Saint's Progress

With the awful persistence of approaching doom, scrawny, scantily garbed but great-souled St. Gandhi trudged on last week, hot-stepping toward the sea (TIME, March 24 et seq.).

Sunbeams dancing on the hard road made the barefoot Saint's steps hot. Eighteen of the 79 disciples who tried to hot-step after him dropped exhausted, were bundled into automobiles by friends of the saint, rushed to the nearest village, weeping because they had "failed the Master."

All India was tense, watching to see if His Majesty's Government would arrest Mr. Gandhi when he should reach the sea and evaporate a gallon or two of water for a pinch of salt, thus breaking the law which makes salt a British monopoly in India. Pausing at the village of Tresela, St. Gandhi made a speech (characteristically) on a topic which had nothing to do with his main object of starting by example his long prepared campaign of "Indian mass civil disobedience." The subject: Child Marriage.

Child marriage was nearing its zero hour. Within a few days the law forbidding females under 14 and males under 18 to marry anywhere in British India would go into effect. Mr. Gandhi knew that as he spoke hundreds of children all over India were being married by parents frantically anxious to get their sons and daughters in under the wire. (Theory: a mature man who marries a babe, aged two, knows that the young spouse is without worldly taint.)

St. Gandhi himself was married at twelve to a girl of twelve. Said he last week: "Oh foolish ones! Without understanding this law you are busy marrying off little children. Shame, shame! You are so ignorant, and ignorance is the cause of your slavery to Great Britain." But though his own child-marriage was bitterly unhappy, he did not specifically condemn the custom, merely called it "ignorant."

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