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I ran the risk and if I was set free I would still do the same.  I would be failing in my duty if I do not do so.  I have felt it this morning that I would have failed in my duty if I did not say all what I said here just now.  I wanted to avoid violence.  Non-violence is the first article of my faith.  It is the last article of my faith.  But I had to make my choice.  I had either to submit to a system which I considered has done an irreparable harm to my country or incur the risk of the mad fury of my people bursting forth when they understood the truth from my lips.  I know that my people have sometimes gone mad.  I am deeply sorry for it; and I am, therefore, here to submit not to a light penalty but to the highest penalty.  I do not ask for mercy.  I do not plead any extenuating act.  I am here, therefore, to invite and submit to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen.  The only course open to you, Mr. Judge, is, as I am just going to say in my statement, either to resign your post or inflict on me the severest penalty if you believe that the system and law you are assisting to administer are good for the people.  I do not expect that kind of conversion.  But by the time I have finished with my statement you will, perhaps, have a glimpse of what is raging within my breast to run this maddest risk which a sane man can run.

WRITTEN STATEMENT

I owe it perhaps to the Indian public and to the public in England to placate which this prosecution is mainly taken up that I should explain why from a staunch loyalist and co-operator I have become an uncompromising disaffectionist and non-co-operator.  To the Court too I should say why I plead guilty to the charge of promoting disaffection towards the Government established by law in India.  My public life began in 1893 in South Africa in troubled weather.  My first contact with British authority in that country was not of a happy character.  I discovered that as a man and as an Indian I had no rights.  On the contrary I discovered that I had no rights as a man because I was an Indian.

But I was not baffled.  I thought that this treatment of Indians was an excrescence upon a system that was intrinsically and mainly good.  I gave the Government my voluntary and hearty co-operation, criticising it fully where I felt it was faulty but never wishing its destruction.

Consequently when the existence of the Empire was threatened in 1899 by the Boer challenge, I offered my services to it, raised a volunteer ambulance corps and served at several actions that took place for the relief of Ladysmith.  Similarly in 1906 at the time of the Zulu revolt I raised a stretcher-bearer party and served till the end of the ‘rebellion’.  On both these occasions I received medals and was even mentioned in despatches.  For my work in South