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PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE

Reference :-

C.O.882/11

ALLY WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE BE REPRODUCED PHOTOGRAPHIC-

PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE, LONDON

COPYRIGHT PHOTOGRAPH-NOT TO

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generally aware of the trend of my thoughts in regard to the question of the Public Service. but if they should not yet have reported, and if you see no objection, I should he glad if a copy of this despatch could be communicated to them.

SIR,

(Confidential.)

I have, &c.,

H. J. STANLEY,

Governor.

Enclosure 1 in No. 3.

Government House, Singapore, 14th July, 1927.

1 REGRET that pressure of work during the three months preceding my departure from Ceylon and again since my assumption of the Government of the Straits Settle- ments, has prevented me until now from replying to your Confidential despatch of the 2nd February last.* I propose to pass this despatch to you through His Excellency the Honourable Mr. A. M. Fletcher, C.M.G., C.B.E., Officer Administering the Govern- ment of Ceylon, in order that he may have an opportunity of making upon it any comments that may seem to him desirable.

2. You observe, in connection with the opinion expressed by me in my telegram of the 7th December, 1926,† that I regard as undesirable the proposal discussed in the Legislative Council for the differentiation of pay between Ceylonese and European Officers in the form of Overseas allowances. You point out that the principle of such allowances has been adopted in British India; and you add that, though you recognise that the arrangements would not be so satisfactory as the maintenance of the passage privilege hitherto in force, there appears to be little difference in principle between the Overseas allowances and a definite allowance for passages.

3. My personal knowledge of the conditions that prevail in British India is unfortunately slight, but I think it is certain that the vast extent of the country and the thronging life of its great cities render public servants in India far less conspicuous individually, and expose them less to the observation of the general public, than is the case in a small Island like Ceylon. There, broadly speaking, everybody knows every- body knows about him, moreover, a great deal that is true and a great deal that passes currency as truth; and is certainly well acquainted with his reputation for such qualities as generosity or parsimony, his general style of living and other details of a purely domestic and private character. In these circumstances, if any scheme is devised whereby European and Ceylonese Officers of precisely the same standing in one and the same Civil or Public Service draw, and are known to the general public to be drawing, different rates of salary, much evil will, I anticipate, result therefrom. Judges of the Supreme Court, for example, occupying, as they do, positions of very special authority and dignity, incurring in the course of their duties the same heavy responsibilities, sitting side by side, often enough, upon the same Judicial Bench, will. I am convinced, be bitterly aggrieved in the case of the Ceylonese, and rendered exceedingly uncomfortable in the case of the European, by the fact that the accident of their birth-viz., that one is born in Ceylon, the other, in some different part of the same Empire-entitled the latter to a higher rate of remuneration for his services than is awarded by the Colonial Government to his Ceylonese colleagues. Similarly, in the case of an European and a Ceylonese Government Agent or Assistant Govern- ment Agent, suppose the latter succeeds the former, the fact that he is paid a lower rate than was his predecessor, will give him a reasonable excuse for living upon a smaller scale, and for abandoning all attempts to make the Residency continue to br the social centre of his Province. The European, it would be claimed, was in a financial position to afford such expenditure: but a Ceylonese Government Agent, or Assistant Government Agent, on a lower rate of pay, it will be contended, cannot justly be expected to emulate such liberality. It is, however, of immense importance that the C'erlonisation of the Civil and Public Services should not be accompanied by any reduction of the standards of living which have been set up by the European Officers of whom those Services have until quite recently heen mainly, or almost exclusively. composed. It is essential that in this and in other ways, the traditions of these Services should be fully maintained, and that every possible effort should be made to prevent them from falling into decay. In an Asiatic land this is not merely a question of sentiment, but is a necessary condition for the maintenance of an efficient Govern- ment. In a small Island like Čeylon, every individual Public Officer, from the Minor Headman and the Ceylonese Sanitary Inspector, or the least of the latest-joined Cadets,

↑ C. 22630/26; not printed.

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* C. 23756/26: not printed.

