Page:The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 1.djvu/323




 * Nothing more clearly proves this than our own experience. If we look to 1859, we shall find that the assured promise of Indian labour resulted in an immediate rise of revenue which increased fourfold within a few years. Mechanics who could not get work and were earning 5/- a day, and less, found their wages more than doubled, and progress gave encouragement to everyone from the Burg to the Sea. But a few years later, alarm (a well-founded alarm) arose, that it would be suspended (the records are there to correct me if I am wrong) simultaneously, down went the revenue and wages, immigration was checked, confidence vanished and retrenchment and reductions of salaries was the main thing thought of; and yet another change some years later in 1873 (long after the discovery of diamonds in 1868), a fresh promise of renewed Indian immigration created its effect, and up again went the revenue, wages and salaries, and retrenchment was soon spoken of as a thing of the past (would that this was so now).


 * Records like these ought to tell their own tale and silence childish race sentimentalities and mean jealousies.


 * In further and collateral corroboration of the effect of introduction of coloured labour on the welfare of white settlers let me refer to a speech made by the Duke of Manchester who has so identified himself with colonial interests. He had just returned from Queensland and told his hearers that the result of an agitation there, hostile to the introduction of coloured labour, had proved most disastrous to those very white settlers who had hoped by checking the supply of imported coloured labourers to destroy competition which they wrongly imagined deprived the white settlers of work.

At page 100 the same gentleman continues:


 * So far as concerns free Indian traders, their competition and the consequent lowering of the prices of articles of consumption by which the public benefits (and yet strange to say, of which it complains) it is clearly shown that these Indian shops have been and are most exclusively supported by the larger firms of white merchants who thus practically employ these men to dispose of their goods.


 * Stop Indian immigration if you will; if there are not enough unoccupied houses now, empty more by clearing out Arabs or Indians, who add to the productive and consuming power of a less than half-peopled country, but let us trace results in this one branch of the enquiry taking it as an example of others, trace out how untenanted houses depreciate the value of property and securities, how after this must result stagnation in the building trade, and those other trades and stores for supplies dependent on it. Follow out how this leads to a reduced demand for white mechanics,