PART V

Interlude - INTO THE NORTH

Kohat, guarding the mouth of Kohat Pass -- just one little post on the long line of the North-West Frontier defenses. All compact and tight-set, fit for the grim work it faces. Beds of blue violets along its streets. Beds of blue violets in gardens, for somehow your Briton will have flowers, wherever you strand him. Barbed wire entanglements girdling the town. Lights every hundred paces, and heavy-armed sentries. Big arc searchlights at each corner of each house, turned on full blaze at dusk. No shrubs, no trees or other cover for skulkers, allowed too near a dwelling. No white woman permitted outside the wire after daylight begins to fail; not because of fears, but because of things that have happened. Army officers' wives they are, the few white women in Kohat; the quiet, comradely sort that play the whole game to the finish.

And not one moment of any day or night, in this or any Frontier post, is free from mortal danger.

Under the wing of the Post, an Indian town, ringed about by high mud walls. Bazaars, mosques, temples, blind-faced houses in pinched and tortuous streets, where hawk-nosed men in sheepskin coats, with rifles lying in the crook of their arms, shoulder bullocks and asses for passage. Hundreds of little stalls, like booths in a country fair, reflect the Afghan boundary. Wonderful shining slippers, heelless and curly-toed, for the little feet of Muslim ladies; Persian bed-posts, gayly lacquered; beautiful gauzes; block-printed silks and cottons; vessels inlaid in tin and brass or copper; peacock pottery; fine fox-skins from the mountains; red rugs from Bokhara; meat, for this is a Muslim country; rice and curry and sugar, because certain Hindus have ventured in, lending money while they sell their wares and getting always richer with their money-lending.

Getting too rich, maybe, and a little too confident. For though the hawk-nosed man in the big sheepskin coat may not be their match in playing with money, that lurks in his half-humorous, wholly piercing hawk-eye that should warn the boldest.

Besides, this hawk-nosed, hawk-eyed citizen is here in his own country. And no more than a revolver-shot away, in the gray, impending crags of the Frontier mountains lurk his brother Muslims, the wild tribes who call no man king or master, who know no business other than that of raiding, and whose favorite year-round sport is the kidnapping of Hindu money-lenders to hear the queer sounds they emit in the course of the subsequent entertainment.

In all this world, say the men who, day and night, year in, year out, guard the frontier of India -- in all this world are no fighters better than the tribesmen. Also, behind them lies Afghanistan, like a couchant leopard, green eyes fixed on the glittering bait of India. And behind Afghanistan -- nay, in Kabul itself, lurks "the Man that walks like a Bear," fingering gold and whispering ceaselessly of the glories of a rush across the border that shall sweep the Crescent through the strong Muslim Punjab, gathering Islam in its train; that shall raise the Muslims of the South and so shall close from both sides, like a tide, forever, over the heads of the Hindus.

"Why not?" asks the Bear. "Are you feebler men than your fathers? What stops you? The English? But look! I worry them on the other flank, stirring up the silly Hindus, North and South, against them. Already these English relax their hand, as the councils of their home-country weaken. And, I, the Bear, am behind you. Look at the loot and the killings! Drive in your wedge! Strike!"

CHAPTER XXIV - FIREBRANDS TO STRAW

Roughly speaking, three-quarters of the population of British India are Hindus, if the 60,000,000 Untouchables be computed with the Hindus.
[The Census of India, of 1921 shows about three and a quarter million Sikhs and about one and a sixth million Jains, of both of which sects many members call themselves Hindus. The Buddhists, numbering eleven and a half millions, are largely confined to the Province of Burma, outside the Indian Peninsula.]
Roughly speaking, one quarter of the population of British India is Muhammadan. And between the two lies a great gulf whence issues a continuous threatening rumble, with periodic destructive outbursts of sulphur and flame. This gulf constitutes one of the greatest factors in the present Indian situation.

Its elements formed integral parts of the problem that the British Crown assumed in 1858. And if for the first half-century of Crown rule they remained largely dormant, the reason is not obscure. During that half-century, Government was operated by British officers of the Civil Service, both in the administrative and in the judicial branches. These officers, in the performance of their duties, made no difference between Hindu and Muhammadan, holding the general interest in an equal hand. Therefore, being in the enjoyment of justice and of care, man by man, day by day, and from an outside authority that neither Hindu nor Muhamma-dan could challenge, neither party was roused to jealousy, and religious communal questions scarcely arose.

In 1909, however, the wind switched to a stormy quarter. The Minto-Morley scheme was enacted by Parliament as the "Indian Councils Act." The effect of this measure was instantly to alarm the Muhammadan element, rousing it into self-consciousness as a distinct and separate body, unorganized, but suspicious, militant in spirit and disturbed about its rights. For it saw, clearly enough, that in any elected legislature, and in any advantages thereby to be gained, the Hindu was practically sure to shoulder the Muhammadan out of the path.

Now in order to understand how this situation came about, it is necessary to recall that Muhammadanism first came to India as the religion of the conqueror; that for five hundred years its arm controlled the greater part of India, during which period Persian was the language of the court, the language of literature and verse, the language of the law. But the Muhammadan, though he learned his Koran and his Persian verse, was as a rule an open-air sort of man who would rarely bother his own head with pens or books if he could find another to do the job for him. Therefore, whenever some Brahman, with his quick brain and facile memory, acquired a knowledge of Persian and thereby released his further store of learning for the master's use, he was apt to find a desirable niche in government service. Consequently, for five centuries or so, the Brahman did much of the paper work, while the Muhammadan commanded the country.

The history of the interval between Islam's effective dominance and the assumption of direct administration by the British Crown has been elsewhere outlined. It was twenty-one years previous to the latter event -- back in the days of the East India Company -- that a little seed was sown with whose fruit we now deal. This was the changing of the language of the Courts of Justice from Persian to English.

The change took place as a logical part of the westernizing of Indian education. It looked simple. Its results have been simple, like the results of a clean stroke of the ax. The Calcutta University Commission thus suggests the initial process:

Literate or illiterate, the Muhammadan is a passionate monotheist. "There is but One God." His mosques are clear of images. His frequent daily prayer is offered straight to the invisible One Omnipotent. And although he respects Christianity as a revealed religion and reverences Christ as an inspired teacher, the doctrine of the Trinity constitutes an impossible heresy. His faith is his highest possession, and he would not willingly open the door to what he considered impure doctrine by learning its vehicle, the English tongue.

Deeply hurt by the alternatives forced upon it, Islam withdrew into itself, little foreseeing the consequences of its withdrawal.

As long as British officials administered the affairs of India in town and village, the potentiality of the situation thus created remained obscured. But the first gun of the Minto-Morley "Reforms," rent the curtain, and the startled Islamic chiefs, their hands on the hilt of the sword a-rust in the scabbard, peered forth half-awake upon a world dark with shapes of ill-omen.

And so, greatly at a disadvantage, the Muslims as a political entity reappeared in the field. Yet over the wide country, in the villages and the hamlets, the stir scarcely reached. For there, still, the British official alone represented Government, dealing justice and favor with an even hand, and Muslim and Hindu, side by side, lived at peace.

Then came 1919, the extension of the "Reforms" of 1909, the transfer of much power, place and patronage from British into Indian hands, and the promise, furthermore, of a reviewal of the field at the end of a third ten-year interval, with an eye to still further transfers.

From that moment, except in country districts un-reached by agitators, peace between the two elements became a mere name--an artificial appearance maintained wholly by the British presence. And now, as 1929 draws nigh, the tension daily increases, while the two rivals pace around each other in circles, hackles up, looking for first toothhold.

For a time during the political disturbances that followed the War a brief farce of unity was played by the leaders of that day. Mr. Gandhi embraced the Khilafat[5] agitation as embodied in those picturesque freebooters, the Ali brothers, if thereby the Muham-madan weight might be swung with his own to embarrass the British administration. But the Khilafat cause itself died an early death. And a single incident of the Gandhi-Ali alliance may be cited to illustrate the actual depth of the brotherhood it proclaimed.

[5. An Islamic movement aiming at the restoration of Turkey to prewar status, including her reconquest of the emancipated Armenians and Arabs, and her recovery of Palestine, Syria, Thrace, and the Dardanelles.]

Up on the mountains overlooking the Malabar coast, among a population of about two million Hindus, live a people known as the Moplahs, descendants of old Arab traders and the women of the country. The Moplahs, who themselves number about a million, live in surprisingly clean and well-kept houses, have often intelligent, rugged faces and, according to my own experience, are an interesting and friendly primitive folk.

But, zealot Muhammadans, they have ever been prone to outbreaks of religious passion in which their one desire is to be sent to Paradise by a bullet or a knife, first having piled up the longest possible list of non-believers dead by their hands.

Among these simple creatures, in the year of disorders 1921, the political combination above indicated sent emissaries preaching a special edition of its doctrines. Government's hand, these proclaimed, was raised against the holy places of Islam. Government was "Satanic," an enemy of the Faith. Government must and would be driven out of India and that right soon. Swaraj must be set up.

From mosque to mosque, from hamlet to hamlet, from cocoanut grove to cocoanut grove, the fiery words passed. And, whatever meaning they might bear for an abstract philosopher, to the simple Moplah, as, in those miserable years, to so many millions of simple Hindus all over the land, they meant just what they said--War.

But, the point that Mr. Gandhi missed, whatever the humorous Ali brothers may privately have thought about it, was this: Swaraj, to a Moplah, could only mean the coming of the earthly Kingdom of Islam, in which, whatever else happened or failed to happen, no idol-worshiping Hindu could be tolerated alive.

So the Moplahs, secretly and as best they could, made store of weapons--knives, spears, cutlasses. And on August 20, 1921, the thing broke loose. As if by a preliminary gesture of courtesy to the sponsors of the occasion, one European planter was murdered at the start. But without further dissipation of energy the frenzied people then concentrated on the far more congenial task of communal war. First blocking the roads, cutting the telegraph wires and tearing up the railway lines at strategic points, thereby isolating the little police stations scattered through the mountains, they set to work, in earnest and in detail, to establish a Muslim Kingdom and to declare a Swaraj after their own hearts.

Their Hindu neighbors, though outnumbering them two to one, seem to have stood no chance against them. The Hindu women, as a rule, were first circumcised--• "forcibly converted," as the process is called--and were then added to Moplah families. The Hindu men were sometimes given the choice of death or "conversion," sometimes flayed alive, sometimes cutlassed at once and thrown down their own wells. In one district, the Ernad Taluk, over nine hundred males were "forcibly converted" and the work spread on through the mountain-slopes.

As rapidly as possible police and troops were thrown into the country, by whose work, after six months of trying service, the disorders were quelled. But not until some three thousand Moplahs had cast away their lives, without reckoning the Hindus they accounted for, not until much property had been destroyed and many families ruined, and not until a long list of prisoners awaited trial for guilt that certainly belonged on heads higher than theirs.

Meantime, the circumcised male Hindus wandered up and down the land calling upon their brethren to take warning.

A trained American observer, agent of the United States Government, chanced to be in the region at the time. His statement follows:

"I saw them in village after village, through the south and east of Madras Presidency. They had been circumcised by a peculiarly painful method, and now, in many cases, were suffering tortures from blood poisoning. They were proclaiming their misery, and calling on all their gods to curse Swaraj and to keep the British in the land. 'Behold our miserable bodies! We are defiled, outcasted, unclean, and all because of the serpents who crept among us with their poison of Swaraj. Once let the British leave the land and the shame that has befallen us will assuredly befall you also, Hindus, men and women, every one.'

"The terrors of hell were literally upon them.

"And the Brahman priests were asking one hundred to one hundred and fifty rupees a head to perform the purification ceremony which alone could save the poor creatures' souls.

"This ceremony consisted in filling the eyes, ears, mouth and nose with soft cow-dung, which must then be washed out with cow's urine, after which should be administered ghee (clarified butter), milk and curds. It sounds simple, but can only be performed by a Brah-man, and with proper rites and sacred verses. And the price which the Brahmans now set upon their services was, to most of the needy, prohibitive. Their distress was so desperate that British officials, for once interfering in a religious matter, interceded with the Brahmans and persuaded them, in view of the large number concerned, to accept a wholesale purification fee of not over twelve rupees a head."

I have not verified the final item in this statement. My informant, however, besides having been on the spot at the time, is professionally critical as to evidence.

If there was anything particularly Muhammadan in this outbreak, it was in the feature of "forcible conversion" rather than in the general barbarity educed. Less than six months before the Moplah affair began, occurred the Chauri Chaura incident in the United Provinces, far away from Malabar.

An organization called the "National Volunteers" had lately been formed, more or less under pay, to act as a militia for the enforcement of the decrees of the Working Committee of the Indian National Congress. This "Congress" is a purely political organization, and was, at the time, under the control of Mr. Gandhi.

