u, the worst declassment. The factory workers
are not yet numerous enough to form a compact and powerful proletariat,
able to exert pressure on the old society. Even if they do occasionally
strike, they are as far from the modern Trade-Union as they are from the
traditional working-caste. Neither can they look for leadership to the
'intellectual proletariat'; for the Nationalist movement has not emerged
from the 'bourgeois' phase, and always leans on the capitalists....

"Thus Indian industry is still in its embryonic stages. In truth, the
material evolution which translates itself by the construction of
factories, and the social evolution which creates a proletariat, have
only begun to emerge; while the intellectual evolution from which arise
the programmes of social demands has not even begun."[293]

Other observers of Indian industrial conditions, however, do not share
M. Metin's opinion. Says the British Labour leader, J. Ramsay Macdonald:
"To imagine the backward Indian labourers becoming a conscious regiment
in the class war, seems to be one of the vainest dreams in which a
Western mind can indulge. But I sometimes wonder if it be so very vain
after all. In the first place, the development of factory industry in
India has created a landless and homeless proletariat unmatched by the
same economic class in any other capitalist community; and to imagine
that this class is to be kept out, or can be kept out, of Indian
politics is far more vain than to dream of its developing a politics on
Western lines. Further than that, the wage-earners have shown a
willingness to respond to Trades-Union methods; they are forming
industrial associations and have engaged in strikes; some of the social
reform movements conducted by Indian intellectuals definitely try to
establish Trades-Unions and preach ideas familiar to us in connection
with Trades-Union propaganda. A capitalist fiscal policy will not only
give this movement a great impetus as it did in Japan, but in India will
not be able to suppress the movement, as was done in Japan, by
legislation. As yet, the true proletarian wage-earner, uprooted from his
native village and broken away from the organization of Indian society,
is but insignificant. It is growing, however, and I believe that it will
organize itself rapidly on the general lines of the proletarian classes
of other capitalist countries. So soon as it becomes politically
conscious, there are no other lines upon whic