THE INDIAN MENACE.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 97, 17 January 1908, Page 6

THE INDIAN MENACE.

. - ——e— —- ' ' Tiie events now taking place in the Transvaal India '-should warn publicists throughout the Empire of the undesirableness of extending and intensifying the difficulties of the colour problem that is facing the Empire's ■ , statesmen. Without making "the yellow, peril" acute, the Empire has enough to do in controlling her great Hindu .element.; The " passive resistance" campaign, that is making the enforcement of the llegistration Act seriously embarrassing to the Transvaal Government, is not unrelated to the wave of sedition that is again sweeping through India. The Registration Act—which provides for the compulsory registration of all Hindus in the Transvaal—is an " efficiency " measure to check the influx of the Asiatics. Its provisions are particularly stringent, and' include the now famous finger-prjnt clauses. The Hindus have increasingly protest&l that they do not object to registration, but they object to compulsion, and particularly to the indignity; of being treated, as they put it, as criminals in the matter of the finger-print identification. Under the guidance, mainly, of Mr. Ghandi, a Johannesburg solicitor of Hindu extraction, who has usod language as inflammatory; as that of Mr. Keir Hardie'ancl his friend' Mr. Banerjee in ludia, tlie natives have rested their resistance to the Act upon their. rights as British subjects, and are now submitting to . imprisonment so generally that the gaols should shortly be inadequate to hold them all.. It seems clear that the plea of indignity"" is not wholly sincere, and that the agitation is designed to force the repeal of the Act, and the ultimate removal of barriers to the free influx of Indians into the Transvaal. In India, as a cable message reports to-day, Mr. \lknerjee and 'Lala Lajpat llai are renewing their violent attacks upon " the common enemy," and calling upon "patriots" to fight against the " political slavery" of the Hindus. The treatment of the Transvaal Hindus has been used by the Indian agitators as so much more proof of injustice. The position in India cannot be lightly treated, and the danger in the Transvaal is that, by scoring a victory, over the white 1 colony, the followers of Mr. Ghandi may stimulate the sedition-mongers of Bengal to further energy in their attempt to destroy British rule. >So far as the Transvaal is concerned, no, overseas Briton who has any pride of race can fail to sympathise with the Government of that country. The taunt of "economic jealousy " has b'een flung at the Transvaal Government, of course, as it is' flung by the London " Times " and the " Saturday Keview" at every mail who expresses the instinctive hostility of white communities to free Asiatic immigration. The colour problem, now making itself felt in. South Africa and Canada, may make itself felt before long in Australia. It is one of the contingencies overlooked by the statesmen who originated and carried out the Empire expansion policy, and it must be faced as a penalty of Empire. Mr. Ghandi has declared that the issue has come to this; Will the Empire keep India or the colonies? The Empire can keep both. In the meantime, as we had occasion to say yesterday in another connection, there never was greater need, while the Empire is disturbed by a colour problem within its borders, for temperance and sympathetic candour all round. ,