ndustrial revival might be promoted by a crude boycott of
foreign imported goods which would at the same time serve as a
manifestation of their political discontent. The _Swadeshi_ movement
failed, as it was bound to fail. But failure intensified the suspicion
that, as India's foreign trade was chiefly with the United Kingdom, her
industrial backwardness was deliberately encouraged in the interests of
British manufactures, and it was not altogether unjustified by the
maintenance of the excise duty on locally manufactured cotton goods,
which protected the interests of Lancashire in the one industrial field
in which Indian enterprise had achieved greatest success. The
introduction of an annual Industrial Conference in connection with the
Indian National Congress was the first organised attempt of the
politically minded classes to link up with politics a movement towards
industrial independence. It assumed increased bitterness with the
disastrous failures of Indian banks started on "national" lines in
Bombay and the Punjab. The cry for fiscal freedom and protection grew
widespread and insistent before the war broke out. Then, under the
pressure of war necessities, the Government of India explored, as it had
never done before, the whole field of India's natural resources and of
the development of Indian industries. At the same time an opportunity
arose for a group of Indian "merchant-venturers"--to use the term in its
fine old Elizabethan sense--who had set themselves to give the lead to
their countrymen, to show what Indian enterprise was capable of
achieving. What it has already achieved deserves to be studied as the
most pregnant illustration of what the future may hold in reserve.

It is a somewhat chastening reflection that the creation of the one
great metallurgical industry in India has been due not to British but to
Indian capital and enterprise, assisted in the earliest and most
critical stages not by British but by American skill, and that, had it
not been created when it was, our Syrian and Mesopotamian campaigns
could never have been fought to their victorious issue, as Jamsheedpur
produced and could alone at that juncture supply the rails for the
construction of the railways essential to the rapid success of those
great military operations. Equally chastening is the reflection that
from its very inception less than twenty years ago, the pioneers of this
vast undertaking had constantly to reckon with the indiffer