One wealthy Hindu had ventured even in manufacture to follow the extreme party which said: “Let the English go their way. We will ask no share in their government and take none. We will neither appeal to their law courts nor accept salaries as their officials. We must pay their taxes, but otherwise we will forget that these foreigners are among us at all.” He had determined to set up a cotton works without the aid even of imported machinery. Collecting members of the old weaving caste, he erected a bamboo factory of hand-looms, where they were turning out the beautiful fabrics of Indian work, little more expensive than the English machine-made stuffs and four times as durable. The experiment is exposed to some of the dangers of conscious revivals—the dangers of “Arts and Crafts.” But hand-loom weaving still retains a quite natural life in many parts of India, in spite of the British manufacturers’ long endeavours to kill the Indian weaving industry. When I visited his simple factory among the palms north of Madras, he told me he could not keep pace with the demands of the Hindu women. And if the women who buy cotton cloth for their _saris_ and children’s bits of clothing are willing to give a few farthings more for native and national work, in a district where they have to toil all day for a wage of twopence, it shows that the national spirit, even in philosophic and devotional Madras, is reaching far beyond the limits of the class that our own most highly educated classes taunt and sneer at as “educated Indians.” FOOTNOTES: [30] “Macedonia,” by H. N. Brailsford, p. 75. [31] Speech at Arbroath, October 21, 1907. [32] This increase is probably shown in the rapid increase of the Excise Revenue, which rose from £3,742,800 in 1897 to £5,687,820 in 1906. Of the latter sum “country spirits” yielded nearly £3,000,000, and “toddy” (the popular drink made from the toddy palm), £874,000. CHAPTER VI ON THE BEACH It was evening, and the sky was full of the deep and ominous colours of an Indian sunset in the rains. A hot wind blowing in from the sea threw the waves in heavy surf upon the sand. Up and down the long “Marina,” or esplanade, bordered by a few vast public offices and a few fishermen’s hovels, the last carriages were bearing home Anglo-Indian ladies or youths comfortably wearied with their polo and other games. But on the broad, dry sand, between the esplanade and the surf, a vast circle of people was gathered round a little platform and chair. They were seated by hundreds on the sand—between four and five thousand of them altogether—and round the outer edge of the seated circle hundreds more were standing upright, like the rim of a flat plate.