18 THE GOSPEL AND THE PLOW 



rate of about two cents per day or less, are permanently 

 underfed and ill-nourished, are so short of food that 

 they do not get proper growth and are generally too 

 weak to do a fair day 's work. 



Now a cent does not buy more of the necessities of life 

 in India than it does in America, for the price for grain 

 is fixed by world conditions ; wheat is in a world market. 

 Cotton cloth made in Lancashire from American cotton, 

 competes with cloth made from cotton grown, spun and 

 woven in India. 



It simply means that Indians, in number approximat- 

 ing the population of the United States, about one hun- 

 dred million, have not yet come to regard as possible 

 luxuries many things which America's poorest regard as 

 absolute necessities. No one may understand India who 

 ignores this degrading, debasing poverty which is one 

 inseparable link in the vicious circle of ignorance, super- 

 stition, oppression, ill-health, infant mortality, lack of 

 sanitation and the continued persistence of such epidemic 

 diseases as cholera, dysentery, plague, enteric, malaria, 

 hook-worm, small-pox and other preventable ills. It is 

 a poverty which robs manhood, womanhood, and child- 

 hood of all that is best and most worthwhile in them. 

 India 's poverty is a menace to the rest of the world. A 

 prosperous India producing more of the things she can 

 most easily produce could exchange them for the manu- 

 factured articles she needs but cannot produce. Self- 

 interest, as well as sympathy, demand that a remedy be 

 found for India's poverty. 



In many villages with from one hundred to three hun- 

 dred inhabitants, one could not find one person, man or 

 woman, who could read or write. Sir Michael E. Sadler, 

 K.C.S.I., in reviewing ''Village Education in India,'* 



