COLOUR WAR PROBABLE.

Shannon News, 16 October 1923, Page 1

COLOUR WAR PROBABLE.

POWERFUL ANGLO-INDIAN INTERVIEWED. (By DREW I?EARSON.) / Writing from Calcutta, Mr. Drew Pearson, a well known international journalist, sends the story of an interview which he had recently witn the most powerful Briton in India. This is C. P. Andrews, a man who, during IS years’ residence in India, has so won the esteem of his adopted people as to be bracketed in their esteem, with Gandhi and Tagore.

Mr. Andrews has been to this country, and has'his own opinions of, Our White Australia policy. He does not think a mixture of white and coloured races has been tried to such an extent as to enable definite views thereon to be formed. He has also been to Africa and what he saw there inclines him to the belief that a colour war is almost inevitable.

I have just interviewed the most powerful Briton in India. He is not, as one might suppose, the Viceroy, with his trained army and unexcelled military equipment. He is not a commercial or financial magnate, with ships and banks at his beck and call. H e is not a powerful adviser at the gorgeous court of some despotic native prince.

He is a man who wears no shoes. Tlis flowing beard helps to cover a half naked chest exposed by the loose folds of garb. He lives in an Indian:'house in a village not far from here}'and eats the vegetarian food or his Hindu friends.

His.jJß.me is C. F. Andrews. And during eighteen years of missionary and later political work, he has so won the love of the Indian people, that they have placed him in the mod ern Indian trinity—Gandhi, the patriot; Tagore, the poet; Andrews, the peacemaker. Everywhere dn India, I have asked Indians, British and Europeans, “ who is the most powerful white man in India ? ” • Practically always the answer was: “ C. F. Andrews.” And the explanation was that though the 'Viceroy controlled the armies, Andrews controlled the people His picture is sold in the bazaars along with that of Gandhi, the Ali Brothers, and the Indian patriots. His speeches are quoted in the Indian press perhaps more than any other individual save Mahatma Gandhi himself. His name, at least, and frequently his person, is known to every coolie and every village ryot the length and breadth of the land, from Burma to Bombay.

It is probable that C. F. Andrews would have been deported long ago were it not for his strength—strengtn with the Indians and with his friends in England. He is strong because he is sincere,, because he has never preached sedition or violence and because he has tried to act as a peacemaker between the Government and the Indians.

AUSTRALIA IN THE TROPICS. It was this quaint, but powerful Englishman whom I sought out in the native village of Bolpur, not far from Calcutta, We sat in his Indian house and talked through the hot afternoon, and I who perspired in my close-fit-ting European “ whites “ envied him in his cool flowing cottons, which. he could throw up over his knees or down over his shoulders. Andrews was interested when I told him that I had just come from Australia. He had been there, and to New Zealand, and to Fiji, and to Africa, sent by the Indians to investigate ana promote the condition of their fellowcountrymen. I asked him what he thought of the “Tyhite Australia” tory has no record of an Instance where white men were able "to settle and develop a tropical country in any way, except as the lords and masters of its native race. Take the white policy.

“ Extremely selfish,” he answered, without hesitation. “And impractical,” he added. “Almost all of the Northern Territory lies within the tropica, and white men cannot live there. Hismen in North Australia to-day. There aren’t more than 3000 of them, and everyone a pensioner. You cannot develop a country by giving pensions. Pensions create parasites. . “And North Australia is a country of wonderful possibilities square, miles of fertile territory, with 40 to SO inches of rainfall, but only 3000 inhabitants. They say it is God's

decree that the temperate zone shall he reserved for'the white man. Bui certainly God/did not decree that five tropics should be reserved for him also —and kept empty.” I interrupted to suggest that if the Northern Territory were opened to the coloured races, Australia would become a country of mixed breeds. “ But no one has yet proved that the intercrossing of colours is degenerating: And no less a person than an Australian professor has come forward recently with a theory that a mixture of the races is beneficial rather than harmful. Personally, Ido not know. I only know that it has not been given -a fair trial. The present marriages between Europeans Indians have been so handicapped by convention and social prejudice that we cannot judge them impartially. Test the intelligence: and mental capacity of the Anglo-Indian and the Englishman, and I am not so sure that you would find any great difference.’* PACIFIC LABOUR CONFERENCE. I then told the Peacemaker of a plan which Australian Labour leaders had unfolded to me, of calling a Pan-Pacific Labour conference, at which Labour delegates—white, yellow, and brown—would sit together around the same table and thresh out some of these immigration and colour problems. These Labour leaders were confident that they rather than their Governments with diplomatic notes and big navies, could get the Japanese and Chinese and Indians to agree i not to emigrate to Australia. It would be an appeal to reason rather than to force.

“The Indians would never agree to that,” Andrews returned quickly. “As long as India remains a member of the British Empire, Indians will demand just'as much rig'ht and just as high a position in any Dominion as any other British subject. “But,” he continued, “conditions in New Zealand and Australia are heavenly compared to those in East and South Africa. There, the prejudice against Indians is such that an Indian Christian cannot enter a church and worship with fellow-Christians who happen „to be Europeans. Because they are Asiatics, Indians are debarred from sitting in Christian European churches. Yet, Christ was an Asiatic!” COLOUR WAR IN AFRICA. Andrews was talking earnestly. He never raised his voice, but became more earnest and intense as he told of his trip to Africa, and how he had found that negro natives who had held land for centuries were being pushed back and back by the whites, rents increased, their land expropriated, laws passed preventing them even from growing certain lucrative crops, of which the white planters wanted a monopoly. He was defending not the Indian, but more the native black. And he concluded:

“No, we white races want to have our cake and eat it, too. We keep! Australia empty, as a reserve for the future overflow of our own people. That isn’t so bad, since it always was empty. Bui instead of filling up that reserve, we push into India, seize its Government and exploit it commercially. But even in India we don’t confiscate the ryots’ land. In Africa, however, we go the full limit. We take a country to which we never had a claim; we exploit it commercially, and finally we take away the land from the black owners.

“I am usually an optimist and always a pacifist. But from what I have myself seen in Africa, there is sure to be an uprising—the blacks against the whites." “Will it spread to a colour war,” I asked, “another world conflagration?” “It might—” Andrews voice trailed off wearily. He dropped his sentence, uncompleted. . We dropped the subject with. it. We talked much longer of other things—lndian politics. Gandhi's arrest, the use of Indian homespun. Then the Peacemaker led me out past the home of Rebindrariath Tagore, the poet, through the poet’s school, and to my waiting motor. And the village folk, whom we fell upon their knees to. touch the fiare feet of this Englishman, as they would the feet of on* of, their own saint*.