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to the Government Agents, the Puisne Judges and the Members of the Civil Service who man the Secretariat, is for ever in the limelight. The Home Civil Servant often resembles the mole or the beaver-the approved types of inconspicuous but efficient industry; while the Colonial Civil Servant is condemned to transact his affairs with a publicity which he often finds inconvenient but for which he is in no way to blame. To-day in Ceylon, the local newspapers are full of criticisms of individual public servants, which do not always confine themselves wholly to his public acts; most senior Colonial Civil Servants of long standing have become so familiar with this, that they have learned to accept it as a natural part of the appointed order of things. Such publicity being unavoidable, however, the Government Servant in one of the Tropical Dependencies of the Crown, no matter how junior his rank, carries in some measure upon his individual shoulders the reputation of the Service to which he belongs. The indigenous people of the Tropics, moreover, are singularly observant and accus- tomed to attach importance to many things which Europeans might regard as mere trifles; and this causes them to remark every detail of conduct and deportment, and guides them in their decision concerning the precise amount of respect and confidence that the object of their scrutiny can justly expect. Anything, therefore, which con- tributes in the least degree to the lowering of the standard of living among Ceylonese members of the Civil and Public Services is, in my judgment, to be strongly deprecated, not upon social or other grounds of the kind, but primarily because it cannot fail to be actively detrimental to the reputation, and consequently to the efficiency, of the Service to which they belong. This is so because it will tend materially to diminish the respect paid to Authority of which, in a Crown Colony or Protectorate, the Govern- ment servants of all ranks are the living and visible embodiment; and because in this way it will work progressive damage to the administrative machine, and will diminish the influence, and with it the power for good, of both the Civil, and the Public Services. To pay European officers at higher rates than those which are allotted to their Ceylonese brother officers will bring this about with deadly certainty; and it will, I am convinced, be destructive of the cohesion, of the homogeneity and of the esprit de corps of the Public Service and, by effecting a sharp cleavage in the matter of their personal emolu- ments between European and Ceylonese, will stimulate racial animosities within the Service in a manner that cannot be too strongly deprecated.

4. In this connection, it is necessary to bear in mind the peculiar positions occupied in Ceylon by the Ceylonese officials, who have been drafted into the Civil Service, or who have been allotted comparatively senior posts in other Public Depart-

ments.

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5. Though the entire body of articulate educated Ceylonese join, whenever the opportunity offers, in clamourously choric appeals for the more rapid" Ceylonisation of the Civil and Public Services, a large number of those who are most vocal on this subject find it convenient, when it comes to the conduct of their private affairs, to enlist the services of Europeans-thus displaying a regrettable disposition to prefer their pockets to their principles. When I came to Ceylon twenty years ago, it was notorious that many educated litigants, and practically all Ceylonese villagers, habitually resorted to every possible expedient to secure the hearing of their cases by any European, no matter what his calibre, rather than submit them, to the decision of one of their fellow countrymen. The feeling that prompted this action survives in Ceylon, I fear, even to this day; and it behoves the Government of the Island to realise this, and also to appreciate, and to make due allowances for, the more than ordinary difficulties with which a Ceylonese Revenue Officer is inevitably confronted, as compared with an European official similarly situated. He has, it is true, the immense advan- tage-which is shared by a regrettably small number of his European colleagues— of intimate familiarity with one or another, or perhaps with both the vernacular languages; but his troubles arise, not through any contempt to his authority or want of consideration for him that is likely to be shown by the European inhabitants of his district, but from the suspicion with which his own race-mates incline instinctively to regard him. They know that the rank and file of their countrymen who, from the beginning of British rule in Ceylon, have held innumerable minor offices, in only too many instances have proved to be notoriously venal and corrupt; and from this know- ledge they are apt to generalise in a fashion which does a gross and wholly unmerited injustice to the majority of the more highly placed Ceylonese officials of to-day. Moreover, though for some centuries they have, from generation to generation, been accustomed to take orders without a murmur from quite juvenile Europeans set in authority over them, they have a conscious or sub-conscious sense of grievance and of abasement when they find themselves called upon to yield an equally unquestioning