him from insult. Your readers have now the whole matter before
them, and the reasons which induced Mr. Gandhi, to land as he did. He Might have
kept to the boat at Cato’s Creek, when he saw the crowd collecting to receive him; he
might have taken refuge in the police-station; but he did not, he said he was quite
ready to face the men of Durban and to trust them as Englishmen. Throughout the
trying procession, his manliness and pluck could not have been surpassed, and I can
assure Natal that he is a man who must be treated as a man. Intimidation is out of the
question, because, if the knew the Town Hall were going to be thrown at him, I
believe, from what I saw, that he would not quail. Now, you have the tale impartially
told, I hope, Durban has grossly insulted this man. I don’t describe the scene; I prefer
not [to]. I say Durban, because Durban raised the storm, and is answerable for the
result. We are all humiliated at the treatment. Our tradition concerning fair play
appears to be in the dust. Let us act like gentlemen, and, however much against the
grain it may be, let us express regret handsomely and generously,
—I am, etc.,
F. A. LAUGHTON.—The Natal Mercury, 16th January, 1897.
There has been a good deal said about Reuter’s cabled summary of Mr. Gandhi’s Indian pamphlet, within the last day or two . . . The general impression that is conveyed by these summaries is unquestionably different to the impression created in the minds of those who read the pamphlet . . . Frankly, it may be admitted that Mr. Gandhi’s pamphlet is not an unfair statement of the position of the Indian in South Africa from an Indian’s point of view. The European refuses to recognize the Indian as an equal’ and the Indian, as a British subject, considers he has a right to all the privileges of the British subjects of European birth in the Colony, and under the Proclamation of 1858, he is legally entitled to that claim. That there is a prejudice in South Africa against the Indian, it would be folly to deny, but at the same time, Mr. Gandhi, we think, might make greater allowance for the fact that, as whole, his countrymen in South Africa are not of a class that, even in India, would be allowed to ride in first-class railway carriages or admitted into the best hotels . . . Coming back to the pamphlet and the cabled summaries, these latter might have been as correctly written of some pamphlet describing the treatment of the Armenians by the Turks, and, in fact, Reuter’s cable read by itself gives some such impression. When the pamphlet written by Mr. Gandhi, however, is read in its entirety, the context reveals the fact that, while there are instances of real hardship given, the bulk of it is made up of political grievances in many cases similar to those the Uitlanders complain of in the Transvaal. The pamphlet, in short, contains practically nothing that Mr. Gandhi did not publish previously in Natal, and nothing that is not generally known. On the other hand, it is useless for Mr. Gandhi, or anyone else, to endeavour to have the Indian accepted in South Africa at his own estimate. There is no use being hypocritical in the
