ovoked enough irritation in India
to show how deeply engrained is the suspicion that, from the days of the
East India Company onward, the industrial and commercial interests of
India have always been deliberately or instinctively sacrificed to those
of Great Britain. Indians regard complete fiscal autonomy as one of the
first steps towards the fulfilment of the pledge of self-government, and
indeed as the logical consequence of the recommendation already made by
the Joint Select Committee of both Houses of Parliament. To believe that
in such matters the Government of India would now place itself in
opposition to the views of the Indian Legislature is to ignore the whole
spirit of the constitutional changes.

To the economic factors that react unfavourably upon a difficult
political situation must be added the growth of labour troubles, which
Extremist agitators know how to exploit to the utmost even when they do
not actually foment them. Strikes are as common to-day in India as they
are in England, and the epidemic has sometimes spread from industrial
workers to those employed by municipalities and by the State. There have
been strikes not only in the big cotton mills and jute mills and other
large manufacturing industries, but also amongst postmen, and amongst
railwaymen on State as well as on private-owned lines, amongst tram-car
drivers and conductors, and even amongst city scavengers. Lightning
strikes without any notice are of growing frequency. Some are
short-lived, others very obstinate, dragging on for weeks and months.
Some are grotesquely frivolous, others by no means lack justification or
excuse. Intimidation often not unaccompanied by violent assaults on
non-strikers is an ugly feature common to most of them. They sometimes
lead to very serious riots and bloodshed. They have played a prominent
part in the worst disorders of the last few years. Nowhere have they
assumed at times a more threatening shape than in the Bombay Presidency,
for in the cotton mills of Bombay itself and of the Ahmedabad district,
which employ over 200,000 hands, are collected the largest
agglomerations of factory workers in India.

Labour troubles were bound to come with the introduction of Western
methods of industrial development and Western machinery. It has led, and
very rapidly, to a demand for labour which the urban population could
not supply. But the wages soon attracted immigrants from the more or
less distant countryside, w