News of the Week
THE wisest comment on Mr. Gandhi's announcement of " a fast to a finish," failing the withdrawal of the British Government's proposals (in the Communal Settlement plan) giving the Depressed Classes the separate electorates they have demanded, has been made by his fellow-countryman and fellow Congress-man, Mr. V. J. Patel, former President of the Legislative Assembly, who urges the Mahatma to believe that he can better serve India by living for it than by dying for it. But in fact if the fast which Mr. Gandhi declares he will begin on Tuesday should most unhappily have a fatal ending the deliberate suicide would have been undertaken not for India but for a particular theory or principle of Parliamentary representation. And if odium is to fall on anyone as the result of what would be widely r ro- claimed, and as widely hailed, as martyrdom, it ought rightly to be not on the British Government at all but on the Indian partieS, Mr. Gandhi's own not least, whose failure to agree in any communal settlement themselves made the formulation of a settlement by the Cabinet inevitable.
