CHAP. xtx. THE CURSE OF CIVILIZATION. 341 



vice under which millions are forced to live in the slums 

 of all our great cities, are, in proportion to our wealth 

 and their nearness to the centre of government, even 

 more disgraceful than the periodic famines of remote 

 India. Both are the results of the same system the 

 exploitation of the workers for the benefit of the ruling 

 caste and both alike are among the most terrible fail- 

 ures of the century. 



The state of things briefly indicated in this chapter is 

 not progress, but retrogression. It will be held by the 

 historian of the future to show that we of the nine- 

 teenth century were morally and socially unfit to possess 



that the Bombay " chawls" were not so bad as the Calcutta "bus- 

 tees"; that it was " utterly untrue to say that Bombay was a grossly 

 insanitary town," and that it was really the most sanitary large town 

 in India! But the climax of contradiction is reached by the Rev. A. 

 Bowman, late chaplain of Byculla Jail, Bombay, who stated in a 

 letter to The Times (reprinted in the Journal of the Society of Arts, 

 vol. xlvi. p. 333), that he had known the streets and lanes of Bom- 

 bay intimately for the last five years, and he says, without fear of 

 contradiction, that such places as were described by the Surgeon- 

 General [Dr. Cleghorn] do not exist! The reverend gentleman 

 referred especially to "chawls" holding one thousand people, and 

 rooms and corridors which the light of day could not enter; but he 

 apparently did not then know that Dr. Cleghorn had made these 

 statements in an official memorandum for the information of the 

 Government of India, or he would hardly have made his contradic- 

 tion so emphatic. 



But what are we to think of a Government that has allowed the 

 erection of such tenements in the two chief cities of the empire, and 

 which takes no heed of the most rudimentary principles of sanita- 

 tion till a visitation of plague compels attention to them? A Gov- 

 ernment which spends millions on railroads, on gigantic armies, on 

 annexations and frontier wars, on colleges and schools, and on mag- 

 nificent public buildings, while allowing a considerable proportion 

 of the native population to live in such horribly insanitary condi- 

 tions as to rival the worst plague-infected cities of Europe in the 

 Middle Ages. And this is modern civilization! 



