o another, and, intensely conservative in their
habits and outlook, with no horizon wider than their own village, they
generally prefer, even under the stress of economic pressure, the ills
they know of. But that does not affect the issue raised in the most
acute and naked form in some of the States now forming the South African
Union. To Mr. Gandhi's experiences and struggles in Natal and the
Transvaal can be traced back, as I have already shown, a great deal of
the bitterness which has now led him to denounce British rule as
"Satanic." It is only about fifty years ago that Indians began to go
across to South Africa, when the Government of Natal with the consent
and assistance of the Government of India sought to engage Indians to
work as indentured labourers on sugar and tea plantations. In 1911, the
year of the last census, the number of Indians in the Union was about
150,000, and, immigration having been since then checked and finally
stopped, they cannot have increased by more than 10 per cent during the
last decade. Of the total in 1911, 133,000 were in Natal, 11,000 in the
Transvaal, and 7000 in the Cape, with barely 100 in the Orange Free
State. The proportion of Indians to the total European population of the
Union, which was then about 1,400,000, was therefore only just over one
to ten. But they had not remained merely indentured labourers as at the
beginning. When their labour contracts expired many settled in the
country, acquiring small plots of land as their own or becoming petty
traders, artisans, etc., and, being frugal and hard-working and of a
higher type than the Kaffir and other natives, they throve as a whole.
The white population, who had found them at first very useful, began to
see in them either dangerous competitors or an undesirable element
calculated to complicate the social problems in a country in which the
European formed anyhow but a small minority face to face with 6,000,000
natives. Both the old Boer Government in the Transvaal and the Colonial
Government of Natal set to work to curtail by legislative enactments and
local regulations the rights which Indians had been at first allowed to
enjoy, and to assimilate their treatment to that of the lowest and most
backward natives. The Indians were systematically subjected to the
disabilities and indignities against which Mr. Gandhi for the first time
led them to organise a violent agitation and finally to offer passive
resistance.

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