To the economic factors that react unfavourably upon a difficult political situation must be added the growth of labour troubles, which Extremist agitators know how to exploit to the utmost even when they do not actually foment them.  Strikes are as common to-day in India as they are in England, and the epidemic has sometimes spread from industrial workers to those employed by municipalities and by the State.  There have been strikes not only in the big cotton mills and jute mills and other large manufacturing industries, but also amongst postmen, and amongst railwaymen on State as well as on private-owned lines, amongst tram-car drivers and conductors, and even amongst city scavengers.  Lightning strikes without any notice are of growing frequency.  Some are short-lived, others very obstinate, dragging on for weeks and months.  Some are grotesquely frivolous, others by no means lack justification or excuse.  Intimidation often not unaccompanied by violent assaults on non-strikers is an ugly feature common to most of them.  They sometimes lead to very serious riots and bloodshed.  They have played a prominent part in the worst disorders of the last few years.  Nowhere have they assumed at times a more threatening shape than in the Bombay Presidency, for in the cotton mills of Bombay itself and of the Ahmedabad district, which employ over 200,000 hands, are collected the largest agglomerations of factory workers in India.

Labour troubles were bound to come with the introduction of Western methods of industrial development and Western machinery.  It has led, and very rapidly, to a demand for labour which the urban population could not supply.  But the wages soon attracted immigrants from the more or less distant countryside, where at certain seasons of the year there is little work to be done on the land.  It became the custom for an increasingly large number of rural districts to send their men into the towns, where they worked for a few months.  Then they went away after they had put by a little money and came back again when they had exhausted their hoard.  These migrations became more and more regular and on a larger scale as the demand for labour increased, and they constitute to-day the feature which radically differentiates the problem of Indian labour from that of British labour.  There has not yet grown up in India an industrial population permanently rooted in the towns.  It is still largely migratory, returning from time to time for more or less lengthy periods to field-work in the villages, which remain the real home.  The Indian factory operative has not yet ceased to be a man of the country rather than of the town.  Hence perhaps the conditions under which he is sometimes content to live whilst he is working in a town—­in Bombay, for instance, for the most part in huge overcrowded blocks, known as chawls, ill lighted, ill ventilated, in a foul atmosphere and unspeakable dirt—­may seem to him less intolerable as he can look forward