she has been recognized by the Council of the League of Nations as one of the eight chief industrial countries of the world.1

Calcutta is now the center of the jute industry. Bengal has over a thousand mills, employing more than 430,000. Bombay, now one of the great cotton centers of the world, has 954 mills with 312,000 operatives. Madras has over 500 establishments with some 100,000 workers. India's principal manufactures are cotton and jute, followed by wool, iron and steel, paper, etc. During the twenty-six years from 1892 to the close of the war, the number of India's factories had increased 398 per cent and industrial laborers 239 per cent. India's foreign trade has increased over forty-five fold since 1834 and at the close of the war reached over one and a half billion dollars, being a little less than that of Japan and more than that of China.

The Tatas are a fine example of Indian enterprise. Beginning about 1850 with almost nothing, they built up their large fortune out of their cotton mills in Bombay and Nagpur. The great iron and steel works at Tatanagar reduced what was a barren jungle in Bengal in 1908, to a great model industrial city, comfortably housing some forty thousand of their own employees and fifty thousand others employed in subsidiary enterprises. Their invest

1 Lord Chelmsford, the late Viceroy of India, in speaking on behalf of India's industrial importance at the Council of the League of Nations, referred to India as one of the first countries to convert the Resolutions of the Washington Labor Conference into statutory form. Although claiming the industrial population of India as 20 millions, on the basis of Professor Gini's figures for the League, he compared the industrial population of the leading countries affiliated with the League having over a million workers among which India ranks fourth.

ment of millions with five modern blast furnaces now claims to be turning out the cheapest pig iron in the world. Their vast hydro-electrical plants are harnessing the power of the rainfall of western India at a cost of over $50,000,000 to develop finally over 150,000 horse-power for Bombay, a city of a million people. Their engineering works, cement companies, oil mills, sugar corporation, industrial bank and hotel companies are a further mark of the enterprise of this great Indian firm. With an eight-hour day in Tatanagar, shop committees, a relatively high wage scale, workmen's insurance and wise welfare work, they are setting an example to both Indian and foreign employers. They suggest the possibilities of India's future industrial development.

CHAPTER IV

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF RUSSIA

As the storm center of the chief problems which now confront the new world of labor, the writer again visited Russia. Concerning no other country has there been such a flood of propaganda, both red and white, such exaggeration and distortion of fact in the interest of passion and prejudice. In no other country did we find it so difficult simply to see and to tell the truth objectively. For instance, as we crossed the border we saw the red flag and the soldiers of the red army. To one traveler in our compartment they suggested the red of bloodshed and the Terror, to another the great principle of the blood of a common humanity of one brotherhood. The determining factor was the attitude of the observer. It is so throughout Russia. Some can see nothing good, and others nothing bad.

Our one desire has been to keep an open mind and to be fair; to record impartially and objectively what we saw. During our visit, from Riga through Russia and back to the Polish border, in Moscow or Petrograd, we moved everywhere with perfect freedom. We went anywhere alone by night or day, chose our own interpreters, selected the factories we wished to inspect, saw everything we desired and talked with everybody we wished, whether they were friends or foes of the present régime. Nowhere have we been accorded greater kindness, courtesy and freedom of movement, or met more frank, fearless and honest men

than some of the leaders we interviewed. We criticized freely the methods of the present government to their face and told them the evils we observed in their system.

With all its faults the present government impressed us as better than the hideous régime of old Czarist Russia which we found a decade ago. Instead of the hunger and famine in Moscow, "the city of the dead," of two years before, it is now throbbing with new life and its population increased from one to two millions. Shops are open, private business, buying and selling in industry and agriculture are in full swing; there is an apparent trade boom, everywhere streets are being paved, houses repaired and painted and life quickened by a new hope.

We attended the great All-Russian Agricultural and Home Industries Exhibition where the whole life of Russia is focused and visualized from the Arctic to the semitropics, from the Esquimaux of the Pacific to Turkestan and the borders of India. We saw their exhibits of industry, agriculture, peasant life and the working of their great Co-operatives. We observed their demonstrations and tourist parties for nearly a million peasants brought in from all the Russias to be instructed at the Exhibit in the use of tractors, modern machinery, demonstrations in methods of farming, the conduct of community centers, social welfare and training for citizenship.

With all its mistakes, which are many, we found an actual government composed for the most part of workingmen, administering with growing success the most vast state in the world. And they are in a measure economically succeeding after facing for six years probably the most colossal combination of difficulties which ever confronted a single people in the same period of time. They have had to overcome the inheritance of a corrupt Czarist régime, the greatest loss of any nation in the world war, a world

blockade and two revolutions. They have had to meet allied invasion from without and counter revolutionary white armies within, fighting at one time on twelve fronts. They have had to contend with the strike and sabotage of almost their whole bureaucracy and united bourgeois opposition. Finally, they have had to pass in turn through chaos, bankruptcy and awful famine.

Despite the almost daily prophecy of their speedy downfall, and their widespread unpopularity, they have emerged from all this not only more firmly entrenched than ever, but apparently the most enduring cabinet or party in Europe today. The Conservative Baldwin Government in Britain, and that of Poincare in France, Stresemann in Germany and Mussolini in Italy give promise of falling long before that in Russia. Lenine has broken down, but he is hardly missed, for the Government of Russia is not and never has been a one-man régime. We refer in this connection to the government as enduring, in the British sense of the cabinet or party in power, not to the social order. Nearly all responsible leaders in Russia agree that the people are utterly sick of further war, or revolution, or foreign intervention which proved such a miserable failure and that there is no other party in sight that could preserve law and order in Russia.

Now let us face the facts. Here is movement of vast possible significance for good or evil, which must be studied and interpreted if we are to understand the present international situation or the new world of labor.

As we left the country we endeavored to focus our thought and sum up our conflicting impressions of Russia. They cannot be reduced to a single formula. Rather we were forced to note the contrasts between things good and evil. Among the glaring evils of the present system are the following: