all appreciated what an enterprise that owed little or nothing to them meant to India and the Empire.  When the war was over, Lord Chelmsford paid a visit to Jamsheedpur and generously acknowledged that debt.  “I can hardly imagine,” said the Viceroy, “what we should have done if the Tata Company had not been able to give us steel rails which have provided not only for Mesopotamia, but for Egypt, Palestine, and East Africa.”  One may therefore hope that the lesson of the war will not be forgotten, and that Sir Thomas Holland, who has now exchanged the Munitions Board for the portfolio of Industry, will prevent a relapse into the old traditions of aloofness now that the war pressure is over.

The cotton-mills of Bombay, the jute-mills of Calcutta, the goldfields of Mysore each contribute their own remarkable chapter to the story of British industrial enterprise in India, but none can compare in point of romance with the story of the iron and steel industry of Jamsheedpur.  It need only be very briefly recalled.  In 1902 Mr. Jamsheedji Tata, a veteran of the great Parsee community of Bombay and one of the founders of the Bombay cotton industry, visited the United States.  His active mind had already for some time been busy with the idea of starting a metallurgic industry in India, and he had received in the course of conversation with Lord George Hamilton, then Secretary of State for India, about the only encouragement he ever did receive in England.  He fared better in America.  In New York he called with a letter of introduction from Lord Avebury on Mr. C. Page Perin, an eminent mining engineer, who was at once impressed both with his visitor and with the schemes which he unfolded, though they were still quite visionary.  Mr. Perin, who is still the consulting engineer of the Tata Company, agreed to send a party of American prospectors, and followed them in 1904 to India.  Long was the search and many the hardships undergone, and Mr. Jamsheedji Tata himself passed away before he could see the fulfilment of his dream.  But Sir Dorab Tata proved himself not unworthy to follow in his footsteps, and when an area hitherto almost unknown and unexplored had been definitely located, combining in an extraordinary degree the primary requisites of adequate coalfields, vast ore deposits of great wealth, a sufficient water supply, a suitable site for a large industrial town with good railway communication though still badly needing development, he and a small group of his Bombay friends tried to find in London the financial support which they imagined would hardly be denied to an enterprise of such immense importance for our Indian Empire.  But they failed.  It was then that, largely on the advice of Sir George Clarke, now Lord Sydenham, who was then Governor of Bombay—­whose great services to the economic advancement of India and to Indian technical education latter-day politicians are too apt to forget—­they appealed to their own fellow-countrymen for the capital needed.