Page:Gandhi - The Wheel of fortune.djvu/79

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
"HANDLOOMS OR POWERMILLS?"
61
(5) lastly it will supply the long-felt want of, and honest field of, work and livelihood for educated Indians."

But even this is not all that can be said in, favour of hand-loom industry. Mill industry no doubt can be a powerful aid to the promotion of Swadeshi. But apart from the bitter struggle, strife and demoralisation of the capitalist and the workman (as explained by the eminent scholar, administrator and economist, the late Mr. Romesh Chundra Dutt) it has led to, the question is: Can it solve the problem which pure Swadeshi is designed and sought to do and which arises only because of its abandonment? Every writer of note on the industries of India, whatever his ideas and conclusions about the future of Indian Industrialism may be, has shown that there was a time and that was even till the Early British Rule in India—where spinning and weaving, only next to agriculture, were the great national industries of India, when all the cotton was spun by hand and every portion of, the work was done by the farming population which augmented its