VOL. XVI C

No. 1

Freedom of Labour.

In the sonnet addressed to Thomas Clarkson, on the final passing of the bill for the abolition of the slave trade, March, 1807, Wordsworth wrote:

The bloody writing is for ever torn,

And thou henceforth shalt have a good man's calm,
A great man's happiness; thy zeal shall find
Repose at length, firm friend of human kind!

Little did the poet dream when he wrote thus that there would be such things as the horrors of the rubber trade in the Congo Free State or the atrocities in the Putumayo district, both of which class of cruelties can keep in countenance the most diabolically cruel slave-owner that ever tainted the atmosphere of the globe. Not until such things have entirely ceased to exist, can it be said that slavery has really become extinct. Nor must we forget certain other systems of forced labour which are perilously near to slavery, such as indentured labour in the British colonies, begar or forced labour in Kumaon and other districts in Upper India, and contract labour in some tea plantations in India, Unless these systems, too, are abolished, labour will not be free.

If it be contended that without some sort of compulsory labour, the material resources of some countries cannot be developed; in the first place, we deny that this contention has ever been proved; secondly, it is unquestionably better that these resources should lie undeveloped until they can be exploited by free labour than that laborers should be practically enslaved; thirdly, it is not for the enrichment of those who are forced to work that exploitation is carried on. If it be contended that there are certain races who will not work unless compelled to and that work is better than idleness,

our reply is that, if the fact be as stated, these races ought first to be civilized up to the level of those peoples who work freely. Till then the world can do without the ill-gotten wealth produced by enslaving men. It may also be permissible to ask, if the employers of indentured or other kinds of compulsory labour be really philanthropists whose object is to cure men of idleness, why they do not try to force the hordes of idle rich people, to be found in every country, to work. Lastly, if it be contended that those who are forced to labour are materially better off than their kindred who are not forced; our reply is that men are not beasts that a sleek and welfed body is to be in their case the sole or main criterion of welfare. Man does not live by bread alone.

The free races and free workers are the world were really a topsyturvydom where most prosperous in the world. But if this freedom generally went with semi-starvation, and a lean body and enslavement with a well-nourished body, we would unhesitatingly vote for freedom with all its disadvantages. For man is a spirit and the body is its servant. The welfare of the soul ought to be the first consideration under all circumstances.

No worldly advantage can compensate for the loss of freedom.

Increase of Police Expenditure. Expenditure on the Police Department has been increasing steadily. In 1910-11 the total expenditure for India stood at Rs. 652-42 lakhs. In the Budget for 1914-15 the sum of Rs. 780 29 lakhs has been provided. Increased expenditure on the police would not be felt grievance if there were a corresponding decrease in crime. But large amounts are devoted to fighting sedition and political

as a

crime, without calmly considering why sedition and there is the thing called whether what the people say and do in India would be considered seditious in a free country.

People would greatly appreciate increased safety of life and property in the Punjab and the N.-W. Frontier Province and immunity from dacoities in East Bengal, where the river police ought to be made more efficient than it is.

Education and Sanitation.

The resolution on scientific sanitation in India issued by the Government of India contains an important pronouncement of opinion on the bearing that mass education has on the promotion of public health. The resolution says:

The diffusion of sound education will, however, remain the most potent and penetrating instrument of sanitation among a population which still views it for the most part with hostility or unconcern. The claims of hygiene as part of their educational policy were recognised by the Government of India in their educational resolution of the 21st February 1913. It may be hoped that before many years have passed educational institutions will have become missions of sanitation in their own vicinity and beyond. Meanwhile, some simple knowledge of the more common infectious diseases may with advantage be diffused.

We do not admit that our people are hostile or indifferent to real sanitation. Ninetenths of good sanitation in our villages consist in a supply of good water and good drainage. Our people are not in love with dirty water and stinking drains.

It should not, moreover, be forgotten that it is well-nourished people who have the power to resist the inroads of disease, and that, consequently, a poverty-stricken people like ours must die in large numbers in spite of the best sanitary arrangements. But as there is no sanitation worth speaking of in our villages, the mortality is appalling.

