own money or with money borrowed from the money-lender. The artisans were the masters of the goods they produced and, unless otherwise agreed with the money-lender, sold them in the open market. The necessities of life, being cheap and easily procurable the artisans cared more for quality than quantity. Their work was a source of pleasure and pride as well as of profit to them. Now everything has gone, pleasure, pride, as well as profit. Where profit has remained, pleasure and pride are gone. We are on the high road to a "distinctly industrial civilization." In fact, the principal complaint of our political reformers and free trade economists is that the British Government has not let us proceed on that road at a sufficiently rapid pace and that, in preventing us, they have been dominated by their own national interests more than by our own good. We saw that other nations were progressing by following the laws of industrial development, and quite naturally we also wanted to prosper by the same method. This war has opened our eyes as it has opened those of the rest of the world and we have begun to feel that the goal that we sought leads to perdition and not salvation. This makes it necessary for the Indian politicians and economists to review their ideas of political progress. What are we aiming at? Do we want to rise, in order to fall? Do we want to copy and emulate Europe even in its mistakes and blunders? Does the road to heaven lie through hell? Must we make a wreck of our ship and then try salvage? The civilization of Europe, as we have known it, is dying. It may take decades or perhaps a century or more to die. But _die it must_. This War has prepared a death bed for it from which it will never rise. Upon its ruins is rising, or will rise, another civilization which will reproduce much of what was valuable and precious in our own with much of what we never had. The question that we want to put to our compatriots is, shall we prepare ourselves for the coming era, or shall we bury ourselves in the débris of the expiring one. We have no right to answer it for others, but our answer is clear and unequivocal. We will not be a party to any scheme which shall add to the powers of the capitalist and the landlord and will introduce and accentuate the evils of the expiring industrial civilization into our beloved country.