(3) It will consume the surplus stock of Indian spinning mills which need not then be sent out of the country.
(4) Being mainly a village-industry, it supplies the local demand, at the same time gives employment to small capitalists, weavers and other village workmen and
(5) lastly it will supply the long-felt want of, and honest field of, work and livelihood for educated Indians."
But even this is not all that can be said in favour of hand-loom industry. Mill industry no doubt can be a powerful aid to the promotion of Swadeshi. But apart from the bitter struggle, strife and demoralisation of the capitalist and the workman (as explained by the eminent scholar, administrator and economist, the late Mr. Romesh Chundra Dutt) it has led to, the question is: Can it solve the problem which pure Swadeshi is designed and sought to do and which arises only because of its abandonment? Every writer of note on the industries of India, whatever his ideas and conclusions about the future of Indian Industrialism may be, has shown that there was a time and that was even till the Early British Rule in India—where spinning and weaving, only next to agriculture, were the great national industries of India, when all the cotton was spun by hand and every portion of the work was done by the farming population which augmented its resources by spinning and weaving. Mr. Dutt has given extracts from the statistical observations of Dr. Francis Buchanan's economic enquiries in Southern and Northern India, conducted between 1798 and 1814. They show how many hundreds of thousands of our men, women and children worked on this industry—mostly in their leisure time—each day and earned crores of rupees annually.
How our home-industries came to the sad plight they are in to-day is an open secret, admitted by all authorities and need not be repeated here. Suffice it to say that the problem to-day is not to bring about that political and economic re-organisation of our country, which disturbs the West to-day—an organisation which has led to the breaking up of the society by ceaseless struggles, bitterness and rupture between Capital and Labour. We want to work out the real political and economic regeneration of the country by Swadeshi. And the problem of the Swadeshi is the problem of 80 per cent. of our population who spend more than six months of the year in enforced idleness, eking, throughout the year, a miserable, half-starving and half-naked existence. We must find out suitable work for them during their idle hours. We must make them a real asset and power to the nation. Pure Swadeshi alone can do it.
Y. I.—28th July 1920.
HAND-SPINNING AND HAND-WEAVING
Some people spurn the idea of making in this age of mechanism hand-spinning and hand-weaving a national industry, but they forget there are millions of their countrymen in this age who, for want of suitable occupation, are eking out a most miserable existence, and thousands who die of starvation and underfeeding every year, whereas only a hundred years ago hand-spinning and hand-weaving proved an insurance against a pauper's death. The extent to which relief was provided by this industry is recorded by Mr. Dutt in his "History of India: Victorian age" from the investigations conducted by Dr. Buchanan for seven years, 1813–1820. Dr. Buchanan travelled throughout of the whole country. And his observations and statistics convinced him that next to agriculture, hand-spinning and hand-weaving were the great national industries. We make no apology for giving some of the facts and figures collected by Dr. Buchanan:
In the districts of Patna and Behar with a population of 3,364,420 souls, the number of spinners was 330,426. "By far the greater part of these," observed Dr. Buchanan, "spin only a few hours in the afternoon, and upon the average estimate the whole value of the thread that each spins in a year is worth Rs. 7–2–8 giving a total annual income of Rs. 23,67,277 and by a similar calculation the raw material at the retail price will amount to Rs. 12,86,272, leaving a profit of Rs. 10,81,005 for the spinners or Rs. 3–4–0 per spinner...."