§ MR. HENRY SEYMOURsaid, he would beg to ask the Secretary of State for India, If he will promote a Labour Ordinance for India, or certain parts of India, similar to that now in force in Ceylon; and if he will cause to be remedied the great want of roads in the important district of Wynaad? The tea and coffee plantations in India had become a most important branch of industry, and an increasing amount of revenue was being obtained from them to this country. The planters in India, however, experienced a difficulty which was not felt in other of Her Majesty's colonies. There was no proper law existing between master and servant in that country, and the planters had no power to compel labourers to keep their contracts. When the planter in Ceylon 237 brought his Coolies from India, as he constantly did, he knew exactly what his expenditure would be, and he could compel the labourers to perform their contracts; but, strange to say that in India, where there were millions of acres of magnificent land lying waste, with her population going east and west to cultivate land in other countries, there was no labour ordinance to give security to the capitalist. When an Englishman went out to India and bought an estate for the purpose of cultivating it, he found, after going to the expense of gathering labourers from various places on that vast continent, that upon any day they might all leave him bodily, and there was no law to protect him. A meeting of the planters of the southern districts of India had been recently held upon this subject of labour ordinance, and they were unanimously of opinion that the labour ordinance which existed in Ceylon, and which had worked so well for the last twenty years, ought to be extended to India. When a gentleman in India invited a guest to dinner, the butler came in—not to announce that the dinner was ready, but that the cook had resigned. This was a very serious question. A planter might have 200 or 300 labourers, and he would find some morning that they had been bribed, and had gone to gather in some other person's crop. There were 1,000,000 acres in the south of India upon which tea and coffee might be grown; each acre would cost £100 to bring it into a proper state of cultivation, so that £100,000,000 of capital might be well employed in that part of India alone. The profits of the planters in the southern districts were represented at about 50 per cent, and as there was a deficit in the exchequer of India, he thought it would be a matter of interest to the Secretary of State for that country to encourage as far as possible the expenditure of capital in India. English capital and English energy were bid for in every part of the world, and they were taken to America, Australia, and every other part of the civilized and uncivilized world except India. Considering that the right hon. Baronet (Sir Charles Wood) would have in the course of a month or two to announce a deficit in the Indian budget, it would surely be worth his while to compete a little for that English energy and capital which went everywhere except to India. It was surprising that a labour ordinance had not been introduced into India long ago. In many parts of the country the planters were 238 leaving for want of that support which the Government had it in their power to give them. The local governors in India dismissed all complaints in a very summary manner, as they knew their superior would not find fault with them, and that the right hon. Gentleman the Secretary of State was many thousands of miles off. Nor was he particularly well disposed in favour of a European population in India, and the consequence was that the revenues of the country had not been so productive as they ought to have been, and the land remained to a considerable extent untilled. The meeting of planters to which he had referred was also unanimous as to the want of roads in the district, This had been a want felt for the last ten or twelve years, and they had always been assured by the right hon. Gentleman the Secretary of State for India that roads were being made. Roads were always being made, but, somehow or other, not a single road had been completed. He could not understand how it was that such a want of energy should be displayed by the authorities in India, or why they should so neglect those sources of wealth which were open to them. It could not be because they had an overflowing treasury, for when his right hon. Friend paid off somewhat too prematurely two millions of Indian debt he little, in all probability, anticipated that he would have to come down to the House of Commons and announce a deficit in the course of the present Session. He might, however, have paid off that debt to the extent which he had done, had he only availed himself of the inexhaustible resources which India offered. He seemed to think, however, that there was some undefinable danger in expending British capital in India, and the result was that India remained unexplored, and the Indian Exchequer un-replenished to the extent which otherwise might be expected. A deficit existed in the Indian revenue. He believed that deficit would be diminished by the construction of reproductive works such as those which he then recommended. There were men who spent forty years of their lives in India, and who returned from it quite fresh, and he therefore saw no reason why the district to which he referred should not be colonized by Europeans, if the matter was only taken up by the Government in a proper manner. Such colonization had answered perfectly well in Ceylon, but, be that as it might, the waste lands which his right hon. Friend had promised should 239 be sold had been for some inexplicable cause left unbought. He should like to know what stood in the way of the sale, for it appeared that in Assam a considerable portion of land had been purchased. Those were all matters which deserved the most serious consideration of the Government, and he hoped they would receive their deliberate attention.