It is something that it has been admitted in theory that education is the most potent instrument of sanitation. May it, therefore, be expected that Government will try its best to open a great many more schools every year, in addition to improving those in existence? The paragraph from which the above extract has been made does not, however, afford any definite basis for such a hope. What it says is :

The difficulties are considerable and systematic organisation is required. The Indian branch of the St. John Ambulance Association has offered its valu

and

able assistance. In several provinces, pictorial leaflets are distributed and simple lantern lectures demonstrations are given at fairs and other large gatherings while in Bombay popular lectures to teachers, students and others have been organised by Major Glen Liston. The Indian Research Fund Association has decided to establish a central bureau where lanterns and lantern slides, pictures, and skeleton lectures can be stocked for issue on loan Much may be done by utilising the services of muni cipal health officers and medical subordinates attached to travelling dispensaries and by enlisting the sympa thies and active help of medical women, private medi cal practitioners and private philanthropic agencies and persons.

leaflets are of use only to literate persons, It may be pointed out that pictorial whose number is extremely small.

The resolution recognises that "sanitation must begin at home," but fails to draw the most obvious conclusion, viz., that heroic efforts must be made to promote the education of girls and women. It makes several good suggestions, omitting the most important, namely, the establishment of more girls' schools and women's colleges and the introduction of courses of hygiene in all educational institutions for girls and women. Here are the exact words of the resolution :

Sanitation must begin at home and as the Hon'ble Sir Pardey Lukis and Colonel Firth, the former on the civil, the latter on the military side, have pointed out, there will never be any real advance in domestic or personal hygiene until the women of the country realise its advantages and necessity. The encouragement of medical women to preach the gospel of health inside the zenana and to organise pardah parties for simple lantern demonstration lectures and the employment of nurse visitors as in Delhi, Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, are to be commended.

The concluding sentence of the resolution is not incompatible with the hope that Government has in view the increase of literacy in the country. It runs as follows:

The Governor-General in Council appeals with confidence to all who have interest in the well-being of India to join with him and the local Governments in a sustained endeavour to give effect to His Imperial Majesty's most gracious wish that the homes of his Indian subjects may be brightened and their labour sweetened by the spread of knowledge with all that follows in its train, a higher level of thought, of comfort and of health.

Vivekananda and his Messge.

We wrote in the May number that Vivekananda was not a mild Hindu, and that his religion was of a militant type. Here are some extracts to show what we meant by our remarks.

"Yes, the older I grow, the more everything seems to me to lie in manliness. This is my new gospel. Do even evil like a man! Be wicked, if you must, on a great scale!" Quoted in 'The master as I saw Him' by Sister Nivedita, page 221.

"If you look, you will find that I have never quoted anything but the Upanishads. And of the Upanishads it is only that one idea, strength. The quintessence of the Vedas and Vedanta and all lies in that one word." Ditto."

'Strength, strength, strength, was the one quality he called for, in woman as in man. But how stern was his discrimination of what constituted strength!" Itto, page 366.

"The longer I live," he was once heard to ejaculate, "the more I think that, the whole thing is summed up in manliness." Ditto, page 296.

"......an inextinguishable passion for his country's good. He never proclaimed nationality, but he was himself the living embodiment of the idea which the word conveys." Ditto, pp. 306-10.

"The aim of his whole life was, as he had said to me in Kashmir, "to make Hinduism aggressive, like Christianity and Islam"......The same purpose spoke again in his definition of the aims of the order of Ramakrishna-"to effect an exchange of the highest ideals of the East and the West, and to realise them in practice." Ditto

"Hero, take courage, be proud that you are an Indian.......pray day and night, 'Thou Lord, Thou Mother of the Universe, Vouchsafe manliness unto me.-Thou mother of strength, Take away my unmanliness and make me man.' Address.

"We must go out, we must conquer the world through our spirituality and philosophy. There is no other alternative: we must do it or die. The only condition of national life, of awakened and vigorous national life, is the conquest of the world by Indian thought." Address at Madras.

