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Preface to the new edition
[In issuing this new edition of Hind Swaray, it may not be inappropriate to publish the following that I wrote in the Harijan in connection of the Hind Swaraj Special Number of the Aryan Path. Though Gandhiji's views as expressed in the first edition of the Hind Swaraj have remained in substance unchanged, they have gone through a necessary evolution. My article copied below throws some light on this evolution. The proof copy of this edition has been revised by numerous friends to whom I am deeply indebted.]
Mahadev Desai Wardha, 11-12-1938
An Important Publication
Unique in its conception and beautifully successful in its execution is the Special Swaraj Number of the Aryan Path. It owes its appearance mainly to the devoted labours of that gifted sister Shrimati Sophia Wadia who sent copies of Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule to numerous friends abroad and invited the most prominent of them to express their views on the book and seen in it the hope for future India, but she wanted the European thinkers and writers to say that it had in it the potency to help even Europe out of its chaos, and therefore she thought of this plan. The result is remarkable. The special number contains articles by Professor Soddy, G. D. H. Cole, C. Delisle Burns, John Middleton Murry, J. D. Beresford, Hugh Fausset, Claude Houghton, Gerald Heard and Irene Rathbone. Some of these are of course well-known pacifists and socialists. One wonders what the number would have been like, if it had included in it articles by non-pacifist and non-socialist writers! The articles are so arranged "that adverse criticisms and objections raised in earlier articles are mostly answered in subsequent ones". But there are one or two criticisms which have been made practically by all the writers, and it would be worth while considering them here.
There are certain things which it would be well to recognize at once. Thus Professor Soddy remarks that, having just returned from a visit to India, he saw little outwardly to suggest that the doctrine inculcated in the book had attainted any considerable measure of success. That is quite true. Equally true is Mr. G. D. H. Cole's remark that though Gandhiji's is "as near as a man can be to Swaraj in a purely personal sense, he has never solved, to his own satisfaction, the other problem — that of finding terms of collaboration that could span the gulf between man and man, between acting alone and helping others to act in accordance with their lights, which involves acting with them and as one of them— being at once one's self and someone else, someone one's self can and must regard and criticize and attempt to value." Also as John Middleton Murry says,
