“This civilization is such that one has only to be patient and it will be self-destroyed. According to the teaching of Mahomet this would be considered a Satanic civilisation. Hinduism calls it the Black Age. I cannot give you an adequate conception of it. It is eating into the vitals of the English nation. It must be shunned. Parliaments are really emblems of slavery. If you will sufficiently think over this, you will entertain the same opinion, and cease to blame the English. They rather deserve our sympathy. They are a shrewd nation and I, therefore, believe that they will cast off this evil. They are enterprising and industrious, and their mode of thought is not inherently immoral. Neither are they bad at heart. Civilisation is not an incurable disease, but it should never be forgotten that the English people are at present afflicted by it.” (14)

Gandhi’s point stated in this passage, which, if my interpretation is correct, pervades and informs all of the book, is undoubtedly true. Western and specifically British, civilization did lack the dharma that was the organizing principle of Gandhi’s imaginary village. The British writers Gandhi recommends, John Ruskin, Edward Carpenter and the others, had said the same things of their own country in almost the same terms. Gandhi’s comments elsewhere in ˙Hind Swaraj on railways are meant to illustrate the main point. They underline that material progress without moral progress does not make people better. Further, when the so-called “progress” enriches a few and impoverishes many it does not deserve to be called even material progress. In 1908 Gandhi debunked the specific ornaments of British pride. If he later said, what perhaps he never meant to deny, that in the context of an ethic of service and duty and voluntary simple living the same specific machines and professionals might be truly useful, he did not in saying so retract what he meant to say in 1908. Hence Gandhi could say subsequently that he stood by the philosophy he had expressed in Hind Swaraj. Later he clarified his meaning, and even changed his views, with respect to some of the illustrations he had used to illustrate his ethical concepts, but he did not change his ethical concepts.