Page:The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 2.djvu/204

 beer, etc. Again, I dare say, bad for butchers and licenced victuallers. Depend upon it, all these things will find their level, but to force by Act of Parliament (beyond what decency and sobriety call for the common weal) what people are to eat and drink and wear is tyranny, not beneficent legislation. Crowds of white immigrants are kept out. Are they? With our native population, unless you can shunt the whole lot, white men will not work for a mere living wage in this Colony. They would rather be loafers.


 * We cannot get out of it. Ours is a black Colony, and much as I like our natives in their proper place, and the coolies [sic], too, who is more willing to keep it [sic] in his, the While man’s role is and must be to be boss. Stop at that, I do not want to talk of how poor farmers cannot afford to pay their fashionable friends, the town artisans, their price, and are very glad to put up with even indifferent work by an off-coloured mechanic; but I would appeal to the skilled workmen to be content to regulate their own tariffs, and not be afraid of indifferent opposition—a good man is always worth his full value— but avoid, because they are numerically strong in the towns, a class agitation, a race quarrel. It is the same with the good tradesmen, and though the owners of country stores may have to cut their prices finer, they won’t be ruined. Four hundred gallons of treacle for cash per week isn’t bad. Talk of the federation of the Empire, and we are tabooing our fellow-subjects of India, whose warriors have fought shoulder to shoulder with ours, whose armies have upheld the honour of the flag on many a gory field! There are plenty of European stores in India, and well patronized and flourishing, too.

It is, in your Memorialists’ humble opinion, because the Indians sell the wares for the European merchants, that there are so many large European houses which afford employment to hundreds of European clerks and assistants. Your Memorialists submit that an industrious and frugal class of men, as the Indians are admitted to be even by their most virulent opponents, cannot but on the whole add to the general prosperity, wealth, and consequently material happiness of the place they go to. The Star sums up the situation with regard to the Uitlanders in the Transvaal—the class of people who so inconsistently object to the presence of the Indians in South Africa, in the following words:


 * South Africa is a new country. It should therefore be open to all. Poverty should be no bar to admission. The vast majority of those now in affluence, came here originally with only the proverbial half-crown in their pockets. By all means let us keep the population reputable; do so however, by the just and stringent enforcement of local laws against vagrancy and roguery, and not by the arbitrary exclusion of new arrivals before it is p