On February 4, 1921, a body of National Volunteers, followed by a mob whom their anti-government propaganda had inflamed, attacked the little police station at Chauri Chaura, within which were assembled some twenty-one police constables and village watchmen, the common guardians of the rural peace. The peasantry and the "Volunteers," numbering altogether some three thousand men, surrounded the police station, shot a few of its inmates dead, wounded the rest, collected the wounded into a heap, poured oil over them, and fried them alive.

This was as Hindu to Hindu.

Again, in the Punjab during the disorders of 1919, anti-Government workers launched a special propaganda for the violation of foreign women.

Its public declarations took the form of posters such as these: "Blessed be Mahatma Gandhi. We are sons of India...Gandhi! We the Indians will fight to death after you;" and "What time are you waiting for now? There are many ladies here to dishonor. Go all around India, clear the country of the ladies," etc., etc.[6]

[6. See Disorders Inquiry Committee, 1919-20, Report, Chapter VII, for placards posted in and around Lyallpur, in April, 1919.]

This was as Indian to white man.

Such language, to such a public, could carry neither a figurative nor a second import. Had time been given it to do its work, had a weak hand then held the helm of the Punjab, an unbearable page had been written in the history of India.

And if these three instances are here brought forward from among the scores of grim contemporaneous parallels with which they can be diversified and reën-forced, it is not for the purpose of shaming the Indian peoples, but rather to point out the wild, primitive and terribly explosive nature of the elements that politicians and theorists take into their hands when they ignite those people's passions.

In most rural regions even now no developed Hindu-Muhammadan animosity exists, and the two elements live together amicably enough as neighbors, unless outside political agents have disturbed them.

Instances occur, to be sure, such as that in the District of Bulandshahr, near Delhi, in the year 1924, when the Ganges flooded. It was a disastrous flood, sweeping away whole villages and their inhabitants, man and beast. Upon certain Hindu ferrymen and fishermen, the local owners of boats, depended the first work of rescue. And these made use of the opportunity to refuse to take a single drowning Muhammadan out of the water.

But, on the other hand, I recall visiting a village night-school, set up by Muhammadans for their own boys, which was in part supported by contributions from the Hindu neighbors. This was in Nadia District, in Bengal, where the villagers of the two religions seemed to bear no sort of ill-will toward each other, and where an ever-active British Deputy Commissione!, was their confidant and chosen counsellor in all then affairs.

Something, again, is to be learned from the simple history of a park designed for the city of Lucknow. When the ground came to be surveyed, it was found that a little Hindu temple lay in one corner of the allotted area. Following their established policy in such matters, the British authorities left the temple undisturbed.

Then came the Muhammadans of the city, saying: "We, too, desire a place in this fine new park wherein to say our prayers."

So the Municipal authorities arranged that a suitable open space be set aside at the opposite corner of the park for the Muhammadans. And the Hindus worshiped in their temple, and the Muhammadans worshiped in their open space, both quite happily and innocently, for a matter of eight years.

In the interval came the "Reforms," came the fruit of the "Reforms," came a tension, stiffening steadily.

For Lucknow is a Muhammadan city, in the sense that all the important people, all the old families, all the great buildings and monuments, are of the ancient Muhammadan kingdom of Oudh. Wherefore the Muhammadans felt that if the control of India was about to revert to Indians' hands their city of Lucknow ought to revert to them.

But, though the history and the aristocracy of Luck-now are indubitably Muhammadan, in the population of Lucknow the Hindu outnumbers the Muhammadan three to one. Wherefore the Hindus, filled with sudden fear of the future, now asked each other:

"If this Swaraj is indeed coming, where will it plant us Hindus of Lucknow? Under Muhammadan masters? Better were we all dead men!"

Upon which they began to organize, to assert themselves, perhaps rather aggressively and offensively, and particularly to do so each evening, toward sunset, in that little old temple by the park.

Now, sunset is an hour appointed for Muslim devotion. For eight years the Muslim prayer-rugs had been spread, five minutes before sunset, in that same little park, and the faithful, kneeling in rows, had said their vespers there. Nor would they submit to interruption by obstreperous Hindus now. So, they issued an edict: The Hindus, hereafter, must choose for their temple meeting a time that did not clash with the Muham-madans' evening prayer.

The Hindus resented the edict of the Muhamma-dans. The Muhamrnadans resented the resentment of the Hindus. Tinder smoldered up to €ame. And presently big gangs of each religion gathered in the park at one and the same hour to fight the thing to a finish.

In the matter ensuing, the Muhammadans seem to have been the more skillful, since they swept the field quickly of human impedimenta and were about to smash the offensive temple itself, when a detachment of police, reënforced by British troops, intervened.

Thus this particular incident came to a standstill, such of the combatants as were able dispersing to their homes. But an intense and really dangerous feeling, bred of the battle and of the fear and jealousy in the air, survived in full vigor. If a small lurking party of the other side saw a Hindu or a Muhammadan pass in the street, that party would dash out, seize and beat him. To restore confidence it was necessary for two or three days to patrol the city streets with British cavalry.

Enter, then, the British District Commissioner -- for cities, as well as rural parts, have their commissioners. And the Commissioner, obviously, must "arrange." For the quarrel was literally ruining the town. Trade was suffering, small shops were failing, the people were boycotting each other, and fresh broils and violence, promising any eruption, disfigured every day.

So the Commissioner invited the leaders of the factions to come to his house and talk it over--because his house was the only place where they would meet in peace. They came, and sat, and came again. They sat and talked and talked again. And neither party would yield an inch.

The Hindus insisted that they must begin to beat their prayer drums five minutes before sunset. The Muhammadans as firmly maintained: "At exactly five minutes before sunset we must begin our evening worship, which you Hindus shall not disturb."

Yet at last the Commissioner prevailed. For he elicited from the Hindus a concession of five minutes, and from the Muhammadans a concession of five minutes. Then, with his combined winnings safe under his feet, he proceeded to extract from the Hindus a promise that, during the last ten minutes before sunset, they would not play music in their temple; and from the Muhammadans a promise that on the dot of the first of the silent ten minutes they would begin their ten-minute vesper prayer.

For, during the conferences in the Commissioner's drawing room, the fact had developed that the Muhammadans' objection lay, not to the Hindus' praying, but to the din they made at their prayers, hammering temple gongs and drums.

Those joint conferences in the Commissioner's drawing room lasted, altogether, fifteen hours. As the fifteenth hour closed, the Commissioner's dinner-gong rang in the hall. Whereupon one of the Hindus pondered aloud:

"That gong's voice, over in our temple, wouldn't reach so far."

"Will you try it and see?" asked the Commissioner, quickly. And to this day the Hindus of that Lucknow temple worship to the low and mellow voice of the British Commissioner's dinner-gong.

But that experienced official is by no means deluding himself with the notion that he can now go to sleep on his post.

CHAPTER XXV - SONS OF THE PROPHET

In December, 1916, a political body called the All-India Muslim League united with the Indian National Congress already mentioned, in proclaiming the identity of Muhammadan and Hindu interests, and in asserting their common desire for Swaraj.

The white light of the Moplah uprising remained yet veiled on the knees of the future, but at the joint act of the two organizations, the Muhammadans' instinct of self-preservation, far and wide over India, took alarm. So that when, in the autumn of 1917, Mr. Montagu, Secretary of State for India, sat in Delhi to receive from Indian interests their views on the subject of his proposed Reforms, association after association came forward to deplore or to repudiate the act of the All-India Muslim League; and the language they used was simple enough. Said the United Provinces Muslim Defence Association:[1]

[1. Addresses Presented in India to His Excellency the Viceroy and the Right Honourable the Secretary of State for India, London, 1918, p. 10. ]

...any large measure of self-government which might curtail the moderating and adjusting influence of the British Government could be nothing short of a cataclysm.

Said the Indian Muslim Association of Bengal:[2]

[2. Ibid, p. 30.]

In the existing backward condition of the majority of Hindus and Muslims, with their divergent creeds, castes, institutions and clashing interests, the differences which separate the Hindu from the Muslim cannot but be reflected in their dealings and relations with each other...No careful observer will be deluded by the deceptive unanimity of the National Congress and the Muslim League...

The Indian Muslim Association...does not agree to the wisdom of any catastrophic changes likely to weaken the permanance and stability of British rule in India, upon the broad foundations of which rest all our hopes and aspirations of constitutional and administrative progress.

Said the Association to Safeguard the Muslim Interests in the Province of Bihar and Orissa:[3]

[3. Addresses Presented in India to His Excellency the Viceroy and the Right Honourable the Secretary of State for India, p. 40.]

We cannot deprecate too strongly the want of foresight displayed by some of our co-religionists in endorsing in their entirety, the views and claims of the Congress. Already there is strong tendency visible in certain quarters to oppress and terrorise the Musalmans and ignore...their interests. The guiding principle of the English rule up to now has always been to administer the affairs of Indian Empire with impartiality in the presence of diverse religions and nationalities of which it is composed...

The South India Islamia League[4] presented a plea in which they reminded Mr. Montagu that, being a minority community, they

...realise the value of the British Government in holding the scales even between different classes in this country...[and] are opposed to any scheme of political reconstruction which tends to undermine the authority of British Government in India, but are strongly in favour of gradual progressive political development.

[4. Ibid., pp. 62-3.]

The Muttialpet Muslim Anjuman, a Muhammadan educational society of Madras, implored Mr. Montagu to stay his reforming hand:[5]

[5. Ibid., p. 63.]

The Britisher alone can hold the scales even between the various communities. Whenever our interests collide with those of other communities, it is to him we look up as the embodiment of justice and fair play. Whatever reforms may be introduced, we trust that nothing will be done to undermine the authority of the British Government in India.

The Muhammadans of the Bombay Presidency presented an anxious appeal which read in part:[6]

[6. Ibid., pp. 78-9.]

It is freely asserted that in no distant future the English bureaucracy will disappear and an Indian majority in the Councils will take its place. Whatever may have been the defects of that much abused bureaucracy in the past, it must be admitted that it has had one redeeming merit, viz., that of holding the balance even as between the two principal communities in India, and thus protecting the weak against the strong.

But in view of the nature of Muhammadan thought, a more ominous weight lay in a simpler pronouncement. The Ulema is the body of official interpreters of the Koran which, on occasion of doubt, delivers decisions that guide the Muslim world. The solemn verdict of the Ulema of Madras, now laid before the British Secretary of State for India, was expressed in three closely similar dicta, one of which follows:[7]

[7. Addresses Presented ïn India to His Excellency the Viceroy and the Right Honourable the Secretary of State for India, pp. 63-4.]

"Verily, Polytheists are unclean." In case the British Gov-ernment were to hand over the administration, as desired by the Hindus, it would be contrary to the Sacred Law of Musulmans to live under them, Polytheists.

Saiyid Muhi-ud-din
Trustee of the endowments of the Amir-un-Nisa. Begum Sahiba Mosque

One who is forgiven!

The comparative numbers of the Hindu and the Muhammadan element in the major provinces of British India may be seen from the following table:[8]

[8. Statistical Abstract for British India, from 1914-15 to 1923-24, pp. 14-5]

Province                    Hindus  Muhammadans

Madras                       88.64   6.71
Bombay                       76.58  19.74
Bengal                       43.27  53.99
United Provinces             85.09  14.28
Bihar and Orissa             82.84  10.85
Central Provinces and Berar  83.54   4.05
Assam                        54.34  28.96
Punjab                       31.80  55.33
North-West Frontier Province  6.66  91.62

Now, in view of the militant character developed in any people by the Islamic faith, it appears that British India's Muhammadan factor, even where it is weakest, is strong enough to make trouble. Always an international rather than a nationalist, all over India the Muhammadan is saying today: "We are foreigners, conquerors, fighting men. What if our numbers are small! Is it numbers, or men, that count? When the British go, we shall rule India. Therefore it behooves us quickly to gain such ground as we can."

The Hindu, on his side, wittingly misses no step to consolidate his own position. And so wherever choice rests in Indian hands, every office must be filled, every decision taken, every appropriation spent, on religious communal lines, while the other side fights it, tooth and nail, and the actual merits of the matter concerned disappear from the picture.

Heavily as this condition in all directions handicaps the public service, nowhere is its influence more stultifying than in the judiciary. Always an eager litigant, the Indian finds in his religious quarrels endless occasions for appeal to law. But, if the case must be tried before an Indian judge, one side or the other is in despair. For, though he were, in fact, a miracle of rectitude, he is expected to lean, in his verdict, to the side of his own creed, and nothing can persuade the litigant of the other faith that he will not do so.

