The Parting of Ways

The establishment of Swaraj in India is not merely the transference of power from one body of officers to another or from one race of men to a second, but it means a definite parting of ways, a pursuit of not merely administration but of culture and ideals entirely different to those after which we have been running during the past 150 years. The conquest of India by England has not been exclusively territorial but it has been all-embracing and has covered every field of human activity. India’s culture, India’s religion, India’s crafts and arts, Indian society and Indian village life have so entirely been conquered that they have been transformed beyond all possibility of recognition. Swaraj to India therefore means an immediate recovery of all that is great and glorious in the national asset, the revival of Indian tradition and philosophy and a rehabilitation of her culture and crafts, –not that we stand for a complete re-establishment of the conditions that prevailed a 1000 years ago in the domain of economics and administration, but that it shall be our earnest study in working out our Swaraj to carve out institutions and enact measures which would be in conformity with India’s ancient past.

Today in India, life has been compartmentalised. She has been taught that politics is different from economics, that social organization is different from political upheaval, that religion is a matter of individual concern and not a province of the State, that the strata into which society has been divided and sub-divided are all ill-assorted and rugged and must be steam-road-rolled under the one engine-power of modern democracy on the one hand and modern industrialism on the other. Today in India the centre of gravity of national and public life, so-called, has become located in the few hundreds of towns that modern civilization has reared into existence and not in the seven and half lacs of villages which formed the very pivot of Indian nationalism in its Golden Age. Today a foreign culture and a foreign civilization have captured the imagination of the millions of India’s population without being able to enlighten even a tenth or hundredth of those teeming millions. Today the object of man’s ambitions and allurements is a post or a prize that is within the gift of the foreign bureaucracy, while the service of the nation commands few votaries. There is an ever-growing stream of migration from villages to towns, so much so that the latest Census has revealed the astonishing figure of 33% increase in the population of towns like Masulipatam, Rajahmundry, Bezwada and Guntur, as against a general increase of 10% in the whole population, Today the passion that engages people’s energies and talents is the development of machinery and the establishment of mills, which concentrates profits in the hands of a few and drives the many into the fathomless abyss of unemployment. Today the craze is for the accumulation of capital and the concentration of power into the hands of a few, to whom both Government and the people offer assistance more and more, so that the rich may become richer and the poor poorer. Truly may it be said that, under this civilization which holds sway over India and under this Government which has enslaved crores of population, the doctrine is, "unto him that hath, more shall be given; and from him that hath not, the little that he hath shall be taken away." The establishment of Swaraj is not bringing the millennium into our hands. By itself it is not the panacea that will serve to cure the ills which have been the heritage of a century and half of foreign domination. For more than a couple of decades possibly, we shall have to suffer from the philistinism of our own bureaucrats, the denationalisation of our own politicians, the perversities and the new fangled superstitions of our own ministers and members of legislatures. In an age of renaissance the great duty, even as it is the great difficulty of the people, is to unlearn what they have learnt during the period of their enslavement, and then to learn what they have long since forgotten in the culture and civilization of their ancient past. That process is yet to begin. The transference of Education into the hands of Indian Ministers has not nationalised the educational atmosphere or the educational outlook of this country. The same old examinations, the same old degrees, the same old standards of efficiency and merit, the same old conceptions of education being an avenue of service under the State, continue to dominate men’s minds; and it is sad to reflect how, in an age when every department of human thought is being charged with the new spirit, the young men of colleges and schools alone remain not merely unmoved but continue to be the worst supporters of a denationalising system education. Likewise in every department of administration do we see the prevalence of that bureaucratic spirit which has been the bane of this alien rule, and which will continue to be the pest of Swaraj, notwithstanding the change, for the change is only of names and not of spirit. But this does not prevent us from visualising before our mind how national life will be affected and what changes will be wrought in the spirit of the nation when Swaraj shall, ere long, have been established.

