Gandhi

Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)

MOHANDAS KARAM- CHAND, leader of the non-co-operative, anti-British movement in India, was born in Porbandar, Oct. 2, 1869. He studied law for five years in England and in 1893 took up the practice of his profession for a short time in Bombay, after which he removed to South Africa, where he became immediately involved in the general hatred and persecution visited on all his countrymen by the British colonial government and population. Undertaking to plead the cause of the Hindu, he was denied the privileges of the courts and his life was repeatedly threatened by mobs; yet in spite of all this, when the Boer War broke out he organized an Indian ambulance unit and served in the field in posts of danger. For similar services in the Zulu rebellion a few years later he received the thanks of the governor of Natal, but the persecutions of the Hindus in South Africa continuing, he conceived the idea of putting into practice the principle of passive resistance or soul force, the doing of good to overcome evil. For this passive resistof plants with screens of glass, wood, straw, cloth, or paper; the building of smudge fires to form blankets of smoke, and the artificial charging of the air with moisture or the sprinkling of the leaves and buds of plants themselves to prevent evaporation on clear nights when frosts are threatened. Orchards are especially endangered by frosts, and some are provided with alarm thermometers, which ring a bell at the approach of the danger point. Heaters of various types are used, with the object, primarily, of preventing the settlement of a stagnant layer of cold air on the orchard. In extensive orchards it has been discovered that there are "warm spots" in which the trees are less liable to be injured by frosts, due probably to something in the character of the soil. There are also "thermal belts" or "verdant zones" in orchard regions of mountainous States, where the temperature under ordinary conditions is higher than in belts both below and above. over The local prediction of frosts from general weather observations is still uncertain. An extensive study of the subject has been made by the Weather Bureau and published as Supplement 16 of the Monthly Weather Review (1920). G ance to the government of South Africa he was thrown into jail there, but his work was so far successful that many of the worst legal disabilities of the Hindu population were finally removed. In the World War he helped raise recruits in India for the British service and was the organizer of an Indian Ambulance Corps, but his feelings toward England, or rather toward all western civilization, gradually changed and he became convinced that there was no hope for India under British rule, however reformed, but that the duty and salvation of all Indians lay in returning to the teachings and the ways of the ancient Vedas. He organized the non-co-operative movement to establish the Swaraj or self-rule of India by means of a general boycott of everything British, inclu including goods, offices, employments, courts, and schools, a movement essentially religious in conception, a determination to sever all connection with what was held to be worldly and evil. Gandhi was opposed to all violence and all hatred. Swaraj was to be obtained by self-discipline and soul force. On Dec. 29, 1921, he was declared by the Indian National Congress to be the sole executive authority in the nationalist movement, but on March 10, 1922, he was arrested by British authorities on the charge of sedition in his writings and was sentenced a week later to six years' imprisonment, refusing to cease his teachings if released and challenging the court either to resign or to impose the full penalty of the law.