SIR MANCHERJEE BHOWNAG-GREETo ask the Secretary of State 749 for the Colonies if he will state fully the terms of the message in which Lord Milner, or the Transvaal authority, has asked permission to place some locations or residences of British Indian subjects in Johannesburg under the provisions of the Chinese Labour Ordinance owing to the prevalence of plague there, and what reply he has sent to the message; and whether, in view of the general powers of the local administration to provide sanitary safeguards in such an emergency, he will recommend that recourse be not had to the Ordinance, which distinctly provided that it was not applicable to British Indian subjects.
(Answered by Mr. Secretary Lyttelton.) The message to which I referred in my remarks in the House yesterday, and which, as I stated, seemed obscure, did not, I find, bear the meaning which I attached to it at first, and indeed related to another Ordinance altogether, which does not concern the treatment of Asiatics within the Transvaal. I have no reason to suppose that recourse will be had to the Labour Importation Ordinance in connection with the plague.