A GRAIN OF SALT

Into the teeth of England whose hand has long been dominant in the Far East, a small, brown man of India prepares to throw a grain of salt. Fourteen days have elapsed since Mahatma Gandhi began his pilgrimage to the sea. Four more are necessary before the one hundred and fifty miles are completed and general civil disobedience can be inaugurated by the manufacture of salt in defiance of the British monopoly. The path of the leader and the seventy-eight faithful does not lack cheers, flowers, triumphal arches.

Chief among the English sources of revenue is salt; but unfortunately it is a no less important part of Indian diet. In choosing the manufacture of salt as the starting point of his campaign, Gandhi enlisted the sympathies of India's masses whose average wage of three cents a day renders government Salt prices almost prohibitive. Religion is deeply rooted in India's soil; by investing his pilgrimage with religious fervor, Gandhi makes further universal appeal.

Whether a glorious gesture or a death-blow, the Nationalist movement in India stimulates no definite answer from the falling Labor Government. So far, England also seems to take the affair with a grain of salt.