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Great indeed are the uses of poetry. In all my letters from India I shall hardly be able to do more than expand and enlarge upon the great fundamental truths so eloquently set forth in our four-line poetry piece.
If it be sound logic to say that "God must have loved the common people because he made so many of them," then the Creator must also have a special fondness for these "poor benighted Hindus," for within an area less than half the size of the United States more than 300,000,000 of them live and move and have their being. That is to say, if the United States were as thickly populated as India, it would contain 600,000,000 people. It is also said that when the far-flung battle-line of Imperial Rome had reached its uttermost expansion that great empire had within its borders only half as many people as there are in India to-day. India and its next-door neighbor, China, contain half the population of the whole earth. In other words, if the Chinese and East Indians were the equals of the other races in military prowess the combined armies of all other nations on the globe, of every nation in Europe, North America, South America, Africa, Australia, the Isles of the Sea, and of the rest of Asia, would be required to defeat them.
Obviously, such a considerable portion of the human family calls for special study. And if we would study them we must not confine ourselves to a tour of a few cities in North India, interesting as these cities are.
The significant man in India (where about eight tenths of the people live on the soil) is not the trader, a city-dweller in these few large centres of population, but the ryot or farmer, in the thousands and thousands of little mud-house villages between the Himalaya slopes and Cape Comorin. The significant economic fact in India is not the millions of dollars once spent on royal palaces but the $7 to $30 spent in building this average peasant's home or hut. The significant social fact is not the income of some ancient Mogul or some modern Rajah {212} estimated in lakhs of rupees, but the five or six cents a day which is a laborer's wage for millions and millions of the people.
For these reasons I have been no more interested in the famous cities I have seen than in the little rural villages whose names may have never found place in an English book. Let us get, if we can, a pen picture of one of these villages in north central India.
As I approached it from a distance it looked like an enormous mass of ant-hills, for the low windowless one-story huts, as has been suggested, are made of yellowish sun-dried clay, and are often roofed with clay also--made flat on top with a little trench or gutter for drainage. Perhaps the majority, however, have thick sloping roofs of straw, the eaves being hardly as high as a man's head. Very thick are the mud walls of the houses, eighteen inches or more in most cases, and as the floor is also the bare earth, there is no woodwork about such a dwelling except the doors and a few poles to hold up the roof. In one or two small rooms of this kind without a window or chimney (oftener perhaps in one room than in two) a whole family lives, cooks, and sleeps.
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