PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE
Reference :-
C.O. 882
PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE, LONDON
ALLY WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE BE REPRODUCED. PHOTOGRAPHIC- COPYRIGHT PHOTOGRAPH—NOT TO]
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As to their relations in general, I have never seen such reciprocal goodwill existing between the higher and lower classes in any Colony as I observe here.
10. This mutual confidence is not the offspring of legislative enactments or the work of officials. The stringent laws that I found in operation in other Colonies had failed to produce anything of the kind.
11. Why is there this exceptional state of colonial society in Mauritius? Can it be traced to the exceptional position, as contrasted with other Crown Colonies, of the upper and middle classes?
I think so.
12. That the Indians look with confidence to their employers as their real friends and protectors, may manifestly arise from the fact that the latter are in Mauritius not mere strangers or foreigners, anxious to make some money quickly and to get away to another country, but that they are settled residents, knowing that their children and grandchildren are to be educated and brought up in the Island, and recognizing the fact that the future content and happiness of their families cannot be separated from the future condition of the Colony-not the condition of its fields and trees only, but the condition of every class of the population.
13. In addition to my general statements, whatever they may be worth, as to the contrast between Mauritius and other Crown Colonies, I venture to add some recorded official facts which will set forth the true nature of the contrast to which I have been referring better than the views or speculations of half a dozen Governors.
14. I confine myself to incidents in the routine work of my official life that have occurred since my arrival here.
15. In June, 1883, soon after I reached Mauritius, I had to consider in Executive Council whether I would allow the capital sentence to be carried out on an Indian immigrant who had been convicted of murder. The majority of my advisers and the judge (an intelligent Scotchman), in recommending that the punishment of death should be inflicted, specially drew my attention to the fact that, owing to the humane and paternal character of the Mauritian jurors, it was impossible that the man should have been convicted of a capital crime in this Colony if there had been the slightest ground for acquitting him. However, for somewhat technical reasons, I felt con- strained to exercise the clemency of the Crown. When it became known that the man was not to be executed, the only expressions of public opinion were all in favour of the Governor's decision.
16. In 1878, in a somewhat similar case in Hongkong, I did not allow the sentence Thereupon a number of British and of death to be carried out on a Chinaman. German traders at a public meeting protested against the leniency of the Governor to
the natives.
17. When I suggested in Mauritius the total abolition of certain licenses that the Indian hawkers of vegetables, cakes, and fish had to pay, the Mauritian planters and the Mauritian press earnestly supported the proposal. The only whisper of opposition All the Mauritians in the Council of Government was from a non-Mauritian source.
supported it; and those taxes on the food of the labouring classes are now removed by Ordinance No. 26 of 1883.
18. When, as Governor-in-Chief of the Windward Islands, I made a similar proposal in favour of the negro hawkers of food, it was denounced by the planting body and the West Indian press as something unduly favouring the negroes, and the food of the poor is still subject in the West Indies to this tax.
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19. In visiting the Indian camps on the sugar estates, the Indian immigrants com- plained to me that they were not allowed to keep their cows in their huts or adjoining They also said they objected to Indian women being treated by to their huts.
go European doctors, and they complained of the Indian women being forced to hospitals. On inquiry I found that the upper and middle classes of the Mauritian community entirely sympathised with the labouring class, and were anxious to have those complaints remedied, whilst the advocates for applying to the Indians these particular "sanitary rules (defensible perhaps, in theory, but in my opinion injurious in practice and unnecessary here,) were officials only.
20. In Hongkong one or two officials who seemed disposed to worry the Chinese with were zealously backed up by what are called “the sanitary rules of western science European traders. The Europeans objected to the natives being allowed to keep cattle according to the native fashion, and they urged me to insist on the Chinese submitting to hospital treatment on the European system. The Chinese themselves complained to me that this sanitary zeal of the European trader was not unmixed with a desire to drive them out of the Colony, and I so reported to Her Majesty's Government.
