The Future of Humanity

most important cause is general lack of education-not the three R's, but that which has been aptly called by Professor Geddes, as education of the three H's; head, heart and hand. The result is a low standard of living as well as of thinking, with its evil consequences influencing our entire activity. The standard of living and the marginal productivity of labour of any class are at any moment in a state of equilibrium with one another or are tending towards it and a change in one has a reciprocal effect on the other. We also find an equilibrium between the standard of living of a class and its state of procreation; the standard of what constitutes reasonable comfort is also influenced by the standard of life of the parents. Thus our low standard of living perpetuates a double evil; it keeps our production inefficient and unorganised and undeveloped; and it brings out an ever-increasing number of inefficient, unintelligent and weak people who have neither the will nor the power to realise a better lot.

The average length of life in India is very much lower than in other countries and we get less return for the same expenditure of time and effort than other countries where it is higher.

Agricultural activity which is conditioned by physical religio-social and legal factors displays a case of action and reaction. The minute subdivision of holdings is a result partly of our legislation. Poverty is the destruction of the poor; and this saying of Dr. Marshall is nowhere more true than in the case of the Indian Agriculturist. Agricultural practice is subject to some defects, which by their cumulative effect living about a great reduction in the annual output, among which may be mentioned want of intelligent and organised direction; want of organised capital and labour and want of economic holdings. Want and waste bulk as prominently in the case of manufactures and even in our means of communication and our trade which fails to co-ordinate the efforts of the producer with the wants of the consumer.

Mr. Frederick Harrison, the well-known English critic, writing in the March number of The Positivist Review, offers a trenchant criticism of the problem of spirituality and the unseen, "an incomprehensible something that wraps the doubts and incoherence of its champions." Those whose faith gets shaken and doubtful in their own creed fall back he says, on 66 a very miscellaneous spiritualism" and believe in any phrases such as the unseen, the beyond, the immaterial, etc. "They have ceased to believe they doubt."

"Spiritualism is scepticism. To put your hope and your trust in the Unseen is not to know what you hope nor what you trust. Not to know is to be indifferent, to accept anything outside visible evidence, no matter what. That is indeed a pitiable state of an empty head and a flabby soul. If you do know what the unseen is, what its force is, its nature, its reaction upon yourself, why not call it by its proper name and description? To palm off on us the unseen, as a hazy mode of "Something-not-ourselves" which we do not quite think of as the living God, to use it as a general term for the Gospel Idea, is shuffling with us and with yourself.

The unseen means, you don't know what to think. Some leaders of Anglican Modernism Mr. Harrison thinks, knowing that the probems of religion could not be solved in thought, have adopted the faith of Divine Life. But pure

Modernists reject all their professed beliefs in any literal sense. They prefer to be Christian Agnostics. They are wont to reproach the other Agnostics, Ethicists, Positivists as mere Materialists.

As they have no Church, no Creed, no Bible, except such as all men have, their unseen is simply what they fashion, imagine, and dream out of their own minds and the human Past. The only Divine Life they know is what they frame as the best life-the purest, most rational, most humane life as drawn from history, philosophy, science, and morals-from the lives of saintly and wise men. That is our faith, too. We do not call it the Divine Life, we call it the Human Life. We have our Unseen quite as much as they have. Our spirits do not dwell on what we see to-day-but on what we hope, believe, know, is to come-to come on Earth not in Heaven. If we are agnostic as to Heaven and Hell, we are not agnostic as to the coming of Humanity. Our Unseen is a far grander, more beautiful, more soul-stirring power than their vague dreams.' It is the inexhaustible development of Man on this Earth.

War, Women and Work

That there is an essential link between the various portions of the present panorama-first the Great War, second the Feminist Movement, and third the Labour Problem-and that man is in no position to understand any one of them unless he understands one and all of them, is the theme of an interesting article in the April number of the Theosophist. Adherents of the old Monarchical system putting their feet on the neck of democracy have found their system threatened by the world's trend towards democracy; and hence women became aware of their position as the chattels of men; hence the Feminist movement. Labour awoke to the sense that it was underdog to capital; hence the latest problem. It may be truly said that the Labour Movement dates from the French Revolution or even further back. The German Movement can be traced to Frederick the Great; and in its larger sense, that of the struggle of military imperialism against the advancing tide of democracy, it may be surely traced further back still. The Feminist movement was the first of the three which reached an acute pitch in the 20th century; but it again dates from the time of Mill, if not from the thirties of last century and the Brontes.

