NATAL FOR THE WHITE MAN

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9070, 22 April 1908, Page 3

NATAL FOR THE WHITE MAN

"The time has come for something to be done to save Natal for the white man," declares the "Natal Witness." '"We have no desire," it says, "that Indians shall be unfairly or harshly dealt with. Those who have come hero and have been allowed by us to acquire rights and privileges must not be ruthlessly assailed as though such rights and privileges did not exist. If any step is to be taken to annul their rights they must be given ample notice, and every facility to protect their own interests. Moreover, if we acquire such rights by what amounts to legal force, we muet pay a fair price eo those who are deprived of them. It seems to us a monstrous thing that in a European colony practically nothing should be done to attract white settlers or retain those already in it, while every faiiltiy should be given for low- ' priced Asiatics to rush in and flood the country with cheap trade and labour, the price of which is sent thousands of miles across the ocean to be spent. India is a big enough country for its own people. Let them be content there, where they have a good form of government and rights and privileges they cannot obtain anywhere else in the world. By requesting that they shall stay in their own country South Africa imposes upon them no hardship, but simply says in effect that we, as the white and dominant race, have already one sufficiently serious problem in our own blacks without desiring to create another. It is a thousand pities Natal did not take up this attitude years ago. There is time yet, difficult as the problem is. The agitation in the Transvaal may have achieved at least one good object in that it will have caused South Africa in general to realise the full depth and meaning of the problem with which it is face to face. Judging by the meeting in Durban, and those held previously at other centres, the feeling throughout Natal in favour of the Transvaal is intensifying. Natal affords the most striking example it is possible to conceive of the evils which must inevitably result from the influx of Asiatics into communities of Europeans. At the time when this colony was first thrown open to the Indian no one realised, or, if he realised and pre* dieted it, he was laughed at, the «normous amount of trouble which wouldjultimatelyjensue. WaJ it been understood then to what serious and often fatal disabilities the presence of the Asiatic would eventually subject the European, no one would have had the hardihood to advocate a policy of importation. The Indians were brought here in the first instance to help the planters. Not even the planteis who brought them here looked far enough ahead to see that in many cases the very Indians brought by them to till the soil would, with their descendants, own as masters the property on which many yearsago tkey worked as servants.