Darkest India: A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out"Booth-Tucker, Frederick St. George De Lautour
History
Darkest India: A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out"
Booth-Tucker, Frederick St. George De Lautour
India -- Social conditions; Poor -- India
4. The lack of combination among the congested mass of labourers is
another serious evil. They are as sheep without a shepherd. Individually
they have no influence. Collectively they are capable of becoming a
mighty power. What is needed at the present moment is a directing head
and an enfolding organisation that shall gather them together, bind them
in one harmonious whole, and with the help of a friendly Government lead
them on to occupy and cultivate these waste lands, converting them into
districts inhabited by a sober, thrifty and enterprising population.
Without such a combination the efforts that are made by private
enterprise will continue to be carried out on such a petty scale as will
utterly fail to cope with or remove the existing evil, and will merely
serve to give relief in a few isolated cases. For instance I have in
mind one district where to my personal knowledge the amount of congested
labor cannot amount on the most moderate calculation to less than half a
million people. There is in their immediate neighbourhood abundance of
waste land capable of supporting them. The Government is anxious for
that land to be occupied. The people are eager to obtain and capable of
cultivating every piece of waste that can be placed at their disposal.
If, instead of leaving it to individual caprice and effort to carry on
in the present haphazard and redtape fashion, we are able on the one
hand to combine this mass of labor, and to obtain on the other hand from
Government the particulars of the land they are desirous of having
cultivated, and the most favorable terms on which it can be granted to
us, we shall be in a position with, but a very moderate amount of
capital at our command, to solve the double problem of the waste land
and waste labor, and that within a very short period.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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