APPENDIX II
APPRECIATIONS
COUNT LEO TOLSTOY
"God help our dear brothers and co-workers in the Transvaal! That same struggle of the tender against the harsh of meekness and love against pride and violence is every year making itself more and more felt here among us also, especially in one of the very sharpest of the conflicts of the religious law with the worldly laws, in refusals of Military Service. Buch refusals are becoming ever more and more frequent. I greet you fraternally, and am glad to have intercourse with you."
Your activity in the Transvasl, as it seems to us at the end of the world, is the most essential work, the most important of all the work now being done in the world, and in which not only the nations of the Christian, but of all the world, will unavoidably take part. (Letter to Mr. Gandhi.)
PROF. GILBERT MURRAY
Let me take a present day instance of this battle between a soul and a Government, a very curious instance, because it is almost impossible without more knowledge than most people in England possess to say who was wrong and who right.
About the year 1889 a young Indian student called Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, came to England to study law. He was rich and clever, of a cultivated family, gentle and modest in his manner. He dressed and behaved like other people. There was nothing particular about him to show that he had already taken a Jain vow to abstain from wine, from flesh, and from sexual intercourse. He took his degree and became a successful lawyer in Bombay, but he cared more for religion than law. Gradually his asceticism increased. He gave away all his money to good causes except the meagrest allowance. He took vows of poverty. He ceased to practise at the law because his religion—a mysticism which seems to be as closely related to Christianity as it is to any traditional Indian religion—forbade him to take part in a system which tried to do right by violence. When I met him in England in 1914, he ate, I believe, only rice, and drank only water, and slept on the floor; and his wife who seemed to be his companion in everything, lived in the same way. His conversation was that of a cultivated and well-read man
