CHAPTER X

THE NATURAL GROWTH OF SOCIETY

E saw, in the preceding chapter, that Christ's con

WE ception of the social order is primarily that

of a silent growth, intimately connected with the simple, natural family life and its normal sanctions. This Christ expressed in the terms of the Fatherhood of God. But entirely apart from this natural order, we have also the conception of certain sudden and unnatural unnatural breaks in the breaks in the historical progress of humanity, called by Christ "the days of the Son of Man,"-involving revolution and crisis and upheaval. We have seen how these are similar to the wider aspects of nature herself. For we have earthquakes and volcanic outbreaks coming suddenly from time to time, side by side with the daily sunshine and the rain.

If we turn to present conditions in India, in the light of this teaching of Christ, there appears very much. indeed that is altogether encouraging in the outlook. India appears to me to have been very highly developed in the past with regard to those normal processes of family life which Christ consecrated and blessed. As far as I have been able to read the facts of history, the salt of Indian society, which has not lost its savour

hitherto, but has remained good, and kept that society from corruption, has been the sacramental ideal of marriage, and the religious fulfilment of domestic life which this marriage sanctity has always involved.

For in India there has been a deep religious spirit which penetrated, from the very first, the domestic life and made it pure and healthy. This sacramental ideal of the family has been the great purifying thought which has saved Indian civilization from decay, while other empires have perished. The idea of Dharma (religious duty, and especially of religious domestic duty) has become second nature in India. No Indian can ever throw off lightly his duty to his family. However distant any relative may be, this religious duty is sure to be recognised; and as a consequence the humiliations of the 'workhouse,' which those who have lived among the poor in England know so well, have been practically unknown in India.

But, in our own generation, a terrible injury has been done, owing to the pressure of the new industrial conditions; and if no steps are taken, this wrong, which has already been perpetrated, may soon become irreparable. In the neighbourhood of all the great modern Indian towns, the social and domestic fabric of the villages, which depends upon the sanctity of marriage, is rapidly being broken up. There can be no longer, I am afraid, any doubt with regard to this fact and its serious ana alarming moral consequences.

It has been my duty, in recent years, to make a very careful investigation into the new industrial life of India at the different centres, both in the great Indian cities and in the smaller rising townships, where growth of population has been rapid. I have also been called upon to investigate conditions of labour, under indenture, among those who were sent abroad from India to Fiji, Ceylon, Malaya, South Africa and other places.

The facts and figures presented by these investigations have been so startling, as a revelation of festering moral evil, that for a long time I hardly dared to credit them or to give them full publicity. But they have now been proved up to the hilt by independent enquirers to be true, and the time has come to state them clearly.

The truth is, that the old domestic morality of the Indian agricultural life is breaking down in every direction, wherever close contact with the larger city life, and even with the smaller townships, owing to new industrial conditions, has occurred.

Let me take the facts which I myself know best of all, those of Indian indentured labour. The actual "Government of India Regulation" for this labour was almost incredible in its callous laxity. It agreed that forty women should be sent out with every hundred men. In earlier years the percentage was 33, or three men with every one woman. These men and women

were suddenly swept away from their village homes under these new new labour conditions. Very many thousands were thus transported. The result, as I saw it with my own eyes in Fiji, was awful in its moral disaster. The women were compelled to give themselves to prostitution. I will give the picture in the words of Miss Garnham, who was sent by the Australian United Women's Associations, to find out whether my own report was true or false. She writes as follows:"I had evidence from various sources during my stay in Fiji, that life among the Indian labourers in the 'coolie lines' is unspeakably corrupt. Indians speak of the 'lines' at the mill centres as 'prostitution houses'; and many men have told me how glad they were to be away from the 'lines,' and settle in places where their wives could be protected. It was quite impossible, they said, for a woman to preserve her chastity in the lines.' The utter abandonment of morals is unfortunately not confined to the adult Indians. I have heard little children speak of things which showed an appalling knowledge of vice of the worst kind. . . . One may well pause to consider what sort of childhood is possible where the motherhood is so utterly depraved.

Moral interests were evidently sacrificed to money in this labour importation from India; and the fact that the prosperity of a colony depends largely on the moral and social welfare of the people seems to have been disregarded."

These facts, which I had set out in detail in two reports, and which Mr. Pearson had corroborated both in Fiji and Natal, were brought home to me with terrible pain by repeated visits to the Colonies where Indians had settled abroad.

Strangely enough, for a long time this emigration problem abroad had so absorbed my attention that I did not realize how an emigration was going on within India itself, from the villages to the cities, with hardly less deadly effects. One day an Indian friend and social worker said to me,-" Why do you go out to Fiji? I can show you evils just as bad under your very eyes."

At the time I thought this to be an absurd exaggeration; but I cannot think so now, after what I have seen in recent years in our great Indian cities and in the smaller towns. Only a few weeks ago, I was engaged in investigating the conditions in Matiaburj, beyond the Kidderpore Docks, where returned emigrants from Fiji have drifted; and those Indians whom I could trust, and who were among my personal friends in Fiji, have told me that after living down in Matiaburj, they have found the conditions there with regard to sexual immorality worse than in Fiji.

Again, I have made a series of investigations into the social conditions of the little town of Bolpur, which has been growing rapidly as a railway centre in the "rice" district of Bengal. I have found an increasing moral breakdown in those who have come in for trade purposes and left their wives behind them in the villages. The student life, which has been obliged to congregate in different quarters, called "messes," situated in the very centre of the bazaar, has also been unable to escape