The economic causes of the growing frequency of strikes during recent years have not yet been all explored, and Sir George Lloyd responded to a crying need when, in his reply to the deputation, he announced that the Bombay Government was about to establish a Labour Bureau under a competent official from the British Board of Trade to advise it in the interests of labour. One of the greatest difficulties in dealing with industrial disputes in India is, the Governor rightly observed, the absence of all trustworthy materials for forming an accurate judgment on the actual cost of living for the working man, and the ever fluctuating relations between the wages he receives and the expenditure he has to incur even for the mere necessaries of life. With a two-and three-fold appreciation, during and especially since the war, in the cost both of the cotton stuffs which the working man needs even for his scanty apparel and of the foodstuffs which constitute his meagre fare, discontent grew steadily more acute, and wages, though more than once enhanced, did not always keep pace with that appreciation. If in circumstances, often of undoubted hardship, labour had been sufficiently equipped to state its own case, or had found disinterested friends to state it clearly and temperately, it would have been easier to admit that economic causes sufficed, in some cases at least, to explain, and perhaps even to justify, the increasing use of the strike weapon. But there is unhappily very abundant evidence to show that strikes would not have been so frequent, so precipitate, and so tumultuous, had not political agitation at least contributed to foment them as part of a scheme for promoting a general upheaval. The Extremists, who, with few exceptions, have no part or lot in labour, either as employers or as workers, began to carry on in Mr. Tilak's days amongst the mill-hands of Bombay an active propaganda which originally had little to do with labour. The mill-hands played an evil part in the worst excesses committed during the outbreak in and around Ahmedabad in April 1919, and twice within the last two years they have seriously threatened the peace of Bombay itself and held up for weeks together the normal life of the great city, necessitating the employment of large military forces to overawe them, and to avert through the exercise of disciplined forbearance collisions with which the police alone would have been unable to cope, and which, when once started, could probably have been quelled only at the cost of considerable bloodshed. Mr. Gandhi has a great personal hold over the factory workers, especially in Western India. Sometimes he uses it to restrain them, sometimes, though one may hope less deliberately, he works dangerously on their emotions. His influence when he preaches temperance to them on temperate lines may be all to the good, and except that, when he denounces tea also, because it is tainted with Western capitalism, he is waging war against a