Empire.  It was the one question which called forth very deep feeling in the Indian National Congress at Lahore last December, where subscriptions and donations flowed in freely to defray the expenses of a campaign throughout India, and it figured just as prominently in the proceedings of the All-India Moslem League, which held its annual meeting there in the following month.  In fact, Mahomedans have the additional grievance that the laws of the Transvaal discriminate by name against those of their faith.  There is scarcely a city of any importance in India in which public meetings have not testified to the interest and indignation which the subject arouses in every class of Indian audience.

This is a very grave fact.  I need not enter into the details of the question.  They are well known.  There may be some exaggerations, Indian immigrants may not always be drawn from desirable classes, there may be differences of opinion as to the wisdom of the attitude taken up by some of the Indians in South Africa, and Englishmen may sympathize with the desire of British and Dutch colonists to check the growth of another alien population in their midst.  But that the Indian has not received there the just treatment to which he is entitled as a subject of the British Crown, and that disabilities and indignities are heaped upon him because he is an Indian, are broad facts that are not and cannot be disputed.  The resolution adopted by the Imperial Council, with the sanction of the Government of India, was formally directed against Natal because it is only in regard to Natal that India possesses an effective weapon of retaliation in withholding the supply of indentured labour which is indispensable to the prosperity of that colony.  But the Indian grievance is not confined to Natal; it is even greater in the Transvaal.  Still less is it confined to the particular class of Indians who emigrate as indentured labourers to South Africa.  What Indians feel most bitterly is that however well educated, however respectable and even distinguished may be an Indian who goes to or resides in South Africa, and especially in the Transvaal, he is treated as an outcast and is at the mercy of harsh laws and regulations framed for his oppression, and often interpreted with extra harshness by the officials who are left to apply them.  This bitterness is intensified by the recollection that, before the South African War, the wrongs of British Indians in the Transvaal figured prominently in the catalogue of charges brought by the Imperial Government against the Kruger regime and contributed not a little to precipitate its downfall.  In prosecuting the South African War Great Britain drew freely upon India for assistance of every kind except actual Indian combatants.  Not only was it the loyalty of India that enabled the British troops who saved Natal to be embarked hurriedly at Bombay, but it was the constant supply from India of stores of all kinds, of transport columns, of hospital bearers,