The hot climate of India does not suit white people very well. The English who live there always try to send their children back to England, so that they can grow up well and strong. They also want their children to be educated in England.
India also includes Burma, to the south east in the peninsula of Indo-China; and Baluchistan to the northwest, • a part of the plateau of Iran. Burma is a hot country, with forests and rice fields on the level plains along the rivers. Baluchistan is mountainous, rocky, and dry, with hot summers and cold winters, such as those of Afghanistan and Persia.
The 300,000,000 people of India have many large cities. Both Calcutta and Bombay are larger than any city in the United States, except New York, Phila delphia and Chicago. In the Indian cities one sees many temples and other beautiful buildings, some of which were built long before Columbus discovered America.
The people have strangely divided them selves into classes called castes. People of one caste will have nothing to do with the people of another caste. A man would go hungry all day rather than take food from the hand of a man of another caste. A man must belong to the caste of his father. This strange custom is a great bother to the people now that they have begun to trade and build railways.
494. Agriculture and of the natives of India live by agriculture. In the northwest, where the rainfall is light, wheat is grown. In the years of good crops, some of this wheat is exported to England from Karachi. The people here grow for their own food millet, sorghum, and barley, three grains about which we know but little in America. To the east
of Bombay, in the plateau, is the Indian cotton district, from which much cotton goes to England by way of Bombay. People in Manchester, England, not only eat bread made of Indian wheat, but they make cloth of Indian cotton and send it back to India.
In the lower Ganges Valley, the wet part of India, the farmers raise and send to the United States something that every school boy and girl has seen. Certainly everyone has seen burlap. It is cloth made from the fibers of a reed-like plant (jute) that groWs in the wet plain of the Ganges, and is shipped from Calcutta to Boston and New York, where it is made into the com mon gunny-sacks of which we use so many.
495. of the people of India are very poor, and there are so many of them that when they have poor crops they sometimes have famines, and many people starve. The government tries to help by building irrigation works, teaching the people better ways to grow crops, and by giving food in famine times. But some times a whole summer goes by without rain in large districts. Then there are so many to feed that starvation cannot be kept away.
496. English peo ple, with the help of the, natives, have built cotton factories in some of the larger cities, and some of the natives also have built cotton factories and jute factories. Manufacturing is now increasing in India. But most of the Indian cotton is still sent• to England and Japan. Most of the cotton cloth used in India still comes from England.