The agreement arrived at between General Smuts and Mr. Gandhi in 1914 was in the nature of a compromise which gave the Indians some relief without conceding the principle of equal rights, and it only brought the long struggle to a temporary close.  The old sore was reopened with the Asiatics’ Trading and Land Act of 1919, which, the Indians contend, wantonly violated both the terms and the spirit of the 1914 settlement and which Europeans have declared to be “necessary in the interests of a white population.”  The chief grievances of the Indians are the denial of representation and franchise (except in Cape Colony), their segregation within appointed areas, and the curtailment of their “inherent right to trade.”  Some Europeans would fain deny that colour prejudice affects their view of the problem, which they regard as essentially eugenic and economic.  As far as the mixture of races is concerned the European’s objections to it should be readily understood by the Indians, whose own caste laws are as rigidly directed as any in the world against the drawbacks of miscegenation.  The European, however, has legislated not to prevent mixed marriages but to arrest the general depression of the standards of life—­low wages, a lower standard of skill in skilled trades, and low housing conditions which, he alleges, have resulted from the unrestricted influx of a large coloured population into the towns—­and he uses the term “coloured” to include the Indians.  With regard to the restrictions of trade licences he deduces the necessity for them from the economic effects of unrestricted competition which has led, he declares, to the bankruptcy of European firms, to their displacement in the same premises by Indians, and to the depreciation of European property.  But, the Indian replies, if Indians have thriven in South Africa in the past it is because they work harder and live more frugally, and if they flourish more especially as traders it is because Europeans, finding it to their interest to trade with them, have been their best customers.  Apart from the material ruin which South African legislation has brought upon many Indians, what they most deeply resent is unquestionably its specifically racial character.  They may suffer fewer personal disabilities as to travelling on railways and in tram-cars and walking on street pavements than they did a few years ago, when very special precautions had to be taken to prevent such a distinguished Indian as Mr. Gokhale being exposed to them during his visit to South Africa.  But they still suffer, they complain, under the supreme indignity of racial discrimination with which South African legislation is openly stamped.  Repatriation could only take place slowly even if the cost of compensation, which no fair-minded European could then reasonably deny, were not in itself an almost insurmountable obstacle.  From the merely practical point of view the question therefore is now reduced to the discovery of a modus vivendi