As to shutting Canadians out of India, Canada would accept that challenge gladly. When Canadians carry vices to India—says Canada—shut them out.
These are the reasons given for the Pacific Coast's aversion to the Hindu, and even with the arguments stated explicitly, there is a great deal untold and untellable.
For instance, some of the leaders talking loudest in Eastern Canada in the name of the Sikh are not Sikhs at all, and one at least has a criminal record in San Francisco.
For instance again, when the coronation festivities were on in England, there was a very peculiar guard kept round the Hindu quarters. It would be well for some of the eastern women's clubs to inquire why that was; also why the fact was hushed up that two white women of bad character were carried out of that compound dead.
Said a mill owner, one who employs many Hindus, "If the East could understand how some of these penniless leaders grow rich, they would realize that the Hindu has our employment sharks beaten to a frazzle. I take in a new man from one of these leaders. The leader gets two dollars or five dollars for finding this fellow a job. I have barely got the man broken in when the leader yanks him off to another job and sends me a new man, getting, of course, the employment agent fee for both changes."
"But why not let them come out here and work and go back?" asks the East.
Because that is just what the Hindu will not do. When he comes, he fights for the franchise to stay. That is the real meaning behind the fight over cases now in the courts.
"They are curious fellows, poor beggars," said a police court official to me. "They have no more conception of what truth means than a dog stealing a bone. We had a Hindu come in here as complainant against another man, with his back hacked to beef steak. We had very nearly sent the defendant up for a long term in the 'pen,' when we got wind that these two fellows had been bitter enemies—old spites—and that there was something queer about the complainant's shanty. We sent out to examine. The fellow had stuck bits of glass all over the inside of his shack walls and then cut his own back to pay an old grudge against the other man. Another fellow rushed in here gesticulating complaint, who was literally soaked in blood. We had had our experience and so sending for an interpreter, we soused this fellow into a bathtub. Every dab came off and there was not a scratch under."
"You say the Hindu is the negro problem multiplied by ten, plus craft," said a life-long resident of India to me. "That is hardly correct. The Hindu is different from the negro. He is intellectual and spiritual as well as crafty and sensuous. You will never have trouble with the Hindu, if you keep him in his place—"
"But do you think a democratic country can what you call 'keep a race in its place'? The very genius of our democracy is that we want each individual to come up out of his place to a higher place."