etc., to the mother-land. And the mother-land, under pretence of sending them manufactured wares, gets rid of her burnt stuffs, her machine scrap-iron and everything which she no longer has use for. It costs her little or nothing, and none the less the articles are sold at exorbitant prices.
Such was the theory—such was the practice for a long time. In London and Manchester fortunes were made while India was being ruined. In the India Museum in London unheard-of riches, collected in Calcutta and Bombay by English merchants, are to be seen.
But other English merchants and capitalists conceived the very simple idea that it would be more expedient to exploit the natives of India by making cotton-cloth in India itself, than to import from twenty to twenty-four million pounds' worth of goods annually.
At first a series of experiments ended in failure. Indian weavers—artists and experts in their own craft could not inure themselves to factory life; the machinery sent from Liverpool was bad; the climate had to be taken into account; and merchants had to adapt themselves to new conditions, now fully observed, before British India could become the menacing rival of the Motherland she is to-day.
She now possesses 200 cotton factories which employ about 196,400 workmen, and contain 5,231,000 spindles and 48,400 looms, and 38 jute-mills, with 409,000 spindles. She exports annually
