ble, would have to capitulate to the extremist demands for complete self-government. Such was the non-co-operation idea. And the idea soon found an able exponent: a certain M. K. Gandhi, who had long possessed a reputation for personal sanctity and thus inspired the Hindu masses with that peculiar religious fervor which certain types of Indian ascetics have always known how to arouse. Gandhi's propaganda can be judged by the following extract from one of his speeches: "It is as amazing as it is humiliating that less than 100,000 white men should be able to rule 315,000,000 Indians. They do so somewhat, undoubtedly, by force, but more by securing our co-operation in a thousand ways and making us more and more helpless and dependent on them, as time goes forward. Let us not mistake reformed councils (legislatures), more law-courts, and even governorships for real freedom or power. They are but subtler methods of emasculation. The British cannot rule us by mere force. And so they resort to all means, honorable and dishonorable, in order to retain their hold on India. They want India's billions and they want India's man-power for their imperialistic greed. If we refuse to supply them with men and money, we achieve our goal: namely, Swaraj,1 equality, manliness." The extreme hopes of the non-co-operation movement have not been realized. The Montagu-Chelmsford reforms have been put in operation, and the first elections under them were held at the beginning of 1921. But the outlook is far from bright. The very light vote cast at the elections revealed the effect of the non-co 1 I. e., self-government, in the extremist sense-practically independence. operation movement, which showed itself in countless other ways, from strikes in factories to strikes of schoolchildren. India to-day is in a turmoil of unrest. And this unrest is not merely political; it is social as well. The vast economic changes which have been going on in India for the past half-century have profoundly disorganized Indian society. These changes will be discussed in later chapters. The point to be here noted is that the extremist leaders are capitalizing social discontent and are unquestionably in touch with Bolshevik Russia. Meanwhile the older factors of disturbance are by no means eliminated. The recent atrocious massacre of dissident Sikh pilgrims by orthodox Sikh fanatics, and the three-cornered riots between Hindus, Mohammedans, and native Christians which broke out about the same time in southern India, reveal the hidden fires of religious and racial fanaticism that smoulder beneath the surface of Indian life. The truth of the matter is that India is to-day a battle-ground between the forces of evolutionary and revolutionary change. It is an anxious and a troubled time. The old order is obviously passing, and the new order is not yet fairly in sight. The hour is big with possibilities of both good and evil, and no one can confidently predict the outcome. CHAPTER VII ECONOMIC CHANGE ONE of the most interesting phenomena of modern world-history is the twofold conquest of the East by the West. The word "conquest" is usually employed in a political sense, and calls up visions of embattled armies subduing foreign lands and lording it over distant peoples. Such political conquests in the Orient did of course occur, and we have already seen how, during the past century, the decrepit states of the Near and Middle East fell an easy prey to the armed might of the European Powers. But what is not so generally realized is the fact that this political conquest was paralleled by an economic conquest perhaps even more complete and probably destined to produce changes of an even more profound and enduring character. The root-cause of this economic conquest was the Industrial Revolution. Just as the voyages of Columbus and Da Gama gave Europe the strategic mastery of the ocean and thereby the political mastery of the world, so the technical inventions of the later eighteenth century which inaugurated the Industrial Revolution gave Europe the economic mastery of the world. These inventions in fact heralded a new Age of Discovery, this time into the realms of science. The results were, if possible, more momentous even than those of the age of geographical discovery three centuries before. They 268 gave our race such increased mastery over the resources of nature that the ensuing transformation of economic life swiftly and utterly transformed the face of things. This transformation was, indeed, unprecedented in the world's history. Hitherto man's material progress had been a gradual evolution. With the exception of gunpowder, he had tapped no new sources of material energy since very ancient times. The horse-drawn mailcoach of our great-grandfathers was merely a logical elaboration of the horse-drawn Egyptian chariot; the wind-driven clipper-ship traced its line unbroken to Ulysses's lateen bark before Troy; while industry still relied on the brawn of man and beast or upon the simple action of wind and waterfall. Suddenly all was changed. Steam, electricity, petrol, the Hertzian wave, harnessed nature's hidden powers, conquered distance, and shrunk the terrestrial globe to the measure of human hands. Man entered a new material world, differing not merely in degree but in kind from that of previous generations. When I say "Man," I mean, so far as the nineteenth century was concerned, the white man of Europe and its racial settlements overseas. It was the white man's brain which had conceived all this, and it was the white man alone who at first reaped the benefits. The two outstanding features of the new order were the rise of machine-industry with its incalculable acceleration of mass-production, and the correlative development of cheap and rapid transportation. Both these factors favored a prodigious increase in economic power and wealth in Europe, since Europe became the workshop of the world. In fact, during the nineteenth century, Europe was transformed from a semirural continent into a swarming hive of industry, gorged with goods, capital, and men, pouring forth its wares to the remotest corners of the earth, and drawing thence fresh stores of raw material for new fabrication and exchange. Such was the industrially revolutionized West which confronted an East as backward and stagnant in economics as it was in politics and the art of war. In fact, the East was virtually devoid of either industry or business, as we understand these terms to-day. Economically, the East was on an agricultural basis, the economic unit being the self-supporting, semi-isolated village. Oriental "industries" were handicrafts, carried on by relatively small numbers of artisans, usually working by and for themselves. Their products, while often exquisite in quality, were largely luxuries, and were always produced by such slow, antiquated methods that their quantity was limited and their market price relatively high. Despite very low wages, therefore, Asiatic products not only could not compete in the world-market with European and American machinemade, mass-produced articles, but were hard hit in their home-markets as well. This Oriental inability to compete with Western industry arose not merely from methods of production but also from other factors such as the mentality of the workers and the scarcity of capital. Throughout the Near and Middle East economic life rested on the principle of status. The Western economic principles of contract and competition were virtually unknown. Agriculturists and artisans followed blindly in the footsteps of their fathers. There was no competition, no stimu |