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Rh impression which was left on my mind on the occasions when I have had the opportunity of traveling far afield. A quarter of a century ago it was my good fortune to spend a few months in India, and to get some insight into the extraordinary contrasts between Britain and her great dependency. At that time many of the changes which had revolutionized English industry and internal traffic were beginning to make themselves felt throughout India. Railway communication was being opened up in all directions, and cotton spinning was carried on at mills in Bombay and in Hyderabad in the Deccan. The results of the age of mechanical invention had begun to invade the changeless civilization of the east. Still the persistence of the old order was also noticeable. The village community, as an exclusive group, with the headman who supervised all transactions with the outer world, forced itself upon my attention when I attempted to hire a pony to visit the cave at Karli. I passed a granary in Kathiawar where the officials of a native state were measuring out the crop and collecting the revenue in kind. The highly developed gild system at Ahmedabad was the very image of much that I had read of regulated industry in medieval towns. On every side it seemed as if the survivals of the past had been preserved in the east, so as to make the story of bygone ages in the west alive before my eyes. On the other hand, the transition from the old to the new, which had gone on steadily in England for centuries, seemed to be ready to sweep over Hindustan like a flood that would disintegrate existing institutions, while it showed little constructive power. And when I heard discussions on the incidence of taxation, the pressure of the salt tax, or the impossibility of imposing an income tax, I at least realized that the conditions were strangely unlike those of which a chancellor of the exchequer would have to take account in England. The mechanism of society is entirely different; the expedients which would make for convenience and equality and inexpensiveness in England would not necessarily be feasible in India at all.

Five years ago I had occasion to reside for some months in the United States, and once again I came away with a strong impression that the mechanism of society was very unlike that with which I am familiar in England—the differences were more subtle, but not less real, than those between English and Indian economic life. Throughout the states there are few vestiges of past history; the alleged relics of Norse invasion have disappeared under the solvent of critical investigation; and though frontier life has been till lately an abiding factor in American civilization, comparatively little influence has been exercised by the native races on the economy of America to-day. The English stock, with grafts of many kinds, has had a clear space in which to grow. In India the conflict of the past and the present seemed to be the dominating condition, but in America there had been