NATAL FOR THE WHITE MAN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 13727, 18 April 1908, Page 4

NATAL FOR THE WHITE MAN.

'• The time has come for something to be done to save Natal for the white man," declares the Natal Witness. "We have no desire," it says, "that Indians shall be unfairly or harshly dealt with. Those who have come her* and have been, allowed by as to acquire rights and privileges must not be ruthlessly assailed as though such rights and privileges did not exist. If any step is to be token to annul their rights they must be given ample notice, and every facility to protect their own interests. Moreover, if we acquire such rights by what amounts to legal force, we must pay a fair price to those who are deprived of them. It seems to us a monstrous thing that in a European colony practically nothing should he done to attract white settlers or retain those already in it, while every facility should be given for law-priced Asiatic* to rush in and flood the country with cheap trade and labour, the price of which is sent thousands of miles across the ocean to be spent. India is a big enough country for its own people. Let them be content there, where they have a good form of government and rights and privileges they cannot obtain anywhere else in the world. By requesting that they shall stay in their own country South Africa imposes upon them no hardship, but simply says in effect that we, as the white and dominant race, have already one sufficiently serious problem in our own blacks without desiring to create another. It is ft thousand pities Natal did not take up this attitude years ago. Thert is time yet, difficult as the problem is. The agitation in the Transvaal may haw achieved at least one good object in thai it will have caused South Africa in general to realise the full depth and meaning of the problem with which it is face to face. Judging by the meeting in Durban, and those held previously at other centres, the feeling throughout Natal in favour of the Transvaal is intensifying. Natal affords the most striking example it is possible to conceive of the evils Avnich must inevitably result from the influx of Asiatics into communities of Europeans. At the time when this colony was lirst thrown open to the Indian no one realised, or, if he realised and predicted it, he was laughed at, the enormous amount of trouble which would ultimately ensue. Had it been understood then to what- serious and often fatal disabilities the presence of the Asiatic would eventually subject the European, no one would have had the hardihood to advocate a policy of importation. The Indians were brought here in the first instance to help the planters. Not even the 'planters who brought them here looked far enough ahead to see that in many cares the very Indians brought by them to till the soil would, with their descendants, own as masters the property on which many years ago they worked as servants.""