MIGRATION AND THE FACTORY WORKER. 15 
retain tenancies, various changes may operate to render a holding 
insufficient for those dependent on it. An increase in the number of mem- 
bers of the family, a rise in rent, the growth of debt, all contribute to 
force the agricultural worker to abandon his ancestral occupation. 
Moreover, there are always large areas where the soil can 
produce enough for the people in the ordinary year, but where 
periodic drought or floods make living precarious. A generation ago 
there was, in some of these areas, no alternative to facing the penury 
of the lean years; but the opening up of the country by the improvement 
of communications has offered a way of escape. Migration has, in fact, 
been dependent upon opportunity. It is noteworthy, for example, that 
where a connection was established between a factory and a particular 
village or group of villages, recruits would continue to come from these, 
while adjacent areas yielded none. Some of the minor currents in the 
streams of migration owe their force to little more than accident. 
Village Crafts. 
It must not be supposed that the economic pressure which 
drives the villager to the city is confined to those engaged in agriculture. 
The village craftsman, working formerly within an isolated economic unit, 
finds himself, by the improvement of communications and the growth of in- 
dustry, subjected to competition from the larger world. The textile mills 
have many weavers drawn from families that, for generations previously, 
worked at handlooms ; the village worker in hides and leather, the 
carpenter and the blacksmith are all being subjected to pressure from the: 
factory. In many cases the easiest, perhaps the only, way out of the 
difficulty is for the village craftsman to transfer his allegiance to the rival 
which is supplanting him. 
Disabilities. 
Poverty, though it is the most important, is not the only dis- 
ability which drives the villager to the factory. All over India there are 
strata of the population who suffer from serious social disabilities ; the 
lower castes and those who are regarded as outside the pale of Hindu 
society find that in the industrial areas caste disabilities lose much of their 
force. With the growing realisation of the humiliation of their position 
and of the freedom which industry offers, there is an increasing readiness 
5 migrate to industrial centres. In addition to the bondage which 
caste may inflict, there are other bonds which, if they were not consciously 
felt to be hardships a generation ago, are steadily becoming more irksome 
fo those subjected to them. There are traces of feudalism to be found 
Many parts of the country ; and in a few areas there is still a system of 
bond-zervice which is not far removed from slavery. We deal with this 
factor in a later chapter for, although it is responsible for some migration, 
that migration is not, as a rule, to the factories. But it is obvious that 
every disability to which men are subjected in the village adds attrac- 
bions to the avenues of escape which industry offers. In. addition to. 
those who migrate to escape from. destitution. or disabilities. there are