"There was one thing, however, deep in the Master's nature, that he himself never knew how to adjust. This was his love of his country and resentment of her suffering. Throughout those years in which I saw him almost daily, the thought of India was to him The the air he breathed. True, he was a worker at foundations. He neither used the word 'nationality,' nor proclaimed an era of 'nation-making.' 'Manmaking,' he said, was his own task. But he was born a lover, and the queen of his adoration was his mother land. Like some delicately-poised bell, thrilled and vibrated by every sound that fell upon it. was his heart to all that concerned her. Not a so was heard within her shores that did not find in him a responsive echo. There was no cry of fear, no tremor of weakness, no shrinking from mortification that he had not known and understood. He was hard on her sins, unsparing of her want of worldly visdom, but only because he felt these faults

be his own. And none, on the contrary, Vas ever SO possessed by the vision of her greatness. . . . His country's religion, history, geography, ethnology poured from his lips in an inhaustible stream. With equal delight he treated of details and of the whole. . . . Like some great spiral of emotion, its lowest circles held fast in love of soil and love of nature; its next embracing every possible association of race, experience, history and thought; nd the whole converging and centring upon a single Latinite point, was thus the Swami's worship of his vn land. And the point in which it was focussed as the conviction that India was not old and effete, her critics had supposed, but young, ripe with tentiality, and standing, at the beginning of the

twentieth century, on the threshold of even greater developments than she had known in the past. 'I see that India is young.' But in truth this vision was implied in every word he ever spoke. It throbbed in every story he told. And when he would lose himself, in splendid scorn of apology for anything Indian, in fiery repudiation of false charge or contemptuous criticism, or in laying down for others the elements of a faith and love that could never be more than a pale reflection of his own, how often did the habit of the monk slip away from him, and the armour of the warrior stand revealed! But it was not to be supposed that he was unaware of the temptation which all this implied. . . . he would endeavour, time and again, to restrain and suppress these thoughts of country and history, and to make of self only that poor religious wanderer, to whom all races and all countries should be alike. . . . He believed that force spent in mere emotion was dissipated, only force restrained being conserved for expression in work, Yet again the impulse to give all he had would overtake him, and before be knew it, he would once more be scattering those thoughts of hope and love for his race and for his country, which apparently without his knowledge, fell in so many cases like seed upon soil prepared for it, and bave sprung up already in widely distant parts of India, into hearts and lives of devotion to the mother-land." The Master as I saw Him, Chapter III.

"What a land is India! Whosoever stands on this sacred land, alien or a child of the soil, feels, unless his soul is degraded to the level of brute animals, himself surrounded by the living thoughts of the earth's best and purest sons, working to raise the animal to the divine, through centuries whose beginning history fails to trace. The very air is full of the pulsation of spiri tuality. This land is sacred to philosophy, to ethics, to spirituality, to all that tends to give respite to man in his incessant struggle for the preservation of the animal, to all training that urges man to throw off the garment of brutality and stand revealed as the spirit immortal, the birthless, the deathless, the everblessed. Here in this ocean of humanity. . . in the melting rhythm of eternal peace and calmness, arose the throne of renunciation. This is the land where alone religion has been practical and real and where alone men and women have plunged boldly in to realise the goal, just as in other lands they rush madly on to realise the pleasures of life by robbing their weaker brethren. Here and here alone the human heart has expanded till it included not only man but birds, beasts and plants; from the highest gods to grains of sand, the highest and the lowest all find a place in the heart of man grown great, infinite. Here alone the human soul has studied the universe as "one unbroken unity whose every pulse was his own pulse."

"We hear much about the degradation of India. There was a time when I also believed in it. But to-day, standing on the vantage-ground of experience, with eyes cleared of obstructive predispositions, and above all, with the highly coloured pictures of the countries beyond the seas toned down to their proper light and shade by actual contact, I confess in all humility that I was wrong. Thou blessed land of the Aryas, thou wert never degraded. Sceptres have been broken and thrown away, the ball of power has indeed rolled from hand to hand, but in India courts and kings have always touched only a few and the vast mass of the people have been left to pursue its own inevitable course, the current of national life flowing at times slower and half-conscious, at others stronger and awakened. I stand in awe before an unbroken procession of scores of shining centuries,