VIVE KANANDA LEAVES
(New Discoveries, Vol. 1, p. 380.)
[Detroit Journal, February 23, 1894]
——
HE TELLS SOMETHING
ABOUT THE CONDITIONS OF HINDOO LABORERS.
Swami Vive Kananda repaid the admiration of his lady acquaintances by writing verses, at the same time religious and semi-sentimental, yesterday afternoon.1 He departed this morning for Ada, O. [Ohio].
In a conversation concerning the material condition of the Hindu workingmen, the learned monk said that the poor lived on porridge alone. The laborer ate a breakfast of porridge, went off to his daily toil and returned in the evening to another breakfast of porridge and called it dinner. In most of the provinces the farmers were so poor that they could not afford to eat any of the wheat raised. A day laborer on a farm received only 12 pence a day, but a dollar in India brought 10 times as much as it would in this country. Cotton was raised, but its fiber was so short it had to be woven by hand, and even then it was necessary to import American and Egyptian cotton to mix with it.
- ^At the small farewell tea which Mrs. John J. Bagley held for her departing guest.