ecessitating the employment of large
military forces to overawe them, and to avert through the exercise of
disciplined forbearance collisions with which the police alone would
have been unable to cope, and which, when once started, could probably
have been quelled only at the cost of considerable bloodshed. Mr. Gandhi
has a great personal hold over the factory workers, especially in
Western India. Sometimes he uses it to restrain them, sometimes, though
one may hope less deliberately, he works dangerously on their emotions.
His influence when he preaches temperance to them on temperate lines may
be all to the good, and except that, when he denounces tea also, because
it is tainted with Western capitalism, he is waging war against a
popular substitute for spirits, one need not quarrel with the solemn
processions of mill-hands proceeding to a favourite shrine to break a
symbolical teapot in the presence of the deity as a pledge of
renunciation. But not all Mr. Gandhi's followers can be credited with
his earnest sympathies for labour, largely inspired by his detestation
of a "machine age," and he himself lapses into language that seems to
preach more rigid abstention from drink than from violence.

Factory legislation has never been neglected in India, though until
recently the chief impulse has had to proceed from Government itself. A
great increase of public interest has taken place in the last years, and
in India perhaps even more than anywhere else the activity in this
respect of the League of Nations and of the International Labour Office
has elicited prompt and vigorous response. The Secretary of State has
created at the India Office a new department for dealing with labour and
industry. India has had her own representation at international labour
conferences, and the Government of India is now engaged on a new Factory
Act in accordance with the draft covenants and recommendations of the
Washington Conference. Indeed in some directions the Bill is in advance
of Washington. The statutory definition of a child presents special
difficulties in India, where physical development is more precocious
than in Western countries, but, instead of making the general limit of
age for juvenile work lower, the Bill proposes to raise it not to
fourteen but to fifteen years, whilst still permitting the employment of
younger children on special and very stringent conditions. Provisions
are also made for securing longer daily intervals d