AN INSOLUBLE PROBLEM.
WE do not envy Mr. Chamberlain his position. Within the next three months he will have to face a problem which we believe to be insoluble, or at all events in which all the rights are one way and all the expediencies the other, in which Parliament can give him no manner of help, and yet on which Parliament will probably insist on pronouncing its more or less authorita- tive opinion. For some time past a strong conviction has been growing up among the whites of South Africa that it is most inexpedient to allow natives of India to settle there, and that they must be prohibited from so doing by local laws. We are already,' urge the settlers of both the white races, almost submerged in a sea of coloured men who are not really friendly, whom it is most difficult at once to govern and to civilise, and who, it is most pro- bable, before the final settlement is effected, will try con- clusions with us once more, as the Red Indians under "King Philip" did with the settlers in North America, and will turn South Africa for a year or two into a shambles. They grow more numerous every day, they are becoming independent, and if they ever unite, which as regards all of the Banta stock is quite possible, they may either overwhelm us, or, which would be as bad, they may compel us to turn ourselves into a strictly military caste, maintaining our ascendency as the southern planters did, by sternly repressive laws, and institutions which in all but name would be those of i. military feudalism. If these hordes of dark men are to be reinforced by other hordes from India, which can lend out millions and never miss them, we shall be lost, sverwhelmed by the endless waves of a lower civilisation. The superior intelligence of the Indians only increases the danger, as also does their skill in business, which enables them so to undersell white competitors that our Colony ceases to attract immigrants from Europe of the classes we most desire. We will not bear it, and whatever the Home Government may say, the Indians shall not come.' This is the decision of 95 per cent. of all white men in South Africa, and so resolute is it, that in Natal it has already produced an unarmed rebellion, the settlers of Durban declaring that two ship-loads of Indians now in the harbour shall not land even if they have to be stopped by force. The Government in presence of this unanimity is perfectly powerless—there are no soldiers available, and if there were it is a very ugly subject upon which to demand their help—and it has accordingly promised, if the settlers will remain quiet, to introduce a prohibitory law.
It is not difficult to understand the feeling in South Africa. The settlers desire, very reasonably, to make of that continent a white possession ; they are hampered already by enormous difficulties arising from the presence and the rights of the indigenous rsees, and from the very ugly fact that other dark races who have no rights of residence are inclined to swarm down from the North, to the land where white intelligence and energy produces prosperity for the poor. The very virtues of the whites are telling against them in this matter, and every improvement they introduce—say any new and profitable culture like that of tobacco or rhea-grass—attracts a new swarm of barbarians who in many respects, and especially in that of obedience to unarmed policemen, undo all that our officials are trying so patiently to establish. To witness an addition to these swarms of other swarms of men from a distant continent, who are just as difficult to rule, and who at once through their skill and their small range of wants monopolise all the minor occupations, is most irritating. We very much doubt if it would be borne in London, and indeed we see what the feeling excited would be from the rage displayed in the industrial quarters because of the arrival of a handful of Polish Jews, who are not even coloured men. All that is at once true and intelligible ; but think of the position of the Imperial Government. It is bound by every theory it professes to do equal justice to all its subjects, and the immigrants against whom South Africa is raging are as much its subjects as the people of Cornwall or the Hebrides. Any. nation has a right on reason shown to keep out aliens ; but these are not aliens, but her Majesty's loyal taxpayers, who have as much right to wander about or settle in one part of her Majesty's dominions as in another. How can Mr. Chamberlain possibly sanction an Act which prevents natives of India from trading or cultivating or settling in a portion of the Queen's dominions ? Sikhs are actually holding Central Africa for us; the Resident in Zanzibar relies upon Hindoos for support within that island; and Sir H. Johnstone, the able Commissioner of Nya.ssaland, invites emigrants from Bombay, and says that if they will but come in swarms the civilisation of African Lakeland will speedily be placed beyond risk of retrogression. It seems monstrous, and in a way it is monstrous, to ask people to one Colony whom we are expelling from another, who in both are her Majesty's born subjects, and in both are not only innocent of crime, but are objected to because they are so thrifty, indus- trious, and contented with small gains. It does not diminish but increases the worry of the situation that the men to be expelled are not feeble folk, but belong to the second largest community in the world, which we are trying to make loyal, and which has already remonstrated rather sharply about the treatment of its brethren. Yet it would be at least as monstrous to shoot our own settlers for resisting an invasion which they regard with horror, and are trying to keep off by means which we have sanctioned, or at least winked at, both in Australia and British Columbia. What, under such circumstances, is Mr. Chambtrlain to do ? We can help him a little out of the quandary for the moment, but the expedient we intend to suggest rather turns the difficulty than gets rid of it. The Government of India have the right under a statute, passed, we think, in 1852 in order to compel the planters of Reunion to treat coolies decently—they were letting them die whole- sale in a mad panic about cholera—to regulate or pro- hibit any emigration. They have, we believe, grave cause for such prohibition as regards the emigration of coolies to German colonies in Africa. and it will diminish the invidiousness of applying the Act to them, if it is applied at the same time to the whole of South Africa, on the distinct ground that "in presence of recent demonstra- tions Indian emigrants cannot in that region expect either justice or freedom." The restriction would then come from the Indian Government, which is bound to protect its subjects, and not from the South Africans who are oppressing them, and it would in theory be temporary, lasting only till the people of Natal, the Cape, 8tc., have recovered their sense of the necessary fairplay among her Majesty's subjects. We do not like this expedient, which rathers appears just than is just, for a reason given below; but still it will work ; it gets the Queen's Government out of what might otherwise prove an impasse, and it has, curiously enough, an international precedent in its favour. If we are not mistaken, in the very last treaty between the -United States and China the Emperor binds himself, in consideration of certain advantages, to prohibit his sub- jects from emigrating to any part of the territories of the United States. The precedent is not perfect, because the Chinese are foreigners in the Union and the Indians are not foreigners in South Africa; but still it will serve.
We say our suggestion only appears to be just, and the reason is this. We are unable to contend for the equality of all mankind because we do not believe in it, and can see, as Providence seems to have seen, very grave reasons for keeping the colours geographically apart. It is much better that there should be white countries and dark countries, if only because we thereby avoid those wars of race which in the primeval world must have driven the colours, after untold sufferings, to separate themselves entirely from each other, so that in Asia there are no whites or blacks, and in Africa, outside Egypt, no indigenous browns. We doubt the experiment of fusion, and know that without fusion men of two colours never work peacefully side by side. But the exasperating feature of the struggle in South Africa is that two colours are there already. Nobody proposes to expel the blacks, or to restrict their increase of numbers, and to say that people who are only brown, and who are otherwise good citizens, shall not come there is irritatingly oppressive. It is, in fact, in theory indefensible ; but still politicians have occasionally to put up with anomalies. Indians as a body do not care about fields of emigration, and it is better to be in theory less than just than to deepen that antagonism of colour which in South Africa as in the United States, and perhaps in Northern Australia also, threatens to be the most difficult of the many problems with which the white race, since it began its new world-wanderings, has had to contend.
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