"The foundation that Macaulay laid of education", he says: "has enslaved us. It is worth noting that by receiving English education, we have enslaved the nation. Hypocrisy, tyranny etc. have increased; English-knowing Indians have not hesitated to cheat and strike terror into the people. Now, if we are doing anything for the people at all, we are paying only a portion of the debt due to them".
I shall have to deal with this question of education later in connection with this appeal to the boys to leave the schools and colleges.
After all this, it will not surprise any one to be told that we must have nothing to do with machinery:—
"It was not that we did not know how to invent machinery, but our forefathers knew that, if we set our hearts after such things, we would become slaves and lose our moral fibre. They, therefore, after due deliberation, decided that we should only do what we could with our hands and feet. They saw that our real happiness and health consisted in a proper use of our hands and feet."
He would not therefore have mills for the reason that machinery is the chief symbol of modern civilisation and it has already begun to desolate Europe. In his opinion it were better for us to send money to Manchester and to use flimsy Manchester cloth than to multiply mills in India. I wonder why he does not ask Lancashire to pay him his crore of rupees. Lancashire would no doubt do so in consideration of the monopoly of supplying India with manufactured goods and India would, according to Mr. Gandhi, get Swaraj. India does not want manufactured goods; he asks:—
"What did India do before these articles were introduced? Precisely the same should be done to-day. As long as we cannot make pins without machinery, so long will we do without them. The tinsel splendour of glassware we will have nothing to do with, and we will make wick, as of old, with home grown cotton, and use hand-made earthen saucers for Lamps". He finally adds: "I cannot recall a single good point in connection with machinery."
Mr. Gandhi wrote his book in 1908 after a visit to England when the Liberal and the Labour parties were carrying on their great campaign in favour of the working men and against the capitalists and Lloyd George was about to launch his great land campaign. He seems to have been impressed with the horrors of the condition of the wage earners which was then portrayed in dark colours in order to support that campaign. His mind, emotional and ill balanced, seems to have been entirely upset by the descriptions that he had then read. He is on the fringe of a large question about which he seems to have been singularly ill informed. In England there is not at this time and there was not when he wrote, any question of the destruction of machinery which is a necessary adjunct to the industrial system. The questions under debate are the conditions of labour and the distribution of the wealth created by machinery between capitalists and labour. These questions have been under consideration now for some years; the condition of the labourers is being slowly improved, a minimum wage has been introduced and there is a prospect of a still more equitable distribution of the proceeds between capital and labour. Mr. Gandhi says that he has read Dutt's book on the decline of Indian industries but he does not seem to have learnt the lesson inculcated therein—that it is necessary to improve our industries not only to meet the needs of the people of the country, find employment for our labouring population, but also not to force them to compete with the cultivating classes. In India the same problem as in England awaits us. We have to see that the condition of the labourers in the mills and in the other industries is improved. In asking for the ruin of all our manufacturing industries Mr. Gandhi is only playing into the hands of our opponents. He will find strong support in this respect from Lancashire who will, according to some Indian publicists, only be too willing to take any steps to effect the destruction of our competing industries. If he had directed half the energy of his non-co-operation campaign to improving the conditions of the workmen in all our industries he might possibly have succeeded in getting rid of many of those evils which in his opinion require elimination of all machinery and of all industrial undertakings. The other reason for the deplorable condition of the industrial workmen in England is the congestion and overcrowding, in the industrial centres. This is due to a great extent to the action of the landlords who will not allow any expansion of those industrial centres in order to increase the value of their land and thus to exploit the community. In India we have not got that trouble. There is ample room for extension except in Bombay, in all the industrial centres and even in Bombay the difficulty is not due, so far as I am informed to the action of landlords but to natural conditions arising out of the geography of Bombay. Machinery is essential to the creation of wealth by manufacturing industries. The evils that have been portrayed by Mr. Gandhi can be and are being removed by patient effort. His tirade against machinery and mill industries on account of the evils he has witnessed in the West, is due to his ignorance; a little knowledge in his case has proved a dangerous thing. It is this feeling which has led him to advocate the universal use of spinning wheel in India. This might be useful as a cottage or home industry. It might find work for some who would otherwise be idle. But he is living in a fool's paradise if he considers it a substitute for or will supplant, machinery.
It is unnecessary to say that he hates Parliaments:—
"The condition of England at present is pitiable. I pray to God that India may never be in that plight. That which you consider to be Mother of Parliaments is like a sterile woman and a prostitute. Both these are harsh terms, but exactly fit the case. That Parliament has not yet of its own accord done a single good thing; hence I have compared it to a sterile woman. The natural condition of that Parliament is such that without out-side pressure it can do nothing. It is like a prostitute because it is under the control of ministers who change from time to time. To-day it is under Mr. Asquith; tomorrow it may be under Mr. Balfour."
"If the money and the time wasted by Parliament were entrusted to a few good men, the English nation would be occupying to-day a much higher platform. The Parliament is simply a costly toy of the nation. These views are by no means peculiar to me. Some great English thinkers have expressed them.