In the course of the only long conversation I had with Mr. Gandhi I tried to obtain from him some picture of what India would be like under _Swaraj_ as he understood it. In a voice as gentle as his whole manner is persuasive, he explained, more in pity than in anger, that India had at last recovered her own soul through the fiery ordeal which Hindus and Mahomedans had undergone in the Punjab, and the perfect act of faith which the _Khilafat_ meant for all Mahomedans, and that, purged of the degrading influences of the West, she would find again that peace which was hers before alien domination divided and exploited her people. As to the form of government and administration which would then obtain in India, he would not go beyond a vague assurance that it would be based on the free will of the people expressed by manhood suffrage for which Indians were already ripe, if called upon to exercise it upon truly Indian lines. When I objected that caste, which was the bed-rock of Hindu social and religious life, was surely a tremendous obstacle to any real democracy, he admitted that the system would have to be restored to its pristine purity and redeemed from some of the abuses that had crept into it. But he upheld the four original castes as laid down in the Vedas, and even their hereditary character, though in practice some born in a lower caste might well rise by their own merits and secure the deference and respect of the highest castes, "such as, for instance, if I may in all modesty quote my own unworthy case, the highest Brahmans spontaneously accord to me to-day, though by birth I am only of a lowly caste." I tried to get on to more solid ground by pointing out that, whatever views one might hold as to his ultimate goal, the methods he was employing in trying to break up the existing schools and colleges and law-courts and to paralyse the machinery of administration was destructive rather than constructive, and that, confident as he might feel of substituting better things ultimately for those that he had destroyed, construction must always be a much slower process than destruction; and in the meantime infinite and perhaps irreparable harm would be done. "No," he rejoined--and I think I can convey his words pretty accurately, but not his curious smile as of boundless compassion for the incurable scepticism of one in outer darkness--"no, I destroy nothing that I cannot at once replace. Let your law-courts with their cumbersome and ruinous procedure disappear, and India will set up her old _Panchayats_, in which justice will be dispensed in accordance with her own conscience. For your schools and colleges, upon which lakhs of rupees have been wasted in bricks and mortar for the erection of ponderous buildings that weigh as heavily upon our boys as the educational processes by which you reduce their souls to slavery, we will give them simpler structures, open to God's air and light, and the learning of our forefathers that will make them free men once more." Not that he would exclude all Western literature--Ruskin, for instance, he would always welcome with both hands--nor Western science so long as it was applied to spiritual and not to materialistic purposes, nor even English teachers, if they would become Indianised and were reborn of the spirit of India. Indeed, what he had looked for, and looked in vain for, in the rulers of India was "a change of hearts" by which they too might be reborn of the spirit of India. He hated no one, for that would be a negation of the great principle of _Ahimsa_, on which he expatiated with immense earnestness.