vers of blood. Government has so far
wisely shrunk from adding to his halo as a saint that of a "confessor
and martyr." But he may yet force Government's hands.[6] For there must
be limits to the impunity granted even to a Mahatma who professes and
preaches the doctrine of _Ahimsa_, but whose footsteps are dogged by
violence which is the negation of _Ahimsa_.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] Later reports promise a far better monsoon than was at first
indicated.

[6] Whilst these pages are going through the press, reports are coming
in of a Moplah rising on the Malabar coast, far more ominous than any
of the disturbances already referred to in this chapter. The Moplahs
are an extremely backward and unruly race, with an infusion of Arab
blood, always notorious for their fierce Mahomedan fanaticism, wrought
up to a white heat by a recent visit from the two Mahomedan firebrands
of "Non-co-operation." The murder of Europeans, the burning and
looting of Government buildings, the tearing up of railways and
telegraphs, recall the worst excesses committed by Indian mobs two
years ago in the Punjab. But on this occasion there has been no
Mahomedan-Hindu fraternisation. The Moplahs have vented their
_Khilafat_ fury equally upon the helpless Hindu populations of the
whole district, who have been slaughtered and plundered or forcibly
converted to Islam as in the earliest days of Mahomedan domination.
Hindu members of the Legislative Assembly, realising that their
co-religionists owe their safety only to the military forces which are
being rushed up by a Satanic Government to arrest a campaign of sheer
murder and rapine, may well ask, as Mr. Jamnadas Dwarkadas has just
done, how long such men as Mahomed and Shaukat Ali are to be allowed
to go on preaching the doctrines which the Moplahs have so effectively
carried into practice. However local this outbreak may remain, it is
only another and a more sinister symptom of the widespread upheaval
against all constituted authority into which "Non-co-operation" has
degenerated under the leadership of Mr. Gandhi and his Mahomedan
allies.

CHAPTER XVI

THE INDIAN PROBLEM A WORLD PROBLEM

A great constitutional experiment, of which the expressed purpose is to
bring a self-governing India into full and equal partnership with all
other parts of the British Empire, has been courageously launched in
deep waters still only partially explored, and it has resisted the first
onslaught of a singular c