The magnitude of the issue and the resentment which it has caused in India are, it is true, out of all proportion to the actual number of Indians who have immigrated into other parts of the Empire.  The Indians are not a migratory people.  Mostly engaged in agriculture, they cling, as peasants are apt to do all over the world, to their own bit of land and familiar surroundings.  It is difficult even to induce them to move from one part of India to another, and, intensely conservative in their habits and outlook, with no horizon wider than their own village, they generally prefer, even under the stress of economic pressure, the ills they know of.  But that does not affect the issue raised in the most acute and naked form in some of the States now forming the South African Union.  To Mr. Gandhi’s experiences and struggles in Natal and the Transvaal can be traced back, as I have already shown, a great deal of the bitterness which has now led him to denounce British rule as “Satanic.”  It is only about fifty years ago that Indians began to go across to South Africa, when the Government of Natal with the consent and assistance of the Government of India sought to engage Indians to work as indentured labourers on sugar and tea plantations.  In 1911, the year of the last census, the number of Indians in the Union was about 150,000, and, immigration having been since then checked and finally stopped, they cannot have increased by more than 10 per cent during the last decade.  Of the total in 1911, 133,000 were in Natal, 11,000 in the Transvaal, and 7000 in the Cape, with barely 100 in the Orange Free State.  The proportion of Indians to the total European population of the Union, which was then about 1,400,000, was therefore only just over one to ten.  But they had not remained merely indentured labourers as at the beginning.  When their labour contracts expired many settled in the country, acquiring small plots of land as their own or becoming petty traders, artisans, etc., and, being frugal and hard-working and of a higher type than the Kaffir and other natives, they throve as a whole.  The white population, who had found them at first very useful, began to see in them either dangerous competitors or an undesirable element calculated to complicate the social problems in a country in which the European formed anyhow but a small minority face to face with 6,000,000 natives.  Both the old Boer Government in the Transvaal and the Colonial Government of Natal set to work to curtail by legislative enactments and local regulations the rights which Indians had been at first allowed to enjoy, and to assimilate their treatment to that of the lowest and most backward natives.  The Indians were systematically subjected to the disabilities and indignities against which Mr. Gandhi for the first time led them to organise a violent agitation and finally to offer passive resistance.