The bench of India has been and is graced by some native judges of irreproachable probity. Yet the Indian is traditionally used to the judge who accepts a fee from either side in advance of the trial, feeling that probity is sufficiently served if, after the verdict, the fee of the loser is returned. Bought witnesses are also a matter of course; you may see them today squatting before the court house waiting to be hired. "Theoretically I know it is irregular," said one western-educated barrister of Madras, "but practically I cannot leave that advantage entirely in my opponent's hands-It is our custom."

But when the matter of the Hindu-Muslim conflict enters in, all else as a rule gives way. "How shall any judge decide against his gods?" moans the unfortunate. "And does he not hold court in the midst of my enemies? Take me, therefore, before an English judge, who cares naught for these matters but will give me upright judgment, though I be right or wrong."

A freakish case was that of an old, experienced Mu-hammadan District Magistrate of the United Provinces before whom, last year, were brought certain police officers of his district. These men had grossly failed in their duty during certain religious riots, entailing thereby the death of several persons. They richly deserved a severe sentence. But they were Hindus. Therefore the judge, fearing the accusation of religious animosity, let them off with a sentence so light as to amount to an unjust award and an offense against the public service.

More usual is the spirit illustrated in another incident, which occurred in February, 1926. An old Mu-hammadan assistant engineer who had long served in the Irrigation Department under a British superior, suddenly found himself taking orders from a Hindu. This young man, just out of college and full of new ideas, set himself to worry his senior, baiting and pin-pricking till his victim could bear no more.

So, accompanied by his son, the old Muslim sought out a major British official, asking for counsel.

"Sahib, can't you help my father? Surely it is a shame, after all his years of service, to treat him so! " exclaimed the son, at the end of the story.

But the Briton could not resist his opportunity. "Mahmoud," said he. "You have always wanted swaraj. You see, in this, what swaraj does to you. How do you feel about it?"

"Aha!" replied the youngster. "But I've got a Deputy Collectorship now. I take office shortly, and when I do, God help the Hindus I get my hands on!"

The Muslim comprises but a bare quarter of the population of British India. But that percentage is growing. His gains indicate both superior fecundity and superior vitality. His brain is not quick, but he has often a gift of horse sense. He is beginning to see that he must go to school. Granted time, opportunity and a sense of security, he may wipe out his handicaps and fit himself for full participation in the administration of the country. Thrown into the arena today, he would see but one recourse -- the sword.

And it should never for a moment be forgotten that when the Muslims of India draw the sword, it will not be as an isolated body but as the advance line of an energy now banked up, like the waters of a brimming reservoir, by the Frontier Defense of the Army.

A glance at the map shows a strip of territory some three hundred and fifty miles long by from twenty to fifty miles wide, lying along the northern boundary of the Punjab. This strip is the North-West Frontier Province. Beyond it lies a parallel strip of similar dimensions, tribal territory occupied by independent Mu-hammadan clans, superb fighters whose sole business, since time began, has been the business of raiding. Behind this, again, lies Muhammadan Afghanistan and Muhammadan Asia, a huge primeval engine always to be swung as one great hammer by the call to loot and a Holy War.

To release that force needs at any moment but a word. Its ceaseless pressure along the thin steel line of the frontier, its tenseness, its snapping, stinging electric current, is scarcely realizable until one sees and feels it for one's self.

Few Hindu politicians do realize it. "The Afghan has kept off us these many long years. Why should he come through now? Bah! It is a child's bogey!" they say with dull eyes, as unaware of their own life-long protected state and how it is brought about as the oyster on its sea-bed is unaware of the hurricanes that blow.

The North-West Frontier Province, 95%. Muhammadan, lies today quiet and contented with its government, a buffer state between, on the one hand, the rich, part-Hindu Punjab and the vast soft Hindu South, and on the other hand, the hungry Muslim fighting hordes whose fingers twitch and whose mouths water to be at them. The contentment of the North-West Frontier Province with things as they are is invaluable to the peace of India.

I talked with many leading men of that province. All seemed of one mind in the matter. Here, therefore, are the exact words of a single representative -- a mountain-bred man of Persian ancestry some generations back -- big, lean, hawk-nosed, hawk-eyed, leader of many, sententious until his subject snatched the bridle from his tongue:

"The whole province is satisfied now and desires no change. As for those little folk of the South, we have never called them men. There is far more difference between us and them than between us and the British. If the British withdraw, immediate hell will follow, in the first days of which the Bengali and all his tribe will be removed from the earth. I can account for a few, myself, with much pleasure. Cooperation between the British and us is our one course. They have given us roads, telephones, good water where no water was before, peace, justice, a revenue from trade made possible only by their protection, safety for our families, care for our sick and schools for our children. None of these things did we have till they came. I ask you, is it likely we shall throw them all away because a coward and a sneak and our own inherited enemy calls for 'boycott,' and 'non-cooperation'? Nothing was ever gained and much lost by that stupid 'non-cooperation.' India is a big country and needs all our united strength can do for it. Muslims and British and even Hindus. But without the British no Hindus will remain in India except such as we keep for slaves."

On December 26, 1925, over eight years after the Indian National Congress and the All-India Muslim League proclaimed their united demand for the self-government of India, the former, or Hindu body, assembled for its annual session. Its president, this time a woman, a product of European life and education, opened the proceedings with an address that deplored the

...sharp and importunate sense of aloofness on the part of my Muslim brothers, which, to the profound alarm and resentment of the Hindu community, manifests itself in a growing and insistent demand for separate and preferential rights and privileges in academic, official, civic and political circles of life.

A few days later the All-India Muslim League convened. And the address of its president, Sir Abdur Rahim, coming as a tacit reply to the earlier pronouncement, was so clean-hewn as to constitute a landmark in Indian history. It repays study at length.[9]

[9. Sir Abdur Rahim's address was published in pamphlet form by Karim Bux Brothers, Calcutta.]

Hindus and Mussalmans are not two religious sects like the Protestants and Catholics in England but form two distinct communities or peoples...Their respective attitudes towards life, their distinctive culture, civilisation and social habits, their traditions and history no less than their religion, divide them so completely that the fact that they have lived in the same country for nearly a thousand years has contributed hardly anything to their fusion into a nation.

Referring to recent Hindu movements set on foot to proselyte Mussalmans, and to train Hindus in the arts of self-defense, the speaker said:

Sir Abdur Rahim's plain words brought down a storm of accusation from the Hindu leaders and their press, while the rancor between the two camps grew stronger.

Meantime, grim potentialities were beginning to be dimly perceived. The Calcutta Riots broke out. By midsummer, 1926, thirty-one murderous explosions had occurred since the beginning of the year, some with heavy casualties. It was already evident that both sides, Muslim and Hindu, were becoming sobered by the situation into which their mutual fears had brought them. The old Gandhi-ist accusation that the secret hand of Britain bred their dissensions still found its mouthpieces; but these, commonly, were of the irresponsible firebrand type who had no stake in the country save such as might best be served under cover of smoke. Thinking men of either party saw the untena-bility of the idea and began, however reluctantly, to declare the need of a strong and impartial suzerain to give them security in the advantages already in their possession; advantages which, they now saw clearly enough, had their roots in the British presence and would be drowned in blood on the day that presence was withdrawn.

The Summer Session of the Indian Legislative Assembly met in a mood to talk reason. Said Maulvi Muhammad Yakub, a Muhammadan member, speaking on the twenty-fourth day of August:

A few months earlier such words could scarcely have been spoken on that floor without rousing a flurry of rebuttal. Today not a voice opposed them. Instead rose that king-pillar of orthodox Hinduism, our old friend the Dewan Bahadur T. Rangachariar of Madras, not to rail at an "alien government," not to accuse it of clumsy or arrogant interference in Indian affairs, but to acknowledge that[12]

[12. Legislative Assembly Debates, August 24, 1925, pp. 283-4.]

...facts are facts, and they have to be faced by us like men...I admire the sincere spirit in which my Honourable friend Maulvi Muhammed Yakub has come forward. He feels the soreness of this disgraceful position...and I feel it likewise. I am glad, and the whole country is glad, that His Excellency Lord Irwin has taken it up in right earnest...We cannot achieve the results which we have at heart without the co-operation of all people, official and non-official alike. I want a majority of the people whose hearts are really bent upon changing the situation.

The doctrine of non-cooperation with the established Power led nowhere, as all now see. The mystic doctrine of spiritual war, a war of "soul-force," that uses the language of hate while protesting theories of love, had logically and insistently projected itself upon the material plane in the form of the slaughter of men. The inability of individuals to subordinate personal, family or clan interests and to hold together for team-work, had been demonstrated. And the fact had been driven home to the hilt that neither Hindu nor Muhamma-dan could think in terms of the whole people.

For the moment, some of them see it. Can they hold the vision? To have seen it at all marks gain.

CHAPTER XXVI - THE HOLY CITY

Edwin Arnold has written beautifully about Benares. Hundreds of people have also written about Benares. Tourists, enraptured with its river-front panorama, have exhausted their vocabulary in admiration. And small wonder, for the scene is beautiful, instinct with color and grace and with that sense of souls' uplifting that surrounds the high altar of any part of the human race.

Benares is the Sacred City of the Hindu world. Countless temples adorn it, set like tiers of crowns above and among the broad flights of stairs that ascend from the Ganges, Holy River. Chains of yellow marigolds are stretched across that river to welcome Mother Ganges as she comes. And as the worshipers, clad in long robes of tender or brilliant colors, bearing their water-jars upon their heads or shoulders, trail up and down the high gray steps, they seem so like figures in the vision of a prophet of Israel that one almost hears the song they sang as "they went up by the stairs of the city of David, at the going up of the wall."

But my visit to Benares was made in the company of the Municipal Health Officer, a man of whom no artist-soul is apt to think. This gentleman is an Indian. Before taking up his present duties, he made preparatory studies in America, in the enjoyment of a Rockefeller Foundation Scholar, ship in Public Health. Without attempting to convey an idea of his whole problem, one may indicate here a few of its points.

The normal stationary population of Benares is about two hundred thousand, of whom some thirty thousand are Brahmans connected with the temples. In addition, two to three hundred thousand pilgrims come yearly for transient stays. And upon special occasions, such as an eclipse, four hundred thousand persons may pour into the city for that day, to depart a few days later as swiftly as they came.

To take care of all this humanity the Municipality allows its chief Health Officer an annual sum equal to about ten thousand dollars, which must cover his work in vaccination, registration of births and deaths, and the handling of epidemics and infectious diseases.

Much of his best work lies in watching the pilgrims as they debark from the railroad trains, to catch cholera patients before they disappear into the rabbit-warrens of the town. Let that disappearance once be effected and the case will lie concealed until a burst of epidemic announces the presence of the disease. For, although the municipality pays the higher officials and the foremen of the Public Health Department fairly well, it allows a mere pittance to its menial staff, with the result that, if contagion is reported and disinfection is ordered, the subordinates harass the people for what they can wring from distress.

Benares is an old city. Some of its drains were built in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. No one now knows their course except that, wherever they start, their outlets give into the river. Constructed of stone, their location is sometimes disconcertingly revealed by the caving-in of their masonry beneath a building or a street. Sometimes, silt-choked at the outlet, their mouths have been unwittingly or unthinkingly sealed in the course of river-wall repairs. Not a few still freely discharge their thick[1] stream of house-sewage into the river, anywhere along its humanity-teeming front. But most, having become semi-tight cesspools, await the downpours of the rainy season, when their suddenly swollen contents will push into the city's subsoil with daily increasing force.

[1. "Thick" in particular because of the little water used in Indian houses.]

The city stands on a bluff, her streets about seventy-five feet above river level. The face of the bluff, for a distance of three miles or more along the river front, is buttressed by stairs and by high walls of stone. These, because of their continuity, back up the subsoil water, which, from time to time, bursts the masonry and seeps through into the river, all along its famous templed front. There, among the worshiping drinkers and bathers, among the high-born pilgrim ladies, the painted holy-men, the ash-pasted saddhus and yogis, you may see it oozing and trickling down from those long zigzag cracks that so mellow the beauty of the venerable stones.

Against bitter religious opposition, the British, in 1905, succeeded in getting a partial sewage system and water pipe-line into the city. Its main pumping station is at the south end of the town, not much habitation lying above it. The water is settled in a tank, filtered, and then put into general distribution, the Municipal Health Officer himself doing a weekly chemical and bacteriological analysis from each filter.

But the devout will not drink this filtered water. Instead, they go daily to the river, descend the stairs of some bathing-ghat, scoop up a vesself ul in the midst of the bathers under the seepage-cracked wall, and carry it home to quench the thirst of the household. All warnings and protests of the Health Officer they meet with supreme contempt.

"It lies not in the power of man to pollute the Ganges." And "filtering Ganges water takes the holiness out," they reply, firmly.

Now, whoever bathes in the Ganges at Benares and drinks Ganges water there, having at the same time due regard to the needs of the priests, may be cured of the worst disease that flesh is heir to. Consequently upon Benares are deliberately focused all the maladies of the Hindu millions. Again, whoever dies in Benares, goes straight to heaven. Therefore endless sick, hopeless of cure, come here to breathe their last, if possible, on the brink of the river with their feet in the flood.

