empowered to adjudicate the same cases. This mistake may now be avoided; and with our additional experience of eighty years we may surely make the attempt now with greater chance of success. It is demoralising to administrators that they should be in no real touch with the people; and it is demoralising to a great agricultural people to have no kind of organised bodies and recognised leaders among themselves, and to have no real contact with the officials and administrators except through the hated and dreaded medium of the police.

It is a sad truth that with increased facilities in communication between Europe and India, Englishmen in India live less among the people, mix less with the people, know less of the people, than they did seventy years ago, in the days of Munro and Elphinstone, Malcolm and Bentinck. And this makes it all the more necessary and imperative in the interests of good government that both in villages and in provincial capitals, both in judicial and in executive matters, representative leaders of the people should be elected to represent the feelings, the sentiments, and the wishes of the people, and to stand as real interpreters between the people and their rulers. In the executive Councils of the Viceroy and the Provincial Governors, no less than in village unions, there should be room fo, trusted leaders of the people, to be their spokesmenr to represent their interests, to keep the Government in touch with the people. The Government of India needs be immensely strong amidst the vast and varied population of that country, and it will add to the strength of the Government to make the administration a little less autocratic and a little more in touch with the people.

INDUSTRIES IN INDIA

BY SIR M. M. BHOWNAGGREE, K.C.I.E., M.P.

Of all the numerous subjects which a well-wisher of India is called upon to take into his serious consideration, there is none of such surpassing interest and importance as that of her industrial development, and as it is now a universally accepted principle that the growth of industries among a people is in proportion to their instruction in the sciences and arts applicable to their practical pursuit, the theme of technical education in India is one which, from reasons which will appear later on, I approach with much deliberation and with a certain feeling of anxiety. I must at once premise that the reflections which the subject presents in its economic, political, and educational aspects, are so varied and vast that I could not pretend to deal with them here exhaustively. The multiform diversity of the ethical, physical, religious, and social conditions of the country, and of the races inhabiting it, require the elucidation of propositions and exceptions, with peculiar reference to the different provinces and castes, which the limits of this paper will not permit of my attempting in detail. In the absence of such special treatment of the subject, the information I convey, and the conclusions I draw in the course of this paper, might seem here and there open to doubt and objection, but when it is remembered that I am speaking in one breath as it were of a country not far short of two million square miles in extent, inhabited by a congeries of nearly three hundred millions of vastly diversified races of

people, I cannot well be expected to treat the subject in any more definite and specialised, or rather less general method than that which I have chosen to employ. It is the only method possible in dealing with so vast an amount of matter in so short space as is placed at our disposal.

The want of coal and iron, the simple needs of the people, their indisposition to migrate to industrial centres from their agricultural village homes, the limits which religion and custom place on their aspirations and on healthy inter-racial competition, and other such causes, are unfavourable to the dissemination of technical instruction. On the other hand, the caste system of the people can be utilised in improving workmanship and enlarging the sphere of labour generally, and lends itself to conditions of co-operative work in factories, the rising standards of life, and the enormous imports of foreign manufactures for the production of articles of daily use or consumption. The extension of general education, and the growth of Western notions as to the objective of industrial labour being the common weal of the country, instead of mainly contributing, as it did in former times, to the pride and luxury of the ruling and aristocratic classes, are designed to prepare large communities to burst the bounds of hereditary employment within fixed and orthodox limits, and to proceed to the extension and application of the principle of science and art to practical pursuits, or, in other words, for the reception of technical education in its widest and best sense.

I propose, in the first place, to enlarge upon those conditions of Indian life which will enable us to realise whether, and how far, the habits and wants of her people at the present day demand a supply of such articles as require in their manufacture skilled labour based upon technical instruction. Of the 288,000,000 of people who form the population of

In

the country, it is roughly reckoned that 180,000,000 are agriculturists. If we entirely exclude this great subdivision of her inhabitants from the classification mentioned in the preceding sentence, and regard it as offering no market for manufactures of skilled industry, we still have upwards of 100,000,000 of people, or three times the whole population of the United Kingdom, who might fairly be assumed in varying degrees to take such articles into daily use. respect of the agricultural population, too, it must be remembered that they afford a vast field for the consumption of rough cotton and woollen fabrics, which are at present supplied to a large extent by hand-looms. This might seem strange to those who have heard of the large cotton-spinning and weaving steam-factories of India, but that these mills do not compete with the hand-looms to such an extent as to drive the worker at those crude primitive machines out of existence might not unreasonably be assumed to point to the fact, that even in the one industry which is mistakenly supposed to be fully developed in India, there is enough scope for much further development by means of such technical instruction as might ultimately tend to cheapen the manufactured article, thus enabling it to replace the slow production of the hand-loom. This subject, I must confess, admits of some controversy, and therefore, after contenting myself with the passing allusion I have made to it, I will revert to the consideration of the wants of the 100,000,000, which, as we have seen, extend to articles of skilled manufacture.

What do they use every day? Take the humblest household first. You will find there metal pots and pans for cooking purposes; kerosene or mineral oil and matches for light; cotton, bone or metal buttons, pins, hooks and eyes, needles and thread, which enter into the preparation of the family garments of rough native

made fabrics. Then there are tacks and nails, twine. and string, a hammer, and other tools, in many houses. All these articles, every one of them, is of foreign make.

Peering into another household a stage or two upraised in the social scale, you find nearly all the articles common to the daily use of a European working man; most of the culinary utensils, lamps, candle and soap, paper, ink, pen, pencil, not a single one of which is made in India. His house is painted with colour or washes of foreign composition, the woodwork of it is varnished with foreign varnish, his clothes are of European manufacture. One degree higher, again, and four-fifths of the articles you find in the domicile of a peon, a petty schoolmaster, or a clerk, and on his own and wife and children's persons, are of foreign make. Then come the households of the large middle class, of the successful and comfortable tradesman, the merchant, and the professional man. There, and in a still greater degree in the mansions of millionaires and the palaces of princes, the predominating proportion of articles is all of foreign manufacture. I try hard to recall to my mind what particular article I should find of Indian workmanship in places like these last, and I do see many of that description, from the kitchen and stable to the drawing-room and the hall. Some critics who do not fall in with my views might point to the furniture. That would make a somewhat important exception if I viewed this considerable part of a household as a superficial observer would, but then he does not remember that, save in the simplest and crudest class of furniture, a good proportion of what is known as local furniture is not native-made at all. The springs of a couch or chair, the lining, the buttons, the thread, the hinges of a cupboard or box, the screws, the nails, the locks, the very tools with which these are put together and formed into shape, are all made abroad.