Before I proceed with the other intimate European contacts, I must note two
or three items of importance. One of the contacts, however, should
be mentioned at once. The appointment of Miss Dick was not enough
for my purpose. I needed more assistance. I have in the earlier
chapters referred to Mr. Ritch. I knew him very well. He was manager in a
commercial firm. He approved my suggestion of leaving the firm and
getting articled under me, and he considerably lightened my burden.
About this time Sjt. Madanjit approached me with a proposal to start
Indian Opinion and sought my advice. He had already been conducting a press, and I
approved of his proposal. The journal was launched in 1904, and Sjt.
Mansukhlal Nazar became the first editor. But I had to bear the
brunt of the work, having for most of the time to be practically in
charge of the journal. Not that Sjt. Mansukhlal could not carry it
on. He had been doing a fair amount of journalism whilst in India,
but he would never venture to write on intricate South African
problems so long as I was there. He had the greatest confidence in
my discernment, and therefore threw on me the responsibility of
attending to the editorial columns. The journal has been until this
day a weekly. In the beginning it used to be issued in Gujarati,
Hindi, Tamil and English. I saw, however, that the Tamil and Hindi
sections were a make-believe. They did not serve the purpose for
which they were intended, so I discontinued them as I even felt that
there would be a certain amount of deception involved in their
continuance.
I had no notion that I should have to invest any money in this
journal, but I soon discovered that it could not go on without my
financial help. The Indians and the Europeans both knew that, though
I was not avowedly the editor of Indian Opinion,
I was virtually responsible for its conduct. It would not have
mattered if the journal had never been started, but to stop it after
it had once been launched would have been both a loss and a
disgrace. So I kept on pouring out my money, until ultimately I was
practically sinking all my savings in it. I remember a time when I
had to remit £75 each month.
But after all these years I feel that the journal has served the
community well. It was never intended to be a commercial concern. So
long as it was under my control, the changes in the journal were
indicative of changes in my life.
Indian Opinion in those days, like Young India
and Navajivan today, was a mirror of part of my life. Week after week I poured out
my soul in its columns, and expounded the principles and practice of
Satyagraha as I understood it. During ten years, that is, until
1914, excepting the intervals of my enforced rest in prison, there
was hardly an issue of Indian Opinion
without an article from me. I cannot recall a word in those articles
set down without thought or deliberation, or a word of conscious
exaggeration, or anything merely to please. Indeed the journal
became for me a training in self-restraint, and for friends a medium
through which to keep in touch with my thoughts. The critic found
very little to which he could object. In fact the tone of
Indian Opinion compelled the critic to put a curb on his own pen. Satyagraha would
probably have been impossible without Indian Opinion.
The readers looked forward to it for a trustworthy account of the
Satyagraha campaign as also of the real condition of Indians in
South Africa. For me it became a means for the study of human nature
in all its casts and shades, as I always aimed at establishing an
intimate and clean bond between the editor and the readers. I was
inundated with letters containing the outpourings of my
correspondents' hearts. They were friendly, critical or bitter,
according to the temper of the writer. It was a fine education for me
to study, digest and answer all this correspondence. It was as
though the community thought audibly through this correspondence
with me. It made me thoroughly understand the responsibility of a
journalist, and the hold I secured in this way over the community
made the future campaign workable, dignified and irresistible.
In the very first month of Indian Opinion,
I realized that the sole aim of journalism should be service. The
newspaper press is a great power, but just as an unchained torrent
of water submerges whole countrysides and devastates crops, even so
an uncontrolled pen serves but to destroy. If the control is from
without, it proves more poisonous than want of control. It can be
profitable only when exercised from within. If this line of
reasoning is correct, how many of the journals in the world would
stand the test? But who would stop those that are useless? And who
should be the judge? The useful and the useless must, like good and
evil generally, go on together, and man must make his choice.