a position to judge.................

     Let us now see what that Himalayan miscalculation was.  Before one can be fit for the practice of civil disobedience one must have rendered a willing and respectful obedience to the state laws.  For the most part we obey such laws out of fear of the penalty for their breach, and this holds good particularly in respect of such laws as do not not involve a moral principle.  For instance, an honest, respectable man will not suddenly take to stealing, whether there is a law against stealing or not, but this very man will not feel any remorse for failure to observe the rule about carrying head-lights on bicycles after dark.  Indeed it is doubtful whether he would even accept advice kindly about being more careful in this respect.  But he would observe any obligatory rule of this kind, if only to escape the inconvenience of facing a prosecution for a breach of the rule.  Such compliance is not, however, the willing and spontaneous obedience that is required of a Satyagrahi.  A Satyagrahi obeys the laws of society intelligently and of his own free will, because he considers it to be his sacred duty to do so.  It is only when a person has thus obeyed the laws of society scrupulously that he is in a position to judge as to which particular rules are good and just and which unjust and iniquitous.  Only then does the right accrue to him of the civil disobedience of certain laws in well-defined circumstances.  My error lay in my failure to observe this necessary limitation.  I had called on the people to launch upon civil disobedience before they had thus qualified themselves for it, and this mistake seemed to me of Himalayan magnitude.

-Mohandas K. Gandhi,  Gandhi: An Autobiography:  The Story Of My Experiments With Truth