him on the possibility of immediate legislative
intervention. The very name of Bombay, which for most people recalls a
spacious and dignified landfall, lateen sails, green islands and
jutting precipices, a long city of trees and buildings like a bright and
various breakwater between the great harbor and the sea, and then
exquisite little temples, painted bullock carriages, Towers of Silence,
Parsis, and an amazingly kaleidoscopic population,--is for me a reminder
of narrow, foetid, plague-stricken streets and tall insanitary
tenement-houses packed and dripping with humanity, and of terrible
throbbing factories working far into the night, blazing with electric
light against the velvet-black night-sky of India, damp with the
steam-clouds that are maintained to moisten the thread, and swarming
with emaciated overworked brown children--for even the adults, spare and
small, in those mills seem children to a western eye.

I plunged into this heated dreadful business with a passionate interest
and went back to the Yacht Club only when the craving for air and a good
bath and clean clothes and space and respect became unendurable. I waded
deep in labor, in this process of consuming humanity for gain, chasing
my facts through throbbing quivering sheds reeking of sweat and
excrement under the tall black-smoking chimneys,--chasing them in very
truth, because when we came prying into the mills after the hour when
child-labor should cease, there would be a shrill whistle, a patter of
feet and a cuffing and hiding of the naked little creatures we were
trying to rescue. They would be hidden under rugs, in boxes, in the most
impossible places, and we dragged them out scared and lying. Many of
them were perhaps seven years old at most; and the adults--men and women
of fourteen that is to say--we could not touch at all, and they worked
in that Indian heat, in a noisome air drenched with steam for fourteen
and fifteen hours a day. And essential to that general impression is a
memory of a slim Parsi mill-manager luminously explaining the inherited
passion for toil in the Indian weaver, and a certain bulky Hindu with a
lemon-yellow turban and a strip of plump brown stomach showing between
his clothes, who was doing very well, he said, with two wives and five
children in the mills.

That is my Bombay, that and the columns of crossed circles marking
plague cases upon the corners of houses and a peculiar acrid smell, and
the polychromatic sti