§ THE EARL OF ELLENBOROUGHasked whether the Government were prepared to lay on the Table of the House the financial scheme of which mention had been made in the newspapers as having recently been submitted to the Legislative Council of India, and also whether that scheme had obtained their previous sanction. He was the more anxious to obtain information on those points, because it appeared to him that there must be some mistake in the details which appeared in the newspapers. If, however, that statement were correct, income tax would have to be paid by every private soldier in Her Majesty's Cavalry and Artillery in India; the non-commissioned officers in the Infantry would also be liable to it, and he was not quite sure that it would not have in some instances to be borne by the privates themselves—at any rate they would only escape by the difference of a few shillings. But that was not all; every commissioned officer in the Native army, as well as privates in the Native Irregular Cavalry, would also come within the scope of the scheme; so that nearly all our troops in India, Native as well as European, would be combined together with the people by considerations for their own interest in opposition to the plan. And he might add, what everybody knew, the difficulty if not the impossibility of obtaining trustworthy Commissioners to hear and decide appeals from over-assessments.
THE DUKE OF ARGYLLsaid, that having received no notice of the noble Earl's question, he was not prepared to give to it an explicit answer. He might, however, observe that if his right hon. Friend the Secretary for India had received the financial statement to which the noble Earl al- 1231 luded, it must have been since he last saw him, inasmuch as he had not then been officially informed of its details. He earnestly hoped the noble Earl, as well as others, would abstain from making any observations which might create prejudice against the plan of the Government of India until it had been fully stated and explained to Parliament, inasmuch as there might be many mistakes as to its details contained in the accounts which had been received. It was, he might add, physically impossible that the plan could have obtained the previous sanction of the Government at home.