Dear friend,
Your welcome letter is before me. Instead of tiring it soothes. I endorse your reasoning regarding family considerations. Apart, however, from those considerations, the body as a vehicle for the upliftment of the soul within needs care such as would keep it in good order and condition. In my opinion, it has to be sacrificed without the slightest hesitation when it obstructs the progress of the soul.
You were in no way bound to take the jail food provided for Indian prisoners in general. In spite of your having Indianised yourself you cannot all of a sudden make radical changes in your food and expect the body to respond.
I agree too with your decision to finish your writing before taking up any public work. Do please send me copies of your two memoranda. It is my duty before coming to a final decision to understand thoroughly the viewpoint of those who advocated council-entry. I would therefore like to possess both the copies.
If at any time I could go over to the north for rest, it would be a privilege to me to regard your house as my own and place myself under your and Mrs. Stokes' care and attention. You may not know that Andrews has come again to me, sent by the poet. He is not to leave me again till I am completely restored. I know that I should send you and Mrs. Stokes his love although he does not know that I have a letter from you and that I am writing to you. When I see him this evening I am going to show your letter to him. 
With love to you and Mrs. Stokes,

Yours sincerely,
M.K. Gandhi

Dear friend,
I have your letter of the 7th instant. As you must have seen from the papers, I have now removed to a seaside place. It is a beautiful retreat where we are accommodated. It faces the sea and we constantly hear the music of the waves. Somehow or other I feel that I must express as early as possible my opinion about the Council-entry, etc. I think I have sufficient energy to do the mental work required for the purpose. I have already undertaken to see Hakimji [Hakim Ajmalkhan] and other friends. I am avoiding as much physical exertion as possible, and I do not think that the amount of mental work I am doing just now will do me harm. 
An unknown friend wrote to me that you had asked him to send me some hill honey, and he kindly sent me 5 lbs. It was very good indeed. I understood subsequently that Mohanlal Pandya had written to you for hill honey for me. I know that you have been exceedingly kind to me. He ought not to have troubled you. I was then getting good honey from Mahabaleshwar. During my illness I have been so overwhelmed with kindness from those whom I knew and those whom I had never the pleasure of knowing that I feel it was almost worth having that illness. 
With love from both of us to both of you,

Yours ever,

S. E. Stokes, Esq.
Harmony Hall
Kotgarh
Simla Hills

Dear friend,
I got the registered packet on Sunday, and yesterday being my first Monday of silence after admission to the Sassoon Hospital, I was able to read both the papers. The written memorandum I am sending up as desired by you. I found both to be useful and instructive as giving me the mentality of one of whose impartiality I am certain and whose opinions I value. If I could but accept your premises and your view of non-cooperation, there is not much with which I should disagree. I entirely endorse your opinion that, if there is any Council-entry at all, it should not be for mere obstruction. On the contrary, we should take advantage of everything good that may be offered by the Government measures and endeavour to do our best to correct the evil in them. Accepting your reasoning, I would also endorse your view that the embargo upon lawyers and law-courts should also be lifted. 
But I think that, perhaps, there is a fundamental difference between us as to the interpretation and implications of non-violent non-cooperation and, therefore, what appeared to you to be a dismal outlook on your coming out of prison would not have set me thinking of other means of getting rid of the paralysis which you felt and saw had overcome all Congress activities. I would have regarded it as a necessary stage in the evolution of the public life of the country. It would have been for me a rare opportunity and still rarer privilege for redoubling my efforts and testing my faith in the programme. 
You have cited your own personal experiences and naturally concluded that there was something wrong about the programme in that the work that was patiently built by you and your co-workers had been almost undone in a moment. But there is a saying among lawyers that hard cases make bad law. Properly applied, it is a sound truth. Paraphrased in religious terms, it means that because, under some exceptional circumstances, departure from religious truth may appear to be advantageous, it furnishes no ground for losing faith in the truth. In your own case I would have reasoned to myself: This undoing of the work must be regarded as the people's sacrifice in order to get the real thing. 
And what is that real thing? For the common masses to rid themselves of the fetish of power. For ages they have been taught to look to a Government to do everything for them, to protect them. The Government, instead of being regarded as an instrument in their hands for their advantage, is looked up to as something beyond and apart from them which, like a deity, whether benignant or malignant, has got to be propitiated. Non-cooperation as conceived by me is ceasing to cooperate with that idea of Government and teaching the people to feel that the Government is their creation and not they creatures of the Government. I should not therefore wonder that many of the so-called advantages that we have hitherto enjoyed through the instrumentality of such a Government have to be sacrificed. If the non-cooperation was not non-violent, we would seek, as all nations in history have sought, to beat Governments with their own weapons, that is, force of arms. In such a fight it would be folly not to make use of the whole of the Government machinery. People in a violent struggle do not expect to sacrifice though they are prepared for it and, if they have at their disposal arms superior to those possessed by the Government, beat it down without any sacrifice. But in a non-violent struggle resort to arms is eschewed, and sacrifice for the moment is a necessity of the case.
In practice, too, in our own struggle, ever since the September of 1920, we have been sacrificing. Lawyers, school-masters, school-boys, merchants, every class of people who have realised the implications of non-violent non-cooperation, have sacrificed to the measure of their ability and understanding. I know men who have lost money because they would not go to a court of law. I know cases in which the Government officials have chuckled with pride and pleasure that men who before used to gain advantages through their instrumentality were losing, but those who lost with a full knowledge of the struggle counted their loss as gain. It is my firm conviction that you cannot enter the Councils at the present moment with the present system and the administrators with their present mentality without participating in violence of an extremely bad type which is the basis of the Government of India.
Take again the history of the other Governments of the world. By way of illustration I cite the Egyptian Government. They are in a fair way to attaining to what they want. They have resorted to ordinary means hitherto adopted. The Egyptians are trained for the use of arms. It was open to them to take part in the Councils and all administrative machinery because they were able and willing to vindicate their position by force of arms. In India we have a state of things, so far as I am aware, without a parallel in the world. The people as a mass are neither willing nor able to take up arms. If you go to the Councils and are defeated in your purpose by the Government, you must be prepared for raising a rebellion. It cannot be successfully raised in India. Nor are the present Councillors men who can give that training to the people. My endeavour was and is to find a substitute for ordinary rebellion, and that is civil disobedience. The Councils are no training-ground even for the Councillors for civil disobedience. They believe in the "tooth for tooth" law. The sophistry, evasion and even fraud of the Government benches are returned in coin. Their manifest purpose is to embarrass the Government. Their appeal is to fear. The non-cooperator's manifest purpose is never to embarrass, and his appeal must always be to the heart, therefore, to love and trust.
You evidently seem to think that mystical and religious non-cooperation can run side by side with the purely political non-cooperation of the Councils. I hold that the two are mutually destructive, and my faith in religious non-cooperation is so immutable that, if I find that it would not answer the needs of India and that the masses would not respond to it, I should be content to be alone and rely upon its ultimate invincibility to convert even the masses. Indeed, I see no escape for this world except through the acceptance of non-violence as the predominant and ordinary rule of life. The present society is ultimately based upon force. That is violence. My endeavour is no less than to get rid of this worship of force, and my conviction is that, if any country is ready for assimilating the doctrine in its entirety in a large and workable measure, it is India. And having that conviction, I have no other remedy for the needs of our country.
I think I have already said more than I wished to. It is possible to amplify what I have said, but I have no doubt that you will yourself dot the i's and cross the t's. I am almost impatient to express my opinion upon the Council-entry and kindred matters, the more so after reading your memorandum, but I am under promise to Motilalji, Hakimji and other friends not to give public expression to my views till I have met them again and discussed the whole thing. When I am free to say all that I have in view on this question and if you have time to spare from your writings, you will see the development of the outline I have sketched above.

