EFFICIENCY OF LABOUE 149 



in part, to reduce their hours of labour. Few people 

 will contend that incessant labour is in itself a bless- 

 ing ; and when a man has satisfied his necessities he 

 will fix the limit up to which he is prepared to work 

 with reference to his desire for more than the bare 

 necessities of life, in other words, in accordance with 

 his standard of comfort. The standard of comfort of 

 the Indian peasant is low, and his training teaches 

 him to be content with little ; but there is clear evi- 

 dence that the standard of living is rising. The trouble, 

 of course, is that the efficiency of labour and the 

 standard of effort in India, are, speaking generally, 

 already very low, and will hardly bear any relaxation. 

 In the Bombay cotton mills it takes six men to do 

 work similar to that done in Lancashire by one 

 operative, and even then the outturn is less. It is 

 even stated that there are cotton mills, identically 

 constructed, in the Bombay Presidency and in Lanca- 

 shire, respectively, and that the number of hands 

 employed in the former is ten times as great as the 

 number employed in the latter. In agriculture the 

 following examples give some idea of the relative 

 efficiency of agricultural labour in India. In the 

 West Indies a labourer gets three times the pay of a 

 labourer in the Deccan, yet it costs less in the former 

 place to get a ton of sugar-cane cut and stripped, be- 

 cause the West Indian labourer does more than three 

 times the work of the Deccan labourer. Again, take 

 the operation of cotton picking. A woman in India 

 will pick only one-half as much as a woman in Egypt 