It is no exaggeration to say that English influence on Indian life has changed the direction of the vision of the people from east to west. Under Swaraj it shall be our duty to teach our men and women that the Sun rises in the east and sets in the west, that we should look to our own country primarily for guidance in our future progress and that we should not be dazzled by the radiance and brightness of the things of the West. We must recognise that life in India knows no compartments, that it is but one composite stream bearing in its content the confluence of all those tributaries which they in the West categorise into social, religious, economic and industrial. The ancient Rishis have carved out Hindu society into various strata wherein people have been enabled to cultivate from their very birth certain tastes and talents, and in which they cannot suffer from those perils and pests of what they call in the West "unemployment." The vast mass of the people in this country live in villages unlike in the West. Here nearly 85% constitute the rural population and they form the bone of the country, while but 16% congregate into towns and suffer from the competitions which urban life makes inevitable. Not so in England; there 15% represents the rural population and 85% live in the slums and palaces of towns and cities. The modern craze for people in India to congregate in towns is a necessary result of the tide of industrialism, the passion for English education and the necessity to eke out livelihood under the departments organized by the State, and above all, of the absence of openings to the young men of the country along fields and avenues which are open to young men of all self-governing nationalities elsewhere in the world. When Swaraj shall have been established the first change will be that the young men will not crave for service under the State, –(it is by no means disgraceful to do so)–but will seek to engage themselves in fields even more honourable to themselves and more helpful to their country than the petrified routine of Government service. The age of the industrialism of the West is fast going, nay, has almost gone and it is hardly likely that such an age which is disappearing in the West will dawn upon India anew. Industrialism has grown and prospered in the West because it could live as a parasite on the East, but when the East has ceased to be the host, the parasite itself must go out of existence. India and China, which between themselves contain a half of the world’s population, have furnished the dumping ground for the gewgaws, the spickspacks, and the tawdry upholstery of the Western countries. But a new spirit has permeated the un-numbered numbers of the Oriental countries. Persia refuses to take British goods so does Egypt and so does Arabia. India has wiped out the foreign cloth that has been imported to its shores aggregating to crores in value. China has stemmed the tide of foreign trade long ago, and Europe and America are left in the unenviable position of having only their own countries on which to dump one another’s goods. The supreme lesson is being borne in upon even the Western countries, and therefore more so upon India, that production hereafter shall be only for consumption and not for export. The false philosophy of seeking to relieve unemployment in the past by production has only aggravated the state of things in the West, and has led not merely to industrialism but imperialism in order to find markets for the growing stocks. But when there are no countries to receive those stocks, the fountains of production must necessarily dry up and the age of industrialism must come to an end. If, therefore, in countries where industrialism has been deep-rooted and widespread, production for export has ceased to be an economic proposition, much less is it to be expected in a country like India that industrialism will ever be able to raise its head. The lesson is therefore clear to both countries that each country should as far as possible be self-contained, or that at any rate one country cannot expect to suck out the life-blood of another in order that it may live. The parting of ways therefore will not be merely for India but for England also. When one-half of the world has ceased to be the dumping ground for the other half, the other half must re-align its plans and convert its forests and gaming grounds once again into arable land. It must cease to foster the machinery which has helped to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few and promote once again the crafts that alone bring happiness to every home. India was at one time organised on this basis and the same basis must be re-established under Swaraj.

When the village has once again been made the basis of Indian nationalism it should become truly that miniature cosmos which the ancient Indian Rishis and economists had designed it to be. The whole of England put together, with its 40 million population, is not a composite country having facilities for providing the people with food and raiment within its borders It is well-known, that England has to import its wheat from Russia, its eggs from Denmark, its meat from New Zealand and Australia, its coffee from Ceylon, its rice from India, and it is only when the whole gamut of industrialism including production-centres, middlemen, railways, dockyards, mine-workers are all in order and at work, that the people in England can get their food. The slightest disturbance throws the whole machinery out of gear and the people have to starve. Not so is the Indian village though isolated and sequestered; imagine that it is surrounded for months together by floods or besieged by the enemy; there is no reason why the people should suffer or starve, for the population of the village is composed of its farmer and cooly, its barber and dhoby, its carpenter and smith, its weaver and spinner, its priest and physician, its cobbler and craftsman. It grows its cotton in the yard, it spins its yarn in the parlour, it weaves its cloth in the frontage of its house, it grows its paddy or maize or corn and eats what it grows. Its food and raiment are thus guaranteed to it and there is no power on earth that can make the Indian village the slave of the town or the city, much less of the foreign lands which dump their goods into this country nowadays. It may be deprived of the pastime of litigation and the luxuries of cinema and theatre, but it nevertheless has its ancient amusements, its music and art, its craft-life which enables the craftsman to realise his soul and give full play to his creative energy. He does not thus slave for wages or produce parts of articles but has the pleasure of having produced wholes which he can own, use, sell, pawn or dispose of otherwise. His home is not disturbed; his family is not disrupted; the morals of himself and his family are not jeopardised; he is master of himself and slave of none. It is this recovery of Indian craft-life that will be re-established under Swaraj.

