seen in any event is this, that although I have a hundred thousand friends, not one of them has been able to write me any letter for six months, or to send any greetings, and the fact that due to the informing of plotters who are trying to deceive the Government, interrogations and searches have been continually carried out from the eastern provinces to those in the west.
The plan these intriguers hatched was evidently to organize an ‘incident’ that would be the cause of thousands like me receiving the heaviest penalties. However, the result was a penalty that recalled an incident of petty pilfering perpetrated by the commonest person. Of one hundred and fifteen people, fifteen innocent men were given sentences of five or six months. Would any rational creature in the world prick the tail of a fierce lion or terrible dragon with his brilliantly sharp diamond sword, and make it turn on him? If his intention was self-defence or combat, he would use his sword somewhere else.
With your deluded view, you conceive of me as such a man, for that is the way you have charged me and sentenced me. If I act in a manner so contrary to consciousness and reason, this great country should not be terrorized and public opinion turned against me with propaganda, I should be sent to a lunatic asylum like a common madman. But if I am someone of the importance you afford me, my keen sword would not be pointed at the tails of the lion or the dragon to make them attack him, he would rather defend himself as far as he could. Just as I have voluntarily chosen seclusion these last ten years, and tolerating difficulties beyond human endurance, have interfered in no way whatsoever in matters of government, nor have I wanted to interfere. Because my sacred duty prohibits me.
O you who bind and loose! Is it at all possible that in the one hundred and twenty treatises of a person who, as was written in the newspapers twenty-five years ago, with one newspaper article caused thirty thousand people to accept his ideas, and drew the attention of the huge ‘Operation Army’ on himself, and replied with six words to the questions of the chief cleric of the English, who wanted six hundred, and gave a speech after the Constitutional Revolution as though he was a leading diplomat, — would only fifteen words related to politics and the world be found in the one hundred and twenty treatises of such a man? Is it at all reasonable to accept that this man follows politics and his aim is this world and he is troubling the Government? If his mind was set on meddling in politics and the Government, such a person would have made it clear in a single of his treatises, and indicated it in a thousand places. If his purpose had been criticism with political intent, would he not have found anything to