INDIA'S POVERTY AND ILLITERACY 21 



is often a chattel, degraded, debased. This treatment 

 causes her to lose her self-respect. A survey of the field 

 of Indian life shows no more devitalizing handicap 

 clamped upon a great people than the illiteracy of the 

 nation's motherhood. There is most urgent need that 

 the Christian women of the world help their illiterate 

 sisters in India to receive the same generous heritage 

 which they themselves take as a matter of course, seldom 

 realizing that they owe their position of equality with 

 men, and freedom to decide their own life's partner and 

 work, to Jesus, who is the world's first Gentleman. It is 

 only as Christian men obey Him that woman has a 

 chance as an individual with a soul, and a right to choose 

 her own life, to control her own person, and to say who 

 shall be the father of her children. 



The causes for India's poverty are many, but the chief 

 of them are such as can only be removed by the Indians 

 themselves for they are related to the religion of the 

 Hindus. I believe the causes for India's poverty to be: 

 1. Caste; 2. Too many cattle that are an economic loss 

 to the country; 3. The great army of able-bodied men, 

 over five millions of them, who toil not neither do they 

 spin, the religious mendicants or "faqirs." But the 

 greatest of these is Caste. 



