THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1907. A NEW TROUBLE IN THE TRANSVAAL.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXX, Issue 8554, 12 October 1907, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1907. A NEW TROUBLE IN THE TRANSVAAL.

The passive resistar with whom the Transvaal Government are confronted j threatens to provide .them with a much more serious problem than the | Noncomformisb passive resisters did for the Balfour Government. For he is Asiatic, and the Asiatic's powers of passive resistance are ten or twenty-fold those of the Englishman, e/en when tha latter is inspired by religious convictions. Thcrj are in the "Tiansvaal to-day over 12,000 Asiatics of various racesmar, y of them British Indian". They include over eleven hundred storekeepers and dealers,- some 4,000 hawkers and pedlars, and sixty.lam-dry-r.wners. The pressure of their competition is driving white men by the hundred intj the Bankruptcy Court or out of the country. When, therefore. General Botha and his colleagues were in the first flush of their newly acquired power they passed a law requiring every Asiatic in the colony to apply for a registration certificate, and to place on that certificate tha impression of his fingers. The certificates, with the additional rr.fcasura of precaution provided by th 3 adoption of the finger-print system, woulJ, it was, believed, act as a check upon the increase of a section of the community, which wiis regarded as being already too large .and which was. being recruited by means of fraudulent peiy mits. It was one thing, • however, to pass the law and quite another to enforce it, as the Government soon found. For the Asiatics, led by the British Indians, flatly refused to obey the law. The penalties involved in disobedience are severe—a fine of £IOO or three months' imprisonment in the first case, followed, if the offenders prove contumacious, by the loss of their trading licenses, and finally by deportation. But the Asiatics evidently do not believe that the Government are prepared to punish in this manner more than 12,000 persons, and they are still defying the law, only some 200 having registered. They assert, it is said,

that the Act is class legislation of the worst kind, and that while they would register if registration were compulsory on all residents of the : colony, they will not be singled out. j They object to the. finger-print sys-j tem on account of its use in connection with the detection of criminals. Here, however, their position is untenable, for the system is very widdly employed in India in innumerable business transactions, and in the Indian army, and no protest is made against it. They also weaken their case to some extent by offering to accept registration and j the finger-print system if the whole thing is made voluntary and the Act is withdrawn, except asregard§ those persons who will not register voluntarily. There for the present the matter stands.