Many of the incidents connected with this tenet are exquisitely beautiful and exalted in spirit. But the threat to public health needs little emphasis.

One such has to do with the over-burdened burning-ghats.

The main burning-ghat lies directly in the middle of the populous waterfront. "Nothing on earth can move it from there," says my conductor, "because the place is of particular sanctity. So all I can do is to try to see that all bodies are completely burned."

But complete burning takes a lot of wood. Not every heir will or can face so heavy a cost. And the Indian-run municipality, thus far, has been unable to interest itself in the matter to the extent of giving an additional quantity of wood when necessary to complete incineration.

"See those dogs nosing among the ashes. There--one has found a piece!" said I to the doctor, as we stood looking on.

"Yes," he answered. "That happens often enough. For they burn bodies here, sometimes rather incompletely, at all hours of day and night. Still, if the dog hadn't got that bit, it would simply have got into the river, to float down among the bathers. As the dead babies do, in any case. No Hindu burns an infant. They merely toss them into the stream."

There are no latrines along the water-front. The people prefer to use the sandy places at the water's brink among the bathing stairs. Thus and otherwise one typhoid or cholera carrier may, during his stay, infect ten thousand persons. The river banks are dried sewage. The river water is liquid sewage. The faithful millions drink and bathe in the one, and spread out their clothes to dry upon the other. Then in due time, having picked up what germs they can, they go home over the length and breadth of India to give them further currency, carrying jars of the precious water to serve through the year.

Also, the beautiful and picturesque temples do their part. This may be sufficiently indicated in the words of a distinguished Brahman pathologist, educated in European universities and an annual visitor to London and Paris. Said he, with deep feeling:

"The temples of Benares are as evil as the ooze of the river-banks. I myself went within them to the point where one is obliged to take off one's shoes, because of sanctity. Beyond lay the shrines, rising out of mud, decaying food and human filth. I would not walk in it. I said No! But hundreds of thousands do take off their shoes, walk in, worship, walk out, and put back their shoes upon their unwashed feet. And I, a Hindu and a doctor, must bear witness to that!"

The position of Public Health Officer of Benares, one key to the health of India, means so large and difficult a task that it would seem to confer honor and distinction upon any man to whom it is entrusted. The present incumbent appeared to be confronting his job in a good spirit, determined to piece out his little means with his wits. But I found in the attitude of an Indian brother doctor a differing view. This man, also a Rockefeller Foundation scholar, said: "That fellow has a rotten job."

"Why rotten?" I asked, sincerely surprised.

"Because it is so hard. But chiefly because of the indignity that he, a Rockefeller scholar, should have to serve under a white man. The Minister is an Indian, of course. But the immediate superior, the Director of Public Health, is a Briton. It is a miserable shame!"

Curiously enough, this remark was made while, with the speaker, I was visiting an Indian attempt at sanitary self-help. The attempt was not brilliant, but at least it was a beginning, and the workers were simple, eager, unpretentious little folk hungry and thirsty for encouragement. Seeing which hunger, our Rockefeller scholar, now an official and to them a great luminary, slowly, thoroughly, and without a glimmer of sympathy, impaled them on the toasting-fork of his laughing scorn.

Other holy cities exist in India, other centers of pilgrimages. Each, automatically, is a reservoir and a potential distributing point of disease, demanding the utmost vigilance and the utmost tact in handling.

But the public health problem presented by an ordinary Indian city is stiff enough. Take, for example, Lahore. The European section of the town has something about it of western America--all of one age, new, roomy, airy, with certain of its good modern buildings erected by the public spirit of that fine old Punjabi, Sir Ganga Ram. But Kim's Lahore, the old Indian quarter, where the crowds live and move, and in particular its bazaar, where the crowds adore to congregate, is the danger-point that keeps the Director of Health awake at night.

Streets about eight feet wide, twisting like earth worms after a rain, straight up from whose edges rise solid lines of dwelling houses sometimes several stories high. At their base, on either side, a row of little open-fronted shops, their cottons, brasses, holy pictures, embroideries, silks, grain-piles, jewelry, exposed on their floors or walls. Many rickety wooden platforms, built of intermittent slats, project from the front edge of the shop floors, at street level, to the edge of the street. Close under these platforms, on both sides of the road, runs an open gutter about a foot wide. The gutter is in steady and open use as a public latrine. Heaped on the slats of the wooden platforms, just escaping the gutter, are messes of fried fish, rice cakes, cooked curry, sticky sweetmeats, and other foods for sale. All the food-heaps lie practically underfoot, exposed to every sort of accident, while flies, dirty hands, the nosing of dogs, cows, bulls and sheep, and scurrying rats constantly add their contributions; as do the babies and children with sore eyes and skin diseases, pawing and rolling in the midst of it all, enveloped in clouds of dust and of acrid smoke.

And you must be careful, in walking, not to brush against the wall of a house. For the latrines of the upper stories and of the roofs drain down the outside of the houses either in leaking pipes or else from small vent-holes in the walls, dripping and stringing into the gutter slow streams that just clear the fried fish and the lollypops.

Mr. Gandhi, whose early sojourn in England has influenced his general point of view in more ways, perhaps, than he knows, has repeatedly written on this subject. He says, for example:

Mr. Gandhi's judgment of the attitude of Indian-ized municipal governments was corroborated by my own observations in big and little towns in many parts of India.

The city of Madras, for example, the third largest city in the land, completed its present water system in 1914. The catchment area, in the hills, includes several villages. The water, as it reaches the city plant, is about as foul as water can be. By the design of the system it is here passed through slow sand-filters into a pure-water tank at the rate of 10,000,000 gallons a day.

But the population of Madras has increased and the capacity of the plant is now 4,000,000 gallons short of the daily needs of the town. Detailed plans for the construction of adequate new filters, backed by British experts, have been laid before the Municipal Council. But these sixty leaders and guardians of the public weal, Indians all, have adopted a simpler scheme. As I saw and heard for myself from the Indian Superintendent on the spot, they now filter 10,000,000 gallons of water a day, run it into the pure-water tank, then add 4,000,000 gallons of unfiltered sewage, and dish the mixture out, by pipes, to the citizens of the town.

In judging this performance, one must remember that it takes longer to outgrow race thought and habits of life than it does to learn English. The well-dressed man who speaks with an easy Oxford accent may come from a village where, if they desire a new well, they do today what their fathers did a thousand years ago; they choose the site not by the slope of the land but by throwing a bucket of water over a goat. The goat runs away. The people run after. And where the goat first stops and shakes himself, though it be in the middle of the main street, just there the new well is dug.

CHAPTER XXVII - THE WORLD-MENACE

British India has half a million villages made of mud. Most of them took all their mud from one spot, making thereby a commensurate hole, and built themselves on the edge of the hole.

The hole, at the first rains, filled with water and became the village tank. Thenceforward forever, the village has bathed in its tank, washed its clothes in its tank, washed its pots and its pans in its tank, watered its cattle in its tank, drawn its cooking water from its tank, served the calls of nature by its tank and with the content of its tank has quenched its thirst. Being wholly stagnant, the water breeds mosquitoes and grows steadily thicker in substance as it evaporates between rain and rain. It is sometimes quite beautiful, overgrown with lily-things and shaded by feathered palms. It and its uses pretty generally insure the democratization of any new germs introduced to the village, and its mosquitoes spread malaria with an impartial beak -- though not without some aid.

Witness, small Bengali babies put out to lie in the buzzing grass near the tank's edge.

"Why do you mothers plant your babies there to be eaten alive?"

"Because if we protect our babies the gods will be jealous and bring us all bad luck."

One of the most popular and most glorious gifts that a liberal rich man can make to his own village is the digging of an extra tank. One of the fondest dreams of the British Public Health official is to get all tanks filled up.

Nobody knows the exact incidence of malaria in India, for village vital statistics are, perforce, kept by primitive village watchmen who put down to "fever" all deaths not due to snake-bite, cholera, plague, a broken head or the few other things they recognize. But a million deaths a year from malaria may be regarded as a conservative estimate of India's loss by that malady.

Malaria originates in many places aside from tanks. There is, for example, the water-front of the city of Bombay, needless and deadly poison-trap for the sailors of the world. There are railway embankments built without sufficient drainage outlets, asking for remedy. There is the water-logged country in the Punjab; there is the new farm-land of the United Provinces, cut out of the tiger haunts of the Himalayan foot-hills--both by nature heavily malarial, but both being ditched and drained as a part of the huge agricultural irrigation schemes now under development by Government.

Malaria, altogether, is one of the great and costly curses of the land, not alone because of its huge death-rate but even more because of the lowered physical and social conditions that it produces, with their invitation to other forms of disease.

Under present conditions of Indianized control, govermental anti-malarial work, like all other preventive sanitation, is badly crippled. Yet it generally contrives to hold its own, though denied the sinews of progress.

And one recognizes with satisfaction, here and there, a few small volunteer seedlings springing up, strangers and aliens to the soil. Preeminent among these is the Anti-Malaria Cooperative Society of Bengal, an Indian organization now trying to bring control of malaria into the lives of the people, through educating the villagers in means of protecting their own health. Much praise is due to the enthusiasm of its chief exponent, Rai Bahadur Dr. G. C. Chatterjee, with his ardent coadjutors, Dr. A. N. Mitra and Babu K. N. Banerjee. Not only are these gentlemen, whom I visited at their center in Nimta, trying to do anti-malaria work, but also they are raising funds to make available to the Bengali villagers the services of Indian doctors properly trained in western medicine.

Aside from its precious tank a village may have a well. The depth of the wells averages from twenty to forty feet. Their content is mainly surface seepage. A little round platform of sun-dried brick usually encircles the well, a log lying across the orifice. Squatting on that platform and on that log at all hours of the day you may see villagers washing their clothes, taking their baths, cleaning their teeth and rinsing their mouths, while the water they use splashes back over their feet into the pit whence they drew it.

Also, each person brings his own vessel in which to draw the water he wants--an exceedingly dirty and dangerous vessel from a doctor's point of view--which he lowers into the well with his own old factotum rope. When he returns to his house, he carries his vessel with him, filled with well-water for the family to drink.

One of the great objectives of the British Sanitary Administration is to put good wells into the villages and to educate the people in their proper use. Now, not infrequently, one finds such pucca wells. But, exactly as in the Philippines, the people have a strong hankering for the ancestral type, and, where they can, will usually leave the new and protected water-source for their old accustomed squatting- and gossiping-ground where they all innocently poison each other.

As for pumps, the obvious means to seal the wells and facilitate haulage, some have been installed. But, as a rule, pumps are impractical--for the reason that any bit of machinery is, to the Indian, a thing to consume, not to use and to care for. When the machine drops a nut or a washer, no one puts it back, and thenceforth that machine is junk.

Now, this matter of Indian wells is of more than Indian importance. For cholera is mainly a water-borne disease, and statistics show that certain provinces in British India are by far the largest and most persistent centers of cholera infection in the world.

The malady is contracted by drinking water infected with the fasces of cholera patients or cholera carriers, or from eating uncooked or insufficiently cooked infected food. It finds its best incubating grounds in à population of low vitality and generally weak and unresisting condition. There is a vaccine for preventive, inoculation but, the disease once developed, no cure is known. Outbreaks bring a mortality of from 15 to 90%, usually of about 40%. The area of Lower Bengal and the valley of the Ganges is, in India, the chief cholera center, but "the disease is very generally endemic in some degree throughout the greate/ part of the whole [Indian] peninsula.

Since the year 1817, ten pandemics of cholera have occurred. In 1893 the United States was attacked, and in this explosion the speed of travel from East to West was more rapid than ever before.

In ordinary circumstances, in places where the public water supply is good and under scientific control, cholera is not to be feared. But the great and radical changes of modern times bring about rapid reverses of conditions; such, for example, as the sudden pouring in the year 1920 of hundreds of thousands of disease-sodden refugees out of Russia into Western Europe.

Without fear of the charge of alarmism, international Public Health officers today question whether they can be sure that local controls will always withstand unheralded attacks in force. With that question in mind, they regard India's cholera as a national problem of intense international import.

In estimating the safety of the United States from infection, the element of "carriers" must be considered. Each epidemic produces a crop of "carriers" whose power to spread the disease lasts from one hundred and one days to permanency.[5] Moreover, the existence of healthy carriers is conclusively proved. And India is scarcely a month removed from New York or San Francisco.

"Whenever India's real condition becomes known," said an American Public Health expert now in international service, "all the civilized countries of the world will turn to the League of Nations and demand protection against her."

