Jain Gazette 1905 10

Author(s): Jain Student Institute Kolhapur
Publisher: Jain Student Institute Kolhapur

Page 9

Jain Gazette.
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wideness of views that are the sure results of education in a great cosmopolitan seminary. His mind became saturated with the spirit of the coming age of western commercialism in which he played such an important part.
HIS GREAT OPPORTUNITY.
In olden days, there was no doubt a large amount of carrying trade between the internal centres of Indian commerce. There were the old, unhappily now decaying, ports like Surat, Chiplun and Rajapore on the Western side of this country which carried on sea-borne trade with various other parts and supplied flourishing markets for the bullock-borne commodities produced by up-Ghat plains. But the very conditions of those times put all commerce out of the sphere of competition and consequent risk. Indeed even a certain amount of dangerous risk was run by the marchants owing to the insecure state. their society. But there was very little commercial closche between the growing districts and the consuming Want of roads, postal convenience and telegraphic comm cation and the ever threatening danger that beset the roads that existed, seperated the various portions of the country even more than could the huge mountain ranges untraversed by human feet. To such as took this besetting risk, trade was a monopoly of a very paying kind. In the middle ages, the Arab caravans were said to charge forty Rupees for an article that cost them originally only one Rupee. If not to this extent, one would be quite safe in saying that the profit charged by our merchants in pre-railway-days were certainly worthy of being placed in the same category as above to a pretty good extent. But the advent of British Rule in India inaugurated a new era in commerce as in every other respect. And with this new age, a large number of able men rose up to greate prosperity.
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