cessible, and always costly
both in money and in time. The village officials naturally care more to
please the Tahsildar and the Collector than the villagers, to whom they
are in no way responsible. And factions flourish, because there is
always a third party to whom to resort, who may be flattered if his rank
be high, bribed if it be low, whose favour can be gained in either case
by cringing and by subservience and tale-bearing. As regards the
condition of agriculture in India and the poverty of the agricultural
population, the Bureaucracy is inefficient.

The application of Mr. Gokhale's first test to Indian handicrafts, to
the strengthening of weak industries and the creation of new, to the
care of waterways for traffic and of the coast transport shipping, the
protection of indigo and other indigenous dyes against their German
synthetic rivals, etc., would show similar answers. We are suffering now
from the supineness of the Bureaucracy as regards the development of the
resources of the country, by its careless indifference to the usurping
by Germans of some of those resources, and even now they are pursuing a
similar policy of _laissez faire_ towards Japanese enterprise, which,
leaning on its own Government, is taking the place of Germany in
shouldering Indians out of their own natural heritage.

In all prosperous countries crafts are found side by-side with
agriculture, and they lend each other mutual support. The extreme
poverty of Ireland, and the loss of more than half its population by
emigration, were the direct results of the destruction of its
wool-industry by Great Britain, and the consequent throwing of the
population entirely on the land for subsistence. A similar phenomenon
has resulted here from a similar case, but on a far more widespread
scale. And here, a novel and portentous change for India, "a
considerable landless class is developing, which involves economic
danger," as the _Imperial Gazeteer_ remarks, comparing the census
returns of 1891 and 1901. "The ordinary agricultural labourers are
employed on the land only during the busy seasons of the year, and in
slack times a few are attracted to large trade-centres for temporary
work." One recalls the influx into England of Irish labourers at harvest
time. Professor Radkamal Mukerji has laid stress on the older conditions
of village life. He says:

The village is still almost self-sufficing, and is in itself an
economic unit. The village