reliable gangers and foremen. In the blast furnaces there are only eight
Europeans to 1600 Indians, in the mechanical department only six to
3000, and in the traffic department only one to 1500. In two other
important departments it has been already found possible to place an
Indian in full charge. One of these is the electrical department, which
requires unquestionably high scientific capacity. Another is the coke
ovens, on which 2000 Indians are employed under the sole charge of an
Indian who seemed to me to represent an almost new and very interesting
type--a young Bengalee of good family, nephew to Sir Krishna Gupta, who
was recently a member of the Secretary of State's Council in Whitehall.
He had studied at Harvard, had worked afterwards right through the mill,
and had acquired the habit of organised command, which is still rare
amongst Indians. If Jamsheedpur may be not inaptly regarded as a
microcosm of India, in which the capacity of Indians for self-government
in a wider sense than any merely political experiment connotes is being
subjected to the closest and most severe test, it assuredly holds forth
high promise for the future.

Yet at the very time when the future of Indian industries seemed to be
at last almost assured, and largely thanks to Indian enterprise, it was
gravely compromised by the miserable breakdown of the most important of
all the services on which the very life of industry depends. The Indian
railways proved altogether incapable of meeting the new demands made
upon them. Even in the essential matter of coal supplies, though the
output of the Indian coal mines suffices for present requirements, huge
dumps of coal accumulated round the mines and could not be moved owing
to the lack of rolling-stock and to the general inadequacy of the
existing railway system. The breakdown may have been due in the first
place to the rapid deterioration of rolling-stock and permanent way that
could not be made good during the war, and has not been made good yet,
but the real causes must be traced much farther back to the parsimonious
and short-sighted railway policy of the Government of India for years
past. Apart from the economic consequences, it is particularly
unfortunate, even from the political point of view, that such a
revelation of inefficiency should have occurred in a field which has
been hitherto most jealously preserved for British enterprise, and just
in the very sphere of Western activity which h