Page:The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 1.djvu/275




 * In a country where the Native population is in number so far in excess of the European, the unlimited settlement of Indians is not considered desirable, and there is a general wish that when they have completed their last period of indenture they should return to India. There are already about 25,000 free Indians settled in the Colony, many of whom have allowed their right to a return passage to lapse; this is exclusive of a very considerable Banya trading population!

7. Thus the reasons for the special arrangement are political merely. Properly speaking, there is no question of overcrowding at all. There can be none in a newly opened-up country where there are yet vast tracts of land entirely uninhabited and uncultivated.

8. Again, in the same report, the Delegates state as follows:


 * There is a strong feeling amongst the merchants and shopkeepers with regard to the Arabs, who are all traders and not workers; but as they are mostly British subjects and do not go to the Colony under any form of agreement, it is recognized that they cannot be interfered with.


 * The Coolie does not come into competition to any considerable extent with the European. Field work for Europeans is impossible on the coast, where all the plantations are situated, and the number of servants other than Coolies and Natives has always been very small.


 * Although we are decidedly of opinion that up to the present the working Indians who have settled down (the italics are your Memorialists') have been of great benefit to the Colony, we cannot avoid, having regard to the future, and, in the face of the great Native problem yet to be solved in South Africa, sharing in the concern which is now felt. If a large proportion of the Coolies had taken advantage of the return passage provided for them, there would have been less cause for alarm.

9. Your Memorialists most respectfully submit that the above extracts, which form part of the reasons given for measures restrictive of the settlement of freed Indians in the Colony, go to prove the exact opposite; for if the Indian traders, to which class most of your Memorialists belong, who “do not go to the Colony under any form of agreement”, could not be interfered with, much less the indentured Indians, who are also equally British subjects and who are, so to speak, invited to go to the Colony, and whose settlement (in the Delegates' own words) “has been of great benefit to