When modern politicians even in India talk of labour they grow eloquent and even restive. They talk of fixed timings of work and standards of wages; they talk of maternity benefits and of labour being free from serfdom; they talk of the living wage, hours of work, health conditions of labour, Insurance against old age, sickness and unemployment, and prohibition of employment of children of school-going age in factories, and above all, the right of labour to form Unions and to seek arbitration. All these are excellent in themselves. They form part of the definition of Swaraj as formulated at Karachi by the Congress. But let it be remembered that they refer entirely to an urban population and that theyare limited to 15 lakhs of labourers that labour and sweat and suffer in cities and towns, in mills and factories and workshops, but the vast population of the country is agricultural, –over 250 millions are engaged in that supreme industry. Their conditions in life are little considered. It is they that must get relief; it is their collateral occupations and accessory means of livelihood that must engage the attention of the leaders of Indian nationalism under Swaraj, and unto this end it is that we are seeking to re-habilitate the craft-life of the country. Imagine how the artistic industries of this ancient land have been deliberately destroyed and how those artists who attained eminence both in the East and the West, more especially during, the Moghul and Rajput ages, have fast begun to disappear. In Delhi while the peace negotiations were going on in the months of February and March, we beguiled our leisure hours in assisting, at the Carpet Exhibition that was organised and in walking, round the Central Asian Antiquities Institute and the Art Exhibition building Although the Oriental Carpet Company is entirely financed and owned by Europeans, still it must be admitted that the carpets produced by them, –let alone the prices–are magnificent to a degree, and a look at the superb handiwork of the Indian carpet weaver is bound to elevate India miles high in the estimation of the denationalised Indian as well as the condescending foreigner. Indian agriculture is not a paying proposition, and often-times the farmer is the weaver and weaves his own cloth and the cloth required by his friends, while the weaver farms his own land and cultivates the land of his neighbours. Farming and weaving have therefore come to be supplementary to each other, yea, complementary to each other, and one may now understand why Gandhi declared himself a farmer and weaver before Mr. Broomsfield during his famous trial in the year 1922 for sedition.

Under Swaraj the lot of the agricultural labourer cannot be forgotten, and in fairness to the Congress we must say it has not been forgotten. The country that today governs the land is a Western country with an industrial civilization and an urban outlook. It cannot possibly understand the constitution of village life in this land and does not therefore sympathise with the vicissitudes of the village population of India. Is it the principle of taxation, is it the imposition of income-tax, is it the amenities of municipal life, is it the provision of water-supply, is it the establishment of schools, is it the supply of medical relief, is it the organisation of libraries, is it the affording of entertainments, take what you will, it is the towns that score over the villages. The former have absorbed all funds, Local, Provincial and even Imperial. Government spends 85 p. c. of its revenues on towns. The village roads have been neglected; the village sanitation is a mere myth; the village medical relief is a misnomer; the village schools are a mere apology for what they should be; the village funds have been wiped out; the village Bhajanmandirs no longer exist under the patronage of the State; yea, the very population of the village has migrated into the towns and there is a depletion of population which is truly sad to contemplate. If you want the village once again to prosper, you must promote all these facilities and furnish all these amenities to the rural population. Under the ancient constitution of Indian society the village had always been a self-contained, self-sufficient, self-relying unit of the Indian State. We must not only restore that ancient status of the Indian village but also provide it with all modern facilities, so as to make it not merely self-contained but ever-expanding and ever-progressive. Unto this end land must be provided to the landless, and the depressed classes to whom patches of land are assigned here and there should not be made to feel that the land that they have acquired is a burden to them, throwing them into the hands of the money-lender and of the landlord in the neighbourhood. What doth it avail to give a poor helpless Panchama 5 acres of land and ask him to cultivate this barren area grown with bush and hawthorn and pricklypear? Land does not become arable by the mere granting of a Patta. The bushes have to be cleared; the levels have to be maintained; bunds have to be constructed; channels have to be dug; sluices have to be put up; the soil has to be ploughed and manured; seed has to be purchased; transplantation has to be done; and then weeding, watering, harvesting and reaping, -all these processes in the first five years are items that appear only on the debit side of the balance-sheet. How is the Panchama to finance this industry, and how in the meantime is he to live? He must eke out his livelihood by the sweat of his brow, and while he has sold his body and soul to a master it is hardly likely that he will ever be able to spare his time or energy for the cultivation of his lands. Such a cultivation must therefore take place only by means of hired labour for which payment is necessary, and the beneficent Government that has conferred lands upon these landless people has made no provision whatever for the financing of those agricultural operations without which land can neither be cultivated nor made to yield. We note that land so assigned has been burdened with the condition that it should not be alienated within ten years, but we know too that, in spite of all these, the land has been invariably changing hands and the Panchamas have more often been ruined by the land given by Government than ever they have prospered. The writer, in collaboration with an Assistant Registrar of Co-operative Societies and a Sub-Collector who holds a high position in the Government of India today, elaborated a scheme in the year 1920 whereby the land given to the Panchama should be given, not through individual Pattas but to a Co-operative Society composed of 30 to 40 members, each member holding his share of land on lease from the Society. If that is done and if the Co-operative Society finances the agricultural operations, then will be established a state of things against which there will exist no ground for complaint whatever. But this Government is so "wooden, inelastic, iron and ante-diluvian" that it would not listen to any such proposal, and it is hoped that under Swaraj a more elastic and sensible system of assigning land to the landless will be pursued.

