Communications
COMMUNICATIONS GANDHI'S INDIA Washington, D. C. TO the Editor:—Your editorial of May 21 on Gandhi's India poses a question in three brief words that is today agitating minds over the entire...
...Is it depriving anybody of any right to prohibit him from manufacturing, selling or transporting intoxicating liquor for profit, a thing that has always been regulated and taxed when it was permitted at all ? Of course, there is graft, as Mr...
...Just so...
...In spite of our talk about "parity," England still polices the seas...
...As a Catholic, in common with all Catholics, I have suffered my share of opprobrium and misrepresentation...
...But there is no distinction in the law...
...India is the keystone of the arch of the British empire...
...They felt prohibition was their only salvation...
...Having asked the question, you proceed at once to answer it...
...THE PRESBYTERIAN VOTE Newark, N. J. TO the Editor:—According to newspaper reports, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church voted down an effort to have eliminated from their Confession of Faith the following: "Such as professed the true reformed religion should not marry with infidels, papists and other idolators...
...India for 500 years submitted to Moslem rulers, but in her soul remained unconquered...
...FROM TEMPERANCE TO WHEELERISM Newark, N. J. TO the Editor:—In your issue of April 16 last appeared an article by Ernest Sutherland Bates, entitled From Temperance to Wheelerism...
...The recent religious upheavals in India have been largely the result, not of incompatibility in the Indian temperament, but of the working out of the 1919 "reforms" based as they were upon that clever policy of Great Britain, pointed out by the historian Hume, "divida et impera...
...Again you say "the creeds which have been nursed in it [India] have no power of compatibility...
...Elizabeth S. Kite...
...Once and once only in its age-long history, did Hinduism rise up and cast out a religious sect and that sect was Buddhism...
...it is tyranny that is modern...
...That it will be successfully prohibited may be doubted now by those who put their acquired appetite above the welfare of the human race, but they are in the minority—a minority that will grow constantly smaller...
...Caste feeling," you say, "sets up [in India] insurmountable barriers...
...is undoubtedly the most important in the entire world politics of today...
...But those who had preached temperance for half a century felt, as Father Theobold Mathew felt in his later years, that temperance was a lost cause, and that preaching had little effect upon the whirlpool of drink which shipwrecked its thousands every year...
...Elsie A. Galik...
...England too has ruled India but has never conquered her, as Englishmen themselves have frequently proclaimed...
...Brookfarm has passed into history, therefore it is quite safe to dogmatize regarding it...
...It was the profit in the business that the law sought to reach—although the law-makers might well have known that no matter how carefully they framed the law, there would be a brattling chorus thundering in Sinaic tones that the law was a sumptuary law and deprived the citizen of his liberty...
...Bates says of him and his religious associates...
...Bates declares that "prohibition—difficult though it may be to believe—actually began as a relatively sane 'temperance' movement...
...Your answer, however, fails to satisfy some of us who know India a little from the inside, who approach it, perhaps, a little more sympathetically, having probed a little deeper beneath the surface...
...The "Communal representation" June i8, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 191 instituted by those "reforms" has produced a situation in India very similar to what would happen in the United States if we were suddenly called upon to remold ourselves politically along lines of our religious beliefs and to accept representation according to whether we happened to be Protestants, Catholics or Jews...
...C. P. Connolly...
...He would have thought it beneath him to have singled out people of our faith and have said or intimated the things Mr...
...However, one is amazed that an episcopal body would allow to remain unchanged the wording of a resolution which infers that Catholics are idolators...
...without India the arch falls...
...Why, therefore, should the Anti-saloon League treat them as criminals...
...There was a time when it was as much of a personal disgrace to refuse to drink intoxicating liquors as it was to refuse to engage in mortal combat on the field of honor...
...The Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act prohibit only the manufacture, sale and transportation of liquor...
...He blames them, in other words, for not discriminating between the one who drinks his liquor and the one who does not...
...not so the Satyagraha Ashram...
...In innumerable cases the caste barrier has been surmounted, and is daily being surmounted, more and more effectively all over India...
