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JAINA GAZETTE.
become still shorter, if we consider that a small community with no inlets from anywhere must decay faster than a larger one. But it is not necessary to make an already dark future more gloomy by this calculation.
We can look at it from a different point of view. The figures given above do not represent the real decrease ; for they are calculated on the suppositiou that the population was stationary. How can it be so ? With increasing attention paid to sanitation, with increasing peace and ever-increasing education, with improvement in the means of communication and consequent greater material well-being, increase in the population must come. And so it has. The total population of India increased in the period 1901-1911 by 11.8%. Should not the Jainas have also increased by this average 11.8%? But we find them less by 6.5%. That works up to a real total loss of 18:3% making note of the unavoidable mistake in counting the Jainas among the Hindus in previoas decades.
But ve will make a mistake if we think that the Jainas should have increased by only 11.8% the average increase of the total population of India, of which more than four-fifths are agriculturists. And it is but too sad a truth that their condition is far from satisfactory. Famine after famine has been killing them and there are well-known reasons, which need not be mentioned here, why they are so poor and so ill-fed. No small proportion of them has never known a second meal in a day. A small increase in their number was quite natural and it is but reasonable to suppose that the percentage of increase of the total population has been very considerably lowered by the unsatisfactory condition of the Indian peasant. But for this, the increase should have been vastly more.
The Jaina community on other hand are largely a commercial class. Their living does not as a rule depend on good crops. They are not much affected by famines. They are not ill-fed and starving—wby, they are one of the richest communities in India. The evils of drinking and meat-eating which are responsible for bad health and a large number of deaths are entirely
absent from among them. There is, then, no reason why under Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
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