Really the grievances of the landholders are innumerable. A close economic survey has been made in the reports of the people in connection with the re-settlement operations of Godavari and Krishna Districts. The re-settlement is now overdue but has fortunately been stopped. The economic investigations have yielded results by no means astounding, which have proved beyond a shadow of doubt that agriculture is not a paying proposition for holdings of less, than 12 acres. Supposing that a holding of 10 acres is cultivated and has yielded 12 candies of paddy selling at Rs. 70 a candy (now it sells at Rs. 35), the yield would be Rs. 840 while the expenses amount to Rs. 930. The expenses so tabulated provided Rs. 15 per mensem to the cultivating landlord, his wife and his two or three children.

Few people ever think of preparing a balance-sheet for the agricultural industry. The ryot borrows money when he needs it and allows himself and his lands to be sold out in the open market when his credit is exhausted. 10 acres of land requires a pair of bulls! and a bandy. The former costs Rs. 350 and the latter Rs. 120.These do not serve more than 8 years. Every year therefore the capital outlay upon this alone comes to Rs. 52, while the interest on the capital comes to another Rs. 48. A clean Rs. 100 must be set apart therefore for the bulls and bandy from out of the produce, and if you take the various items that constitute the labour required for cultivation, you will find that no man can pay a rupee of tax on land for holdings of less than 12 to 15 acres. That is why Karachi has decided upon the remission of land-tax on uneconomic holdings and a progressive land-tax as the holding becomes larger and larger. Let it be remembered that today land-tax is a tax on capital, not on produce! It is tragic to note how the Government of the day, being industrial and urban in outlook, has organised a system of taxation involving a great hardship to the people of the villages while comparatively it affords relief to the people living in towns. If a father has got two sons, to one of whom he has given 50 acres of land worth Rs. 1000 each acre and to the other Rs. 50,000 in cash, the latter may show by his accounts that he makes only Rs. 1999 and he need not pay a single pie of taxation to Government, while the former has to pay a land-tax of Rs. 2 per acre on the first acre of his holding as well as the last acre of his holding. Thus of the two sons with equal property, he who lives in towns and is, only called upon to pay income-tax is at a great advantage over him who lives in the village and toils, sows, reaps and lives by the sweat of his labour. The man that produces food in the country is penalised by the Government, while the man that lives in towns as a middleman or as a blood-sucker is favoured in respect of taxation. That is why Karachi has resolved in favour of income-tax on agricultural industry on a progressive scale beyond a certain limit, and it may be at once stated that in order to reach that limit, (of Rs. 2000 which is now prevalent in towns), a cultivator has successfully to cultivate land of not less than 60 acres in extent before he can come under the Income-tax Law. Moreover, as things stand, the Zamindars who make lacs of money every year are exempt from Income-tax operations, while under Swaraj they will have to shell down their share of the tax like any other citizen. Land-tax, if at all it exists, should be made a local cess and earmarked for village development.

