to that?  Are we not at least entitled to claim that the Indian tax-payer’s money should not be spent merely on the maintenance of British garrisons that are here to-day and gone to-morrow, and of an Indian army that is so constituted as to lack all the essentials of a national army, but should go to the building up of an army really worthy to take its place on equal terms when India attains to self-government with the other armies of a commonwealth of free nations?”

The racial issue dominates in a far graver form the whole question of the status and treatment of Indians in the Dominions and Crown Colonies.  For there it enters a much larger field which extends far beyond India.  In India so far, in speaking of the racial issue, Indians and Europeans alike have hitherto had in mind chiefly the relations between the ruling and the subject race.  When the rulers all belong to one race and come from a far distant country not to settle permanently but chiefly to maintain, each one in his own sphere and during his appointed time, the continuity of rulership over millions of subjects of another and very different race with a different civilisation, an additional element of discord is introduced into their relations.  But since Great Britain achieved dominion over India the main issue between rulers and ruled has been how far on the one hand British rulers should devolve on to their Indian subjects a share in the government and administration of the country, and how far on the other hand their Indian subjects could hasten such devolution by various forms of pressure.  Whatever part any purely racial antagonism may have played in the controversy, the British rulers of India have at least since 1833, and still more since the Queen’s Proclamation in 1858, debarred themselves from basing on racial differences their refusal or reluctance to meet the growing aspirations of their Indian subjects.  They have been content to plead the political immaturity of the Indian people and the lack of individual qualifications amongst all but a few Indians, and even these disabilities they had deliberately undertaken and expressed their anxiety to remove by the introduction of Western education.  Neither colour nor descent, it was specifically declared, were to constitute any barrier.  It is quite otherwise with the question of the right of Indians to immigrate into other parts of the Empire, and of the measure of rights they are to enjoy as settlers there.  It brings us face to face with the racial issue pure and simple and in its widest aspects.  There is an open and declared conflict between the claims of the Dominions to exclude or to restrict the rights of Indian settlers on grounds of colour and descent for the avowed purpose of maintaining the paramount ascendancy of one race over another, and the claims put forward by Indians as British subjects to have access to all parts of the Empire and to possess the same rights as other British subjects already enjoy there.  Some of the arguments employed to justify the attitude of the Dominions allege inferior social standards of Indian life, but behind them and quite undisguised is the supreme argument that Indians belong to a coloured race and, in consequence, have no interests or rights that can possibly prevail against those of a superior white race.