 This document was suppressed by the Provincial Governments in India under the Press Act of 1912 and the resulting controversy caused a rift between Mackarness and his sympathetic supporters in the Liberal press and Edwin Montagu who was the Under-Secretary of State for India.Apart from his interest in the issue of so-called coolie labour, Mackarness drew on his experience in South Africa to comment regularly on matters affecting the British colonies there over the years.In 1902 he published "Martial Law in the Cape Colony during 1901" and was a member of the South African Conciliation Committee, a British anti-war organisation opposed to the suffering caused by the Second Boer War and dedicated to bringing the war to an end through negotiation.