Bengal, one of the worst cholera areas, is about the size of Nebraska. It has a village population of over 43,500,000 persons, living in 84,981 villages. In the year 1921, a mild cholera year, the disease was reported from 11,592 of these villages, spread over 26 districts, the reported deaths totaling 80,547. Imagine the task of trying to inoculate 43,500,000 persons, scattered over such an area, in advance of the hour of need; bearing always in mind the fact that the virtue of a cholera preventive inoculation lasts only ninety days. Imagine also the task of disinfecting all these village wells, when first you must persuade, not compel, the incredulous, always fatalistic and often resisting people to permit the process.

In the winter of 1924-5 sporadic cases of cholera appeared in the Indian state of Kashmir. The British authorities did what they could to induce those of Kashmir to act, but the latter, Indian fashion, could see no point in disturbing themselves about ills yet only in bud. Consequently, in April, came an explosion, killing in a single month 2%, of the entire population of the State. Across the border of British India, in the Punjab, the hasty Indianization of the Public Health Service had already so far proceeded that only one British officer remained in the department. Result: for the first time in thirty years the deadly scourge overflowed the Kashmir border and reaped a giant harvest among the Punjabi peasantry.

In the normal course of events, however, the main danger source for widespread cholera epidemics is the periodic concentration of great masses of people in fairs and festivals and in pilgrimages to holy cities. During the past twelve years or more, the British sanitary control of the crowds, in transit and also in concentration, where temporary latrines are built, pipe-lines for water laid, wells chlorinated and doctors and guards stationed, has been so efficient as greatly to lessen the risks. Of the possibilities of the future the Kashmiri incident speaks.

Hookworm, an intestinal parasite, saps its victim's vitality, eventually reducing him, body and mind, to a useless rag not worth his keep to himself or any ont else. Hookworm is contracted by walking with bare feet on ground contaminated with the fasces of persons infected. The procedure against hookworm is (a) to have the people use proper latrines, and (b) to have them wear shoes.

As Mr. Gandhi has shown, Hindus, anywhere, dispense with latrines, but are not, beyond that, always greatly concerned as to what they use. In one town I found from the municipal chairman that latrines had been built obediently to the Health Officer's specifications and desire; but the people, he said, were leaving them strictly alone, preferring to do as they had always done, using roads, alleys, gutters and their own floors.

This was in part because the town was short of out-castes and therefore had no one to remove night-soil -- a thing which no caste man would do though he smothered in his own dirt; and in part because it was easier so to observe the Hindu religious ritual prescribed for the occasion concerned. Villagers, in any case, always use the open fields immediately surrounding their village, fields over which they continually walk.

To sum up in the words of Doctor Adiseshan, Indian, Assistant Director of Public Health of Madras: "How are you to prevent hookworm when people will not use latrines, and when no orthodox Hindu, and certainly no woman, will consent to wear shoes?"

Under such circumstances it appears that, although the cure for hookworm is well established, absolute, simple and cheap, it would be an indefensible waste of public monies to administer that cure to patients sure to be immediately re-infected.

It is estimated that over 80% of the people of Madras and 60%, of those of Bengal, harbor hookworms. And in this connection Dr. Andrew Bal-four makes an interesting calculation. As to India, he says:

Bubonic plague was first introduced into India in 1896, coming from China. Today India is the world's chief reservoir of infection,[9] and has lost, since 1896, some 11,000,000 lives by that cause alone. The case mortality is about 70 per cent. Of pneumonic plague, which sometimes develops in conjunction with the other form, only an occasional case survives.

Plague uncontrolled at its source may at any time become an international scourge, a danger to which international health officers are the more alive since latter-day observations continue to show the disease breaking out in regions where its occurrence has been unknown before.

Plague, unlike cholera, is not communicated by man to man, but to man by fleas from the bodies of sick rats. The flea bites the man and leaves a poisonous substance around the bite. Man, scratching the bite, scratches the poison into his skin and the deed is done. When plague breaks out in a village, the effective procedure is to evacuate the village at once and to inoculate the villagers with plague vaccine.

In most countries you simultaneously proceed to real control by killing the rats. But. this, in a Hindu land, you cannot effectively do, because of the religion.

The constant obstacle in the Public Health Officer's path is, characteristically, a negative one -- the utter apathy of the Indian peoples, based on their fatalistic creed. The intermittent obstacle, acute of latter years, is the political agent who runs here and there among the villages, whispering that an evil Government is bent on working harm. To such a pitch have these persons from time to time wrought their victims, that the latter have murdered the native health agent entrusted with the task of getting them out of an infected site.

With repeated examples, however, of the results of following Government's behests, a degree of improvement has taken place. In some parts where plague has struck often, the people have begun to evacuate of themselves, when rats begin to die, and to flock into the nearest dispensary begging for inoculation. But in general the darkness of their minds is still so deep that the agitator can easily excite them to resistance, even to violence, by some tale of wickedness afoot.

When the first Indian lady of the district can say to the English lady doctor brought to her bedside: "Why should I show you my tongue when the pain is so much lower down? And besides, if I open my mouth like that a lot more devils will jump in"; or when the chief landlord of the district will tie a great ape just beyond claw-reach of his ten-day-old son and then torment the ape to fury to make it snatch and snarl at the child, to frighten away the demon that is giving him convulsions, what is to be expected of the-little folk squatting by the tank?

In the winter of 1926 I went through a plague-infested district in company with a British Public Health officer on tour. The first village that we visited was a prosperous settlement of grain-dealers--shopkeepers and money-lenders -- the market town for the surrounding farmers. Each house was stored with grain in jars and bins, and rats swarmed. The rats had begun to die. Then two men had died. And on that the British District Commissioner had ordered the people out.

Now they were all gathered in a little temporary "straw village" a few hundred yards beyond their town gate, there to await spring and the end of the scourge. As the doctor, a Scotchman 30 years in the Indian Medical Service, approached the encampment, the whole lot, men, women and children, rushed forward to greet him and then to ask advice:

"Sahib, if we build fires here to cook our food, and the wind comes, it will blow sparks and burn these straw houses we have made. What, then, shall we do to cook our food? Please arrange."

"Build your fires over yonder, behind that mound."

"Ah, yes, Sahib, to be sure."

"Sahib, if while we sit here, outside our gates, bad folk creep into our houses and steal our grain, what then?"

"Even so, is it not better that bad men die of the plague than that the plague kills you? Also, you may set watchmen at a distance."

"The Sahib is wise. Further: there is, in a tent near by, a stranger of no merit who wishes to push medicine into our skins. Is it good medicine? Shall we listen to him? And what is the right price?"

"The man in the tent is sent by Government. The medicine is necessary to all who wish to live. It is free medicine. There is no price."

A pause, while the people exchange glances. Then the headman speaks:

"It is well, indeed, that the Sahib came."

"It looks," says the doctor, as we move on, "as if my little dispenser fellow had been squeezing those people for money before inoculating them. They will do that! And then, if the people won't satisfy them, they report that inoculation is refused. Except in the case of soldiers and police, we have no authority to compel inoculation. It is a risky business, this fighting wholesale death with broken reeds!"

Later we find the "stranger of no merit" squatting in his tent, a traveling dispenser of the Public Health Department trained and charged to do minor surgery, well disinfection and plague inoculation, to give simple medicines for simple ailments, to lecture, and to show lantern slides on health propaganda. By his own showing he had sat in this tent for a month.

"I call the people every day to be inoculated, but they refuse to come forward," he complained. "'Plague-doctor,' they say, 'now that you are here the plague must come!' and they laugh at me. They are a backward and an ignorant people."

The doctor inspects his equipment. On the inner lid of his plague box the dosage is written. Within are the serum tubes, the needles, the disinfectant equipment, undisturbed. Also his medicine chest--"Dyspepsia Powders," "Country Medicines," simple drugs in tablets.

"Let me see your instruments," says the doctor. All are rusty, several are broken and useless.

"You should have sent those in, each one as soon as you broke it. You know it would have been replaced at once," says the doctor, patiently. "Now you have nothing to work with."

"Ah, yes, I meant to send them. I forgot."

CHAPTER XXVIII - "QUACKS WHOM WE KNOW"

"It is better to sit [in quarantene] than to walk [outdoors], to lie down than to sit, to sleep than to wake, and death is the best of all," says the Brahman proverb.

Taking into consideration the points with which the preceding chapter is concerned, the question naturally arises as to how the Indian is affected by his own peculiar sanitary habits. That question may be answered in the words of an American scientist now studying in the country:

"From long consumption of diluted sewage they have actually acquired a degree of immunity. Yet all of them are walking menageries of intestinal parasites, which make a heavy drain upon their systems and which inevitably tell when some infection, such as pneumonia or influenza, comes along. Then the people die like flies. They have no resistance."

These conditions, added to infant marriage, sexual recklessness and venereal infections, further let down the bars to physical and mental miseries; and here again one is driven to speculate as to how peoples so living and so bred can have continued to exist.

A reply is thus couched by one of the most eminent of European International Public Health authorities:

"It is a question of adaptation, and of the evolution of a sub-grade of existence on which they now survive. The British are to blame for the world-threat that they constitute. If the British had not protected them, the virile races of the north would have wiped them out."

The superior virility of the northern races--including the Sikhs, and more especially the Pathans and other Muhammadan stocks--is favored by their superior diet. These hardy out-door folk are all large meat-eaters, and consume much milk and grain. The diet of the southern Hindu has little in it to build or repair tissue. He subsists mainly on sweets and carbo-hydrates, and, to the degree that he is able, he leads a sedentary life. Diabetes is often the incident that brings to its early close the career of the southern Indian public man.

Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher, I.M.S., Director of the Central Research Institute of the Government of India, in a paper called "What Disease Costs India," has said:

And Colonel Christopher further points out that so heavy a mortality inevitably indicates a background of widespread and continuous sickness, of reduced productivity, of enhanced costs of administration, and of penalized trade, whose combined tax upon the resources of the country, though difficult to calculate, cannot but be an enormous moral and economic burden to support, a heavy drag upon prosperity.

For this great field of need the lack of means is always conspicuous. For 1925-26, some of the provin-cial budgets showed the following items:[3]

[3] Indian Y ear-Book, 1926, pp. 89, 97, 107, 118.]

                     Education   Public Health

Bombay Presidency   $6,959,700     964,700
Madras Presidency    6,211,100   1,054,500
United Provinces     5,713,000     493,700
Bengal               4,322,000     880,000

The open road to better conditions is clear, and, alas, untrodden. One finger-post reads thus:[4]

[4. Statement Exhibiting the Moral and Material Progress...of India During the Years 1923-24, London, 1924, pp. 211-12.]

The necessary preliminary to any satisfactory advance...is the growth among the educated classes of a missionary and humanitarian spirit which will lead them to consecrate time, money and energy to the task of ameliorating the conditions in which their less fortunate brethren live...India can never be safeguarded from a disastrous death rate, punctuated by heavy epidemics, until her people can be weaned from their tenacious adherence to social observances which are as diametrically opposed to public health as they are to economic prosperity.

But that humanitarian spirit does not today exist.

Curiously lucid contributions on this line come from Mr. Gandhi; speaking as of Hindu medical men, he says:

After which he affirms:

European doctors are the worst of all.

Amplifying his accusation, Mr. Gandhi continues:

These [European] doctors violate our religious instinct. Most of their medical preparations contain either animal fat or spirituous liquors; both of these are tabooed by Hindu and Mahomedans.

And again, more specifically:

I overeat, I have indigestion, I go to a doctor, he gives me medicine. I am cured, I overeat again, and I take his pills again. Had I not taken the pills in the first instance, I would have suffered the punishment deserved by me, and I would not have overeaten again...A continuance of a course of medicine must, therefore, result in loss of control over the mind.

"In these circumstances," he concludes, "we are unfit to serve the country." And therefore "to study European medicine is to deepen our slavery."

Whatever may be thought of Mr. Gandhi's judgment, his sincerity is not questioned. Holding such an opinion of the motives and value of western medical men in India, it is scarcely surprising that, in the period of his "non-cooperation" campaign against Government and all its works, not excepting its educational efforts, he should have exhorted medical and public health students to desert their classes and to boycott their schools.

Boy-fashion, they did it--for a time--and at what a cost to India!

The other side of this phase of Indian nationalism is its enthusiasm for the Aruvedic or ancient Hindu system of medicine under which a large part of the native population is today being treated, more particularly in Bengal and in central and southern India.

This system is held to have been handed down from the gods in earliest times, and to be of spiritual and inspired nature. Some hint of its quality may be gathered from an excerpt from the Sushruta Samhita, one of the two venerable works on which the system is based.[6]

[6. Translation of Kaviraj Kunja Lal Bishagratna, p. 270.]

