those reeking slums, with the cries of little children still ringing in our ears. We even felt sorry for a dog with its feeble bark in that foul air. Not dogs, but nine million families of our toiling brothers are trying to sustain life on less than a dollar a day in Japan, which is now one of the most expensive countries in Asia, caught in the grinding forces of the modern industrial revolution, between the sweated Orient and the organized wealth of the Occident. Amid the clash of forces old and new, of feudalism and industrialism, wealth and poverty, autocracy and democracy, in travail of soul the new Japan is being born.

CHAPTER III

INDIA'S INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

After visiting the principal manufacturing cities of India we became convinced that industrial conditions are on the whole much better than in China, where the struggle for life is more fierce and relentless. The life of the average Indian worker is conditioned by the basic fact of India's greater poverty, for it is the poorest country in the world. The per capita income of the people was estimated by Lord Cromer in 1882 as 27 rupees, or $9.00 a year; in 1900, in Lord Curzon's time, it was estimated at 30 rupees, or $10.00. The Director of Statistics for India now reckons the per capita income as 53 rupees, or $17.66 a year. Thus the average income of this entire fifth of the human race is less than five cents a day.

Such a statement is easily written or read, but what does it mean in terms of human life? It means for tens of millions in India perpetual poverty and often actual hunger. It means one or at most two scanty meals a day of millet or the cheapest grains; it means an earthern floor and four mud walls of a little one-room hovel for a large family in a smoke-filled room with no chimney, and often no bed, table, chair or stove. It means that without adequate industries in the frequent periods of drought millions face the hunger of famine. It is this bitter poverty that drives the worker from the land in times of scarcity to the dreaded factories of Bombay or Calcutta, and from them he seeks to escape whenever his poverty permits.

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The terrible prevalence of debt tends to increase this poverty. In one place which we visited nine-tenths of the workers were reported to be in debt. Much of this is preventable, incurred in unproductive expenditures, such as on marriage ceremonies. Sir Daniel Hamilton well says that the country is in the grip of the money-lender. "It is usury-the rankest, most extortionate, most merciless usury, which eats the marrow out of the raiyat and condemns him to a life of penury and slavery." The interest rate varies from 20 to 150 per cent. The writer found occasionally even higher rates among the drink-cursed miners of Bengal on short term loans without security.

India has an industrial population of some eight millions. There are approximately fourteen million people engaged in primitive or cottage industries and over two hundred millions in agriculture. In 5,312 modern factories British India has 1,367,136 workers, a number larger than in China and a little less than in Russia or Japan.1

After considering India's poverty, we may now examine wages, hours and conditions of labor. According to the report of the Government Bureau of Statistics, the wages of the majority of common laborers were from 8 to 14 cents a day, of carpenters and iron workers 16 to 49 cents, of cotton weavers 8 to 49 cents and of rural workers 4 to 20 cents a day.2

1 The Director of Statistics reports 1,367,136 workers in 5,312 large industrial establishments in 1922. According to the Census there are 2,106,000 in industrial plants and mines employing 20 persons or more; 2,400,000 transport workers, and 825,000 workers in subsidiary occupations. Professor Gini estimates 2,000,000 laborers in establishments employing less than 20 persons, or a total industrial population of approximately 8,000,000. There are approximately 222,000,000 gainfully employed, compared with 41,609,192 in the United States, and 295,000,000 in China according to the estimate of the Government Bureau of Economic Information, Peking.

A careful investigation conducted by the Labor Office of the Bombay Government among 194,000 workers in the cotton industry, revealed the following facts: The majority of the men when we saw them, when wages were still at the peak following the war, earned from 24 to 50 cents a day; women earned from 24 to 33 cents;

In North and South India we found skilled artisans, carpenters, masons, bricklayers, blacksmiths, weavers and engine drivers receiving from $8.00 to $12.00 a month. In the coal mines of Bengal we found unskilled labor paid 10 cents a day for women, 12 cents for men. The average earned by miners in one mine was $1.49 a week; but they only cared to work three days a week. In Cawnpore we found men working for 18 cents a day, women for 9 to 13 cents and children for 8 cents a day.

We cannot forget the sight of some of these children who were under age toiling in the heat, half suffocated by the stifling dust of the tan bark, in a shoe factory which has made large profits and has done nothing for its labor. A neighboring mill has declared 120 per cent profit, paying many of its women 10 cents a day, and unskilled men 16 cents a day. Last year 57 per cent of the children of these workers in Cawnpore died during the first year of their impoverished lives; that is, 570 per thousand of these poor children died during the first year, compared to 83 per thousand during the same year in favored England.1 In the model village furnished by one company the lives of 232 children per thousand are saved a year, but the majority of the employers seem to view with suspicion any suggestion of such welfare work or housing for their workers.

the majority of the children in Ahmedabad earned from 8 to 16 cents, and in Sholapur less than 8 cents a day, Bombay Labor Gazette, January, 1923, p. 15.

The Government Report of the Central Provinces for June 30, 1922, shows rura wages ranged from 8 cents a day for unskilled to 33 cents for skilled workers; urban wages from 12 to 49 cents with an average of less than $3.00 a month. The Report for the Madras Presidency shows practically the same wage scale. An inquiry by Dr. Gilbert Slater in Madras states that the cost of living at the close of the war was $5.66 a month for a family of four. Other inquiries after the prices had risen estimated a minimum budget for a family of four at $8.00, or considerably above the average wage received in that Presidency.

1 Many women leave the city for their country home for their confinement. If the child dies after its return to the city it is registered among the deaths but not among the births, thus increasing the apparent death rate. The actual death rate is disgracefully high, but not as bad as these figures would seem to indicate.

Let us examine for a moment this wage scale in India in the light of profits and the ability of employers to pay a living wage. During the hard times over most of the world in 1922, the mills of Bombay on an investment of some $40,000,000 made a profit of over $50,000,000, or an average of 125 per cent. The year before they made a profit of over 170 per cent. These were certainly exceptional years, but in the meantime their wage scale for all workers averaged only $10.00 a month, or 33 cents a day. Many of the mills of Western India are now demanding a reduction of this wage scale. Is the profit of the single manufacturer or the welfare of the thousands of these stunted personalities of greater moment?

A foreign cotton mill in a city in the South of India visited by the writer, after having made far more than 200 per cent profit last year, paid from 18 to 33 cents a day for unskilled labor, and from $11.00 to $21.00 a month for skilled workers. A thousand boys and a thousand girls are working here at from 16 to 24 cents a day. The company does not believe in any welfare work and has discouraged trade unions or any effort of the people to improve their miserable condition. Which is more important, that a few foreign employers should retire with a comfortable income for life, or that the more than two hundred million toilers in India should receive a living wage?

On the whole we found that the foreign firms pay better wages and provide better working conditions than most of the Indian employers. In one Indian cotton mill which we inspected we found they were paying their skilled labor $8.00 a month, unskilled workers $5.00 and boys $3.00 a month, plus a temporary grant of seventy-five per cent for increased cost of living, while their printed balance sheet showed a profit of 200 per cent.

In the issue of "Capital" for February 15, 1923, dividends