itable, unless we assisted the poverty-stricken
ryot to emigrate and sell his labour to advantage. He proposed
indentures and terminable contracts, for he declared he had no wish to
transplant for good. All that was needed was a short season of
wage-earning abroad, that the labourer might return home with savings
which would set him for the future on a higher economic plane. The
letter was temperate and academic in phrasing, the speculation of a
publicist rather than the declaration of a Minister. But in Liberals,
who remembered the pandemonium raised over the Chinese in South Africa,
it stirred up the gloomiest forebodings.

Then, whispered from mouth to mouth, came the news of the Great Bill.
Vennard, it was said, intended to bring in a measure at the earliest
possible date to authorise a scheme of enforced and State-aided
emigration to the African mines. It would apply at first only to the
famine districts, but power would be given to extend its working by
proclamation to other areas. Such was the rumour, and I need not say
it was soon magnified. Questions were asked in the House which the
Speaker ruled out of order. Furious articles, inviting denial,
appeared in the Liberal Press; but Vennard took not the slightest
notice. He spent his time between his office in Whitehall and the
links at Littlestone, dropping into the House once or twice for half an
hour's slumber while a colleague was speaking. His Under Secretary in
the Lords--a young gentleman who had joined the party for a bet, and to
his immense disgust had been immediately rewarded with office--lost his
temper under cross-examination and swore audibly at the Opposition. In
a day or two the story universally believed was that the Secretary for
India was about to transfer the bulk of the Indian people to work as
indentured labourers for South African Jews.

It was this popular version, I fancy, which reached the ears of Ram
Singh, and the news came on him like a thunderclap. He thought that
what Vennard proposed Vennard could do. He saw his native province
stripped of its people, his fields left unploughed, and his cattle
untended; nay, it was possible, his own worthy and honourable self sent
to a far country to dig in a hole. It was a grievous and intolerable
prospect. He walked home to Gloucester Road in heavy preoccupation,
and the first thing he did was to get out the mysterious brass box in
which he kept his valuables. From a pocket-book he