Remember that this description is of present-day India, after more than a century of British rule and notwithstanding a permeation of Western ideas which, as we shall presently see, has produced momentous modifications in the native point of view. Remember also that this hoarding propensity is not peculiar to India but is shared by the entire Orient. We can then realize the utter lack of capital for investment purposes in the East of a hundred years ago, especially when we remember that political insecurity and religious prohibitions of the lending of money at interest stood in the way of such far-sighted individuals as might have been inclined to employ their hoarded wealth for productive purposes. There was, indeed, one outlet for financial activity--usury, and therein virtually all the scant fluid capital of the old Orient was employed. But such capital, lent not for productive enterprise, but for luxury, profligacy, or incompetence, was a destructive rather than a creative force and merely intensified the prejudice against capital of any kind. Such was the economic life of the Orient a hundred years ago. It is obvious that this archaic order was utterly unable to face the tremendous competition of the industrialized West. Everywhere the flood of cheap Western machine-made, mass-produced goods began invading Eastern lands, driving the native wares before them. The way in which an ancient Oriental handicraft like the Indian textiles was literally annihilated by the destructive competition of Lancashire cottons is only one of many similar instances. To be sure, some Oriental writers contend that this triumph of Western manufactures was due to political rather than economic reasons, and Indian nationalists cite British governmental activity in favour of the Lancashire cottons above mentioned as the sole cause for the destruction of the Indian textile handicrafts. But such arguments appear to be fallacious. British official action may have hastened the triumph of British industry in India, but that triumph was inevitable in the long run. The best proof is the way in which the textile crafts of independent Oriental countries like Turkey and Persia were similarly ruined by Western competition.