...As a matter of fact from the very earliest times, Hinduism, which is the religion of the vast majority of the people of India, has been famous for its spirit of broad toleration...
...I have known men to vote for prohibition who were drunkards...
...Furthermore it seems a rather premature statement regarding "Gandhi's famous community of Sabaramati," when you say it is "only a kind of Brookfarm or Ruskinian guild...
...and I regret to see a Catholic publication lend itself to an attack upon those who, during past convulsions of anti-Catholic bigotry, stood by us when we were well-nigh helpless against the storm...
...I would hesitate to appeal to you for the opportunity to reply if Mr...
...The ban on mixed marriages is of little consequence to Catholics because their own Church disapproves of, nay, forbids them...
...But is that a new thing in this land of lotus-eaters...
...Another objectionable term is the derogatory "papists" from which can be drawn no other meaning than that we are followers of the Pope...
...The Brahman must be ready at any time to take the place of a sweeper, and must have given indisputable proof that he looks upon the so-called "untouchable" as his brother or sister...
...And is prohibition to be blamed...
...As well might we blame oil for the oil scandals, or justice for the crimes of its ministers...
...Bates has evidently thrown all of his fat into the fire, and the result is a very thin blaze...
...We will have to grapple with this evil, but when we look for it we will not stop at prohibition and its enforcement...
...And because they saw the evil and were the first to lead against it, is that just cause for ridicule and condemnation...
...They did not think it hypocritical...
...Now anyone who knows Gandhi's India at all must admit that the first requisite for being allowed to enter that state is to have laid caste feeling aside...
...Bates says...
...Bates—and they seem to be his friends—they ought to be good enough for the Anti-saloon League...
...If they are good enough for Mr...
...In the words of Madame de Stael: "Liberty is ancient...
...It is time that the impression that prohibition is Protestant and anti-Catholic be blotted out...
...Catholic priests and bishops worked hand in hand with the Anti-saloon League in the West...
...It is indeed easy to rail against Gandhi, to point out his absurdities, to seek to belittle the movement of which he is the soul...
...According to Gandhi's doctrine, preached in season and out of season, to be a "Satyagrahi," that is, one capable of offering civil disobedience in his sense, must have purged all hatred from his heart...
...The movement was gradual, and its most effective protagonists were not the church people, but the saloon and its friends...
...The question then "What is India...
...Bates's article had not appeared in a Catholic publication, with the implication, if not the direct charge, that the Anti-saloon League is hypocritical and insincere...
...Bates censures the Anti-saloon League for accepting the votes of office-holders who are not teetotalers...
...To quell that movement is a very different matter...
...Let us examine a few of the statements taken at random from your article...
...This was centuries upon centuries ago and for a very definite reason not pertinent here...
...He points his pen indignantly at Wayne B. Wheeler, the Anti-saloon League and all other prohibitionists because he thinks they would deprive the individual of the liberty to drink what he pleases...
...That the latter is a vital living force none knows better than the present rulers of India...
...COMMUNICATIONS GANDHI'S INDIA Washington, D. C. TO the Editor:—Your editorial of May 21 on Gandhi's India poses a question in three brief words that is today agitating minds over the entire civilized world—the momentous question, "What is India...
...It is quite conceivable that with the amazing propaganda now going on against prohibition, we may repeat on a national scale the experience of several of our states, which first went dry, and then, under the influence of propaganda, recanted and returned to their wallow, to be eventually convinced by repentance that there was only the one way out—prohibition even at its worst...
...I knew Wayne B. Wheeler fairly well during his lifetime, and I venture to say there were few finer, gentler or more charitable characters...
...The task still remains to be performed and the vital question is: Can England conquer India...
...They looked upon it as an organization of sane, well-meaning men who had witnessed the harvest of liquor until they could submit in patience to it no longer and determined to put a stop to it...
...They reluctantly concluded there was only one way to stop it, namely, to prohibit the traffic altogether...
...And the question touches all of us...
...These latter furnished most of the ammunition...
Vol. 12 • June 1930 • No. 7