The cause of the war was the feeling on the part of the military caste of Germany that they were being hampered by democracy. Women's suffragist struggle seemed to end in failure; but they won by turning their swords into pruning hooks, their banners of revolt into bandages for the wounded and their window-smashing energy into the channel of munition making. The tale of the labour struggle has yet to be written but its end will involve the dramatic triumphs of the other two. The labour struggle may drag the nations through some at any rate of the horors of Bolshevism; and its points of similarity to Bolshevist attitude are too many to be ignored.

Each of the three movements is a response to a common impulse, the sounding of what may be called "the new time." The link is that the war, the Feminist movement and our present labour difficulties, are all, each in their own way, manifestations of Feminism, i.e., each due to the forward step on the part of the Feminine, passive or material moiety in our universe. The war was of the nature of a Feminine movement because it was the outcome of the advance of democracy which was hitherto passive. The labour unrest can also be seen to be a similar manifestation because labour represents the mere physical passive force. All these great movements are for the betterment of the physical, in order that a finer vehicle might be provided for the spiritual, to occupy at the various stages of the evolutionary progress of man. Economic Statistics in India.

A very informing article, entitled "The Value of Economic Statistics in India," by Dr. Gilbert Slater, is one of the outstanding features of the February Mysore Economic Journal. The gathering of the statistics, says the writer, is an important part of the pursuit of economic truth. It may be, to a certain extent, the work of private individuals, but the powers of individuals in this respect are very limited, especially in India. "We have no Indian statisticians who have done work on any. thing like the scale of the investigations of Mr. Charles Booth and Mr. Seebohm Rowntree. It is true that we have had very creditable efforts in these directions, but the conditions in India are such that the amount of investigation so carried on has necessarily been small."

The Conquering Chinese

A recent number of Harpers' Magazine describes how in spite of the serious internal situation and still worse aspect of foreign affairs, China, the weakest and most unpolitical of nations, is still unconquerable and conquering. The Chinese have the viability of rats; wretched, laughing philosophical, they withstand beat and cold, dwell in all climates, perform labour that no white man would undertake and live on food upon which a white man would starve. Because its scale of living is lov and because it is fruitful, the Chinese nation is indeed indestructible. The procreative impule rules China as the Manchus never ruled it.

The

Neither the Europeans nor the Japanese have been able to permeate China. The Japanese, following in the footsteps of the Russians developed Southern Manchuria and opened it to immigration, but it was the Chinese, not the Japanese who immigrated. The pure-blooded Manchus are becoming rare, the country, the race and the civilisation are Chinese. In Formosa also the Chinese have met with a hopelessly inferior culture and have steadily expanded and conquered. Chinese emigration was never and is not a spontaneous and joyous. movement. The Chinese coolie is attached to his home family and birthplace; and it is only a dead insistent omnipresent poverty that forces him to emigrate. This poverty is caused by a low stage of industrial development and by an over-high birth-rate and it creates superfluous men who toil at all forms of semi-useless labour for a wage which barely buys millet or rice.

.

Even at home China seems about to expand. In proportion to her area and her still undeveloped natural resources, China is far from the limits of possible growth. Its vast mineral resources are untouched, its railways and roads are unbuilt and its new industrial system is not yet sketched; and it is on the eve of a stupendous industrial revolution which will vastly increase wealth and population.

The Legal Position of Indians in England

Recent events have shown it to be very desirable that Indians in England, students, especially should understand very clearly their position with regard to marriage law in that country. Sir Fredrick Robertson, in the pages of the Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law explains the various phases of this difficult question and draws the following conclusions:

No marriage, wherever contracted, is, as regards the status of marriage between the parties, of any validity in this country unless it be a purely monogamous union. The only marriage recognised in England is a union of one man and one woman, and a marriage celebrated in England before any English public officer (clergyman, registrar, or marriage officer under the Foreign Marriage Act) must always be understood to be a monogamous one, even though a party to it be a Hindu or a Mohammedan, or other person who in his own country could have contracted a polygomous marriage. And nothing is a marriage in England unless celebrated before an English Public Officer. Any person who, having contracted such a marriage, while it is still undissolved, goes through a second similar marriage, commits bigamy.