Yours sincerely,

S. E. Stokes, Esq.
Kotgarh
Simla Hills

My dear Satyanand,
Pyarelal has preserved many letters for me to read when I can. I can just now find yours of 31st March in this bundle. I have devoured its contents with avidity simply because it is your letter. I never knew that you had gone to Vienna. What was the operation for? Was it not successful? I have never appreciated the homage paid to the Vienna surgeons. However this is all by the way. I do hope your incapacity is not permanent. 
As to the great question raised by you, my reading of Gita and interpretation of ahimsa is different from yours. I do not believe that killing in war can ever be done without anger or zest. As I believe in unadulterated ahimsa I am groping as to India's duty. I am shirking the national solution. I discuss without coming to a decision. My own individual conduct is determined. But I quite agree with you that national can be exactly the opposite. My present mood is to ask the Working Committee to decide for itself. It was not without cause that God prompted me to cease even to remain a four-anna member of the Congress. Hence there is no moral obligation on me to give an opinion. At the same time if I felt the call, I should not hesitate to announce my opinion. As it is I am praying for light.
How is Mrs. Stokes? What are the children doing? How long were you away?...

My dear Satyanand,
It was a perfect pleasure to hear from you. For though we correspond but rarely you are never out of my mind and often a subject of conversation.
I cling to an old superstition, if it may be so called. When in doubt on a matter involving no immorality either way, I toss and actually read in it divine guidance. I have no other scientific basis. To attribute residuary powers to God is a scientific mode in my opinion. In this crisis too, I have resorted to a kind of toss.
If I had my way, you know what would have happened. That was not to be. The Congress way was not only not immoral; for it, it was the only moral way. Hence I kept myself with the Congress.
My object was and still is to push forth the non-violent way as it was in my own proposal. The Congress made room for the interpretation you have put upon it.
But I do not regard it as a condition. It is a toss. If the British intention is pure, says the Congress, we plunge.
The way to test the intention is to know the British mind about India. If it is pure, then it is clear that God wants the Congress to throw its whole weight on the side of Britain, so that ultimately the victory may go not to the strongest arms but to the strongest cause. What you want is already at Britain's disposal. She draws men and money without let or hindrance. Unless violence breaks out, she will continue to get these. The Congress won't tolerate violence, let us assume. Then Britain has nothing to fear from the Congress in the violent way. And I hold that considered from the non-violent standpoint, which in my opinion is the only point worth considering, it would be immoral for the Congress to give her moral support to Britain unless the latter's moral position is made clear.
I do not lay down the law as you do about Nazism. Germans are as much human beings as you and I are. Nazism like other "isms" is a toy of today. It will share the same fate as the other "isms."
I fancy I see the distinction between you and me. You, as a Westerner, cannot subordinate reason to faith. I, as an Indian, cannot subordinate faith to reason even if I will. You tempt the Lord God with your reason; I won't. As the Gita says, God is the fifth or the unknown, deciding factor.
In spite of our intellectual differences our hearts have always been and will be one.
With love to you all,

Bapu