St. Gandhi Yessed

Sweetly reasonably John Henry Whitley who as "Mr. Speaker" used to soothe irate members of the House of Commons into sitting down (see col. 1) turned up again last week like the brightest of pennies.

In the two years since his retirement as Speaker (TIME, July 2, 1928), Mr. Whitley has spent $400.000 to find out what is the matter with Indian laborers, spent it as chairman of a Royal Commission which presented its 570-page report last week.

Astounding to those Britons who think St. Gandhi a crack-brained fakir is the fact that the Royal Commission's conclusions are substantially those which the Mahatma has trumpeted for years.

Mr. Gandhi has always said that the grinding poverty of India's half-starved masses is the root-evil of the whole Indian question. Last week the Royal Commission reported that "stark poverty" is the "major reason" for the Indian laborer's "comparative inefficiency."

"An endeavor must be made," urged the Royal Commission, "to enhance the efficiency, to heighten earnings and to improve conditions of life. . . . Poverty leads to bad conditions and inefficiency, inefficiency and bad conditions to poverty." Thus the Royal Commission discovered a 20th Century vicious circle similar to the mystic Hindu Wheel of Karma: a series of events everlastingly repeating each other from which the only escape is violently to break the wheel.

Mr. Gandhi has charged British employers with heartless, indifferent exploitation of their Indian employes. The Royal Commission stigmatized last week the "vicious system" whereby British employers do not hire & fire their Indian help themselves, but leave this to Indian foremen who extort the last anna of tribute from wretches who pay to get a job, pay to keep it. An entire chapter is devoted by the Royal Commission to abuses and extortions practiced upon simple Indian peasants who come to town seeking factory jobs.

The Royal Commission reported cigaret factories in which Indian children aged from six to ten are employed 14 hours a day, seven days a week, at a wage of 4-c- a day, adding, "similar conditions were found to prevail in the mining and wool industries." Adult Indian workers, the Royal Commission ascertained, receive some 37-c- a day unless highly skilled, when they may earn 50 cents.

Mr. Gandhi is tireless in his crusade against intoxicants. The Royal Commission, notwithstanding that a trifle of their $400,000 expense account went for drink, reported in favor of "prohibition or restriction" in India--not Britain.

Composed primarily of married men, the Royal Commission viewed with alarm '"deplorable and wretched conditions" in Indian factory towns "where there are twice as many females as males."

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