If a person contracts a valid marriage in England, for example before the Registrar he can contract no other valid marriage until that one has been dissolved.

There can be no doubt that any one, be he Hindu or Mohammedan, who marries an Englishwoman before an English public officer in England, and then returns to India, and with this monogamous marriage still standing, marries another wife according to Hindu or Mohammedan rites, runs the gravest risks of a prosecution for bigamy, while at the same time he has put himself into the position of being unable to dissolve the marriage. The purely legal aspect of the question in this country only has been dealt with, but it is impossible to avoid noticing the very doubtful position of a Hindu or Mohammedan, who has been married in India validly, according to personal law, but who comes to England and contracts a valid monogamous marriage in England. On his return he finds himself, if a Mohammedan, with a Mohammedan wife, or wives whom he could divorce, and a "monogamous" English wife whom he cannot divorce, and whose presence "standing the marriage " prevents him from marrying again at all, and if he be a Hindu he cannot divorce either. The position is not an enviable one and speaking merely from the legal point of view, without considering any other aspect of the case, is one to be very carefully avoided.

A Hindu or a Mahomedan who had contracted a monogamous marriage in England would be bound by the contract he had so entered into and that any further marriage which he entered into would, so long as the first stood be bigamous.

The War and Indian Trade.

Mr. G. Findlay Shirras, in the course of a paper (published in the Hindustan Review for March) explains how the war has stimulated the export of commodities of vital or national interest and at the same time altered the direction of trade with countries abroad. In spite of the phenomenal shortage of ocean freight and the restrictions on the outflow of Indian goods especially to neutrals, the value of the overseas trade for 1917-18 was 393 crores as against 370 the pre-war average, Imports as compared with the five pre-war years increased by 3 per cent. and exports by 6 per cent.; re-exports owing to the scarcity of shipping and the necessity of making India for the moment a distributing centre showed an increase of no less than 97 per cent. A part of the increase in the value of exports and imports was due to the rise in prices. The actual volume of trade decreased by 18 per cent, so that Indian importers had to pay 23 per cent. more to get 18 per cent. less.

For 1917-18 the excess of exports over imports was £61 millions and to liquidate this large favourable balance of trade, treasure and funds

were imported to the extent of nearly £50 millions. The deplorable waste of resources in the absorption of the precious metals has been strikingly brought out during the war. In the five years ending March 1918 gold was absorbed to the extent of Rs. 81 crores or more than half of the world's annual production; and the net imports of silver were nearly twice the annual production. From April 1918, 200 million ounces of American silver have been and are coming into India. There is no justification for this continuing waste and unless it is checked and the hoarded coins restored to circulation, the whole basis of Indian currency and exchange policy must be reconsidered. We should be much better off if we imported goods in preference to the precious metals. If the metals are hoarded in the form of

jewellery they are put to non-productive uses; if they are absorbed prices tend to rise.

Food-grains were exported to the value of 8 crorès above the pre-war average; and wheat exports were 11 per cent. above the pre-war average; while the exports of gram pulse, maize, etc., were 68 per cent. above. Jute export fell to 64 per cent. below the pre-war quinquennial average; but the export of jute manufactures was valued at 43 crores as compared with 20 crores the pre-war average. In the tanning industry the war has been a blessing in disguise. The cotton industry has increased its production by 46 percent, and the exports of Indian piece goods have grown from 90 million yards to 189 million yards. Import of cotton piece-goods decreased no less than 42 per-cent, and this explains in a large measure the rise in the prices of Dhotis and Saris. Indian mills have shown an increase in the production of the finer varieties, particularly coloured goods and have also increased their production of yarn. There has been a decrease in the imports of iron, steel, sugar, railway plant and kerosine oil.

The direction of trade has also changed largely. We are now dealing with the British Empire to a greater extent, its shave of our trade being 57 per cent, as against 53 per cent. The profitable markets lost by Germany and Austria have been taken temporarily mainly by Japan and the United States of America.

During the war period, Government have assisted industrial development (1) by taking steps to guard against the unnecessary import of articles. which are or can be produced in India; (2) organising expert knowledge and making it available to industrialists seeking to begin new concerns (3) assisting and encouraging new industries and enabling industries already established to largely increase their output and (4) insisting upon the effectiveness of all industries, i.e., providing better education, and greater banking facilities,