There is a popular belief that India is seeking Swaraj in the interests of towns and of the rich. That belief is entirely wrong. It is not the so-called educated classes that today enjoy the leadership of the country. The leadership of Indian politics has passed into the hands of the villagers. The village people have recognised that this Government instead of promoting employment has promoted unemployment in the country. In England the 3 million unemployed people receive a dole of nearly a crore of rupees a day and about 300 crores of rupees is set apart for the relief of the unemployed there every year. In India there is no knowing how many are unemployed and how unemployment is sedulously being fostered by the prevalent conditions of the day. The village cobbler has lost his cunning and finds it no use to stick to his trade, because the people in the towns get their boots from factories in India and abroad. The village smith has lost his trade, because, from the wire-nail to the door-hinge, almost every article of house-building, furniture and equipment is imported from abroad nowadays. The village weaver is thrown out of employment, because the cloth needed by the country is supplied by Lancashire. The village spinner is forced to be idle, because, even if the cloth is woven in the village, the yarn is supplied by the mills and millionaires of Bombay and Ahmedabad and people do not see the unwisdom of making the rich at a distance richer and the poor in the neighbourhood poorer. The village fishermen can no longer cure his fish, because there is an embargo on salt in his neighbourhood, and as it is the women that cure the fish while it is the men that catch them, the former cannot go to Government fish-curing yards and cannot work in the presence of strangers, leaving their homes and hearths and the privacy and leisure that they can command there. The industry has therefore gone into the hands of middlemen who employ labour and has deprived this caste of its ancient calling. The barber has lost his cunning as well as calling because of the Gillette and Valet of the necessary self-shaving apparatus, and the people do not mind paying an anna for a blade made in Panama rather than pay an anna to the barber that is starving next door to them. The caret-weaver has almost forgotten his superior skill in making carpets that may sell at Rs. 100 a square yard, and the few that survive in the country are only able to make carpets that sell at Rs. 6 to 12 a square yard. What a fall! The printing and dyeing industry has almost perished and only the revival of Khaddar has revived those crafts in a measure. Under Swaraj therefore it shall be the earnest endeavour of the leaders of the day to revive the means of employment of the poor and not merely to serve the rich. The very offices which will be held under Swaraj will not be attractive for their emoluments in the manner in which they are now, and so hardened and bureaucratic an officer as Sir George Schuster is reported to have declared that, under a popular Government, India cannot afford to give salaries which are inevitable under a bureaucracy. When therefore the maximum of salaries is fixed at Rs. 500, let it not be thought that it is a mere pious wish or even a pious fraud but that it will be a grim reality, and when once ministers draw Rs. 500 per mensem, the fabulous scales and standards of remuneration of lawyers will disappear. As it is, the salaries of ministers are reacting upon the fees of lawyers and the latter upon the former, and a vicious circle is established which will be cut off the moment Swaraj is established.

In the renovated India of the future, every citizen will be made to feel that he owns this country. Thus the lands, the hills and valleys, the rivers that beautify this ancient heritage; the very stars and planets that bedeck the blue canopy above, will be his. When that is so, the citizen will feel it a point of both honour and pride that he should defend his own shores and frontiers and live at peace with his neighbours. We shall no longer be throwing bombs upon the Mohamands, the Vaziris, the Chitralis, the Afridis and the Gilzaris on our frontiers, but befriend them and make them apostles of non-violence and votaries of the Charka. The country shall not be manned by a mercenary soldiery, but the young men who have the spirit of adventure in them and are today left to rot in the corridors of offices, will under Swaraj bear the burden of standing sentinel at the gates of India and protecting the homes and hearths of their countrymen. The Military expenditure which has run up to 55 crores will straightway be reduced to a half, and the benefit of the savings so effected will be passed to the people by the relief they get through the abolition of salt-tax (6 crores), opium (2 crores), and liquor (17 crores). The money saved in reducing the salaries of the Civil establishment and Civil works which will come to about 4 crores, will pass in turn into the pockets of the people when they get an immediate relief of 50% in the land-tax. The Swaraj budget is thus easily balanced. There are no fantastic hopes raised which cannot be implemented by the hard standards of budgets and finance.

