alone. He then went into civil aviation, opened his company’s private air service, and soon afterwards his all-metal monoplanes were on sale. It was the beginning of great developments. At this period the Press published many stories of his fabulous wealth, and his spectacular successes and good treatment of his workers were widely discussed, and Ford himself wrote three books concerning his own life’s work and ideals – My Life and Work, Today and Tomorrow, and Moving Forward. In 1927 ‘Model T’ was superseded and over 350,000 advance orders were received for his new car. In April, 1931, his 20,000,000th car came off the assembly line, but in that year also the company, suffering like all others from the depression, lost £10,000,000.
The years immediately before the 1939–45 war saw a revival in the Ford fortunes and fresh expansions of plant, and as the war developed his company did excellent work; but the production of his great plant at Willow Run scarcely lived up to his earlier estimates of his own capacity as a producer. In 1943 Ford lost his only child and close associate, Edsel Bryant Ford, who for many years had played a leading part in all his undertakings, and, although nearly 80, himself resumed the presidency of his company. He resigned, for the second time, in 1945, and on his nomination his grandson, Henry Ford ii, was elected in his place. Henry Ford ii, who was born in September, 1917, had been released from the United States Navy in 1943 to direct war production at the Ford Motor Company, of which he was appointed executive vice-president in 1944.
Mahatma Gandhi
Apostle of independence
30 January 1948
Mr Gandhi, who was assassinated in Delhi yesterday afternoon, was the most influential figure India has produced for generations. He set out to promote national consciousness, and to defend the ancient Indian ideals of poverty and simplicity against the inroads of modern industrialism, though this part of his teaching was seldom heard in his later years. He judged all activities, whether of the State or of the individual, by their conformity to the doctrine of non-violence, which he held to be the panacea of all human ills, political, social, and economic. His day of triumph when British authority was voluntarily withdrawn was turned to profound sorrow, for communal strife and bloodshed, instead of ending as he had confidently hoped, were greatly intensified, and the two new Dominions of India and Pakistan were brought to the verge of war. To efforts to replace this fratricidal strife by Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh harmony and good will he devoted the last months of his long life.
In all parts of the world many regarded the ‘Mahatma’ (‘great soul’) as both a great moral teacher and a great Indian patriot. Others held him to be the victim of a naive self-delusion which blinded him to the race-hatred, disorder, and bloodshed which his ‘non-violent’ campaigns against British authority invariably provoked. But few critics have questioned the sincerity of his repudiation of force. A whole-hearted pacifist, he believed he had a mission not to India only but to all the world. To his own co-religionists he was certainly a ‘saint’. His increasing asceticism, finally marked by a complete indifference to the comforts of life (though these were showered upon him by wealthy supporters), won him a reverence that bordered upon adoration; the popular mind long credited him with powers little short of miraculous; his gospel of the liberation of India from British rule early won the enthusiastic support of most of the younger school of Hindu politicians, and did much to wean them from the cult of anarchy; his defence of Hindu faith and culture against western ‘materialism’ gave him the adhesion of multitudes of the orthodox.
A convinced Hindu, but widely read in other faiths and a great admirer of the Christian ideal, he was a powerful advocate of social reform. The poverty of the masses and his desire for India to return to the simplicities of the past led him to proclaim the need for the people, rich and poor alike, to spin by hand their own cotton thread and to weave and wear their own hand-made cotton cloth. Wherever he went his charka (spinning wheel) went with him, and as he talked to those who sought him daily he spun his cloth.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869, at Porbandar, the capital of a small State in Kathiawar, Western India, where his father, though belonging only to the socially obscure Bania (moneylending) section of Hindus, was the Dewan. He was married when only 13 to a child of the same age, but from 1906 was a Brahmacharya – that is, a celibate within the marriage state for the purpose of realizing God. In early life he admired Western ways, and in this period he read law at the Inner Temple and was called to the Bar. He was meticulous in wearing the top hat and frock coat of the ‘town kit’ of the period. Some years later on, after conviction in India, he was disbarred. All his life he remained a strict vegetarian and total abstainer. In 1893 he went from Bombay to South Africa in connection with an Indian legal case of some complexity, and remained to oppose discriminatory legislation against Indians, and his stay lasted for 21 years. Gandhi was admitted an advocate of the Supreme Court. When the South African war broke out he organized an Indian Ambulance Corps, 1,000 strong, which often worked under heavy fire. Again, in 1906, on the outbreak of the Zulu rebellion, he formed a stretcher-bearer corps.
After the passage of an Act in 1913 restricting Indian migration between the different Provinces of the Union, some 3,000 Indians with Gandhi at their head, crossed the border from Natal into the Transvaal in order to court arrest. Many, including the leader, his wife, and one of his sons, were imprisoned. In 1914 Gandhi returned to India by way of London, and he landed here a few days before the outbreak of the 1914–18 War. He was instrumental in organizing from among the Indian students a volunteer ambulance corps, which rendered good service. In Western India he rapidly became the champion of all whom he regarded as weak and oppressed, and was associated with the whirlwind movement for Home Rule resulting from the activities of Annie Besant, but at the War Conference convened by the Viceroy at Delhi in the spring of 1918 he supported ‘with all his heart’ a resolution of support of the war effort.
In 1919, in pursuance of what he called satyagraha, or ‘truth-seeking’, he issued a pledge of refusal to obey the Rowlatt Acts, ‘and such other laws as the committee to be hereafter appointed may think fit’. There followed the serious disturbances of April, 1919, both at Ahmedabad, Gandhi’s home, and in the Punjab, notably at Amritsar. The loss of life thus caused led Gandhi to admit that he had made a blunder of ‘Himalayan’ dimensions. But from this time began his unquestioned mastery over the Congress Party organization. To him that party was India; and as its spokesman he was India’s chosen mouthpiece.
In the spring of 1920 Gandhi considered that India was spiritually prepared to undertake a further campaign of passive resistance without risk of lapse into violence. He started a movement of ‘non-violent non-cooperation’, declaring it would be maintained until the claims of the Khilafat movement – started by Indian Muslims to obtain alleviation of the harsh peace terms imposed on Turkey after the 1914–18 war – were conceded, and until public servants alleged to be guilty of ‘martial law excesses’ in the Punjab were adequately punished. He promised swaraj, meaning complete self-government without the aid of the British, within a year. On paper at least he collected within a few months a crore of rupees (£750,000) for swaraj. Gandhi’s open letter to the Viceroy (the first Lord Reading) dated February 9, 1922, giving him seven days in which to announce a change of policy, had scarcely been dispatched when at Chauri-Chaura, in the Gorakhpur district, United Provinces, a number of constables were attacked in their thana and burnt to death. He called a halt to the civil disobedience movement and imposed upon himself a five days’ fast. On March 10, 1922, he was arrested, and was later tried for conspiracy. Gandhi pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six years’ simple imprisonment, but was released in January, 1924, after an operation in gaol for appendicitis.
Early in 1929 Gandhi shared responsibility for a resolution of conditional acceptance of the proposed Round Table Conference passed at a meeting of political leaders. But on March 12, 1930, Gandhi, with 80 volunteers, began a march of 200 miles on foot from his ashram, near Ahmedabad, to Dandi, a village on the sea coast in the Surat district, for the purpose of collecting salt, and thereby defying the law. On May 5 he was arrested and interned at Yeravda Gaol, near Poona, under a Bombay Regulation of 1827. The economic effects of the second era of civil disobedience were much more serious than those of the first, owing in large measure to the intensity of the boycott.
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