PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE
Reference :-
C.O. 882
ALLY WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE BE REPRODUCED PHOTOGRAPHIC- COPYRIGHT PHOTOGRAPH-NOT TO
5 PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE, LONDON
1792, Encl. 11,
nd.
ir A. Havelock's
mosals for
modifying tho
Mummandations
the Select Jommitter.
9.
17.
inal suggestions.
72, Excl. 0.
20
that, as long as the present system continues, there should be in favoured districts a fixed and regularly exacted tax, while in all the poorer and outlying "districts, and wherever cultivation is uncertain "from excessive or deficient water or other causes,' the people should be given the option of reverting to the renting system.
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The recommendations of the Select Committee are as a whole unanimously supported by the Executive Council. All the members stated that they would approve of a Bill being drafted on these lines, leaving the details to be settled in sub- committee.
15. The Governor, in the event of his own schemes being rejected, falls back upon the Select Committee's proposals, but hopes they will be accepted only as a prelude to the complete abolition of the tax. He would prefer to the sliding scale a reduction of the tax all round by one-half, as less likely to open the door to fraud; and apparently, whatever reduction is made, he would make a corresponding reduction in the import duty, and make up the loss by raising the salt and Customs duties.
This proposal really differs very little from his second scheme, in which, as has been seen, the paddy tax would be retained at between one-third or one- half of its present amount; and it need not therefore be further criticised.
16. I now venture to submit my own views on this difficult question in the light of the foregoing remarks :—
(1.) The Act of 1878 was, in my opinion, a wise, comprehensive, and statesmanlike piece of legislation. I believe it to be, as Mr. Saunders styles it," one "of the best laws in the Statute Book." It is im- possible to read the papers connected with its intro- duction and enactment without seeing that it was framed by experienced men on just and considerate lines.
Its object was to induce a habit of paying a fixed and regular instead of a shifting and uncertain tax, in money instead of kind, and thereby to put an end to oppression and fraud. Any change of the kind was likely to produce temporary hardship in some districts at certain times to an unthrifty race.
(2.) The years which immediately followed its passing were years of extraordinary depression, so that it never has had a fair trial: It was not the nature of this particular tax, it was the fact of regularly collecting any tax at all at such times. which troubled the people, and which must trouble all peoples in bad times."
In the late debate, a report of which accompanies these papers, Mr. Seneviratna (Sinhalese) says,
"In
a very large portion of the country it is not so "much the tax which is supposed to cause hard- ship, but the way in which it is collected;" and I utterly demur to judging of the merits of this tax, or to condemning a sound and useful Ordinance, because the failure of coffee brought distress in its train, and because the people found it difficult in consequence to pay anything to the Government.
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It seems to me that this point of view has not been sufficiently brought out, and I wish to insist upon it as strongly as I can.
(3.) I dread the future of Ceylon, weighted with doubtful railways, called on to pay a heavy military contribution, and dependent in the main on a single agricultural industry; and, therefore, I utterly de- precate absorbing all available sources of revenue in order to make up substitutes for this one tax.
(4.) If this tax is now abolished, it will be in the teeth of the advice given by an overwhelming majority of the best and most experienced men. It would be difficult to quote any instance in which sound experience was more entirely on one side.
(5.) I see no evidence that in normal times the tax presses hardly on the peasantry or retards culti- vation. I believe the increase or decrease of paddy cultivation to depend on very much simpler causes.
(6.) I fail to see how the Ceylon peasantry can be taxed except through their food. I regard the paddy tax and the grain duty combined as simply a poll tax, and the fairest poll tax that can be devised as being paid uniformly by all classes.
(7.).I regard it as out of the question to abolish the home tax and keep the import duty on grain. That course, as already stated, will be welcomed at first by those who oppose the grain taxes, for the simple reason that it will make the eventual aboli- tion of the import duty a practical certainty; but it is to my mind perfectly useless to imagine that the paddy tax can be swept away and the import duty permanently maintained.
(8.) I believe a land tax would be as irksome as, far more unpopular than, and less fair than the grain tax,
Mr. Moir, one of the justest and most experienced of all the Ceylon officials, and whose experience has been mainly in the paddy districts, says in his short paper on the subject, to which I would invite special reference, "I deprecate interference with the grain Enel. 7, p. 4
tax; the cry for its abolition emanates, to the best of my knowledge, from a few agitators who "have no personal interest in rice cultivation; and **the complaint, which led to the appointment of
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the Select Committee, had reference not to the imposition of the grain tax, but to the manner in which the Ordinance for its regulation had been administered. A great deal of the outcry, chiefly. in the Eastern Province, was factions, but even in that Province the taxpayers never clamoured for the abolition of the tax.'
This statement seems to me to sum up the actual facts of the case, and in my opinion the paddy tax should be retained,
Turning now to the recommendations of the Select Committee, I have no doubt that most of them are wise and sound and should be adopted; but I object to the tax being whittled away by one- third or one fourth, before the Ordinance of 1878, which also cut it down, has had any real trial; and I look on the introduction of a sliding scale as a inove in the wrong direction, tending to take people back into the old bad system of uncertain taxation. What seems to me to be wanted is no change, in
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