DEAR MR. GANDHI:
His Excellency the Viceroy desires me to acknowl-
edge your letter of the second of March. He regrets to learn that you contemplate a course of action which is clearly bound to involve violation of the law and danger to the public peace.
Yours very truly,
G. CUNNINGHAM,
Private Secretary

On April 5 Gandhi carried out his threat. After marching two hundred miles to the Arabian Sea, he and a small group of companions began making salt in defiance of the law. Within a week British soldiers throughout India were using their swagger sticks to flick the white cotton caps off the heads of Gandhi's supporters, ***who were obstructing traffic by lying down on railway tracks and public thoroughfares***, boycotting British goods, and refusing to obey British laws. On the twenty-third of the month troops at Peshawar, in Northern India, shot down twenty N arional- ists, and on April 30 Gandhi's son was sentenced to a year in prison, charged with sedition. On May 3 Gandhi him- self was seized and imprisoned near Bombay, and troops began raiding several provincial headquarters of the Con- gress Party.

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