The favourable or unfavourable termination of a disease may be predicted from the appearance, speech, dress and demeanour of the messenger sent to call a physician, or from the nature of the asterism and the lunar phase marking the time of the arrival, or from the direction of the wind blowing at the time, or from the nature of omens seen by him on the road, or from the posture or speech of the physician himself. A messenger belonging to the same caste as the patient himself should be regarded as an auspicious omen, whereas one from a different caste would indicate a fatal or an unfavourable termination of the disease.

Several works on modern Aruvedic practice have been published. These make the claim that the Sush-ruta anatomy and surgery of two thousand years ago were far superior to those of modern western science, and deduce that as Aruvedic methods have undergone no serious change since that time, they must be practically perfect. Says Sir Patrick Hehir:[7]

[7.The Medical Profession in India. Major-General Sir Patrick Hehir, I.M.S., Henry Frowde and Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1923, p. 104.]

One of the principles of the system is that diseases are the result of the operations of evil spirits who have to be pacified by various offerings and propitiated by incantations. Regarding the diseases of children it is stated[8] that these "are due to the action of certain spirits who were belated in obtaining lucrative posts in the retinue of the Destroyer and were compelled, to secure power, to tax sorrowing parents, who might have committed any of the hundred-odd ritual faults by afflicting their offspring." One searches in vain for anything approaching definite and rational therapeutics in this system. We have [here] in a modern Aruvedic work a complex combination of drugs extolled as being able to cure such diverse conditions as obesity and gonorrhea, and another extensive combination alleged to effect a cure in all diseases of women however caused.

[8. Quoted from Kaviraj Nagendra Nath Sen Gupta, The System of Medicine, 3 vols., Calcutta, 1909.]

My personal enquiry into Aruvedic surgical cases Was limited to two instances. The first was that of a little boy who walked into a Madras Presidency hospital one day in 1925, carrying his own forearm as a parcel, with a request to the British surgeon in charge, from a well-known Aruvedic doctor, to sew the forearm in place.

The history of this case was that the arm had sustained a compound fracture, the bone sticking through the flesh in an open wound. The Aruvedic doctor had first applied cow-dung to the open wound and then had clapped on splints, which he bound tight with strips of freshly-peeled tree-bark. The weather being hot and dry, the bark had contracted rapidly and produced extreme pressure. The circulation stopped, dry gangrene set in and the arm sloughed off at the elbow. Seeing which, the Aruvedic man thought it time to invoke the courtesies of the profession and to suggest the western needle.

The second case occurred in 1926, in the same prov-ince. An Aruvedic doctor attempted to operate according to his code upon a man having an enlarged gland in the groin. Holding his patient down, and without an anaesthetic, he opened the gland. As the knife went in, the patient jumped, an artery was cut and the peritoneal cavity slit open. The doctor, knowing no anatomy, then took his patient to a near-by government dispensary. But there the little dispensary man in charge, an Indian, out of sheer terror pushed the risk away.

"I am not meant for this sort of thing," he protested. "I am only meant for minor surgery. Take the man on to a hospital."

But before reaching the hospital the man died.

Action for manslaughter was brought by the police against the Aruvedic physician. But an association of Indian doctors holding western degrees, many of whom were in Government employ, defended his case and paid the expenses. "Our fine old Indian system must not be attacked," they said. Their lawyers first got the defendant off on a technicality; and then secured the prosecution of the little dispensary man for criminal delay.

The common arguments in favor of the old system are that it is cheaper for the people, that it particularly suits Indian constitutions and that it is of divine sanction and birth. Leaving the last tenet aside, as not in the field of discussion, we find that the cost of running an Aruvedic dispensary is much the same as that of running a dispensary on western lines;[9] and that no material difference has ever been discovered between white man and brown, in the matter of reaction of medicines upon the system.

[9. The Medical Profession in India, p. 116.]

The Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, however, have occasioned a great recrudescence of native medicine. Provincial ministers dependent on popular vote are prone to favor spending public money to erect Aruvedic and Unani[10] colleges, hospitals and dispensaries. With the Indian National Congress claiming that Aruvedic medicine is "just as scientific as modern western medicine," with such men as Sir Rabindranath Tagore, the poet, fervently declaring that Aruvedic science surpasses anything the West can offer; and with Swarajists in general pushing it forward on patriotic grounds, you get the melancholy spectacle of the meager appropriations allotted to medicine and public health, in this most disease-stricken of lands, being heavily cut into to perpetuate a "science" on the same level as the "voodoo doctoring" of the West Indian negro.

[10. The ancient Arabic school of medicine.]

That the old native systems still exert a strong hold on the imaginations of the masses cannot be questioned. Also, like the voodoo doctors, they teach the use of a few good herbs. These two points enable their practitioners to induce enough "cures" to keep their prestige alive.

But once upon a time it chanced that Mr. Gandhi, having widely and publicly announced that "hospitals are institutions for propagating sin" that "European doctors are the worst of all," and that "quacks whom we know are better than the doctors who put on an air of humaneness," himself fell suddenly ill of a pain in the side. As he happened to be in prison at the time, a British surgeon of the Indian Medical Service came straightway to see him.

"Mr. Gandhi," said the surgeon, as the incident was reported, "I am sorry to have to tell you that you have appendicitis. If you were my patient, I should operate at once. But you will probably prefer to call in your Aruvedic physician."

Mr. Gandhi proved otherwise minded.

"I should prefer not to operate," pursued the surgeon, "because in case the outcome should be unfortunate, all your friends will lay it as a charge of malicious intent against us whose duty it is to care for you."

"If you will only consent to operate," pleaded Mr. Gandhi, "I will call in my friends, now, and explain to them that you do so at my request."

So, Mr. Gandhi willfully went to an "institution for propagating sin"; was operated upon by one of the "worst of all," an officer of the Indian Medical Service, and was attentively nursed through convalescence by an English Sister whom he is understood to have thought after all rather a useful sort of person.

CHAPTER XXIX - PSYCHOLOGICAL GLIMPSES THROUGH THE ECONOMIC LENS

The welfare of any people, we are wont to agree, must finally rest upon economic foundations. In the foregoing pages certain aspects of economic conditions in India have been indicated. To these indications I should like now to add a few more, disclaiming any pretense that they constitute a survey, and offering them merely for what they are worth as scattering observations made in the living field, entirely non-political both in character and in purpose.

The Indian, aside from his grievances earlier described, has other explanations of what he calls his depressed status, in large part covering them with the elastic title of "economic drains" upon the country. Compared with the matters already handled, these considerations seem superficial, serving mainly to befog the issue. The principal drains, as they appear to me, have been shown in the body of this book. But the Indian native politician's category comprises none of them. He speaks, instead, under such headings as cotton, tea, interest on Government bonds, export of grain, army maintenance, and the pay of British Civil Servants in India.

The attempt carefully to examine these or any comparable point with the Indian intelligentsia is likely to end in disappointment and a web of dialectics--for the reason that, as the question grows close, the Indian, as a rule, simply drops it and shifts to another ground where, for the moment, he has more elbow-room. To touch briefly on the items just enumerated will, however, illustrate his mode of thought.

Of cotton, his persistent statement is that the country's raw crop, selfishly cornered, is sent to England to give employment to Lancashire spinners, and then, brought back as cloth, is forced upon Indian purchasers.

The facts are: (a) The English market stands sixth on the list of purchasers of the Indian cotton crop.[1] (b) Indian cotton, being of poor quality, irregular, short of staple and persistently tampered with, to make weight, does not meet the requirements of English cotton cloth manufacturers, (c) The cotton for the looms of Lancashire is supplied from America and the Sudan, (d) The little Indian cotton used in the United Kingdom goes chiefly to making lamp-wicks, cleaning cloths and other low-grade fabrics. (See Appendix III A.]

As affecting the present status of India's cotton import trade, two mutually countervailing influences must be mentioned: On the one hand stands the recent handling by Government of the old excise duty on Indian-milled cotton goods--an imposition which no Briton today defends; that excise duty is now wiped out, and its disappearance would naturally serve to diminish importations and to stimulate sales of home manufacture. On the other hand stand the facts that the people of India acquire, year by year, a little more money to spend and a little more habit of spending it 5 that they like fine cloths; and that the cloth from Indian mills is mostly coarse. Therefore, in spite of free markets, in spite of Japan's growing competition in fine goods, in spite of Mr. Gandhi's cottage spinning campaign and its rough product, India still chooses to indulge in a considerable amount of Lancashire's sheer fabrics.

Government, meantime, has been sparing no pains to improve the quality of the cotton crop. In the endeavor to induce the growers to put more intelligence into the work, experimental farms and model stations have been established in the cotton areas, inspectional teaching has been set up, and improved implements[2] and good seed[3] provided, with an active propaganda as to the feasibility of higher prices.

[2. Originally imported from America, but now made by Indian labor jn the Government agricultural stations.]

[3. From American stock.]

"India is actually a better cotton country than is the United States," an American authority has said, "but the people will not put their backs into the work, and the Swaraj politician does what he can to discourage improved production, on the ground that 'India must not help England by growing cotton that Lancashire will use.'"

Whether unaware or regardless of the facts just recounted, the foremost of Indian politicians repeatedly assured me that "England takes our raw cotton away tc give work to her own unemployed, brings the cloth back here and foists it upon us. So all the profit is hers and India is robbed. No country can stand such a drain."

"But America raises cotton, some of which England buys, makes into cloth and sells to America again. We gladly sell to our best bidders, and we buy where we find what we want. Also, we make some cloth ourselves. Where is the difference," I asked, "between your case and America's?"

"But consider the question of tea," replies the Indian economist quickly. "We raise great crops of tea, and almost the whole is swept out of India -- another exhausting drain upon the country."

"Do you sell your tea, or give it away?"

"Ah, yes -- but the tea, you perceive, is gone"

The third "drain" upon the country, as named above, is the interest upon Government's Public Utility bonds, paid to London. The caliber of the complaint may briefly be shown through the single instance of railways.

The first line of railway in India was finished in 1853. At the end of March, 1924, India had a total length of 38,039 miles of open system, which in 1925 carried over four and a half times as many passengers per mile of steel as did the railways of the United States. (See also Appendix III B.)

Taking the respective viewpoints of Americans and of Indians in the matter now in hand, we get further light on the Indian economist. When America built her railways, she had not sufficient means to do so without borrowing. Consequently she borrowed from Europe, largely from Great Britain, about half the money that built her railway system, well content to pay what it cost in view of benefits expected from the opening of the country. These costs, in the normal course, continued until about 1914. When India built her railways, she also failed to find the money at home; yet in her case not because money was lacking, but because Indian capitalists would lend only at huge rates of interest. Consequently India borrowed from her cheapest market, London, practically all the money that built her railways, paying from 2.5 to 5%, with an average of 3.5%, on the loans -- the lowest rates that the world knows.

It is the payment of the annual interest on these loans that the Indian critic is constantly describing as an insupportable grievance, "a drain" of the country's resources.

But the net profits to the Government of India brought in by the railways after payment of interest, sinking funds, annuity charges, etc., were, in 1924-25, $58,736,000.[5]

[5. Statesman's Year Book, 1926, p. 139.]

Mr. Gandhi's views on railways, being a conspicuous feature of his anti-British propaganda, may be noticed here:

Yet Mr. Gandhi himself sets the example of braving that danger, in his many political tours about the country. And, despite his doubts on the point, one effect of the existence of the railroads has certainly been to wipe out the mortal terror of famine in India. Whereas in the old days that threat hung always over the land, waiting only the failure of a monsoon to reap its human harvest, deaths from this cause are now almost unknown; because Government's systematized famine scheme is sustained by means to transport (a) men from famine areas to areas where labor is wanted, and (b) food and fodder whence both exist in plenty to places where, to save life, both are needed.

Beyond the railheads runs the British-built network of good highroads, speeding motor traffic where bullock carts alone used to creep and wallow.

"And every time I think of famine and the desperate work and the wholesale death it used to mean," said one old Deputy District Commissioner, "I say, 'God bless Henry Ford!'"

It is scarcely necessary to point out the further practical uses of the railways, whether in equalization of prices, in opening of markets, or in development of trade with its consequent increase of individual prosperity and of Government revenues.

Turning now to the fourth item listed for consideration, one finds Mr. Gandhi and other Indian critics pointing to the exportation of grain from a country where many regions are from time to time short of food, as an intolerable "drain" due to administrative ill will, greed, or mismanagement. However elaborately this idea is clothed, its bare bones tell a plain story.

No man sells grain today that he needs today to put into his mouth. If he sells grain, it is to get something that he holds more necessary or more desirable. Government, in the last thirty years, has created great areas of rich grain land where only desert existed before. Millions of Indians are raising on these lands quantities of grain far beyond their own consuming power or that of the regions in which they live. Roads, railways, and ships have brought the markets of the world to their doors. They sell to the highest bidder. If Government should clap an export duty on their produce to keep it at home, what shame would then be cried upon the despot whose jealous grip denied to labor the fruit of its toil! Grain travels to and from India as it does everywhere else--in obedience to the currents of world trade.

