the last two years they have seriously threatened the peace of Bombay itself and held up for weeks together the normal life of the great city, necessitating the employment of large military forces to overawe them, and to avert through the exercise of disciplined forbearance collisions with which the police alone would have been unable to cope, and which, when once started, could probably have been quelled only at the cost of considerable bloodshed.  Mr. Gandhi has a great personal hold over the factory workers, especially in Western India.  Sometimes he uses it to restrain them, sometimes, though one may hope less deliberately, he works dangerously on their emotions.  His influence when he preaches temperance to them on temperate lines may be all to the good, and except that, when he denounces tea also, because it is tainted with Western capitalism, he is waging war against a popular substitute for spirits, one need not quarrel with the solemn processions of mill-hands proceeding to a favourite shrine to break a symbolical teapot in the presence of the deity as a pledge of renunciation.  But not all Mr. Gandhi’s followers can be credited with his earnest sympathies for labour, largely inspired by his detestation of a “machine age,” and he himself lapses into language that seems to preach more rigid abstention from drink than from violence.

Factory legislation has never been neglected in India, though until recently the chief impulse has had to proceed from Government itself.  A great increase of public interest has taken place in the last years, and in India perhaps even more than anywhere else the activity in this respect of the League of Nations and of the International Labour Office has elicited prompt and vigorous response.  The Secretary of State has created at the India Office a new department for dealing with labour and industry.  India has had her own representation at international labour conferences, and the Government of India is now engaged on a new Factory Act in accordance with the draft covenants and recommendations of the Washington Conference.  Indeed in some directions the Bill is in advance of Washington.  The statutory definition of a child presents special difficulties in India, where physical development is more precocious than in Western countries, but, instead of making the general limit of age for juvenile work lower, the Bill proposes to raise it not to fourteen but to fifteen years, whilst still permitting the employment of younger children on special and very stringent conditions.  Provisions are also made for securing longer daily intervals during the working hours as well as a weekly holiday.  Further legislation will be introduced for the benefit of industrial workers, more particularly as regards Trade Union rights and compensation for accidents.  But however excellent such measures may be, only the spread of education and the better organisation with it of labour itself can be expected to give any real stability to large struggling masses invested by the new economic forces that have sprung so rapidly into existence with tremendous powers for mischief, but with no individual or collective sense of responsibility.