ansvaal, 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 p