higher plane of equality and freedom. Not only did India obtain immediate representation in the League of Nations as one of its original members on the same footing as all the self-governing Dominions of the British Empire, but she was granted, under the Government of India Act of 1919, a constitutional charter, which opens up for her the prospect of attaining through stages, which it lies with her to expedite, to full and equal partnership in the British Commonwealth of Nations as a self-governing Dominion herself.

It is a generous measure, conceived in the great traditions of British statesmanship, which was the first to realise that dominion over distant and alien peoples meant responsibility as well as power. Five and twenty years ago it would have been welcomed by the educated classes in India, who are more than any other the offspring of British rule, as a tremendous step towards the fulfilment of national aspirations, themselves largely due to Western education and to increasing contact with the West. To-day it has been rejected with contumely by a large section of the educated classes, in favour of a wild campaign for Swaraj in the sense of immediate Dominion self-government, if not complete independence. Even the "silent masses" have been aroused out of the torpor of placid contentment which only eight years ago the Montagu-Chelmsford Report saw reason to deplore. These facts give some measure of the psychological revolt that has taken place in India against the white man's supremacy. Many grievous side issues have aided that revolt, and not least the racial passions provoked by the Amritzar tragedy, of which, to quote the Duke of Connaught," the shadow lengthened over the whole face of India." By chance, too, the movement happened to find an inspired leader in Gandhi, whose saintly asceticism gave him an exceptional hold on Indian imagination. But there is no cause for despair. There are many signs on the contrary of a return to greater sanity, which cannot fail to be assisted by the selection of a new viceroy, who stands for all that is best in English public life and is credited with just those qualities most needed to restore India's confidence in the sincerity and steadfastness of British statesmanship.

The grave fact, nevertheless, remains that in addition to all the religious, political and social factors which have contributed in a large measure to defeat the liberal purpose of the Government

of India Act of 1919, account must be taken of the reaction upon Indian sentiment caused by the growth of racial feeling in other parts of the Empire. This has developed under insidious conditions, dangerously calculated to widen the gulf between the white and the coloured races.

Economic considerations, the desire for wealth, the urge of trade, the quest for new markets, have been from the very first the chief incentives to the expansion of the white man's power beyond those regions of the world which are his natural home. To these have sometimes been added the pressure of population, the need of new lands for settlement and, on a higher plane, the call to spread amongst less favoured races the material benefits of the white man's civilisation and the spiritual blessings of his faith. With the immense growth of Western commerce and industry, and the development of new means of communication, came the temptation to exploit the labour of the coloured races in order to open up new sources of wealth and produce fresh supplies of foodstuffs and raw materials for the benefit of the white man. The temptation proved nowhere more overwhelming than in the large part of negro or negroid Africa which only half a century ago was still called the Dark Continent, though white men had long since settled on the coast and even at some little distance inland.

The conscience of the Western world had gradually revolted against the old slave traffic in human beings, but it soon found arguments-good, bad and indifferent-to justify the white man's claim to eminent domain over lands in occupation of native races incapable themselves of developing them according to white standards of efficiency. The end of the last century witnessed an agreed distribution of the Dark Continent amongst the nations of Europe as the only means of arresting rivalries which frequently threatened the maintenance of peace, and a genuine attempt was made to combine the acceptance of moral obligations towards the native races with the white man's assumption of rulership. But economic considerations have constantly blurred the sense of moral responsibility. The white men are few, and the climate makes it difficult or irksome for them to undertake the many forms of manual labour essential to the development of the countries in which they have settled. The natives alone can supply that labour, and so long as they do not emerge from the

low stage of social evolution in which the white man found them, it is relatively easy to secure their labour and even a modicum of contentment with their conditions of labour. But they cannot possibly stand still when they, or the best and quickest among them, begin to be stirred by contact with both the better and the seamier side of the white man's civilisation, by the influence of education-however elementary-in State and mission schools, by the infiltration of new ideas, by the creation of new appetites and needs.

Especially in British Possessions many of the white settlers, as well as the officials and missionaries, have always had a strong sense of duty towards the natives, which has been less apparent in the Portuguese and even in the French and Dutch Possessions. The Boers in South Africa, for instance, still cling to their own patriarchal interpretation of the Old Testament, and regard the natives as providentially appointed to be and remain a servile race under the yoke of God's chosen people. Thus different policies have prevailed in the different European colonies, and even under the British flag, partly as the result of, and partly resulting in, different degrees of progress achieved by the native population. In certain regions, such as Swaziland and Bechuanaland in South Africa, the Nigerian and Lagos Protectorates in West Africa, and in parts of East Africa, large tracts have been set apart for the maintenance of particular tribes under conditions approximating more or less to their own traditions of life.

