In order to fight out poverty agriculture will not be sufficient for us. Without industry and commerce our poverty will never be removed. We had commerce though not on European lines. Time was when we earned our own bread and wove our own clothes. We had corn in our granaries; our cattle gave us milk; our tanks supplied us with fish; and the eye was smoothed and refreshed by the limpid blue of the sky and the green foliage of the trees. All day long the peasant toiled in the fields; and at eve returning to his lamp-lit home, he sang the song of his heart. For six months the peasant toiled in the field: and for the remaining six months of the year he worked at the spinning wheel and distaff as was most consonant with the natural genius of his being. To-day that peasant is gone--his very breed extinct; gone too is that house-hold with its ordered and peaceful economy of life. The granaries are empty of their golden wealth; the kine are dry and give no milk; and the fields once so green are dry and parched with thirst. The evening lamp is no more lighted; the house-hold gods are no longer worshipped; even the plough cattle have to be sold in order to give us some poor and meagre sustenance. The tanks have dried up; their water has become unwholesome; and the peasant has lost his natural freshness and gaiety of temperament. What will remedy this? Chitta Ranjan has thus said in his address-- "Agriculture is not sufficient to give us our subsistence. Trade and commerce we must adopt; only our road must not be the road of Industrialism. In the days of old when our life was natural, normal, we had our own fashion and method of trade--a fashion dictated by the law of our being, by the genius of our soul. There we find that when the season of agriculture was over, our peasants would weave their clothes and prepare other articles of domestic use. They had not to look forward to Manchester to clothe them. Our cottage industries have perished; and the muslin-industry of Dacca and other parts of Bengal, once so famous and prosperous--has practically vanished. So also has vanished cotton cultivation--once conducted on an extensive scale but the secret of which now seems to have died out. Why should we not take to the spinning wheel as before and weave our own clothes? The brass ware industry of Bengal--that also has practically disappeared, chiefly for lack of patronage; for economic prudence aside, even our æsthetic taste has grown so coarse and vile that we prefer false and tawdry imitations to genuine and durable articles of value. Thus all our national industries have vanished and with these have vanished our wealth and prosperity."