that must be considered in order to understand the atmosphere and surroundings into which modern industry has come. Of great importance is the relation of the people to their land. There was no unattached population ready to be gathered into the mills when the gates of the latter opened to it. The great majority of mill-workers come from the agricultural classes. The land, its method of division, its power to maintain the dwellers on it, its renovation or deterioration, are factors in the industrial problem of India to-day. Even those who toil as serfs, and the groups of outcastes whose huts may be seen just outside the village precincts, are often deeply attached to the place of their birth. The agricultural population lives for the most part in villages, and a village community includes not only the owners and the cultivators of the neighbouring fields, but also a group of artisans and a headman, an accountant, a watchman, a moneylender, and possibly a schoolmaster. The history of the recent efforts to develop and revivify the system of village government is full of interest.1

In Malabar, and in the Kanara districts to the north of it, where the land is fertile and where inlets from the ocean and frequent rivers and ravines break up the country, the cultivators live in isolated homesteads. Groves of coco-nut palms surround wide fields of rice, which, when harvest is approaching, seem like irregular lakes of green with bays and inlets penetrating into the solid forest. Here and there in the sea of green rise islands bearing a few palm-trees, a group of banana stems, and the buildings of a farm. Other homesteads are partially hid by the palm stems, but the familiar picture of the compact village is nowhere to be seen. But throughout the greater part of India the landscape is broken by a countless succession of villages, often, in the dry season, scarcely discernible from the surrounding country till one is close to them, often marked out at a greater distance by the group of trees beside which the houses nestle.

See Village Government in British India, by John Matthai. For other districts in India where the population is scattered, see Village Government in British India, by John Matthai, p. 8; and The Indian Village Community, by Sir R. S. Baden-Powell, pp. 57, 62, 64.

The systems of land-holding differ very widely throughout the continent. Matthai draws attention to two main types. These are the landlord type, as found in the Punjab, in the United Provinces, and in certain parts of the Central Provinces; and the non-landlord type more commonly found in the Presidencies of Madras and Bombay. In the typical village of the former order a group of proprietors hold the area covered by the village dwellings, by the surrounding fields, and by the waste land attached to these. All the other inhabitants pay rent to them, and the land-holding group are responsible for the revenue from the village as a whole.

In the areas of the other type each cultivator holds his own land and pays the tax on it directly to the State. It is in the districts in which the latter arrangement, or one similar to it, is in operation that the village community, with its elected headman, was most fully developed in former days, and can still be seen exercising many communal functions.

In India the" holy man " is always a poor man, wearing the outward signs of poverty, and content to depend on the gifts of others; but this does not create a general desire for poverty even amongst the devout. The poverty of millions of the labouring folk in India is not the result of choice, nor of idealism, but of hard, daily necessity. A sea of controversy rages round the discussion of the main causes of this poverty, and round the question whether it is increasing or decreasing; but no one denies its existence. The effect of the trading methods of the East India Company and of the modern industrial revolution on the scattered industries of the land will be referred to later. Other alleged causes are beyond the scope of this study.

There is at least one cause of poverty that tends to hasten the development of modern industrialism. It is the difficulty that is found in many areas in procuring by agriculture the necessary support for the increasing population. Here, again, many different opinions are held. There are those who maintain that the land would be more than able to support its inhabitants if better agricul

tural methods were employed, and if all the cultivable

Others

waste land were brought in. Others hold that if a more reasonable proportion of the fruits of the country went to the cultivators, the difficulty would be obviated. again, who have given much thought to the question, maintain that no improvement of landlords, and no advance in methods, can make it possible for the increasing population of such a vast continent as India to find its support from agriculture. It would be an interesting study to gather as many instances as possible of these three attitudes and to find out whether the varying points of view depend entirely or chiefly on the locality that has been investigated, or whether it could be proved that in definite cases different workers have come to opposite opinions with regard to the possible fertility of the same province or neighbourhood.1

There seems to be no doubt that the relation of the cultivators to the land, and their dependence on it, is one great cause of poverty. There are fruitful areas in which the cultivator may count on getting two or even three crops in a year, but there are great stretches of country where the land is infertile. In many districts each holding has been divided out amongst the representatives of a family again and again, as one generation after another took possession, till fieldlets of diminutive size and quaintly shaped outline are scattered all over the neighbourhood. The evil effects of this continual subdivision 3 are to some extent counteracted by the family system which carries with it a sense of joint responsibility. The fields are worked by the members of

See The Economic Life of a Bengal District, by J. C. Jack, I.C.S., R.F.A.; Land and Labour in a Deccan Village, by Harold H. Mann, D.Sc.; Land and Labour in a Deccan Village, Study No. 2, by Harold H. Mann, D.Sc., and N. V. Kanitkar, B.Sc., L.Ag., and “Size of Land Holdings in the Bombay Presidency," by The Hon. Mr. G. F. Keatinge, C.I.E., I.C.S., Indian Journal of Economics, vol. ii, part ii, p. 180.