Most instructive of all are the developments which have taken place in so progressive a self-governing Dominion as the South African Union. Here some of the natives, as well as the halfcastes who in South Africa are specifically termed "coloured people "-have reached a fairly high standard of education and of material well-being, and here, more clearly perhaps than anywhere, the racial problem is bound up with the economic question. With the advancement of the native and "coloured " populations there have grown up amongst them, even though still only amongst a minority of them, definite aspirations to better means of livelihood than mere manual and unskilled labour, and even a vague consciousness of separate nationhood. Correspondingly amongst the whites has grown up the dread of losing control of the requisite supply of native labour for their own exacting purposes, and of seeing the natives gradually enter into direct

: economic competition with them instead of being merely patient under-dogs, ready to answer their call. Hence a white reaction, tending not only to stop any further concessions to the natives but even to withdraw from them those that have been granted

in the past.

Economic considerations in South Africa are reinforced by, or concealed under, more plausible and indeed not unreasonable pleas for the maintenance of the purity of the white race and of its higher standards of life, if the South African Union is to be preserved as a white man's country. It is vehemently urged that the small white population, relying chiefly on a meagre trickle of immigration from Europe, is in danger of being sooner or later completely submerged under an overwhelming black flood, unless artificial dams are promptly and effectively erected to arrest its encroachments. The withdrawal of the limited political franchise which the natives have long enjoyed in the old Cape Colony, and the limited municipal franchise in Natal, and their compulsory segregation on a large scale, are amongst many demands put forward for this purpose, and there are even legislative measures now under discussion at the instance of the South African Government which would for the first time give statutory sanction to the "colour" bar, hitherto only indirectly, though none the less effectively set up.

Very instructive is a recent and careful study of South Africa by Mr. W. H. Dawson, whose former works have amply established his competency as an independent and acute observer. He is not by any means lacking in sympathy with the ideals put forward by the South African white man, but he does not hesitate to say that South Africa is on the wrong road to their fulfilment. The white man imagines that for a white South Africa cheap native labour is essential, whereas "cheap native labour," Mr. Dawson avers, "is the curse of South Africa." His book was written before the recent introduction of legislation intended to give statutory sanction to the "colour-bar," and he seems hardly to have conceived the possibility of so reactionary a measure, against which existing laws consistently set their face. In speaking of the "colour-bar," merely as he saw it already enforced in practice in some of the semi-skilled trades, he describes it as the sign and symbol of purely economic domination. It stamps the coloured population as an inferior and subordinate element in the

community; ignoring all such tests of personal and civic merit as character and capacity, it determines the coloured man's deserts, social status, and right to earn a decent or to use a word which is constantly on the lips of European workmen and their leaders-a "civilised livelihood, by the one factor of the colour of his skin. The effect is to place a stigma on five millions of human beings, whose right to inhabit South Africa is as good as or better than that of the great majority of Europeans, and to doom a large and increasing part of them to a life of poverty and degradation from which they cannot at present even hope to emerge.

It would take up too much space to quote the many concrete instances Mr. Dawson gives of the hardships inflicted by the "colour-bar." He is even more concerned with the spirit of racial domination which it connotes and with the harm which it does to the white man himself, economically as well as morally. The white man's command of native labour has taught him to regard many forms of labour which he could himself perform, and perform with advantage moral and economic to himself, as servile labour unworthy of his racial superiority. On the land, as well as in urban trades and in the mines, the native comes to be looked upon merely "as an instrument of labour from which as much labour as possible can be obtained in return for what is almost invariably only a stable ration of food "whether in kind or in wages. The strife between labour and capital is often as bitter in South Africa as in this country, but that does not diminish the conflict between white and black. European labour may be up in arms against capital, but "the black man must not presume to contest the white man's claim to monopolise the skilled trades," though the white labour leaders "will tell you that they entertain no prejudice against the native as a cheap unskilled labourer." Not only must the white man always be the "boss," but he acquires the wasteful habit of always employing one or two native "boys" to do most of his work for him. "Even the British-born housewife of very restricted resources employs a boy' for work which she would never dream of having done for her at home.' But Jim Fish' as he is called only costs a shilling or so a day, and at that cost it is flattering to be a 'boss' even if on a small scale."

What is the economic result of the "colour-bar" for the community at large?

All through the industrial system, all through social life, the fallacy of the cheapness of native labour exercises its baneful influence, on the