&c., which, to a great extent, made up throughout the war for the deficiencies of the British War Office.  There are monuments erected in South Africa which testify to the devotion of British Indians who, though non-combatants, laid down their lives in the cause of the Empire.  Yet, as far as the British Indians are concerned, the end of it all has been that their lot in the Transvaal since it became a British Colony is harder than it was In the old Kruger days, and the British colonists in the Transvaal, who were ready enough to use Indian grievances as a stick with which to beat Krugerism, have now joined hands with the Dutch in refusing to redress them.  The Government of India have repeatedly urged upon the Imperial Government the gravity of this question, and Lord Curzon especially pressed upon his friends, when they were in office, the vital importance of effecting some acceptable settlement whilst the Transvaal was still a Crown Colony, and, therefore, more amenable to the influence of the Mother Country than it would be likely to prove when once endowed with self-government.  Yet the Imperial Government after a succession of half-hearted and ineffective protests have now finally acquiesced in the perpetuation and even the aggravation of wrongs which some ten years ago they solemnly declared to be intolerable.

Apart from the sense of justice upon which Englishmen pride themselves, it is impossible to overlook the disastrous consequences of this gran rifiuto for the prestige of British rule in India.  One of the Indian Members of Council, Mr. Dadabhoy, indicated them in terms as moderate as they were significant:—­

In 1899 Lord Lansdowne feared the moral consequences in India of a conviction of the powerlessness of the British Raj to save the Indian settlers in the Transvaal from oppression and harsh treatment.  That was when there was peace all over this country, when sedition, much more anarchism, was an unheard-of evil.  If the situation was disquieting then, what is it now when the urgent problem of the moment is how to put down and prevent the growth of unrest In the land?  The masses do not understand the niceties of the relations between the Mother Country and the Colonies; they do not comprehend the legal technicalities.  The British Raj has so far revealed itself to them as a power whose influence is irresistible, and when they find that, with all its traditional omnipotence, it has not succeeded in securing to their countrymen —­admittedly a peaceable and decent body of settlers who rendered valuable services during the war—­equal treatment at the hands of a small Dependency, they become disheartened and attribute the failure to the European colonist’s influence over the Home Government.  That is an impression which is fraught with incalculable potentialities of mischief and which British statesmanship should do everything in its power to dispel.  The present political situation in India adds special urgency to the case.

No comments of mine could add to the significance of this warning.