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21. Your Lordship will see from the report of a committee of inquiry into some recent events in the Mauritius prison, to which I refer in another Despatch, that the Indian prisoner Seechurn died on the 4th of August 1883 from the effects of a flogging he received on the back with the cat-o'-nine tails on the 23rd of July 1883; that the Indian prisoner Juggabundun was certified a few months ago by the Commissioners of Lunacy to be insane, and that he is now in the lunatic asylum, having been flogged with the cat-o'-nine tails four times within four weeks at the end of 1882, when he was not in his right mind; that the Indian prisoner Chummun Kamadu, who had been certified in the early months of 1883 as a monomaniac, and who had been recently suffering from malarious fever was illegally punished by the new superintendent from England, who sentenced him to "extra shot drill," whereupon the Indian committed suicide;
that in these and other serious instances of the maltreatment of Indians by the prison authorities, which have occurred since my arrival in Mauritius, the ordinary safeguards were not taken; there was no medical certificate signed by a doctor before the punishments were carried out, there was no inquiry upon oath, and there was no evidence recorded; the instructions given by your Lordship's predecessors that flogging should not be administered without such precautions had been set at naught by the authorities.
22. The report and the annexures to it show that the authorities had carried on this system under which Indian prisoners were improperly punished and sometimes killed, in spite of the protests of the Mauritian community who had in vain opposed the flogging policy of the state officials.
23. In the précis of prison discipline in the Colonies which was laid before Parliament in 1867, and a copy of which was sent by the Secretary of State to my predecessor, Sir Henry Barkly, a remarkable contrast is referred to as existing between Mauritius and the other Crown Colonies, namely, that in Mauritius the community are opposed to flogging and the authorities alone are in favour of flogging. In one of the official Despatches a hope is expressed that in course of time the Mauritians may become so enlightened as to approve of flogging. That hope has not been realised. Flogging laws have been forced through the Council of Government in spite of the opposition of the Mauritians. Even the casting vote of the Governor was used a few years ago to enforce this form of punishment.
24. I can certainly corroborate the existence to this day of the contrast referred to in the Parliamentary papers of 1867. In the West Indies, in West Africa, and in Hongkong, I found that the so-called upper classes were earnest advocates for flogging the natives. In those Colonies the "authorities" also favoured flogging, though not perhaps with such zeal as leading gentlemen of the European community. Here I find the reverse. The Mauritian community continue to be opposed to flogging, and they are indignant at the injury inflicted by the cat-o'-nine tails on the Indian prisoners. The Mauritian press quote the arguments they used for years past against the flogging system, which they have consistently denounced as inhuman and demoralising.
25. In my Despatch No. 159, of 1883, I referred to the large number of prisoners I found crowding the gaols of Mauritius, and I said that a considerable proportion of those so-called criminals were persons imprisoned for inability to pay fines under the Forest Laws of 1881. My attention was drawn to the subject by petitions from Indian immigrants complaining of the daily injustice to which they were being subjected by the oppressive penalties of Ordinance 10 of 1881.
26. I found that for having in his possession a tooth-pick, being a piece of brush wood about three inches long, an Indian had been fined fifty rupees or ten days' im- prisonment. Another Indian complained that having a small bundle of such portions of twigs in his possession, the total value of which was under a shilling, he had been fined a thousand rupees or two hundred days' imprisonment. Other petitions were from Indians who had, in cutting grass to feed their cattle, unintentionally cut a little brush wood, and who were condemned to pay for each twig a fine of fifty rupesa, though the twig may not have been worth one farthing.
27. On referring the petitions to the magistrates for a report. I found in every case the magistrate stating that the law compelled them to impose the enormous penalties, of which they entirely disapproved. I ascertained that the enactment passed in August 1881 gave a definition of the word "tree" so as to include the ordinary tooth- pick that every
Indian uses, and that the discretion as to the amount of the fine was deliberately taken away from the magistrate by the ordinance.
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