r. Gokhale being exposed to them during his
visit to South Africa. But they still suffer, they complain, under the
supreme indignity of racial discrimination with which South African
legislation is openly stamped. Repatriation could only take place slowly
even if the cost of compensation, which no fair-minded European could
then reasonably deny, were not in itself an almost insurmountable
obstacle. From the merely practical point of view the question therefore
is now reduced to the discovery of a _modus vivendi_ for the Indian
community now in South Africa, and it would be very near a solution if
legislation to secure the economic and eugenic standards on which the
Afrikander lays so much stress were so framed as to apply to the whole
population, even should it in practice bear more heavily on the Indian
than on the European, if the former less frequently rose to the required
standards. A similar solution would remove the sense of grievance
arising out of the denial of the franchise in Natal and the Transvaal,
of which the injustice seems to Indians to be merely heightened by the
fact that it has been given to them in Cape Colony, where they form a
much smaller minority. But there is no sign that the temper of the South
African Union, in which British and Dutch are united on no issue more
firmly than on this one, will abate its claim to treat the Indians
within its borders as an inferior race that has no rights to be weighed
against the interests, real or assumed, of the superior white race.

The Government of India has never questioned the reality of Indian
grievances in South Africa. In 1903, shortly after the Boer war, Lord
Curzon strongly urged the British Government to enforce their redress in
the Transvaal whilst it was still governed as a Crown Colony. At the end
of 1913, when the struggle was most acute, Lord Hardinge expressed his
sympathy with a frankness and warmth which fluttered Ministerial
dovecots both at home and in the Union. Since then Indian troops have
fought during the war side by side with South African troops, and the
representatives of India have sat in the War and Peace Councils of the
Empire side by side with Ministers of the South African Union. So long
as South African legislation bears the impress of racial discrimination
the Government of India is bound to maintain its opposition to it, and
the more fully it voices Indian opinion under the new constitution, the
more emphatic its opposition m