danger inseparable from close contact with a large body of uncleanly citizens, with whom syphilis and leprosy are common diseases, and hideous immorality a matter of course.
25. And yet Dr. Veale, in the certificate attached hereto, gives it as his deliberate opinion that “the lowest class Indian lives better and in better habitation, and with more regard to sanitary measures, than the lowest class White” (App. A).
26. Furthermore, the doctor puts on record that while “every nationality had one or more of its members at some time in the lazaretto, there was not a single Indian attacked”. Added to this is the testimony of the two doctors from Johannesburg to the effect that “the Indians are in no way inferior to the Europeans of the same standing” (App. B and C).
27. In further proof of your Petitioners’ contention, your Petitioners would take the liberty to quote from a leading article from The Cape Times of 13th April, 1889, which states the case for the Indians as fairly as could be wished:
- The outcry which was raised in the Capital of the Transvaal against the “Coolie trader” some little time ago is brought to the mind by occasional paragraphs in the morning papers, regarding the doings of the Indian and the Arab traders.
After quoting a flattering description of the Indian enterprise from another newspaper, the article goes on to say:
- In face of such reminders as these, one may reasonably expect to be pardoned for referring, for a few moments, to a body of respectable, hardworking men whose position is so misunderstood that their very nationality is overlooked and a name labelled to them, which tends to place them in an exceedingly low level in the estimation of their fellow-creatures. In the face, too, of financial operations, the success of which many of their detractors would envy, one fails to understand the agitation which would place the operators in the same category as the half-heathen Native and confine him to Locations, and subject him to the harsher laws by which the Transvaal Kaffir is governed. The impression, which is but too prevalent both in the Transvaal and in this Colony, that the quiet and inoffensive Arab shopkeeper, and the equally harmless Indian, who carries his pack of dainty wares from house to house, is a Coolie, is due largely to an insolent ignorance as to the race whence they spring. When one reflects that the conception of Brahmanism, with its poetic and mysterious mythology, took its rise in the land of the “Coolie trader”, that in that land 24 centuries ago, the almost divine Buddha taught and practised the glorious doctrine of self-sacrifice, and that it was from the plains and
