Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage
Freedom and slavery are not so much physical as mental. He, who possesses this spiritual freedom, mocks at physical confinement and bondage. Freedom of the soul is the real freedom. The man of the race that possesses this mental and spiritual freedom cannot, for long, be held in bondage. Britishers had the strongest stone walls and iron bars and the most alert gaol (jail) keepers. But it spite of this they could not arrest the enthusiasm of Indian freedom fighters. Here I am not referring to a few rebels like Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and JP Narayan who broke loose from the jails; like Netaji outwitted the frontier guards and escaped to Germany and Japan. There were millions whose spirits could not be crushed by the might of the British Empire. All the time the Britishers, who confined our leaders, were secretly afraid of them. As the great Mahatma once humorously revealed to a foreign scholar that he had always been more effective in bargaining behind the prison bars. The history of Indian struggle for freedom is replete with numerous examples of the invincibility of freedom-loving spirits. They bear eloquent testimony to the futility of the tyrants to contain the true lovers of freedom behind the iron bars and stone walls.
