§ In answer to a question from an Hon. MEMBER, as to there being any objection to produce any communications which might 1006 have taken place between the home authorities and the Governor General of India on the regulations affecting the trade in salt,
§ SIR J. C. HOBHOUSEsaid, he had to state to the House, that in consequence of the communications which had been just alluded to, the Court of Directors and the Board of Control had taken that important subject into their joint consideration, and had framed a despatch which went out to India, he thought, yesterday, and the purport of which he had no objection to mention. The purport of it was this: There had been certain regulations framed in 1841, and which the salt trade—the importers of salt—had thought impeded the importation of that article; and it was the opinion of the home authorities that the complaints made against those regulations were well founded. The consequence was that the despatch which had been framed and sent out to India the preceding day, had ordered the Governor General of India to cancel those regulations, and give to the importers of salt the advantages which they had had under the regulations of the year 1836, and from which they had been excluded in 1841.