EMPIRE	343
These differences make political and economic progress
difficult, but they do not remove the need for it. Although there
are many wealthy Indians, and many whose culture, learning and
knowledge of the world are extensive, the mass of the people,
Whatever their race, language or faith, have poverty and ignorance
in common. More than two-thirds of the people are occupied
in agriculture, employing century-old methods, so that the
4 productivity of the land is small. A landlord dass takes a consider-
able proportion of the total wealth, and the peasant is commonly
burdened .with debt. Many labourers move, in their search for
work, between the countryside and the towns, which must
therefore give temporary shelter to many more than their
permanent population. The conditions of work, and, still more,
those of housing, would be regarded as intolerable in this
country, though, since the establishment of the International
Labour Organisation,1 there has been some progress in Factory
Laws. -The poverty of India may be described statistically by
saying that the average income of its inhabitants is fd.* a day,
and that the mass of them get far less; this means not only a
shortage of food, which is reflected in a heavy death rate at an
early age, but an absence of those standards of sanitation and
amenity, to which even the poorest in Britain are accustomed.
British Rule.
British rule has put an end to the internal warfare which
once troubled India, and so paved the way for the investment of
much British and Indian capital. The resulting Indian industrial
revolution greatly increased the importance of two classes in
Indian society—the urban workers and the commercial and
4 industrial middle dass. The latter, finding itself hampered by
trade restrictions imposed in the interest of British capital, began
to demand self-Government for India, and expressed that demand
in the formation of a political party, the Indian National Congress.
{Meanwhile, the total wealth of India has grown enormously,
i Sec Ch. XXIV,