of the riots and the consequent bloodshed in different places he caused the following message to be read at all the meetings that evenings:—
I have not been able to understand the cause of so much excitement and disturbance that followed my detention. It is not Satyagraha. It is worse than Duragraha. Those who join Satyagraha demonstrations are bound one and all to refrain at all hazard from violence, not to throw stones or in any way whatever to injure anybody.
I therefore suggest that if we cannot conduct this movement without the slightest violence from our side, the movement might have to be abandoned or it may be necessary to give it a different and still more restricted shape. It may be necessary to go even further. The time may come for me to offer Satyagraha against ourselves. I would not deem it a disgrace that we die. I shall be pained to hear of the death of a Satyagrahi, but I shall consider it to be the proper sacrifice given for the sake of the struggle.
I do not see what penance I can offer excepting that it is for me to fast and if need be by so doing togive up this body and thus prove the truth of Satyagraha. I appeal to you to peacefully disperse and to refrain from acts that may in any way bring disgrace upon the people of Bombay.
But the Duragraka of the few upset the calculations of Mr. Gandhi, as he had so constantly been warned by many of his friends and admirers who could not however subscribe to his faith in civil disobedience. The story of the tragedy needs no repeating. It is written on the tablet of time with bitter memories, and the embers of that controversy have not yet subsided. But Mr. Gandhi, with a delicacy of conscience and a fine appreciation of truth, which we have learnt to associate with his name as with that of Newman, felt for the wrongs done to Englishmen with the same passionate intensity with which he felt for those indicted on his own countrymen. Few words of remorse in recorded literature are more touching than those uttered by Mr. Gandhi in his speech at Ahmedabad on the 14th April 1919, They are in the supreme manner of Cardinal Newman’s Apologia:
Brothers, the events that have happened in the course of the last few days have been most disgraceful to Ahmedabad, and as all these things have happened in my name, I am ashamed of them, and those who have been responsible for them have thereby not honoured me but disgraced me. A rapier run