For our fifth point: The cost of the army is always alleged to be monstrous in proportion to the country's revenue. "The army is too big," says the politician.

"Is it too big for the work it has to do in keeping your safety and peace?"

"I don't know. I have not looked into that," is the usual reply. "But anyway, it costs an outrageous percentage of India's revenue."

In presenting this view of the subject it is the custom to speak as of the Indian central budget only, which gives a figure of expenditure on defense amounting to about 59%. of the total. To arrive at a just statement, the provincial budgets, which are en-tirely free from defense items, must be reckoned in; lit is then found that the proportion of governmental revenues assigned to defense is about 30% The Indian peoples are taxed about $.58 per capita or the defense of their country.

The people of Great Britain pay about $13 per capita on that count, the people of America about $5; those of Japan pay for defense six times as much as the people of India, implying a per capita tax on that score of over $3.50.

India possesses 1,400 miles of constantly dangerous frontier, always actively threatened, and three times in the last century ablaze with open war. She also has an enormous and extremely vulnerable coast line, which without extra cost to her is defended by the British fleet. And finally, she has a population which, time and again, in its sudden outbursts of internecine fury, needs protection against itself. Taxes are light because the people are poor. Revenues are small because taxes are light. Costs of national defense look large because revenues are small. The maintenance of order and peace is the prime duty of Government. On that duty any Government must spend what it must. If the total revenue be small, the less is left for other activities. The obvious solution is to increase the revenue. (See III C.)

But the great weakness in the Indian's reasoning that the costs of the army constitute a "drain" out of India of India's wealth lies in the fact that practically all the pay of the Army stays in India. The pay of the great body of troops, which is Indian, naturally does so. That part of British soldiers' pay that goes home to Britain is scarcely large enough to waste words upon. British Army officers in India in practically all cases are spending their private means there, over and above their pay. Equipment and stores, by order, are bought in India whenever Indian firms can provide them in suitable quality and at a reasonable competitive price. Otherwise they are bought abroad, by the High Commissioner for India stationed in London, who is himself an Indian. In this matter of governmental purchase of stores, in whatever department, a frequent disparity exists between the actual records and the statements of the Indian politicians who, as my own research proved, are wont to suit their allegations to their convenience rather than to the facts.

The sixth conspicuous channel of "drain" upon the country's resources is the pay of the British members of the Indian Civil Service. Here the relevant facts are that in the beginning it was necessary to offer good pay to get good men to take on the job; and that, with all the upward rush of prices in the last quarter century, no comparable increase has taken place in that pay. India, today, is a costly place to live in, as any sojourner will find. She is not a white man's country, in the sense that she frequently robs him of his health if not of his life. In committing himself to her service he must resign all home associations and privileges for long periods of time. If he marries he must part early with his children, and maintain them separated from their parents by a journey three weeks long. When he retires, after twenty-five to thirty-five years of active service, his pension of £1,000 per annum loses 25% by taxes; and, last but not least, the salaries paid to all but the few highest officials are large only from the point of view of the Indian, with his greatly differing standard of living which few white men would accept. The married British Civil Servant in India, if he has children to educate and no private resources on which to draw, must live with watchful economy to make both ends meet. And he can save little or nothing for a rainy day.

Nevertheless, the unhappy peoples of India, says Sir M. Visvesvaraya,[11] speaking as does many another prominent Indian, "have not only to feed and clothe themselves, but also to support one of the costliest administrations in the world."

To dissect this statement were, after one glance at the Tax Table, a waste of time. "One of the costliest administrations in the world" cannot be supported from such resources. Including land revenue, which is properly to be listed as rental rather than taxation, the total per capita tax paid by the inhabitants of British India in 1923-24 was five and a half rupees[12] or nearly $1.82 in United States currency at the then rate of exchange. The per capita taxation in the Philippines for the year 1923, as shown in the Annual Report of the Insular Auditor, was $3.50.

[12. Statistical Abstract, 1914-15 to 1923-24, p. 190.]

Even such a sum may seem large, in comparison with the general poverty of the Indian people. Costs of Government reduced to the irreducible are still high to a pauper. But observers are not wanting who believe that among the causes of India's poverty is this very lightness of taxation, which deprives the Administration of means with which to work.

Now, leaving matters of argument, let us face about and look at indisputable wastages of India's vital resources. The major channels have been shown in earlier pages, but these leave untouched a list of points only second in importance, such as caste marriage costs, the usurer, the hoarding of treasure, and mendicancy.

Caste laws strictly limit the range of possible marriages, sometimes even to the confines of half-a-dozen families, so that, despite his dread of sonlessness, a man may be forced to wait till he is old for the birth of a girl within the circle wherein he may marry,[13] and then may be forced to pay ruinously to secure her. Or again, there is such a scramble for husbands of right caste that, rather than sacrifice their own souls by leaving a girl unmarried, fathers strain their credit to the snapping point to secure eligible matches for their daughters.

[13. Reconstructing India, Visvesvaraya, p. 241.]

In Bengal, of late years, several cases have become public of girls committing suicide at the approach of puberty, to save their fathers the crushing burden of their marriage dowry.[14] And the chorus of praise evoked from Bengal youth by this act has stimulated further self-immolations. Nor do the father's finances greatly affect the case. Though a man prosper and take in much money, marriages in his family still pull him down to ruin, for the reason that pride and custom forever urge him ahead of his means.

[14. Legislative Assembly Debates, 1922, Vol. II, Part II, p. 1811.]

Marriage expenses and funeral expenses, love of litigation, thriftlessness and crop failures are among the chief roads that lead the Indian into debt. The Indian money-lender, or bania, is the same man as the usurer of the Philippines. And, exactly as in the Philippines, the average Indian having a little money laid by, even though he be not a bania by caste and calling, will, if he be minded to lend, lend to his neighbors at 33%, and up, rather than to Government at a miserable 3.5%, so that Government may build him a railway. Let the silly folk in London do that.

The bania is the man who, foreseeing a short crop, corners all the grain in his region, and at sowing-time sells seed-grain to his neighbors at 200% profit, taking the coming crop as security.

Once in debt to a bania, few escape. Clothing, oxen, and all purchased necessities are bought of the same wise old spider. Compound interest rolls up in the good old way as the years pass, and posterity limps under the load unto the third and fourth generation.

"The assumption that debt is due to poverty cannot be entertained. Debt is due to credit and credit depends upon prosperity and not poverty," writes Cal-vert. Credit, in India, is the creation of the British Government by the establishment of peace and security of property, coupled with public works that increase production and the value of land. The bania in his fullest glory is therefore a by-product of British rule. In the Punjab, rich among provinces, we find him in his paradise, 40,000 strong, collecting from the people annual interest equaling nearly three times the total sum that they annually pay to Government. (See Appendix III D.)

Everywhere, whether openly or covertly, the usurer opposes the education of the people, because a man who can read will not sign the sort of paper by which the bania holds his slave, and a man who can figure will know when his debt is cleared. As two Indian members of the profession warmly told me, the bania, hates "this meddlesome and unsympathetic foreign government that has introduced a system of cooperative credit, which, wherever a Briton directs it, is ruining our good old indigenous banking business. Moreover, not content even with that mischief, it is pushing in night schools and adult-education schemes to upset the people's mind."

Intimately powerful as he is throughout the country, the bania exercises a strong undercurrent of influence in the Swarajist party, making it generally hostile to labor interests and currency reforms.

A third actual drain upon prosperity, seldom advertised, yet affecting not only India but the rest of the world, is India's disposition of bullion. Since the early days of the Roman Empire, western economists have been troubled over India's intake of precious metals, rather than of foreign goods, in payment for her produce. These metals she has always swallowed up (See Appendix III E.)

In 1889 it was estimated that India held imprisoned "a stock of gold bullion wholly useless for commercial purpose and increasing at the rate of nearly 3 million sterling [$14,000,000] annually, of the value of not less than two hundred and seventy million pounds sterling [$1,312,000,000]."[17] This ever-accumulating treasure lies in the hands of all conditions and orders of men, from the poorest laborer to the most eminent prince.

[17. The Industrial Competition of Asia. An Inquiry into the Influence of Currency on the Commerce of the Empire in the East, Clar-mont John Daniell. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., Ltd., London, 1890, p. 249.]

In 1927, Mr. D. C. Bliss, American Trade Commissioner in Bombay, wrote of treasure in India:[18]

[18. The Bombay Bullion Market, Don C. Bliss, Jr., U. S. Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Trade Information Bulletin No-457, pp. 5-6.]

Vast reserves have been accumulated,...estimated as amounting to more than five billion dollars--but they have been jealously hoarded in the form of unproductive precious metals. Put to productive uses, or loaned out in the world's money-markets, they would suffice to make India one of the powerful nations of the world. The traditional "wealth of the Indies" is there, but in such a form that it yields nothing to its possessors.

From time immemorial it has been considered improper for any great heir to draw upon his father's hoard of precious treasure and equally improper for him not to build up a hoard of his own. The late Nyzam of Hyderabad collected in his vaults jewels to immense values. The present prince is understood to prefer bullion, of which his own accumulations are said to reach to between 150 and 200 million dollars. Equally, every peasant in the land secretly buries silver in the earth, and loads it upon his women's necks and wrists and ankles, for safe-keeping. Forty per cent, of the world's total gold production, and 30%, of the world's silver, is thus annually absorbed by India. None of this gold is coined or goes into currency, and, says Mr. Bliss, of silver: "All of the absorption is in response to the demand for bullion for...ornamental uses." "Undoubtedly," he adds, "an enormous quantity of bullion has been buried and forgotten." The man heavily in debt to the bania commonly possesses a store of hidden coin, yet continues borrowing. This custom rests on the idea of being prepared for the rainy day and on a profound distrust of the human element in any scheme of banking.

The tendency of the world's gold and silver to concentrate in India and there to disappear from action tells its own story. On the one hand, an essentially poor country could not bring such a thing about. On the other hand, no country that buries its wealth ana then lies down and. sleeps on the grave can be really prosperous.

Turning now to the drain incurred through robbing the soil: India, as we know, is preeminently an agricultural country, But she has never fertilized her soil. Continually taking from it, she puts nothing back--and yet laments the thinness of her crops. Having bu-. little firewood, she burns her cow-dung for fuel. And, being under religious taboo against the handling of dead animal substance, the Hindu majority will not use for bone-manure the cattle bones of which they have such store, but, instead, sell them to be exported to foreign parts. And they cultivate with a little wooden plow that barely scratches the surface of the ground.

Suppose that, still respecting the taboo, they used some of their idle buried cash, or the interest it would bring, put to work, to buy fertilizer and machinery; what far-reaching profit might not that one step effect, did but their general way of life permit enduring prosperity!

The fragmentation of property through the ancient laws of inheritance, until a man's holding is so split up into absurdly shaped and widely scattered splinters that its useful cultivation is impossible, is another formidable obstacle to the people's welfare. Those interested in the subject will find it well developed in Calvert's Wealth and Welfare of the Punjab, where also is treated the great restriction of potential revenue through lack of women's work. (See Appendix III F.)

And here, too, though at cost of repetition, must be recalled the enormous dead loss incurred by the country through the maintenance of its seventy-odd millions of unprofitable cattle, which, because of religious inhibitions, may but rarely contribute even hides and bones to the country's profit.

Last on our list of draughts upon the wealth of India, we find the item of mendicancy.

The Brahmanic code commends renunciation of active life and the taking up of a life of contemplation and beggary as the proper terminal half of man's earthly career. At the same time it teaches that he who gives to the beggar is in reality a debtor to that beggar, in that he who receives affords the giver a priceless opportunity to establish credit in the life to come.

Therefore neither shame nor gratitude attaches to the beggar's part. (See Appendix III G.)

In the Indian Legislative Assembly, on February 2, 1926, Sir Hari Singh Gour said:

Government's estimate of 1921 put the saints and fakirs then living by beggary at 1,452,174.

Now and again these privileged ones gather in groups of hundreds and stream, across country feeding off the populace as they go. The disciple that follows each holy man holds out his master's begging bowl. And rarely is he denied. One sees their encampments in moving about the country. One meets them on the road, almost or quite naked except for their coat of ashes, their enormous mops of long snarled hair bleached to the color of ginger, their eyes reddened with drugs. At great fairs they turn out in multitudes. A competent witness informed me that at the latest twelfth-year fair of Madras, the two and a half miles of road from the city to the bathing place was lined on both sides with religious beggars sitting shoulder to shoulder, each with an attendant squatting in front, calling out his master's claims to alms.

