The administration may be made impossible in a variety of
ways. It is not actually that every deputy magistrate
should say: I won't serve in it. It is not that when one
man resigns nobody will be found to take his place. But
if you create this spirit in the country the Government service
will gradually imbibe this spirit, and a whole office may go
on strike. That does not put an end to the administration,
but it creates endless complications in the work of administration,
and if these complications are created in every
part of the country, the administration will have been brought
to a deadlock and made none the less impossible, for the
primary thing is the prestige of the Government and the
boycott strikes at the root of that prestige.... We
can reduce every Indian in Government service to the position
of a man who has fallen from the dignity of Indian citizenship....
No man shall receive social honours because he is a
Hakim or a Munsiff or a Huzur Sheristadar.... No law
can compel one to give a chair to a man who comes to his
house. He may give it to an ordinary shopkeeper; he may
refuse it to the Deputy Magistrate or the Subordinate Judge.
He may give his daughter in marriage to a poor beggar,
he may refuse her to the son of a Deputy Magistrate, because
it is absolutely within his rights, absolutely within legal
bounds.

Passive resistance is recognized as legitimate in England.
It is legitimate in theory even in India, and if it is made
illegal by new legislation, these laws will infringe on the primary
rights of personal freedom and will tread on dangerous
grounds. Therefore it seems to me that by means of the boycott