ndustrial revolution has already been accomplished. Bombay is a modern
manufacturing city, where both the dark and the bright side of modern
industrialism strike the eye. Bombay has insanitary slums where
overcrowding is as great an evil as in any European city; she has a
proletariat which works long hours amid the din and whir of machinery;
she also has her millionaires, whose princely charities have adorned her
streets with beautiful buildings. Signs of lavish wealth and, let me
add, culture and taste in Bombay astonish the visitor from the inland
districts. The brown villages and never-ending fields with which he has
hitherto been familiar are the India which is passing away; Bombay is
the presage of the future."[212]

The juxtaposition of vast natural resources and a limitless supply of
cheap labour has encouraged the most ambitious hopes in Oriental minds.
Some Orientals look to a combination of Western money and Eastern
man-power, expressed by an Indian economic writer in the formula:
"English money and Indian labour are the two cheapest things in the
world."[213] Others more ambitiously dream of industrializing the East
entirely by native effort, to the exclusion and even to the detriment
of the West. This view was well set forth some years ago by a Hindu, who
wrote in a leading Indian periodical:[214] "In one sense the Orient is
really menacing the West, and so earnest and open-minded is Asia that no
pretence or apology whatever is made about it. The Easterner has thrown
down the industrial gauntlet, and from now on Asia is destined to
witness a progressively intense trade warfare, the Occidental scrambling
to retain his hold on the markets of the East, and the Oriental
endeavouring to beat him in a battle in which heretofore he has been an
easy victor.... In competing with the Occidental commercialists, the
Oriental has awakened to a dynamic realization of the futility of
pitting unimproved machinery and methods against modern methods and
appliances. Casting aside his former sense of self-complacency, he is
studying the sciences and arts that have given the West its material
prosperity. He is putting the results of his investigations to practical
use, as a rule, recasting the Occidental methods to suit his peculiar
needs, and in some instances improving upon them."

This statement of the spirit of the Orient's industrial awakening is
confirmed by many white observers. At the very moment when the above
article