f
these 10 per cent. the majority are Brahmins. {253} Then, again, the
people use only the crudest tools and machinery; and a third factor in
keeping them poor is the system of early marriage. When it is a common
thing for a boy of fifteen or sixteen to be the father of a growing
family, it is easy to see that not much can be laid up for rainy days.

Owing to the absence of diversified industries, the crudeness of the
tools, the ignorance of the men behind the tools, and the over-crowded
population of folk hard-pressed by poverty, the wages are what an
American would call shamefully low. An Englishman who had lived in an
interior jungle-village, five days by bullock-cart from a railway,
told me that twenty years ago laborers were paid 2 rupees (64 cents) a
month, boarding themselves, or 4 rupees ($1.28) a year and grain. The
wages have now advanced, however, to 5 rupees ($1.60) a month where
the man boards himself; and for day labor the wages are now five annas
(10 cents) instead of two annas (4 cents) twenty years ago.

In Madura a well-educated Hindu with whom I was talking rang the
familiar changes on the "increasing cost of living," and pointed out
that in four or five years the cost of unskilled labor has increased
from eight to twelve cents. "And in some towns," he declared, looking
at the same time as if he feared I should not believe his story,
"they are demanding as much as 8 annas (16 cents) a day!" In Bombay I
was told that coolies average 16 to 20 cents a day; spinners in jute
factories, $1.16 a week, weavers, $1.82. In a great cotton factory I
visited in Madras, employing about 4000 natives (all males) the
average wages for eleven and a half hours' work is $3.84 to $4.85 a
month. In Ahmedabad, another cotton manufacturing centre, about the
same scale is in force. Miners get 16 to 28 cents a day. Servants,
$3.20 to $3.84 a month.

The women in Calcutta (some of them with their babies tied out to
stakes while they worked) whom I saw carrying brick and mortar on
their heads to the tops of three and four story buildings, get 3 to 4
annas a day--6 to 8 cents. In {254} Darjeeling the bowed and
toil-cursed women laden like donkeys, whom I found bringing stone on
their backs from quarries two or three miles away managed to make 12
to 16 cents a day for their bitter toil up steep hills and down, for
eight long hours. Women who carried lighter loads of mud, making 50
trips averaging 20 miles of travel, earned only