In this, Gandhi was embodying what the doughty nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai had propounded in 1905: ‘The British are not a spiritual people,’ the Lala had said. ‘They are either a fighting race or a commercial nation. It would be throwing pearls before swine to appeal to them in the name of the higher morality or justice or on ethical grounds. They are a self-reliant, haughty people, who can appreciate self-respect and self-reliance even in their opponents.’ (Despite this insight, Lajpat Rai was himself killed, aged sixty-three, by repeated blows to the head by the stave of a British
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