When salt is made available to the rich and the poor free of cost, the health of the nation and of the cattle and the efficiency of smaller industries will be restored. When drink has been abolished, labour in India will be free from that pestilence which is known to shorten life and impair strength and, what is worse, promotes crime, destroys morals and jeopardises the happiness and peace of the home and the family. When the burden of taxation is lightened, there will be incentive to labour which is taken away now, because all earned increment in values is diverted to the coffers of the State. When Currency is controlled and Exchange is either abolished or regulated, the tyranny of the importer disappears and agricultural produce can have easy and certain markets in the world. When the import of paddy and wheat is prohibited and the import of cloth is wiped out, the people in the villages will have their second meal once again after centuries of starvation. When the key industries are controlled and Shipping, Banking and Insurance have passed into the hands of the people, the wealth of the country is conserved and young men will have avenues in life which are now shut against them. But when all this is gone through, there remains the huge incubus of rural indebtedness which is grinding down the people of the villages and putting them entirely at the mercy of the Sowcar and the money-lender. It is estimated that India’s rural indebtedness is 618 crores of rupees. How are we to wipe out this indebtedness? Is it ever thinkable that the ryot who is ground down by this unbearable burden will ever be able to stand erect and play his part as citizen under Swaraj? It is well- known how there is a sum of 235 crores of rupees in England representing the Gold Exchange Standard Reserve and the Paper Currency Reserve, which is being used by the Secretary of State for various purposes tending to promote British trade with India, being, lent to British merchants at easy rates of 2 and 3% returnable in a fortnight or three weeks. Sir Daniel Hamilton long ago has suggested that this Reserve should be carried to India but he was ridiculed. It is gratifying however to note that the Young Currency Commission of 1928 has accepted his recommendation though the Government of India has not acted upon it. Sir Daniel Hamilton has suggested that, with this Reserve of 235 crores, an All-India Bank should be established which could be made to start an issue of 705 crores of credit money through note circulation, deposits and current accounts. Thus the capital consisting of silver and gold in securities aggregating to 235 crores, together with debentures and deposits aggregating to 705 crores, makes the liabilities of the bank 940 crores which should be set off by the following assets. 97 crores of gold and silver, and 138 crores of securities convertible into gold and silver, making up 235 crores liquid money and the balance of 705 crores may thus be utilised. 618 crores may be utilised for the redemption of rural indebtedness leaving 87 crores for the promotion of Railways, Irrigation, Drainage, Co-operation, Municipal amenities and Industrial Development. Railways may be assigned 20 crores, Irrigation in the Punjab 4 and in Central Provinces 2, Drainage in Bengal 1, Co-operation 20, Municipal and District Boards 25, and Industrial Development 15. A Bank so constituted under Swaraj on the lines laid down by Sir Daniel Hamilton will wipe out the malaria from Bengal and the drought from the Central Provinces and make India once again a land flowing with milk and honey.

In a word when Swaraj is established, the course of ‘progress’ that has been in vogue during the past one century will become reversed. The towns and cities which are the dumping grounds of foreign trade and the standing monuments of foreign domination, foreign trade, foreign authority and foreign conquest, will cease to be the objects of envy or pursuit. They will remain exposed in all their nakedness and show themselves the parasites that they are, sucking out as they do the life-blood of the village. The village, on the contrary, will become the centre of gravity of Indian nationalism, and leadership in public and political life-which would then mean national life, -will pass from the votaries of towns and universities to the producers of food and raiment, those who till and sow, who weed and reap, those who build the wealth of the nation and feed and clothe its millions. Currency which has committed havoc during the past so many years now stands unveiled and the atrocities that have followed in the train of its vicissitudes have become more apparent now than ever before. In the village, while properties have fallen in value, debts retain their original values and add to them hour in and hour out. And this has spelt the ruin of the ryot. The village will hereafter not witness that rush to towns and cities for money, loans, and mahajans or Sowcars, but learn to exchange service for service, and though it may look atavistic, revive the old conceptions of barter which in modern language may well be rendered into service, so that under the new regime, the fall in prices may be a welcome change to be jubilant over and not a disaster to be bemoaned. Where urban life and amenities may nevertheless have to continue, they will assume an attenuated form or even undergo alterations which will take away the sting of the modern day urbanization and ‘citi-i-zation’ which passes for civilization. The middleman of the towns and cities will yield place to the Co-operative organisations which in God’s good time must culminate in the Co-operative Commonwealth–the dream of Sir Daniel Hamilton. The Swaraj of the future will not pay fat salaries to bureaucrats from the sin money of Drink and Drugs but establish the poor man’s rule, the Raj of the man in the street, designed to promote local industries and ensure to every citizen his share of food and raiment. It will be the Swaraj where not mere Law will be administered by Courts but Justice administered by Panchayats, where falsehood uttered at distant Tribunals will not pass for truth but truth will be told and tested at the scenes of occurrences or disputes, and where the ambiguities of the written word will be obliterated and the value of the spoken word once again restored.