(2) This must result in merely enriching the Indian capitalist and punishing the consumer.
(3) The imports are non-competitive in that the bulk of the kind of piece goods imported are not manufactured in India.
(4) The result of boycotting such piece goods must be high prices without corresponding benefit.
(5) The boycott therefore being against the law of supply and demand and against the consumer must fail in the end.
(6) The destruction of hand spinning which I have deplored is due to natural causes, viz. the invention of time-saving appliances and was therefore inevitable.
(7) The Indian farmer is responsible for his own ruin in that he has indolently neglected cotton culture which was once so good.
(8) The best service I can render is therefore to induce the agriculturist to improve the quality of cotton.
(9) The author concludes, 'If instead of filling homes with useless Charkhas he were to start a propaganda for the more intensive cultivation of cotton and particularly for the production of longer staple cotton, his influence would be felt not only at the present day but for many generations to come.'
The reader will thus see, that what I regard as the supreme necessity for the economical salvation of India, the author considers to be rank folly. There is therefore no meeting ground here. And in spite of the prefatory note of the Government of India reproduced by me, the author does represent the Government attitude. I have invited them and the co-operators definitely to make common cause with the people in this movement at any rate. They may not mind its political implications because they do not believe in them. And surely they need not feel sorry if contrary to their expectation, the rise of the Charkha results in an increase in the political power of the people. Instead of waging war against Khadi, they might have popularised its use and disarmed the terrible suspicion they labour under of wishing to benefit the foreign manufacturer at the expense of the Indian cultivator. My invitation is open for all time. I prophesy that whatever happens to the other parts of the national programme, Swadeshi in its present shape will bide for ever and must if India's pauperism is to be banished.
Even though I am a layman, I make bold to say that the so-called laws laid down in books on economics are not immutable like the laws of Medes and Persians, nor are they universal. The economics of England are different from those of Germany. Germany enriched herself by bounty-fed beet sugar. England enriched herself by exploiting foreign markets. What was possible for a compact area is not possible for an area 1,900 miles long and 1,500 broad. The economics of a nation are determined by its climatic, geological and temperamental conditions. The Indian conditions are different from the English in all these essentials. What is meat for England is in many cases poison for India. Beef tea in the English climate may be good, it is poison for the hot climate of religious India. Fiery whisky in the north of the British Isles may be a necessity, it renders an Indian unfit for work or society. Fur-coats in Scotland are indispensable, they will be an intolerable burden in India. Free trade for a country which has become industrial, whose population can and does live in cities, whose people do not mind preying upon other nations and therefore sustain the biggest navy to protect their unnatural commerce, may be economically sound (though as the reader perceives, I question its morality). Free trade for India has proved her curse and held her in bondage.