PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE
Reference :-
TELEC.O. 8
882
ALLY WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE BE REPRODUCED PHOTOGRAPHIC- COPYRIGHT PHOTOGRAPH-NOT TO
2 PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE, LONDON
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Inclosure in No. 40.
To his Excellency the Honourable Sir Arthur Hamilton Gordon, K.C.M.G., Governor
and Commander-in-chief of Mauritius and its Dependencies, &c., &c., &c.
May it please your Excellency.
I CANNOT help protesting against some of the remarks and conclusions of the Report which has just been presented to your Excellency by the Police Inquiry Com- missioners. I do so with a firm conviction, that I shall meet with a just and impartial award at your Excellency's hands, in regard to the points respecting which I feel compelled to appeal to your Excellency's decision.
2. I feel chiefly aggrieved by the sweeping condemnation passed on the present management of the Immigration Department in paragraphe 122 and 248 of the Report to which I take the liberty of drawing your Excellency's attention; but I consider that I am scarcely less justified in complaining of the unfoundedness of many of the remarks and criticisms of the Report, and of the unfairness of some of its conclusions.
3. Paragraph 122 of the Report is worded as follows:-"That which has struck us most in the Immigration Department is, that it has been transformed, from an office where the immigrants may come freely for advice and assistance, into a Department by means of which fees are levied from the immigrants, in addition to the ordinary taxation fixed by law."
Paragraph 248, expressing the same conclusion in fewer words, says :---" We found that the Immigration Department had become an office for extracting fees from old immigrants, in addition to the ordinary taxation.'
4. It is clear that the above quoted conclusion casts a severe and unqualified censure on the Immigration Department,-one which. if it is deserved at all, can scarcely leave your Excellency any alternative but that of instantly suspending me from the office which I hold. If the Immigration Dpartmenta Department entrusted to an officer styled the Protector of Immigrants-whose very title points out to him unmis- takeably the line of conduct he has to pursue towards immigrants, apart from all laws and instructions speciaily defining his duties. is really transformed, as it is said to be, so as no longer to be a Department where immigrants can come freely for advice and assistance, the inference is unavoidable, that a change in that Department is impera- tively necessary. If it has been so transformed, it is evident that the spirit in which it should be managed is egregiously misunderstood, or has been culpably lost sight of; that the officer to whom the Department has been confided is utterly unworthy of the post he has hitherto been allowed to fill.
5. I do not hesitate to admit that such, and such alone, should be the consequence of the ignorance, or neglect, or wilful and intentional misperformance of duty of which the head of the Immigration Department would stand convicted if the conclusions of the Commissioners were well-founded. But, Sir, I boldy deny their being well-founded. I deny their resting on any foundation admissible by an impartial judge as sufficient to Has it been in the support them. Where are the grounds on which they rest?
remotest manner proved that immigrants have at any time been hindered by me from coming to me for advice and assistance that I have knowtugly tolerated the existence of any obstacle hindering their freely coming to me? or that I have negligently suffered such obstacles to grow up and constitute the transformation which the Report has depicted.
6. It is said that the transformation has converted the Immigration Department into "an office for extracting fees from the old immigrants in addition to the ordinary taxation." If this part of the charge be true, the burden of it lies wholly on the Executive, for no fee has been extracted from immigrants, as the Report expresses it, without the previous sanction of Government itself.
7. I freely admitted, in my answers to the questions put to me by the Commis- sioners, that I disapproved of the Immigration Office being made a Revenue Department; that I thought that the papers which immigrants have to apply for should be subjected to the lowest charges possible; and that, although I thought it unadvisable that these charges should be altogether done away with, I considered that But that such had been stated by me to be they should be reduced to a minimum. my opinion is nowhere acknowledged in the Report, although it clearly appears in the reproduction of my answers.
8. It can hardly be asserted in justification of the terms in which the conclusion of the Report is expressed, that it has simply reproduced my own remark as to the
• Vide Answer 353 in Appendix to Report.
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conversion of the Immigration Department. There is a broad difference, quite apparent to any impartial eye, between my personal declaration and that of the Commission. I simply counselled the reduction of the fees which, under the orders of the Executive, I have now to levy in the Immigration Department; but I certainly never did admit that the Immigration Department had been transformed, nor that advice and assistance are no longer freely given there to immigrants, nor that it is now an office where fees are extracted from immigrants.
9. I here hasten to advert to that part of the letter of Major-General Smyth, in which he acknowledges that Captain Blunt and Mr. Bobertson concurred with him in dissenting from the expediency of inserting paragraphs 245 and 248 in the terms in which they were couched, although they did not deny the correctness of the conclusions intended to be conveyed by those parts of the Report. This admission is most important, and reveals more than it may appear to signify at first view. It establishes first beyond a doubt that the terms at least of paragraph 248 were not in accordance with the true meaning of the members who dissented from it; and next that the only member of the Commission whose sentiments the terms employed wholly conveyed was Mr. Justice Gorrie.
10. The Commission consisted of the following gentlemen :-
(1.) His Honour General 8. Smyth.
(2.) Hin Honour Mr. Justice Gorrie. (3.) The Honourable C. Antelme.
(4) The Honourable J. Fraser.
(5.) Captain F. F. Blunt.
(6.) J. A. Robertson, Esq.
His Honour General Smyth, Captain Blunt, and Mr. Robertson having dissented, the Honourable Mr. Antelme having likewise dissented from the others, and presented a separate Report, and the Honourable Mr. Fraser having presented no Report, it follows that the paragraph, as retained, expressed the sentiments of only one member of the Commission-his Honour Mr. Justice Gorrie. How far it is consistent with the rules which generally regulate the proceedings of public Commissions that the opinion of one member should prevail over those of all the others, I leave it to your Excellency to appreciate.
11. I now beg to point out those remarks of the Report which, in my opinion, are unfounded and erroneous. Paragraph 57, referring to the raising of the fee for a duplicate ticket from 58. to 10s., and then to its present rate of 17. says:-" The Protector tells us that the fee was raised with the view of preventing illicit traffic with tickets, &c. The prevention of the traffic has certainly not been gained, for we had produced to us a bundle of tickets that must have been abstracted from the Immigra- tion Department." To this is added the surprise expressed by Mr. Anderson, the Chief Clerk, on seeing those tickets, and his exclamation-"There must be something far wrong somewhere ?"
If I had been present I might have explained that the fact of a bundle of tickets having been abstracted from the Immigration Office simply proved that some person had been guilty of that abstraction, and that the clerk who had had charge of them had been guilty of neglect in not having kept them in a well-closed press or box, secure against abstractions; but that it established no proof whatever that Indian immigrants now pass over their tickets to one another as easily as they used to do before, that is, before the fee was increased, sad before the further check of the photograph had been resorted to.
12. I may here remark that the fee was raised before the portrait system was adopted; and that, in my opinion, the adoption of this system is a much surar guarantee against illicit traffic in tickets than the enhancement of the fee; and therefore that the fee may now more safely be reduced than it could have been formerly.
18. The Report quotes the following statement contained in the Petition :--- "If one of your petitioners leaves his employ, he must present himself at the Central Police Station of his district within eight days to have his pass put in order;
may
be obliged to come two or three days in succession, and in the meantime the eight days may be exceeded, and he be afterwards arrested and sentenced to hard labour as a vagabond." And in reference to this statement the Report says:-"This complaint. we find well grounded, and it is the law, with the exception that instead of eight days only being allowed they can have seven days more by applying to the officials who have power to extend it, and this is generally done."
he
This is simply an imperfect representation of the law in regard to the pass system.
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