ABSTRACT
The organizers of this meeting (of Cambridge Majlis) have asked me, before I call on the principal speakers, to pay a short tribute myself. In doing so I do not desire to emphasize the note of grief. Grief is for those who knew Mahātmā Gāndhi personally, or who are close to his teaching. I have neither of those claims. Nor would it be seemly to speak with compassion and pity of him, as though it were on him rather than on India and the world that the blow has fallen. If I have understood him rightly, he was always indifferent to death. His work and the welfare of others was what mattered to him, and if the work could have been furthered by dying rather than living, he would have been content. He was accustomed to regard an interruption as an instrument, and he remarks in his Autobiography that God seldom intended for him what he had planned. And he would have regarded death, the supreme interruption, as an instrument, and perhaps the supreme one—preferable to the full 125 years of life for which in his innocence he had hoped. The murder seems so hideous and senseless to us—as an English friend of mine put it, one would have liked the old Saint to fade away magically. But we must remember that we are looking at it all from outside; it was not a defeat to him.
