water. He is saturated with malaria in these mosquitoridden districts, and the continual dampness brings on ague, rheumatism and fever. All round his village he has to bear the stench of rotting jute fibre, the stagnation of standing pools of water, and a hundred other evils. These troubles he is obliged to endure, because he needs ready money to buy cloth for his body and oil for his lamp, and other things; and these articles must all be paid for in cash. His condition before the war was pitiable enough. But his condition during the war, and in the two years of peace which have followed the war, has become almost desperate. The cost of a loin cloth, or a woman's sari, has gone up to twice or even three times its former value. Money has become so scarce among these peasants of Bengal, that instances have been authentically recorded of suicide having taken place because of the misery and shame of nakedness, of poor half-starved men and women. Children have cried with hunger until the father has become a dacoit in order to steal money to get bread. Meanwhile, directors of jute companies have been congratulating their shareholders on bumper dividends, and not a hint has been given in their glowing reports about the condition of the peasantry from whom those dividends were extracted. Surely we need not hesitate for a moment to assert that Jesus of Nazareth, who uttered the words-

Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy laden with toil, and I will give you rest,"

is altogether on the side of the peasants in such a cruelly unjust state of affairs. He is to be found in those peasants' malaria-stricken hovels, rather than in the homes of the wealthy. We can almost hear him saying, with mingled sorrow and compassion

Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these my brethren, ye did it not to me."

It has become more and more clear to thoughtful men and women in our modern age, that the system of unlimited capitalism, under which we live, is a system of brute force in disguise; that its effects are very frequently no less deadly upon the world's populations than the destruction wrought by war.

To give an immediate example, it is not very long ago that the proof was brought home with horror-struck conviction to the whole of Europe that the concessionaire system of King Leopold of Belgium had wrought deadly havoc on the Congo. It is known for certain that many millions of people perished. To turn to modern India, the Government is still to-day making vast sums of money for revenue purposes out of opium, and conniving at its entry into China. To take another side of affairs, I have been in almost every part of the world on journeys which have been undertaken solely in order to investigate the moral evils wrought upon the poor and defenceless by the unrestricted use of capital in foreign lands. I have seen its deadly effects. Let me quote some business figures concerning

the company whose chief field of exploitation has been Fiji, and whose exploited labourers have been the village men and village women from the United Provinces and Madras. The following extract is taken from the business columns of the Sydney Bulletin :—

The net profits shown in this table are the figures given by the Directors of the C.S.R. Company.* Whether they represent the true net profits the Bulletin does not know-nor does anybody know, except the very few inside. In past balance sheets, the Directors certainly did not disclose all the profits made. For instance, in 1910, they admitted that for 15 years they had been purchasing property in Fiji out of profits. The result is shown in the table. In 1916 no less than £3,250,000 was written up and bonus shares issued in a new company, called the Fiji and Maoriland Company. A Directorate which can shake 34 million-equal to the entire former watered capitalout of its sleeve in this way, cannot expect its figures to be taken too seriously. Looking back over the past ten years gives an amazing record for this mammoth concern. Since 1907 no new capital has been got in; but in that year, besides the issue of 15,000 shares of £20 per share, for which only £15 was paid, £750,000 accumulated profits were capitalised. That brought the paid-up capital to £2,500,000. The paid-up capital of the parent company alone is now £3,250,000, and every penny of that three-quarter millions represents capitalised profits. Here is a short history of what has happened since 1908 :

Such is the hard and cold business statement of the wealth of the C.S:R. Company, as given in the Sydney Bulletin, and an even more astounding statement of profits was given later for the years that followed the Armistice. Yet, as I saw with my own eyes, the Indian labourers, who helped to make this enormous wealth, were famished. And when I asked the Head Inspector to raise their wages merely by threepence a day, he at first stubbornly refused and Government had to be made to intervene before it was done.

We have to understand that, here in India itself and all over the world, the destructive powers which can be exercised under the capitalistic system, when unrestricted, are so great, that, in their cumulative effects, they have far exceeded the violence of revolutionary mobs and barbarian powers at open war with one another. The problem of the modern age is to curb these wild excesses without destroying or weakening those forces of enterprise and initiative which are vitally necessary for progress.

I have been obliged to give this modern picture more fully than I had intended at the outset, because I wish to make quite clear to my readers in what follows, that these two economic doctrines of the Medieval Church -the doctrine of the "just price," and the doctrine of the "sin of usury "-are not antiquated, as people have often imagined, but singularly modern in their application.

The doctrine of the “sin of usury” was taken over directly by the early Christians from the Jewish Scriptures, and was handed on by them to Medieval Europe. This doctrine, which declares the immorality of taking interest on money lent, has been almost peculiarly Semitic in the history of mankind. When Islam arose in Arabia, the same doctrine became incorporated in the faith and practice of every Musalman as well as of every Jew. It has validity in Islam to-day. The doctrine itself goes back to the free life of the desert, where hospitality is regarded as a sovereign virtue in human character, and the poorest are allowed to share the food of any household they may reach at their journey's end, when the night is coming on.

Among the Jews, the refusal to take interest was legally limited to dealings with fellow members of the Jewish Brotherhood. Interest could be legally taken from the Gentiles. Indeed, the Jews were the chief money-lenders in Christendom in the Middle Ages.

But the early Christian Church, in this, as in other matters, seems to have overleapt the boundaries of race and creed. The old Jewish doctrine of the "sin of usury" was raised into a universal principle. To take interest on money lent was made sinful, not only in respect to Christians, but in respect to non-Christians also. In the language of an early Christian writerMoney is a dead thing; it must not be allowed to have any progeny, as if it were alive.”