in India is not only a political, but also an economic and
industrial, problem. Whereas in Europe the cultural impulse has
travelled from the city to the village, in India the reverse
has been the case. The centre of social life in this country is
the village, and not the town. Ours was essentially the cottage
industry, and our artisans still work in their own huts, more
or less out of touch with the commercial world. Throughout the
world the tendency has been of late to lay considerable
emphasis on distributive and industrial co-operation based on a
system of village industries and enterprise. Herein would be
found the origins of the arts and crafts guilds and the Garden
Cities, the idea underlying all these being to inaugurate a
reign of Socialism and Co-operation, eradicating the entirely
unequal distribution of wealth amongst producers and consumers.
India has always been a country of small tenantry, and has
thereby escaped many of the evils the western Nations have
experienced owing to the concentration of wealth in a few
hands. The communistic sense in our midst, and the fundamental
tenets of our family life, have checked such concentration of
capital. This has been the cause for the non-development of
factory industries on a large scale.

The need for these changes--to which England is returning, after full
experience of the miseries of life in manufacturing towns--is pressing.

Addressing an English audience, G.K. Gokhale summed up the general state
of India as follows:

Your average annual income has been estimated at about £42 per
head. Ours, according to official estimates, is about £2 per