precious metals." In India alone, the
value of the gold, silver, and jewels hidden in strong-boxes, buried in
the earth, or hanging about the necks of women must run into billions.
Says a recent writer on India: "I had the privilege of being taken
through the treasure-vaults of one of the wealthiest Maharajahs. I could
have plunged my arm to the shoulder in great silver caskets filled with
diamonds, pearls, emeralds, rubies. The walls were studded with hooks
and on each pair of hooks rested gold bars three to four feet long and
two inches across. I stood by a great cask of diamonds, and picking up a
handful let them drop slowly from between my fingers, sparkling and
glistening like drops of water in sunlight. There are some seven hundred
native states, and the rulers of every one has his treasure-vaults on a
more or less elaborate scale. Besides these, every zamindar and every
Indian of high or low degree who can save anything, wants to have it by
him in actual metal; he distrusts this new-fangled paper currency that
they try to pass off on him. Sometimes he beats his coins into bangles
for his wives, and sometimes he hides money behind a loose brick or
under a flat stone in the bottom of the oven, or he goes out and digs a
little hole and buries it."[206]

Remember that this description is of present-day India, after more than
a century of British rule and notwithstanding a permeation of Western
ideas which, as we shall presently see, has produced momentous
modifications in the native point of view. Remember also that this
hoarding propensity is not peculiar to India but is shared by the entire
Orient. We can then realize the utter lack of capital for investment
purposes in the East of a hundred years ago, especially when we remember
that political insecurity and religious prohibitions of the lending of
money at interest stood in the way of such far-sighted individuals as
might have been inclined to employ their hoarded wealth for productive
purposes. There was, indeed, one outlet for financial activity--usury,
and therein virtually all the scant fluid capital of the old Orient was
employed. But such capital, lent not for productive enterprise, but for
luxury, profligacy, or incompetence, was a destructive rather than a
creative force and merely intensified the prejudice against capital of
any kind.

Such was the economic life of the Orient a hundred years ago. It is
obvious that this archaic order was utterly unable