The Indian labour class

THE debate that took place in the House of Commons on the 14th instant on the condition of the labouring classes in India was evidently intended to show the sympathy of the British Labour Party with its “comrades” in India. Now that the party has been in power in England, it took this opportunity, through a private member, to do something to improve the economic condition of the labourers in India, whose great poverty and low wages were graphically described. Mr. TW Grundy moved a resolution declaring that the “conditions and wages of Labour in India are so serious as to call for such changes in the Indian constitution as to secure votes for and representation of the workers and peasants of India in both the Assembly and the Legislative Council.” Unfortunately, neither the mover nor his supporters possessed the necessary knowledge of labour problems in India which could have enabled them to press the Government to give effect to their good intentions. Perhaps it did not occur to them as very odd that the people of Great Britain should at all attempt to solve such a complicated problem affecting the people of a country very different from their own and situated six thousand miles away from them. The most effective remedy they could have suggested was to give powers of self-determination to India at once so that their “comrades” in this country might be free to adopt methods suited to them to improve their moral and material condition. Instead of suggesting this natural course, they obviously assumed, like others, that it was their duty and their right to solve every problem relating to India without studying the real facts of the case.