It is a mere statement of fact to say that every Indian, whether
he owns up to it or not, has national aspirations. But there are
as many opinions as there are Indian nationalists as to the exact
meaning of that aspiration, and more especially as to the methods
to be used to attain the end.

One of the accepted and 'time-honoured' methods to attain the end
is that of violence. The assassination of Sir Curzon Wylie was
an illustration of that method in its worst and most detestable
form. Tolstoy's life has been devoted to replacing the method of
violence for removing tyranny or securing reform by the method of
non-resistance to evil. He would meet hatred expressed in
violence by love expressed in self-suffering. He admits of no
exception to whittle down this great and divine law of love. He
applies it to all the problems that trouble mankind.

When a man like Tolstoy, one of the clearest thinkers in the
western world, one of the greatest writers, one who as a soldier
has known what violence is and what it can do, condemns Japan for
having blindly followed the law of modern science, falsely
so-called, and fears for that country 'the greatest calamities',
it is for us to pause and consider whether, in our impatience of
English rule, we do not want to replace one evil by another and a
worse. India, which is the nursery of the great faiths of the
world, will cease to be nationalist India, whatever else she may
become, when she goes through the process of civilization in the
shape of reproduction on that sacred soil of gun factories and
the hateful industrialism which has reduced the people of Europe
to a state of slavery, and all but stifled among them the best