which always overtake
such mistakes in the manner of employing force as were made two years
ago in the Punjab is that the actual employment of force, however
legitimate, becomes discredited. The Government of India realises--and
no one probably more fully than Lord Reading after his visit to
Amritsar--that with the Punjab fresh in their memories, even Indian
Moderates must require very strong evidence before they give any willing
support to the employment of force, even if circumstances arise to make
it inevitable for the mere maintenance of public order which no
government can allow to be wantonly imperilled. Such evidence is
accumulating only too fast. When the time comes for action, the
existence of a responsible body of Indian opinion, constitutionally
organised, and constitutionally represented in the new Legislatures,
will give Government the moral backing and the moral courage which
failed it with disastrous results in 1919.

It is sad to see a man of Mr. Gandhi's immense power for good drifting
into such deep waters. Mr. Gokhale, who had given him his enthusiastic
support in South Africa, warned him on his return to India that methods
of agitation and passive resistance which were permissible there under
great provocation, and had been used by him with considerable success,
would be quite unwarranted in India where they would only lead to
disaster. Mr. Gokhale died soon afterwards and Mr. Gandhi has
disregarded his advice. At times he has given signs of profound
discouragement and talked of retiring to the Himalayas to spend the rest
of his days in meditation, as pious Hindus not infrequently do. At times
in a more worldly mood he seems to be playing for a crown of martyrdom,
and he was perhaps bidding for it when soon after a series of interviews
with the Viceroy, conducted on both sides with perfect courtesy, he
replied to the official announcement of the impending visit of the
Prince of Wales to India by proclaiming it to be the duty of Indians to
boycott the heir to the Throne in the same way in which he had exhorted
them last winter to boycott the Duke of Connaught. He must certainly
have been bidding for it when in the course of a raging and tearing
temperance campaign in Bombay he declared, it seems, that liquor shops
must be closed even if it cost ri