Trades Unions alleged to have been represented are at present little more than embryonic.  Their spokesmen have not risen to the leadership of labour out of its own ranks by superior industry and knowledge.  Their organisation has not been a spontaneous growth from within, but artificially promoted from without.  The vast majority of unskilled workers are illiterate, and even amongst ordinary skilled labour the level of education is still extremely low.  The actual workers are therefore quite unable to organise, or even to think out the simplest labour problems for themselves, and they easily become the dupes and tools of outsiders—­frequently lawyers or professional politicians—­who are not always disinterested sympathisers, but more often stimulate and exploit grievances which may in themselves be legitimate for purposes which have little to do with the real interests of labour.

The economic causes of the growing frequency of strikes during recent years have not yet been all explored, and Sir George Lloyd responded to a crying need when, in his reply to the deputation, he announced that the Bombay Government was about to establish a Labour Bureau under a competent official from the British Board of Trade to advise it in the interests of labour.  One of the greatest difficulties in dealing with industrial disputes in India is, the Governor rightly observed, the absence of all trustworthy materials for forming an accurate judgment on the actual cost of living for the working man, and the ever fluctuating relations between the wages he receives and the expenditure he has to incur even for the mere necessaries of life.

With a two-and three-fold appreciation, during and especially since the war, in the cost both of the cotton stuffs which the working man needs even for his scanty apparel and of the foodstuffs which constitute his meagre fare, discontent grew steadily more acute, and wages, though more than once enhanced, did not always keep pace with that appreciation.  If in circumstances, often of undoubted hardship, labour had been sufficiently equipped to state its own case, or had found disinterested friends to state it clearly and temperately, it would have been easier to admit that economic causes sufficed, in some cases at least, to explain, and perhaps even to justify, the increasing use of the strike weapon.  But there is unhappily very abundant evidence to show that strikes would not have been so frequent, so precipitate, and so tumultuous, had not political agitation at least contributed to foment them as part of a scheme for promoting a general upheaval.  The Extremists, who, with few exceptions, have no part or lot in labour, either as employers or as workers, began to carry on in Mr. Tilak’s days amongst the mill-hands of Bombay an active propaganda which originally had little to do with labour.  The mill-hands played an evil part in the worst excesses committed during the outbreak in and around Ahmedabad in April 1919, and twice within