r of crowded narrow streets between cliffs of
architecture with carved timbers and heavy ornamentations, into which
the sun strikes obliquely and lights a thousand vivid hues....

Bombay, the gateway of what silly people were still calling in those
days "the immemorial East," Bombay, which is newer than Boston or New
York, Bombay which has grown beneath the Englishman's shadow out of a
Portuguese fort in the last two hundred years....

Sec. 3

I came out of these dark corners presently into the sunblaze of India. I
was now intensely interested in the whole question of employment and
engaged in preparing matter for my first book, "Enterprise and India,"
and therein you may read how I went first to Assam and then down to
Ceylon following up this perplexing and complicated business of human
enslavement to toil, exercised by this great spectacle of human labor,
and at once attracted by and stimulated by and dissatisfied with those
socialist generalizations that would make all this vast harsh spectacle
of productive enterprise a kind of wickedness and outrage upon humanity.
And behind and about the things I was looking for were other things for
which I was not looking, that slowly came into and qualified the
problem. It dawned upon me by degrees that India is not so much one
country as a vast spectacle of human development at every stage, in
infinite variety. One ranges between naked savages and the most
sophisticated of human beings. I pursued my enquiries about great modern
enterprises, about railway labor, canal labor, tea-planting, across vast
stretches of country where men still lived, illiterate, agricultural,
unprogressive and simple, as men lived before the first stirrings of
recorded history. One sees by the tanks of those mud-built villages
groups of women with brass vessels who are identical in pose and figure
and quality with the women modelled in Tanagra figures, and the droning
wall-wheel is the same that irrigated the fields of ancient Greece, and
the crops and beasts and all the life is as it was in Greece and Italy,
Phoenicia and Judea before the very dawn of history.

By imperceptible degrees I came to realize that this matter of
expropriation and enslavement and control, which bulks so vastly upon
the modern consciousness, which the Socialists treat as though it was
the comprehensive present process of mankind, is no more than one aspect
of an overlife that struggles out of a massive ancient and tradi