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PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE

Reference :-

CO. 882/10

ALLY WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE COPYRIGHT PHOTOGRAPH-NUT TO BE REPRODUCED PHOTOGRAPHIC-

PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE, LONDON,

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I have to introduce myself to your lordship last of all. So far as I am con- cerned, my lord, so far as my race is concerned, I do not belong to any particular race in Ceylon. My namie is on the Burgher electorate in Ceylon. The Burghers, as perhaps your lordship may know, are the descendants, more or less mixed with the native population of the country, of the old Dutch and Portuguese settlers of Ceylon. I am a barrister-at-law. I belong, I may say, to a family of lawyers. I believe my brother is well known in the Colonial Office; he was the senior Puisne Justice of the Supreme Court in Ceylon. I have been myself a practising barrister in Ceylon for several years.

VISCOUNT MILNER: Are you still?

MR. PEREIRA: I am still. I shall be returning to Ceylon very shortly. VISCOUNT MILNER: I was going to ask these gentlemen which has most recently come from Ceylon. I observed that several of them are at least temporarily resident in this country.

MR. PEREIRA: Mr. de Silva has come very recently from Ceylon.

VISCOUNT MILNER: Quite lately!

MR. DE SILVA: Yes; in August.

VISCOUNT MILNER: You came in connexion with this business specially? MR. DE SILVA: Yes.

MR. PEREIRA: Your lordship is aware of the difficulty we experience in travelling now, and that is really one reason why a deputation did not come straight from Ceylon; we availed ourselves of the fact of the Ceylonese who were in the country being willing to represent the Associations if your lordship was willing to receive a deputation. I may say, my lord, that I have been here only eighteen months now. I have been here from time to time; this is my last visit perhaps, and I am returning to Ceylon shortly. I have kept up my connexion with Ceylon all the time. I might also mention that three of us here are members of the Associations which we represent--Mr. de Silva, Mr. Jayatilaka, and myself. Mr. Jayatilaka and myself are members of the National Association, and Mr. de Silva is a member of the Reform League and of the National Association, and he was also, till recently, the Secretary of the Reform League. I have been a member of the National Association from its very inception, almost about forty or fifty years ago.

VISCOUNT MILNER: Very well, Mr. Pereira, will you proceed.

MR. PEREIRA: Then, my lord, to go into the subject we have come to see your lordship about, I may say at once that this question of reform of the Constitution of Ceylon is not one of recent years, or one which is what I might call the off- spring of the political unrest which has been created over the world at large after the recent world-war. The records in your lordship's office will show that we have consistently been agitating for reforms in Ceylon for the past fifty years. Your Lordship may be aware of the fact which we have stated in our memorials generally, that so far back as 1809 Sir Alexander Johnstone, who was then Chief Justice of Ceylon, and who was appointed a Commisssioner to inquire into and report to the Home Government on the question of a Constitution for Ceylon, suggested that Ceylon should be given a Parliament on the lines of the British Parliament. He went so far as that in 1809: he said that in his opinion the con- ditions of Ceylon were essentially suited to the establishment of representative institutions such as the British Parliament. I believe it is a matter of record that the suggestion of Sir Alexander Johnstone would have been carried out in due course, or at all events, the greater part of it, had it not been for a change in the Cabinet at the time, and the matter was, therefore, shelved and nothing further done.

Now it is important to remember, my lord, that at the date Sir Alexander Johnstone made this suggestion, the British were not in of any but the Maritime Provinces.

possession The Central Provinces, which were by far the more important Provinces, were still under Sinhalese rule: Sri Vikrama Raja Sinha was still the King of Ceylon at that time, and he claimed jurisdiction prao- tically over the whole of Ceylon, including the Maritime Provinces, because under the Dutch treaty he had not ceded the Provinces to the Dutch, but only leased them to the Dutch, and the British were supposed to have taken over from the Dutch the powers they held.

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Matters went on in this way until 1815; nothing was done practically until 1815, when the Kandian Rebellion, or, rather, the Kandian War, was started. need not go into the details of that, but I merely state that, as a result of an invitation by the Kandian chiefs to the British Commander, or the British Governor, troops were sent to assist them in expelling their own King and dethroning him. He was dethroned, and the chiefs in council assembled, formally offered the throne of Ceylon to the King of Britain, which was accepted by the Governor on behalf of His Majesty the King. The offer was made, my lord, under conditions, the principal condition being that the laws and customs of the people of the country should be respected, and that they should continue to be governed under the same or similar laws.

Now it is said, and I believe with a great degree of truth, that representa- Live institutions were not unknown under the Sinhalese kings. There were many representative institutions under the Sinhalese kings, the representative institu- tions being the village councils, where all the village elders, every head of a family, irrespective of caste, irrespective of religion or position, irrespective of whether a man was a wealthy man or a poor man, or a high caste or a low caste man, were admitted; and those village councils regulated practically all the administrative work of the village. The village councils sent their representatives to the district councils, the district councils being those which generally supervised the particular district in which all the villages were situated. The district councils, again, were subject to the jurisdiction of the King and his ministerial council. Of course these councils were not elected in the modern sense of the term. They elected themselves, and the King himself was supposed to be elected, strictly speaking, under the Sinhalese Constitution; a formal election always took place before the enthronement of the King when the words of the oath were repeated by the Prime Minister, or, rather, the King was made to repeat the words uttered by the Prime Minister when he was elected by the people, so that the idea of election was very much engrained in the minds of the people, who were not strangers, therefore-I am speaking of the Sinhalese to the idea of representative Government. It is an ancient institu- tion, and I believe my friend, Mr. Wikramasinha who is a great student of national literature, would be able to tell your lordship that the ancient inscriptions and ancient tablets and the ancient history of Ceylon all bear out the fact that representative institutions were not unknown in the country.

Then it was

Under those conditions the country was ceded to the British. that in 1829 another Commission was appointed to report on a suitable Constitu- tion for the country, and, as your lordship may be aware, a report was made by that Commission, and on the strength of that report the Legislative and Executive Councils were for the first time created, in the year 1833, practically as they are now, except for a few additions made with regard to the Legislative Council of late years.

At the time those Councils were established in 1833 the Commissioners distinctly stated in their report that, in their opinion these Councils should be of a temporary character, that they thought Ceylon deserved something better, and, to repeat their words, if your lordship will permit me to use some of these docu- ments here, they said: "The Council is not proposed as an institution calculated in itself to provide effectually for the legislation of the island-

"

VISCOUNT MILNER: This is the Legislative Council you are speaking of now! MR. PERRIRA: Yes-"at a more advanced stage of its progress.

It would eventually constitute an essential part of any Colonial legislature for which the island may be prepared at a future period and they added: "The peculiar circumstances of Ceylon, both physical and moral, seem to point it out to the British Government as the fittest spot in our eastern dominions in which to plant the germ of European civilization, whence we may not unreasonably hope that it will spread to the whole of those vast territories."

Now, my lord, that is what was stated by two eminent gentlemen who formed that Commission so far back as 1833. They considered Ceylon fitted at all events for experimental purposes for representative government. passed since then; over a hundred years have passed since Sir Alexander Johnstone Many years have made his suggestion and over eighty years have passed since those Commissioners made their report, and the changes which have occurred since that period are remarkable. For instance, the population of the island in 1884 was only 1.167,000, and in 1917 it was 4,475,022. The revenue was £877,952 in 1834. and at the present day it is four millions odd. The expenditure was £334,000 odd, and at