§ SIR CHARLES WOODsaid, his hon. Friend urged him to incur a very considerable expenditure with a view to increasing the Indian surplus or diminishing the deficit. He could not, however, see how that object was to be attained by heavy expense for the construction of the roads which he advocated. He (Sir Charles Wood) admitted that the execution of the roads referred to was most desirable and necessary, and regretted that they were not more rapidly made. He believed that the roads had been made piecemeal, and he feared they were not well done—but orders had been given which he trusted would remedy that evil. He so far concurred with his hon. Friend that after the Report of Sir W. Denison, who had gone out to India last autumn, he had given instructions that roads, which he quite granted were very much needed, should be proceeded with in a more systematic way, and should be completed within a certain time. With respect to the coffee and tea districts, he found that there was an increase of about 2,000 tons a year in the production of coffee, and that the Assam tea, the production of which also was, he believed, on the increase, commanded a very good price in the London markets. His hon. Friend, however, adverting to another subject, complained that there was no law in India placing on a proper footing the relations between master and servant; but the fact was, that the question having been considered by the Law Commission in this country it had been placed upon that footing which the most able jurists deemed to be the best. Beyond that, the question of importing labour from one part of the country to another had been carefully considered with reference to the tea districts of Assam, for the introduction of labour into which a sepcial Act had been passed two years ago. He regretted, however, to say that the result had not realized the expectations which had been formed, owing to circumstances over which legislation had no control. It should, in dealing with the subject, be borne in mind that the introduction of labour into small islands like the West Indies or 240 Ceylon, and the control of the arrangements for the Coolies, was a comparatively easy matter; but that when labourers were brought into a vast and perfectly wild country, to the sort of life prevailing in which they were unaccustomed, these regulations were attended with considerable difficulty. In the former case the labourers were easily placed under a system of supervision which in the latter they naturally became much less manageable. Into the particular district of Wynaad almost all the labourers came from Mysore; and, as they generally went there only for two or three months, that permanent sort of contract to which his hon. Friend alluded could not well be established. They regarded their new employment only as a temporary matter, from which they returned to their own homes as soon as the coffee harvest was completed.
§ MR. HENRY SEYMOURobserved, that all he said was that a law ought to be passed under the operation of which a servant could not, as at present, leave his master the very next morning after he had engaged to enter his employment. He would have a servant, if he failed to keep his contract with his master in India, punished by imprisonment in the same way as in Ceylon and other colonies of the British Empire.
§ SIR CHARLES WOODsaid, he understood his hon. Friend to have cited the case of Wynaad, and to have contended that a law with regard to labour similar to that which prevailed in Ceylon should be introduced there with the view of producing similar results. The circumstances under which labour was obtained both in Ceylon and the West India Islands was altogether different. The experiment had been tried in Assam, where a special law had been passed authorizing a system of Coolie labour precisely analagous to that which existed in Ceylon, and entire failure had been the consequence. Indeed, the operation of the law, so great were the cruelties practised under it, amounted almost to enforced labour. In reference to the deception practised on Coolies, he would read the following extract from a letter of the Commissioner of the Decca division to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal:—
The deception lies in this, that a Coolie from the upper part of India has no idea of the country to which he is going when he enters into his contract in Calcutta, and the utter wretchedness of life in a plantation only opens to him when he reaches his destination. He naturally tries to 241 escape, and the planter in his duty to himself and his employers of course tries to prevent him, and as the planter has a contract into which the Coolie is supposed to have entered voluntarily he is not likely to listen to the Coolie's plea of ignorance.If these poor fellows complained to the magistrates they were treated as if they had absconded. The existing state of things was thus described by Deputy Commissioner Cachar's assistant—But in too many gardens the labourers are flogged with frightful brutality, and for offences of the most trifling description.He would not now go into details as to what took place under the management of these people. He would simply read the following extract from a communication made by a magistrate of great experience:—The magistrate was opposed to the maintenance of the Act, on the ground that the power given by it was liable to be much abused, so as to become a powerful engine for enforcing slavery.The object of all this was to introduce a modified system of what, to use the mildest terms, might be called forced labour. The people of America, in going into the backwoods, had no necessity for legislation to enforce labour, as they were able to hold out sufficient inducement to procure the services of people willing to work for them. He believed it would be found that kind treatment and good wages would be far more effectual in keeping the labourers on the estates than the enforcement of any system of pains and penalties which could be suggested.