조지 오웰의 영문수필이다. Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent but the tests that have to be applied to them are not of course the same in all cases. In Gandhi s case the questions on feels inclined to ask are to what extent was Gandhi moved by vanity by the consciousness of himself as a humble naked old man sitting on a praying mat and shaking empires by sheer spiritual power and to what extent did he compromise his own principles by entering politics which of their nature are inseparable from coercion and fraud? To give a definite answer one would have to study Gandhi s acts and writings in immense detail for his whole life was a sort of pilgrimage in which every act was significant. But this partial autobiography which ends in the nineteen-twenties is strong evidence in his favor all the more because it covers what he would have called the unregenerate part of his life and reminds one that inside the saint or near-saint there was a very shrewd able person who could if he had chosen have been a brilliant success as a lawyer an administrator or perhaps even a businessman.
