one hand leading to a wilful waste of energy, time and money, and on the other hand diminishing the efficiency of the white worker himself ... and again in the measure that the European falls into slack ways, the native inevitably deteriorates under his example.

And what about the effect of the "colour-bar" on native feeling? The native is learning not only to borrow gradually some of the weapons from the white man's armoury, such as trades unions and strikes, but to oppose racial hatred to racial contempt. There are still in South Africa many white men, and of the best, whonot infrequently drawing their inspiration from the tenets of Christianity which they have laboured to spread amongst their dark brothers are prepared to uphold the black man's cause in the name of justice and humanity; nevertheless the native is being drawn more and more into "the Ethiopian movement with its large ramifications amongst the negroes of America, essentially a movement of deep-seated racial revolt.

One aspect however of the problem Mr. Dawson leaves almost out of account, and that is the reaction upon India of the "colour-bar" as applied to British Indians in South Africa. He tends to treat this particular problem as one that affects South Africa alone. But South Africa is part of the British Empire, and beyond all denial the colour question in India has been fanned into a fiercer flame by the treatment of British Indians in South Africa. It was his experience of their treatment that first estranged Gandhi from the British raj and from Western civilisation. Many other Indians, formerly well-disposed to England, lost their faith in the British Empire when, at the Imperial Conference of 1921, General Smuts successfully defied the policy of the rest of the Empire by dissenting in the name of the South African Union from a resolution which had been moved by the representatives of the Imperial Government and accepted by all the other Dominion representatives. This resolution declared that "there is incongruity between the position of India as an equal member of the Empire and the existence of disabilities upon British Indians lawfully domiciled in some parts of the Empire "; it added that "in the interests of the solidarity of the Commonwealth "it was desirable that their rights of citizenship should be admitted. Not only did South Africa stand out formally against the principle set forth in this resolution, but she proceeded to carry on her high-handed anti-Asiatic policy, without any more

regard for the admitted interests of the Empire as a whole than for the earnest protests of the Government of India itself.

Almost all the arguments which Mr. Dawson uses in his powerful plea for justice to the natives of South Africa apply with equal force to the treatment of the British Indian settlers, but he allows his judgment on this point to be obscured by the fact that they are not of South African origin. He even talks of an Asiatic invasion" of South Africa, as if there had never been an invited immigration of Indians, prompted by South Africa's need for cheap agricultural labour. Out of the 161,000 British Indians in South Africa over 140,000 are in Natal, where so far back as 1860 the Colonial Government officially applied to the Government of India to allow the recruitment of Indian indentured labourers.

Mr. Dawson tries to assimilate the disabilities, now imposed upor. British Indians by special legislation, to the caste disabilities which exist in India. But, however deplorable these caste disabilities may be, they are part of a social and religious system evolved centuries and centuries ago by the Indians themselves and have no statutory force or sanction under British rule. Nor should it be forgotten that the resentment by Indians in India of the treatment meted out to Indians in South Africa owes much of its intensity to the persistence of that treatment-even in an aggravated form-after the Great War, in which India made in fact a much larger contribution than South Africa to the common struggle and the common victory. Most Indians believe too, and not unreasonably, that it is the example set by South Africa which has encouraged the white settlers in Kenya to deal in the same intolerant spirit with the 38,000 British Indians in that young colony. The case of Kenya has indeed caused even more bad blood in India than that of South Africa, for Indians had been living and working in that region long before the establishment of British rule. Moreover Kenya is a Crown Colony, directly controlled by the Colonial Office, under the authority of the British Cabinet, so that the British Government cannot plead, as in the case of South Africa, its inability to interfere with the action of a self-governing Dominion. Whether the compulsory repatriation of the Indian community, either in Kenya or in South Africa, which is sometimes talked of as a possible solution of the question, would be really welcome to the whites themselves is a moot point, for under present conditions the economic problem is to this

extent the same in both parts of Africa. The white man needs the Asiatic to fulfil certain economic functions which the European is unwilling, and the African still unqualified, to discharge. Indians are, therefore, driven to ask where is the sincerity of British statesmanship, which proclaims as the goal of British policy full partnership for India in the British Commonwealth of Nations, and yet cannot secure the redress of Indian grievances in a British Dominion or even in a British Crown Colony.

Fortunately in other parts of the Empire the racial question, in so far as it affects relations with India is less acute. The right of the Dominions to legislate with regard to further immigration in accordance with what they consider to be their interests is nowhere in dispute. In most of the Dominions Indian settlers are very few, and there is no serious opposition to arrangements for allowing ingress to Indians who desire merely to visit the country for purposes of business or study or pleasure. In the colonies which still rely, just as Natal once did, on Indian labour for their development, the Government of India is itself in a sufficiently strong position to secure redress for legitimate Indian grievances by threatening to forbid all emigration to those colonies which are recalcitrant.

