A Letter to a Hindu | Page 2

truth of what he says in the
following: 'A commercial company enslaved a nation comprising two
hundred millions. Tell this to a man free from superstition and he will
fail to grasp what these words mean. What does it mean that thirty
thousand people, not athletes, but rather weak and ordinary people,
have enslaved two hundred millions of vigorous, clever, capable,
freedom-loving people? Do not the figures make it clear that not the
English, but the Indians, have enslaved themselves?'
One need not accept all that Tolstoy says--some of his facts are not
accurately stated--to realize the central truth of his indictment of the
present system, which is to understand and act upon the irresistible

power of the soul over the body, of love, which is an attribute of the
soul, over the brute or body force generated by the stirring in us of evil
passions.
There is no doubt that there is nothing new in what Tolstoy preaches.
But his presentation of the old truth is refreshingly forceful. His logic is
unassailable. And above all he endeavours to practise what he preaches.
He preaches to convince. He is sincere and in earnest. He commands
attention.
[__19th November, 1909__] M. K. GANDHI

A LETTER TO A HINDU
By LEO TOLSTOY

__All that exists is One. People only call this One by different
names.__ THE VEDAS.
__God is love, and he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God
abideth in him.__ I JOHN iv. 16.
__God is one whole; we are the parts.__ EXPOSITION OF THE
TEACHING OF THE VEDAS BY VIVEKANANDA.

I
Do not seek quiet and rest in those earthly realms where delusions and
desires are engendered, for if thou dost, thou wilt be dragged through
the rough wilderness of life, which is far from Me.
Whenever thou feelest that thy feet are becoming entangled in the
interlaced roots of life, know that thou has strayed from the path to
which I beckon thee: for I have placed thee in broad, smooth paths,
which are strewn with flowers. I have put a light before thee, which
thou canst follow and thus run without stumbling. KRISHNA.
I have received your letter and two numbers of your periodical, both of
which interest me extremely. The oppression of a majority by a
minority, and the demoralization inevitably resulting from it, is a
phenomenon that has always occupied me and has done so most
particularly of late. I will try to explain to you what I think about that
subject in general, and particularly about the cause from which the
dreadful evils of which you write in your letter, and in the Hindu

periodical you have sent me, have arisen and continue to arise.
The reason for the astonishing fact that a majority of working people
submit to a handful of idlers who control their labour and their very
lives is always and everywhere the same--whether the oppressors and
oppressed are of one race or whether, as in India and elsewhere, the
oppressors are of a different nation.
This phenomenon seems particularly strange in India, for there more
than two hundred million people, highly gifted both physically and
mentally, find themselves in the power of a small group of people quite
alien to them in thought, and immeasurably inferior to them in religious
morality.
From your letter and the articles in __Free Hindustan__ as well as from
the very interesting writings of the Hindu Swami Vivekananda and
others, it appears that, as is the case in our time with the ills of all
nations, the reason lies in the lack of a reasonable religious teaching
which by explaining the meaning of life would supply a supreme law
for the guidance of conduct and would replace the more than dubious
precepts of pseudo- religion and pseudo-science with the immoral
conclusions deduced from them and commonly called 'civilization'.
Your letter, as well as the articles in __Free Hindustan__ and Indian
political literature generally, shows that most of the leaders of public
opinion among your people no longer attach any significance to the
religious teachings that were and are professed by the peoples of India,
and recognize no possibility of freeing the people from the oppression
they endure except by adopting the irreligious and profoundly immoral
social arrangements under which the English and other
pseudo-Christian nations live to-day.
And yet the chief if not the sole cause of the enslavement of the Indian
peoples by the English lies in this very absence of a religious
consciousness and of the guidance for conduct which should flow from
it--a lack common in our day to all nations East and West, from Japan
to England and America alike.

II
__O ye, who see perplexities over your heads, beneath your feet, and to
the right and