it happened that in bombay circumstances conspired to bring the crude facts of labor enslavement vividly before me. i found a vigorous agitation raging in the english press against the horrible sweating that was going on in the cotton mills, i met the journalist most intimately concerned in the business on my second day in india, and before a week was out i was hard at work getting up the question and preparing a memorandum with him on the possibility of immediate legislative intervention. the very name of bombay, which for most people recalls a spacious and dignified landfall, lateen sails, green islands and jutting precipices, a long city of trees and buildings like a bright and various breakwater between the great harbor and the sea, and then exquisite little temples, painted bullock carriages, towers of silence, parsis, and an amazingly kaleidoscopic population,—is for me a reminder of narrow, fœtid, plague-stricken streets and tall insanitary tenement-houses packed and dripping with humanity, and of terrible throbbing factories working far into the night, blazing with electric light against the velvet-black night-sky of india, damp with the steam-clouds that are maintained to moisten the thread, and swarming with emaciated overworked brown children—for even the adults, spare and small, in those mills seem children to a western eye.
i plunged into this heated dreadful business with a passionate interest and went back to the yacht club only when the craving for air and a good bath and clean clothes and space and respect became unendurable. i waded deep in labor, in this process of consuming humanity for gain, chasing my facts through throbbing quivering sheds reeking of sweat and excrement under the tall black-smoking chimneys,—chasing them in very truth, because when we came prying into the mills after the hour when child-labor should cease, there would be a shrill whistle, a patter of feet and a cuffing and hiding of the naked little creatures we were trying to rescue. they would be hidden under rugs, in boxes, in the most impossible places, and we dragged them out scared and lying. many of them were perhaps seven years old at most; and the adults—men and women of fourteen that is to say—we could not touch at all, and they worked in that indian heat, in a noisome air drenched with steam for fourteen and fifteen hours a day. and essential to that general impression is a memory of a slim parsi mill-manager luminously explaining the inherited passion for toil in the indian weaver, and a certain bulky hindu with a lemon-yellow turban and a strip of plump brown stomach showing between his clothes, who was doing very well, he said, with two wives and five children in the mills.
that is my bombay, that and the columns of crossed circles marking plague cases upon the corners of houses and a peculiar acrid smell, and the polychromatic stir of crowded narrow streets between cliffs of architecture with carved timbers and heavy ornamentations, into which the sun strikes obliquely and lights a thousand vivid hues....
bombay, the gateway of what silly people were still calling in those days "the immemorial east," bombay, which is newer than boston or new york, bombay which has grown beneath the englishman's shadow out of a portuguese fort in the last two hundred years....
