FABBWBLL SPEECH AT JOHANNESBURG 97 there to seek his grave, the brave man replied, °° What does it matter ? I know what you are fighting for. You have not to pay the £3 tax, but my fellow ex·indentured. Indians have to pay that tax, and what more glorious death could I meet ?" He had met that death in the gaol at Durban. No wonder if Passive Resistance had tired and quickened the conscience of South Africa ! But, proceeded Mr. Gandhi, he concurred with Mr. Duncan in an article he wrote some years ago. when he truly analysed the struggle, and said that behind that struggle for concrete rights lay the great spirit which asked for an abstract principle, and the fight which was undertaken in 1906, although it was a fight against a particular law, was a iight undertaken in order to combat the spirit that was seen about to overshadow the whole of South Africa, and to undermine the glorious British Constitution, of which the Chairman had spoken so loftily that evening, and about which he (the speaker) shared his views. It was his knowledge, right or wrong, of the British Constitution which bound him to the Empire. Tear that Constitution to shreds and his loyalty also would be torn to shreds. Keep that Constitution in- tact, and they held him bound a slave to that Constitu- tion. Hs had felt that the choice lay for himself and his fellow·countrymen between two courses, when this spirit was brooding over South Africa. either to sunder themselves from the British Constitution, or to iight in order that the ideals of that Constitution might be pre- served-—~but only the ideals. Lord Ampthill had said, in a preface to Mr. Doke’s book, that the theory of the British Constitution must be preserved at any cost if the British Empire was to be save} from the mistakes that all the previous Empires had made. Practice might
