Page:Mahatma Gandhi, his life, writings and speeches.djvu/320

M. K. Gandhi which it was threatened to plunge the Indian community, who once more offered voluntary re-registration if the Act was suspended. The petition was rejected contemptuously, and, at the end of the year, several of the leaders were arrested ordered to leave the Colony, and, upon their refusal to do so, imprisoned for various periods. This process was repeated, until some hundreds of all classes were lodged in gaol, and the Government, realising that their efforts to crush the community had failed, opened up negotiations through the agency of Mr. Albert Cartwright, then Editor of the Transvaal Leader, with the result that, almost at the moment that H. H. the Aga Khan was presiding over a huge public meeting of protest in Bombay, a compromise was signed, whereby it was agreed to suspend passive resistance, to proceed with voluntary re-registration for a period of three months, during which the operation of the law was to be suspended, and, as the Indian signatories clearly understood, to repeal the hated Act if the re-registration was satisfactorily completed. In the meantime, the situation bad been complicated by the passing of an Immigration Act that, operating jointly with the Asiatic Law Amendment Act, absolutely prohibited all Asiatic immigration, no matter how cultured the immigrant might be. Thus, at a stroke, the policy of non-racial legislation, that had been so strongly 198