2 See Land and Labour in a Deccan Village, Study No. 2, by Harold H. Mann, D.Sc., and N. V. Kanitkar, B.Sc., L.Ag., pp. 40-9; and Size of Land Holdings in the Bombay Presidency," by The Hon. Mr. G. F. Keatinge, C.I.E., I.C.S., in the Indian Journal of Economics, vol. ii, p. 180. 3 Besides subdivision there is frequently fragmentation of holdings in order that, where productivity varies, each heir may get a share of land of each quality. A long field may be divided into strips, some of which are not more than twenty-three feet wide.

the family in co-operation, and if they produce crops that will support the entire group, things go comparatively well. But there are wide areas in which the ground will not yield enough even in prosperous seasons for the sustenance of these large communities, and one of two things happens: either the family lives far below sound subsistence level and therefore dwindles, or else individuals, tired of the struggle, wander off to see if they can do better elsewhere.

Over these areas also, sometimes after a course of years of success, sometimes at intervals of two or three years, there comes the shadow of famine. To read of such things, or to see pictures of famine refugees, gives little idea of what even a slight famine entails. In order to have some faint realization of its meaning, it is necessary to see the district that is in its grip. In the cold season of 1920, large areas in the Deccan were threatened. Poona, the alternative seat of the Bombay Government, stands on the outskirts of one such area. The town has rivers, and its immediate neighbourhood was like a garden; but a short distance from it, roadside flowers and green crops ceased, and the land showed only patches of poor, short grain. The blades were burnt brown. For the most part no fruit had formed. If, amongst such remnants of hopelessly dried-up cereals, there appeared even a few dozen heads of grain, men and women were watching to scare off birds or cattle. Acre upon acre of burnt-up crops or barren ploughed fields in which, for want of a longed-for shower, it had never been possible to sow the seed, stretched on both sides of the track, like an endless sea-beach whose sands were unrelieved by wave or rock. This desert was broken at rare intervals by a green bank beside a muddy pool in the bed of a river otherwise as dry as the plains. Dotted over the area were clusters of huts which showed where the villages were. Herds of buffaloes, bullocks, and goats wandered over fields on which even burnt spikes were not distinguishable. This was in December. There might be rain in June. If good rains came then prices would fall in November. At that time there were no very marked signs of want

on the cattle, nor on the people who gathered to the stations; but the unalterable course of the next eight months was written over great stretches of the land from horizon to horizon. Men and women were already trekking to the cities.

The incidence of famine makes the need for the use of the best methods of agriculture in the intervening years most urgent, but in the way of any general improvement there are many difficulties which must be realized and met. Failure to adopt modern methods is not due only to conservatism on the part of the cultivators. In many localities no one innovation can come without a group of others. A modern plough is no gain in a district where the supplies of water and of manure are very limited, because turning up a deeper layer of soil will only absorb more of these and will give a poorer yield accordingly. The introduction of new methods will have to come gradually and with co-operation. There are immense resources available. Even in areas extensively cultivated much land is still unused or only partially used, but in order to take full advantage of these regions and to secure the benefits of more modern methods, there must be joint action and gradual education.

There are also large districts where the land has never been brought under cultivation. Efforts have been made to encourage colonization in Indian States, but many difficulties surround these experiments in districts in which adequate irrigation has not previously been introduced.2 The colonists are apt to grow discouraged and to drift back to their former homes, before any considerable progress has been secured. Though the land may have been unclaimed when the immigrants reached it, rumours of "vague grazing rights of neighbouring villages which may be several miles away" trouble them. Their animals are stolen and their crops destroyed, and sometimes 1 See The Art of Economic Development," by H. Stanley Jevons, Indian Journal of Economics, vol. iii, part iii, p. 310.

"

A graphic description of the change produced, not only in the fertility of the country, but also in the habits of the people in a newly irrigated region, is given in The Awakening of India, by J. Ramsay MacDonald, M.P., PP. 229 f.