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a) June, 1911.J British and Foreign Shipping. [Hth Day. LAKjI O±< ORE WE — com. " for lower wages and are able to ask lor lower wages than tiie seamen wiio live "in New Zealand/ They would surely say tins is in some respects a harder case than that of Indians who had settled in a particular Dominion, because these are men who are domiciled Indians, who ply their work at a distance from their homes, and in some cases directly from their homes, and yet suiter disabilities. Now it. of course, is true that this is a labour diiiicuity, and, as 1 ventured to point out before, it comes from the practical abdication of the old ideas on political economy; but the Indians are not likely to appreciate it more on that account. It is also necessary to say that this is not, as I think Mr. Buxton will point out, a strictly local question. The complaint is not so much that you are entitled to lay down special rules for the men who are working at sea within your waters, as that you desire to apply those rules to men who are taking, so to speak, a through journey, half round the world, and happen to touch in the course of that journey at your ports or at the Australian ports. Sir JOSEPH WARD : You recognise that if is the economic question we are dealing with. EARL OF ORE WE : Entirely. Sir JOSEPH WARD : Very well. The Indians would absolutely have the right, as far as their economic questions are concerned, to c carry them out as they think proper to suit their race in their own territories. Surely they ought not to object to our doing exactly the same to suit our own race in our territory. That is the point. EARL OF ORE WE : But I think it must be admitted that such a point of view cannot be expected specially to appeal to the Indians, and very largely for this reason : The desire that he should be paid the standard rate of wages is one which might in a way be supposed to appeal to him; but on the other hand he has a different and, if you like, a lower standard of comfort. There is nothing morally wrong in a man being a vegetarian and a teetotaller, and his wife and family also, and being able to live very much more cheaply than people who adopt the European standard of comfort. But the standard of comfort it is desired to impose is that of a Briton, or a man of British extraction. That may be a reasonable thing to do, but it is the imposition of that standard and the accompanying rights—l do not see how you can put it in any other way —upon people who, for purposes of their own, are content with a different standard of comfort to which no moral or, indeed, social objection can be made. If a man is content to live on rice and water, and does not require pork, or beef, and rum, he naturally is able to support his family on a very much lower scale. Consequently you have to convert the entire Indian nation to a theory of economics which they certainly do not hold at present, and to which I think it would be extremely difficult to convert them. As regards the general question on which Sir Joseph Ward has touched, as to people remaining, so far as possible, within their own areas, I may remind the Conference that when T was in Mr. Ffarcourt's office I instituted, with a view, as far as possible, of getting - round this difficulty, an important committee, which was presided over by a very eminent ex-official, Lord Sanderson, with the object of seeing under what conditions and in what circumstances emigration from India to the Crown Colonies could best be encouraged—to the tropical colonies of the Crown. That inquiry was with the view, really, of trying to blunt the edge of this particular difficulty as regards the Dominions, and I hope that certain good results have followed from the report of that inquiry. But the larger question as to whether there is any prospect or probability that the many races of which the British Empire is composed can finally be confined, even in a general sense, to their own areas, is one which is not under absolute discussion now, and therefore I will not attempt to pursue it. As Mr. Malan has pointed out, in South Africa, at any rate, the question hinges mainly on the other side, and it is there a race question, and not an economic one, because there the question of coloured labour exists already on account of the native races which are there in such large numbers.