Page:The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 1.djvu/248




 * As these men enter the State without wives or female relatives the result is obvious. Their religion teaches them to consider all women as soulless and Christians as natural prey (Green Book No. 1, 1894, p. 30).

21. Your Petitioners ask, can there be a grosser libel on the great faiths prevailing in India or a greater insult to the Indian nation?

22. Such are the statements which, it will be noticed from the Green Books referred to, have been used to make out a case against the Indians.

23. The real and the only reason has all along been suppressed. The only reason for compelling your Petitioners [to live in Location] or putting every obstacle in the way of your Petitioners earning a decent livelihood is the trade jealousy. Your Petitioners, i.e., those who are traders—and the whole crusade is practically against them—have, by their competition and owing to their temperate and thrifty habits, been able to reduce the prices of the necessaries of life. This does not suit the European traders who would make very large profits. It is a notorious fact that your Petitioners, who are traders, are almost without exception teetotallers. Their habits are simple, and thus they are content to make small profits. This and this only is the reason of the opposition against them, and this is well-known to everybody in South Africa. That this is so can be gathered from the public Press of South Africa, which sometimes becomes frank and shows the hatred in its true light. Thus, dealing with the “Coolie question”, as it is contemptuously called, after showing that the real “Coolie” is indispensable to South Africa, The Natal Advertiser of the 15th September, 1893, thus delivers itself:


 * The sooner the steps are taken to suppress, and if possible to expel, the Indian trader the better. These are the real canker that is eating into the very vitals of the community.

24. Again, the Press, the Government organ in the Transvaal, dealing with this question, says : “If the Asiatic invasion is not stopped in time, European shopkeepers must be driven to the wall, as they have been in Natal, and in many parts of the Cape Colony.” The whole of the above article is interesting reading, and is a fair sample of the feeling of the Europeans towards colour in South Africa. Although the whole tenor of it betrays fear on the grounds of competition, there occurs this characteristic passage:


 * If we are to be swamped by these people, trade by Europeans will be impossible, and we shall one and all become subjected to the horrible