cians--who are not always disinterested sympathisers, but more
often stimulate and exploit grievances which may in themselves be
legitimate for purposes which have little to do with the real interests
of labour.

The economic causes of the growing frequency of strikes during recent
years have not yet been all explored, and Sir George Lloyd responded to
a crying need when, in his reply to the deputation, he announced that
the Bombay Government was about to establish a Labour Bureau under a
competent official from the British Board of Trade to advise it in the
interests of labour. One of the greatest difficulties in dealing with
industrial disputes in India is, the Governor rightly observed, the
absence of all trustworthy materials for forming an accurate judgment on
the actual cost of living for the working man, and the ever fluctuating
relations between the wages he receives and the expenditure he has to
incur even for the mere necessaries of life.

With a two-and three-fold appreciation, during and especially since the
war, in the cost both of the cotton stuffs which the working man needs
even for his scanty apparel and of the foodstuffs which constitute his
meagre fare, discontent grew steadily more acute, and wages, though more
than once enhanced, did not always keep pace with that appreciation. If
in circumstances, often of undoubted hardship, labour had been
sufficiently equipped to state its own case, or had found disinterested
friends to state it clearly and temperately, it would have been easier
to admit that economic causes sufficed, in some cases at least, to
explain, and perhaps even to justify, the increasing use of the strike
weapon. But there is unhappily very abundant evidence to show that
strikes would not have been so frequent, so precipitate, and so
tumultuous, had not political agitation at least contributed to foment
them as part of a scheme for promoting a general upheaval. The
Extremists, who, with few exceptions, have no part or lot in labour,
either as employers or as workers, began to carry on in Mr. Tilak's days
amongst the mill-hands of Bombay an active propaganda which originally
had little to do with labour. The mill-hands played an evil part in the
worst excesses committed during the outbreak in and around Ahmedabad in
April 1919, and twice within the last two years they have seriously
threatened the peace of Bombay itself and held up for weeks together the
normal life of the great city, n