KELAXATION OF EFFOKT 147 



ments on the labour situation in Gujarat in a series 

 of articles which he recently contributed to the 

 " Quarterly Journal ' of the Broach Agricultural 

 Association. After deploring the fact that all classes 

 of the rural population in Gujarat now require 

 pleasures and luxuries which they did not formerly 

 want, he continues : " The farmer does not at present 

 do as much personal labour as the farmer of old, nor 

 does his family supply the labour that they used to 

 supply formerly. In my young days I used to see 

 the farmer and his family giving their due share of 

 labour to their ancestral profession. It is not so now. 

 At present the whole labour required in all agricul- 

 tural operations is done by hired labourers. This is 

 a great drawback." He then states that amongst 

 the agricultural classes of Patidars, Kunbis, Anavalas, 

 Borahs and Bajputs in Gujarat practically no one 

 does any actual field labour nowadays, and he esti- 

 mates that amongst these classes alone 300,000 able- 

 bodied men have during the last generation been 

 withdrawn from the ranks of active labourers, in this 

 way, and added to the class which lives on the land 

 without doing any actual field work. 



We have now considered the two classes of culti- 

 vators, those who cultivate their own land, and those 

 who hold no land but work only for hire. Between 

 those two comes a large intermediate class of men who 

 own a few acres of land, the cultivation of which oc- 

 cupies part of their time, and who work for hire at other 

 seasons. It has already been noted (p. 60) that this 



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