In the case of Australia the racial issue assumes a special shape. The Australian white man is determined to keep for his exclusive use the whole of a great continent, now cleared almost entirely of its sparse aboriginal population. Yet the white population is so small that generations must elapse before the white man could even hope to develop the whole continent, while in a large and potentially wealthy part of Australia the tropical climate tends to incapacitate the white man for heavy manual labour. JapanAustralia's nearest neighbour in that watery hemisphere has an excessive and rapidly increasing population for which she cannot adequately provide in her own islands, nor find a sufficient outlet elsewhere. She is therefore suspected of casting covetous eyes on the great empty spaces which the Australians are bent on keeping empty until they can be filled by white men. These empty spaces, experts estimate, would add 200,000,000 acres to the wheatproducing areas of the world. It is impossible to deny that this Australian policy provokes a yellow peril. Against her dread of a Japanese invasion Australia can at present rely only on the protection of the British fleet, and Great Britain now finds herself

committed to the construction of a costly naval base at Singapore, the main object of which-though officially denied—is apparent to all, and not least to the Japanese themselves.

In the same way the racial issue, which one might have hoped to see closed as far as Japanese sentiment is concerned by the recognition of Japan as one of the great Powers of the world on a footing of international equality, reappears in another quarter with a law passed last year by the United States Congress to prohibit Japanese immigration in terms all the more needlessly wounding to Japanese susceptibilities in that Japan had agreed to the same purpose being accomplished by an earlier "Gentleman's Agreement," from which she had admittedly never seriously departed. The opposition to Asiatic immigration, Chinese as well as Japanese, is especially strong all along the Pacific slope, in British Columbia no less than in the States of the American Union. China is not to-day in a position to resent the treatment, but Japan might, and there is nowhere so much talk-idle though it probably is of war with Japan as in America.

Determined as the United States may be to keep herself henceforth free from all entanglements of European policy, she cannot escape from the entanglements of the colour problem, whether in regard to Asiatic immigration or in the far more serious form presented by the disastrous legacy of negro slavery. It is unnecessary to enter here on a discussion of a problem at which thoughtful Americans themselves stand appalled when they contemplate the future of that solid block of over 10,000,000 negroes in their midst, with no prospect so far of assimilation or of fusion. All that needs to be noted is that, as in other countries where the white man is in direct contact with a coloured race, the Americans seem constantly to be trying to go back upon the concessions which, in spite of natural prejudices, their own enlightened humanity had previously wrung from them. The franchise, for instance, conferred upon the negro in the Southern States after his emancipation from slavery at the cost of a protracted civil war, has long since become a mockery, because of the system of organized intimidation and fraudulence to which the white man has resorted in order to nullify it. Even in the Northern States, which fought and bled for the abolition of slavery, the reaction against negro infiltration is steadily gaining ground and expresses itself freely in the many forms of social ostracism which give effect to the "colour-bar."

Thus the colour problem girdles the earth with an endless chain of racial enmities. But we seldom talk of it. One of the rare occasions on which some of its aspects have been publicly and worthily discussed was the Church Congress held last autumn at Eastbourne. Sir Frederick Lugard, with his great career of colonial administration behind him and his present responsibilities as British representative on the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations, dwelt earnestly on the duties of trusteeship in the governance of backward peoples. One of these duties, he rightly said, lies in teaching the natives how to utilise the bounties of nature, not only for their own advancement but for the necessities and comfort of the crowded populations of Europe. At the same time he uttered a very necessary word of warning against forcing the pace in such a way as to make excessive demands upon native labour-demands which it is well known are often apt to lead to thinly disguised forms of forced labour, barely distinguishable from slavery.

Education is another of the duties of trusteeship which, as other speakers pointed out, the white man can no longer shirk, for the demand for it is universal and increasingly insistent, and even in Africa the native is determined to get education in some shape or other. Sir Frederick Lugard would have us learn from the mistakes admittedly committed in the moulding of Western education in India and other oriental countries far more advanced than Africa. In consequence of those mistakes Western education has unfortunately not tended, as its pioneers once hoped, to create a solid link between the white and the coloured races. The new policy, which Sir Frederick Lugard advocates, places in the forefront of educational effort the creation of village schools of a vocational type in close touch with the life and needs of the masses.

It was reserved to Mr. J. H. Oldham, the broad-minded author of "Christianity and the Race Problem," to make the crucial point that to-day the most fundamental causes of friction and conflict are not so much racial as economic, though differences of race and colour immensely aggravate them. He might have added that this is so because economic competition in a world deeply saturated with materialism has never been so intense as it is to-day, and the assertion of the white man's racial supremacy as a factor essential to his economic supremacy is apt to appeal more powerfully to his material appetite than the most eloquent