the suspicion that, as India’s foreign trade was chiefly with the United Kingdom, her industrial backwardness was deliberately encouraged in the interests of British manufactures, and it was not altogether unjustified by the maintenance of the excise duty on locally manufactured cotton goods, which protected the interests of Lancashire in the one industrial field in which Indian enterprise had achieved greatest success.  The introduction of an annual Industrial Conference in connection with the Indian National Congress was the first organised attempt of the politically minded classes to link up with politics a movement towards industrial independence.  It assumed increased bitterness with the disastrous failures of Indian banks started on “national” lines in Bombay and the Punjab.  The cry for fiscal freedom and protection grew widespread and insistent before the war broke out.  Then, under the pressure of war necessities, the Government of India explored, as it had never done before, the whole field of India’s natural resources and of the development of Indian industries.  At the same time an opportunity arose for a group of Indian “merchant-venturers”—­to use the term in its fine old Elizabethan sense—­who had set themselves to give the lead to their countrymen, to show what Indian enterprise was capable of achieving.  What it has already achieved deserves to be studied as the most pregnant illustration of what the future may hold in reserve.

It is a somewhat chastening reflection that the creation of the one great metallurgical industry in India has been due not to British but to Indian capital and enterprise, assisted in the earliest and most critical stages not by British but by American skill, and that, had it not been created when it was, our Syrian and Mesopotamian campaigns could never have been fought to their victorious issue, as Jamsheedpur produced and could alone at that juncture supply the rails for the construction of the railways essential to the rapid success of those great military operations.  Equally chastening is the reflection that from its very inception less than twenty years ago, the pioneers of this vast undertaking had constantly to reckon with the indifference and inertia of Anglo-Indian officialdom, and with the almost solitary exceptions of Sir Thomas Holland, then at the head of the Geological Survey, and Sir Benjamin Robertson, afterwards Chief Commissioner of the Central Provinces where the first but unavailing explorations were made, seldom received more than a minimum of countenance and assistance.  Not till Messrs. Tata’s American prospectors had explored this region did the Government of India realise that untold mineral wealth lay there within 150 miles of Calcutta, almost on the surface of the soil, and not until the pressure of the Great War and the inability of India to draw any longer upon British industry for the most vital supplies compelled them to turn to Jamsheedpur do they seem to have at