to face the
tremendous competition of the industrialized West. Everywhere the flood
of cheap Western machine-made, mass-produced goods began invading
Eastern lands, driving the native wares before them. The way in which an
ancient Oriental handicraft like the Indian textiles was literally
annihilated by the destructive competition of Lancashire cottons is only
one of many similar instances. To be sure, some Oriental writers contend
that this triumph of Western manufactures was due to political rather
than economic reasons, and Indian nationalists cite British governmental
activity in favour of the Lancashire cottons above mentioned as the sole
cause for the destruction of the Indian textile handicrafts. But such
arguments appear to be fallacious. British official action may have
hastened the triumph of British industry in India, but that triumph was
inevitable in the long run. The best proof is the way in which the
textile crafts of independent Oriental countries like Turkey and Persia
were similarly ruined by Western competition.

A further proof is the undoubted fact that Oriental peoples, taken as a
whole, have bought Western-manufactured products in preference to their
own hand-made wares. To many Westerners this has been a mystery. Such
persons cannot understand how the Orientals could buy the cheap, shoddy
products of the West, manufactured especially for the Eastern market, in
preference to their native wares of better quality and vastly greater
beauty. The answer, however, is that the average Oriental is not an art
connoisseur but a poor man living perilously close to the margin of
starvation. He not only wants but must buy things cheap, and the wide
price-margin is the deciding factor. Of course there is also the element
of novelty. Besides goods which merely replace articles he has always
used, the West has introduced many new articles whose utility or charm
are irresistible. I have already mentioned the way in which the
sewing-machine and the kerosene-lamp have swept the Orient from end to
end, and there are many other instances of a similar nature. The
permeation of Western industry has, in fact, profoundly modified every
phase of Oriental economic life. New economic wants have been created;
standards of living have been raised; canons of taste have been altered.
Says a lifelong American student of the Orient: "The knowledge of modern
inventions and of other foods and articles has created new wants. The
Chi