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FRAGMENTS OF A PRISONER'S DIARY
able record. But the hollowness of that record itself is exposed by a very significant confession he made last year. The confession was that the seximpulse was still very strong in the old man nearing seventy, after more than thirty years of the practice of Brahmacharya. Nature takes her revenge. Even the Saint cannot cheat her. The lifestories of all the Saints of history bear testimony to defeat in the struggle against the laws of nature. The impulse is not killed, nor controlled. Gandhi's confession proves that the charge of over-sexuality is not unfounded. With a normal man, the seximpulse generally disappears, by the time one approaches scventy. Gandhi is sixty seven. The fact of over-sexuality is further proved by the obsession with the question of sex. These are no personal reflections. The object is to show that his own life disproves the clogma of the moralist.
Yet, defending his opposition to birth control, Gandhi wrote in the “Harijan" that the middleclass has becomc impotent, owing to bad habits on the part of the youth. He deplored that young school and college girls should avidly read birthcontrol literature and even keep contraceptives. What a horror! But it does not occur to the rightcous moralist that those habits, wherever they exist, result from the forced sex-ethics buttressed on religious sanctions and social taboos. Gandhi says that it is a sin against God to waste the vital Auid. What a tragic ignorance of biology! According to
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