ABSTRACT
To some of us the significance of Mahatma Gandhi’s career lies essentially in the fact that it represents the deliberate pursuit of an ideal despite the innumerable difficulties which such action inevitably presents in a world refractory to the embodiment of idealism in concrete activities. For the history of the Commonwealth prime importance must attach to his services in South Africa to the cause of recognition of the value of human personality. In a country wherein the doctrines of the Afrikaans-speaking element formally denied equality in Church or State to those not of European race, he stood out for the essential principle that men qua men are equal, and that artificial distinctions based on race and colour are both unreasonable and immoral. When the enormous strength of the forces of opposition is realized, it will always stand out as among the highest of his achievements that he greatly improved the position of his people, and placed the problem of their status in the Union of South Africa in a new light. That since his departure a narrow-minded racialism has once more gained increasing power is a matter for deep regret, but the resisting power of the Indian community has enormously increased since the Mahatma inspired it with the sense of its own dignity and negatived the idea that any man or group of men could be properly exploited by others as an instrument for their aggrandisement. Submerged as that ideal may be for a time, it cannot be supposed that it will wholly disappear. In Kenya and Zanzibar also the principles of his teaching have had results in mitigating the efforts of the British members of these communities to take advantage of their influence in England to secure the administration of these territories without due regard for Indian rights. Nor has his effort been confined to the welfare of Indians; the doctrines which he has preached are equally applicable to the future of the Africans, and he has given no excuse for the growth of the doctrine that Indians should be content to claim equality of treatment for themselves because of their historic culture, and to join with Europeans in treating as inferiors and suitable for servile conditions the native inhabitants of African lands.