And now we come to a more obscure question, that of the present economic status of the peoples in comparison with their condition in past eras. Mr. Gandhi and his school affirm that the peoples of India have been growing steadily poorer and more miserable, as a result of British rule. To form a close surmise of the facts is difficult indeed. The masses have, as a whole, little ambition to raise or to change actual living conditions. Their minds as a rule do not turn to the accumulation of things. They are content with their mud huts. Given windows and chimneys, they stop them up. Given ample space, they crowd in a closet. Rather than keep the house in repair, they let the rains wash it away, building a new one when the old is gone. Rather than work harder for more food, they prefer their ancient measure of leisure and just enough food for the day.

But their margin of safety is indubitably greater, their power of resistance to calamity increased, and, allegations to the contrary notwithstanding, means of enlarging their income lie at all times, now, within their hands. In just such measure as desire for material advance awakens, one sees this demonstrated in individual lives. (See Appendix III H.) The question whether or not such desire is good underlies one of the prime differences between eastern and western thought and practice.

Now in assigning value to these factors, one must remember that the soil of India is today supporting the pressure of over 54,000,000 more human beings than it sustained 50 years ago, plus an increase of 20%. This, again, is a result of freedom from wars and disorders and from killing famines; of the checking of epidemics; and of the multiplied production of food -- all elements bound to produce ever greater effect as essential features of an established government. And the prospects it unfolds, of sheer volume of humanity piling up as the decades pass, is staggering. For, deprived of infanticide, of suttee, and of her other native escape-valves, yet still clinging to early marriage and unlimited propagation, India stands today at that point of social development where population is controlled by disease, and disease only.

CHAPTER XXX - CONCLUSION

The preceding chapters of this book state living facts of India today. They can easily be denied, but they cannot be disproved or shaken. That there are other facts, other columns of statistics, other angles left untouched by this research I do not contest.

Neither do I wish to imply that some of the most unflattering things here affirmed of India are without counterpart in character and tendency, if not in degree, in certain sections of our western life. But India has carried the principles of egocentricity and of a materialism called spirituality to a further and wider conclusion than has the West. The results, in the individual, the family and the race, are only the more noteworthy. For they cast a spotlight toward the end of that road.

Some few Indians will take plain speech as it is meant--as the faithful wounds of a friend; far more will be hurt at heart. Would that this task of truth-telling might prove so radically performed that all shock of resentment were finally absorbed in it, and that there need be no further waste of life and time for lack of a challenge and a declaration!

APPENDIX

Appendix I - MEDICAL EVIDENCE

In the Indian Legislative Assembly of 1922, the following evidence, introduced from the floor of the House as descriptive of the conditions of the day, aroused neither question nor opposition from any one of the assembled Indian legislators. The fact that, although thirty-one years old, it still remained beyond challenge, carries a contributing significance. The evidence submitted consists of a list, compiled in 1891 by the western women doctors then practicing in India, and by them laid before the Viceroy, with a petition for intervention on behalf of the children of India. It is made up, they affirm, entirely of instances that have come under the hands of one or another of their own number, and whose like are continually revealed in their ordinary professional experience.

A.--Aged 9. Day after marriage. Left femur dislocated, pelvis crushed out of shape, flesh hanging in shreds.

B.--Aged 10. Unable to stand, bleeding profusely, flesh much lacerated.

C.--Aged 9. So completely ravished as to be almost beyond surgical repair. Her husband had two other living wives and spoke very fine English.

D.--Aged 10. A very small child, and entirely undeveloped physically. This child was bleeding to death from the rectum. Her husband was a man of about forty years of age, weighing not less than eleven stone [154 lbs.]. He had accomplished his desire in an unnatural way.

E.--Aged about 9. Lower limbs completely paralyzed.

F.--Aged about 12. Laceration of the perineum extending through the sphincter ani.

G.--Aged about 10. Very weak from loss of blood. Stated that great violence had been done her, in an unnatural way.

H.--Aged about 12. Pregnant, delivered by crani-otomy with great difficulty, on account of the immature state of the pelvis and maternal passage.

I.--Aged about 7. Living with husband. Died in great agony after three days.

K.--Aged about 10. Condition most pitiable. After one day in hospital, was demanded by her husband, for his "lawful" use, he said.

L.--Aged 11. From great violence done her person, will be a cripple for life. No use of her lower extremities.

M.--Aged about 10. Crawled to hospital on her hands and knees. Has never been able to stand erect since her marriage.

N.--Aged 9. Dislocation of pubic arch, and unable to stand or to put one foot before the other.

The list will be found in the Legislative Assembly Debates of 1922, Vol. Ill, Part I, p. 919, Appendix. See also p. 882 of the Debates.

Appendix II - ENFRANCHISEMENT OF WOMEN

In framing the Reform Bill of 1919, the British Parliament decided that the question of enfranchisement for the women of India could properly be determined only by the Indian peoples themselves. Parliament accordingly allowed the old sex disqualification to remain in the Bill; but at the same time so shaped the electoral rules as to leave it in the power of each province's Legislative Council to place women on the provincial electoral register by passing a resolution to this effect.

Pursuant of this power, the Provinces of Madras, Bombay, Bengal, United Provinces, Punjab and Assam have removed their sex disqualifications, granting the vote to women on the same terms as to the male electorate. Further, the Central Legislative Assembly having passed a similar resolution, women may now vote not only for their Provincial Councils but also for the Legislative Assembly. Under the present general qualifications, however, the total number of women entitled to vote throughout India does not exceed 1,000,000, or about 17%, of the total electorate.

Sir Alexander Muddiman's Reform Enquiry Committee of 1924, in opening the consideration of a further step--that of women's candidature for elective office--reaffirmed that[1]

[1. Report of the Reforms Enquiry Committee, 1924, p. 57.]

the question went deep into the social system and susceptibilities of India, and . , . could only with any prudence be settled in accordance with the wishes of the Indians themselves as constitutionally expressed.

It was, however, upon the Muddiman Committee's recommendation that the rules of candidature for Provincial Councils were lately amended, enabling the removal of the sex disqualification by vote of Provincial Council. To this invitation Madras and Bombay have already responded.

The Muddiman Committee next recommended that the electoral rules of both chambers of the Indian Legislature--the Council of State and the Assembly--be amended by the removal of the sex disqualification, so that constituencies in provinces that have enfranchised their women might at will elect women to both Chambers. On September 1, 1926, the Indian Legislature so voted.

Thus far, however, it seems to be the British Provincial Governor rather than the Indian electorate that uses the new privilege. From 1922 to 1926, twenty-two women had become Municipal Councilors or Members of Local Government Boards, of whom only four were elected, the rest being nominated by Government.

The following statement is that of an Englishman deeply conversant with Indian affairs, one who wields much moral influence in India, and who vigorously used that influence to advocate the changes above indicated. It was elicited by my request for the grounds of his position and his view of the present status, and was elsewhere confirmed by ranking Indians.

As for the effect of enfranchisment in the Bombay Presidency, so far as I can see, it has been slight; the women in public life are the women who were there in one way or another before enfranchisement took place. In other parts of India I should say the effect was smaller still. Until the social conditions have improved, the franchise can mean nothing to the Indian woman, for she dares not use it.

In observing the position of the women of Bombay, outstanding in India, one heavily contributing factor appears: This city is the great Parsi center. Out of the total number of Parsis in all India -- 101,778 -- nearly 93,000 are domiciled in Bombay Presidency. Descendants of old Persian stock, the Parsis are practically all either merchants or bankers. Eight hundred per 1,000 of their men are literate, as against the 115 literates per 1,000 of male Hindus. The Parsis neither sequester nor suppress their women, but favor their adequate education. Thus 672 per 1,000 of the women of the Parsis are literate, as against the 14 per 1,000 female literates of the Hindus.

The presence of such a body, occupying conspicuous positions, cannot but influence the whole upper-class population.

Appendix III A - INDIAN COTTON

The record of raw cotton exported from India in the years 1924-25 is as follows, the unit being bales of 400 pounds:[1]

[1. Review of the Trade of India in 1924-25, Calcutta, Government of India Central Publication Branch, 1926, p. 73.]

Japan                        1,671,000
Italy                          485,000
China (excluding Hong Kong)    284,000
Belgium                        201,000
Germany                        174,000
The United Kingdom             162,000

Of the raw cotton exported to England the Lancashire looms use little because of its inferior quality, buying, rather, in Egypt and in America.

India's total raw cotton export, in 1924-25, was 3,326,400 bales.[2] Her consumption in Indian mills during that period was 2,050,891 bales.

[2. Ibid., pp. 21-2.]

Japan's purchase is mostly of the poorer grades of cotton and is mainly used in competing in China with the product of India's mills. In 1924 there were 337 cotton mills in British India. These are nearly all Indian-owned and as a rule have British superintendents and foremen, with Indian labor. The following figures[3] will further clarify the situation:

[3. Review of the Trade of India in 1924-25, p. 23.]

1913-14   1922-23   1923-24   1924-25

                                                    Million   Million   Million   Million
                                                    Yards     Yards     Yards     Yards

Production in Indian mills of cotton piece goods    1,164.3   15725.2   1,701.6   1,970.5
Export of Indian-milled piece goods                    89.2     157.0     165.3     181.5
Imports of foreign-made cotton piece-goods, from
all countries, including the United Kingdom, Japan,
Italy, Netherlands and the United States.           3,197.1   1,593.3   1,485.8   1,823.2

It will thus be seen that while the production and the export trade of India have been rising, the import trade is about half what it was before 1914.

Appendix III B - RAILWAY STATISTICS

The following figures as of the year 1925 are based on statistics contained in The Statesman's Year Book of 1926:

United.

                                                         India Argentine States Canada
Mileage open per 1,000 square miles of territory in        21      19       88      15
Number of passengers carried per mile of open railway  15,834   5,966    3,550     814
Tons of goods carried per mile of open railway          2,785   2,042    8,277   2,019
Total value of imports and exports carried per mile of
open railway                                          $56,929 $73,092  $33,116 $35,647

Appendix III C - MILITARY EXPENDITURE

An acknowledged authority thus puts the frame of the matter:

Appendix III D - USURY

The usurer of the Punjab bania Mr. Calvert writes:[5]

[5. The Wealth and Welfare of the Punjab, H. Calvert, Lahore, 1922, p. i,10.]

He represents the richest single class. His profits probably exceed those of all the cultivators put together. Beside him, the professional class is inconsiderable; the industrial class is insignificant, even trade and commerce take second place.

But the usurer is by no means peculiar to the Punjab. The total rural debt of British India is estimated at approximately $1,900,000,000, in the main unproductive. This burden is largely due to the vicious usury and compound interest system, a trifling percentage is incurred for land improvement, and the rest may be mainly attributed to extravagant expenditures on marriages.

Appendix III E - BULLION

The export of merchandise from India, in the year 1924-25, exceeded the import to the value of over $500,000,000.° During that year the import of private treasure totaled $328,000,000.

America, during 1924-25, imported Indian goods to the value of $117,000,000. Yet she sold to India only $46,900,000 worth of goods and exported to India bars of silver on private account of approximately the same value and gold to the value of $67,700,000. This process is steadily increasing as the years pass, raising the world's price of bullion.

Appendix III F - LOSS OF WOMEN'S LABOR

Calvert says, in his Wealth and Welfare of the Punjab,:

The same point is recognized by the Hindu writer, Visvesvaraya, in his Reconstructing India, p,:

Appendix III G - MENDICANCY

On February 2, 1926, Mr. Abdul Haye, Muham-madan member from the East Punjab, introduced into the Indian Legislative Assembly a resolution looking to the prohibition of beggary and vagrancy in India. Supporting it, he said in part:

Of these mendicants Lala Lajpat Rai says in his National Education in India:

Appendix III H - ECONOMIC CONDITION OF THE MASSES

As general circumstantial evidence of increased means, one sees the consumption by the peasants of non-essentials, once beyond their dreams. Thus, at the fair at Aligarh, in February, 1926, the turnover of cheap boots in one week amounted to $5,000, netting a profit of 20%. Boots, to the sort of people who snapped these up and put them on their own feet, were, 20 years ago, an unheard-of luxury. Big stocks of umbrellas, lamps, and gayly painted iron trunks were sold out and renewed over and over again, on the same occasion, the buyers being the ordinary cultivators. Tea, cigarettes, matches, lanterns, buttons, pocket-knives, mirrors, gramophones are articles of commerce with people who, fifteen years ago, bought nothing of the sort. The heavy third-class passenger traffic by rail is another evidence of money in hand. For railway travel, to the Indian peasant, takes the place that the movie fills in America. In 1924-25, 581,804,000 third-class railway travelers, as against 1,246,000 of the first-class, proved the presence of money to spare in the peasants' possession. "Where are they all going?" I repeatedly asked, watching the crowds packing into the third-class carriages.

"Anywhere. Visiting, pilgrimage, marriage parties, little business trips -- just 'there and back,' mostly for the excitement of going," was the answer.

THE END

PART IV