for the Indian community now in South Africa, and it would be very near a solution if legislation to secure the economic and eugenic standards on which the Afrikander lays so much stress were so framed as to apply to the whole population, even should it in practice bear more heavily on the Indian than on the European, if the former less frequently rose to the required standards.  A similar solution would remove the sense of grievance arising out of the denial of the franchise in Natal and the Transvaal, of which the injustice seems to Indians to be merely heightened by the fact that it has been given to them in Cape Colony, where they form a much smaller minority.  But there is no sign that the temper of the South African Union, in which British and Dutch are united on no issue more firmly than on this one, will abate its claim to treat the Indians within its borders as an inferior race that has no rights to be weighed against the interests, real or assumed, of the superior white race.

The Government of India has never questioned the reality of Indian grievances in South Africa.  In 1903, shortly after the Boer war, Lord Curzon strongly urged the British Government to enforce their redress in the Transvaal whilst it was still governed as a Crown Colony.  At the end of 1913, when the struggle was most acute, Lord Hardinge expressed his sympathy with a frankness and warmth which fluttered Ministerial dovecots both at home and in the Union.  Since then Indian troops have fought during the war side by side with South African troops, and the representatives of India have sat in the War and Peace Councils of the Empire side by side with Ministers of the South African Union.  So long as South African legislation bears the impress of racial discrimination the Government of India is bound to maintain its opposition to it, and the more fully it voices Indian opinion under the new constitution, the more emphatic its opposition must be.

In other Dominions the Indian question is much less acute, as there has never been anything like the same amount of Indian immigration, and it is now practically stopped.  But it must be remembered that it was the return to India of a large number of Sikhs who were refused permission to land in British Columbia that was the signal for grave disorders in the Punjab in the second year of the war.  And not so long ago the Aga Khan, as well known in London as in India, had to give up visiting Australia in view of the many humiliating formalities to which as an Asiatic he would have been subjected before being allowed to land there.  It is surely not beyond the resources of statesmanship to devise at least a scheme by which Indians of good repute who wish to travel for purposes of business or study, or for the mere satisfaction of a legitimate curiosity to see other parts of the Empire, should be free to do so without any restraints on the score of race.  The attitude of the other Dominions seems certainly to be at present far less uncompromising than that of the South African Union, and one may look forward with some confidence to an agreement by which the rights of Indians already settled in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada will obtain sufficient recognition to satisfy Indian self-respect.