ions, with a total of 825,000 members and a working capital of
nearly $30,000,000. These agricultural societies make loans for the
purchase of stock, fodder, seed, manure, sinking of wells, purchase of
Western agricultural machinery, and, in emergencies, personal
maintenance. In the districts where they have established themselves
they have greatly diminished the plague of usury practised by the
"banyas," or village money-lenders, lowering the rate of interest from
its former crushing range of 20 to 75 per cent. to a range averaging
from 9 to 18 per cent. Of course such phenomena are as yet merely
exceptions to a very dreary rule. Nevertheless, they all point toward a
brighter morrow.[231]

But this brighter agricultural morrow is obviously far off, and in
industry it seems to be farther still. Meanwhile the changing Orient is
full of suffering and discontent. What wonder that many Orientals
ascribe their troubles, not to the process of economic transition, but
to the political control of European governments and the economic
exploitation of Western capital. The result is agitation for
emancipation from Western economic as well as Western political control.
At the end of Chapter II we examined the movement among the Mohammedan
peoples known as "Economic Pan-Islamism." A similar movement has arisen
among the Hindus of India--the so-called "Swadeshi" movement. The
Swadeshists declare that India's economic ills are almost entirely due
to the "drain" of India's wealth to England and other Western lands.
They therefore advocate a boycott of English goods until Britain grants
India self-government, whereupon they propose to erect protective
tariffs for Indian products, curb the activities of British capital,
replace high-salaried English officials by natives, and thereby keep
India's wealth at home.[232]

An analysis of these Swadeshist arguments, however, reveals them as
inadequate to account for India's ills, which are due far more to the
general economic trend of the times than to any specific defects of the
British connection. British governance and British capital do cost
money, but their undoubted efficiency in producing peace, order,
security, and development must be considered as offsets to the higher
costs which native rule and native capital would impose. As Sir Theodore
Morison well says: "The advantages which the British Navy and British
credit confer on India are a liberal offset to her expenditure on
pensions