The practice of giving money advances to labourers to be gradually worked off by them, and to contractors who undertake to supply labourers, has been productive of great loss and annoyance to employers, a great temptation to natives to commit fraud, and a source of constant worry to the officers of the Government. The Government sought by Act XIII. of 1859 to check these evils, not by preventive, but purely by punitive legislation. Since then there has been a constant demand by employers of labour for more punitive legislation in the shape of amendments to the Act of 1859, and from recent assurances made by the Viceroy when he visited Mysore in 1892, it seems probable that something further will be done on the same lines. And something may of course be done to insure that the defaulter shall be severely dealt with—when he is caught. When he is caught. Yes, therein lies the whole difficulty, one which seems to have been as completely ignored by the Government as it has been by the planters in the legislation adopted with a view to check the evils connected with advances. In order to prove the necessity for further legislation an old planter once printed an account of a case which he took up against a defaulting coolie. His description of the hunt, and the wiles of the defaulting labourer in moving from one part of the country to another, was positively amusing, and showed conclusively that it did not pay to attempt to catch a defaulting labourer. What, then, can be the use of an Act which after all only punishes the coolie when he is caught, if the trouble and expense involved in catching him be so great, as to make the game not worth the candle? Is it not evident that the only thing which can help the planter is legislation which will make it very difficult for the labourer to obtain money from one employer and then run away and take an advance from another, and which will make it a comparatively easy matter to trace a defaulter? Now, after conferring with experienced planters and some leading native officials, I came to the conclusion that a system of registration could alone mitigate the serious evils of the advance system, and in conjunction with them I drew up a draft of a proposed Act which I laid on the table for the consideration of the Mysore Government when I attended the Representative Assembly in 1891, and I may mention that the draft in question has been printed in the Government Report of the Proceedings. It would be tedious to give an account of the provisions in the Bill, and it is sufficient to say that its two chief features were the registration of advances and the limitation of their amount. The registration was to be effected by its being made compulsory that when an advance was given three tickets on a Government form should be issued, one of which was to be held by the employer, the second by the labourer, and the third by the registrar of the talook. On each ticket was to be entered the name and address of the advancee, and the sum advanced, and as this was paid off the amounts so discharged were to be entered by the employer on the ticket retained by the labourer. When the whole amount was repaid, the ticket retained by the employer was to be handed to the registrar, who was then to erase the name of the labourer from the register of coolies under advances, and before any advance was handed to the labourer the registry was of course to be effected. The amount of advance was to be limited to ten rupees, and this was to be worked off in five months unless in the case of sickness. The object of limiting advances is as much in the interest of the labourer as of the employer, as it has been found that native employers of labour often give large advances to labourers and charge heavy interest on them when the coolie does not come to work, and thus so effectually get him into debt that he is reduced to the position of a slave. This system of registration would no doubt be troublesome, but it is the only way of checking the present evil system of giving advances which, now that labour is so well paid, is not really necessary, and that it is not so is evidenced by the fact that the large bodies of labourers employed in the gold mines receive no advances whatever. I may here mention that a private system of registration with reference to labour contractors has been started by the firm of Messrs. Matheson and Co., in connection with their extensive estates in Coorg, and that it has been found most useful. The system I have proposed would be valuable to the contractors, who themselves are often swindled by labourers to whom they have advanced money.
I now turn to the subject of extradition, the law relating to which has much aggravated the evils connected with giving advances to labourers. The want of legislation on this subject has been brought to the notice of the Viceroy, and it is to be hoped that there may soon be complete reciprocity between native States and the British Government as regards warrants. At present a defaulter flying from Mysore to British territory can only be arrested by calling in the interposition of the Resident, a process so cumbrous that it is practically true, as alleged in the petition of the planters of Southern India, that "Planters or contractors residing in Mysore cannot obtain warrants against defaulters in British territory, though planters in British territory can obtain warrants against defaulters in Mysore." This is a grievance which requires redress, not only for the sake of the planters, but also of all other employers of labourers, or those who may have made contracts of any kind.
Cattle trespass, I may mention, is not here alluded to because, though it was at one time a great grievance, a Cattle Trespass Amendment Act received the assent of His Highness the Maharajah in December, 1892. By this, where it is proved to the satisfaction of Government that in any given local area cattle are habitually allowed to trespass on land and damage crops, the fines will be doubled, and the owner of the land has besides the right to bring an action for compensation for any damage done to his land or crops.
Having alluded to our grievances, I now pass on to consider lastly what may be called our wants as regards wild birds' protection, game preservation, and a Government agricultural chemist.
A Wild Birds' Protection Act exists in British India, but as its provisions have not as yet been extended to our province, I would suggest that Mysore, in consequence of its numerous plantations where coffee and other plants and trees are liable to be attacked by insects, probably requires such an Act even more than any other part of India, and I may at the same time take the opportunity of suggesting that all the native States should be communicated with so that an Act for the Protection of Wild Birds may be provided for every part of India. It would be superfluous to adduce here the numerous and evident advantages that would arise from the protection of wild birds, as their value is now so universally recognized, and I therefore pass on to offer a few brief remarks on game preservation, or, to speak more exactly, of the preservation of those wild birds and harmless animals which are useful as food.
The neglect of game preservation in India has not only been a cause of great loss to the country owing to the reckless waste of the sources of valuable supplies of food, but has severely injured the farmers in jungly tracts in a way that seems hitherto to have escaped notice. I allude to the fact that, in consequence of the wanton destruction of game in the western forests, tigers are compelled to inflict much greater losses on the herds of the natives. This is a fact to which I can personally testify, and which has since the middle of 1892 become steadily more apparent; for, when game was more plentiful in the forests along the crests, and at the foot of the Ghauts, the tigers lived largely upon game and rarely attacked cattle; indeed, so much was this the case that, about thirty years ago, a native who had the most outlying farm on the crests of the Ghauts told me that though tigers were constantly about they had never attacked his cattle. And as I was at the time living near his house, and clearing land for planting, and never got a shot at a tiger when residing there, I am sure that his statement was correct. But since that time English guns have become common, and the destruction of game of all kinds and of any age has gone on apace, and the result is that the tigers, which used to confine themselves mainly to preying on wild animals in the forests, have been forced to fall upon the village cattle, and I have never known tigers to be more destructive than they are now. On a single day this year no less than seven cattle were killed by tigers at one village, and an old planter of more than thirty years' standing, a near neighbour of mine, alluding to the subject in a recent letter, said, "Yes, there have been more tigers about this year than I have ever known." But it is not only on account of the supply of food from game, and for the sake of the cattle of the natives that a Game Preservation Act is urgently required, it is also urgently needed in order to check the abominable cruelties committed by the native hunters. Writing to me with reference to this subject, Colonel J. P. Grant, the head of the Survey and Settlement Service, observes as follows:
"Gunning and especially netting, in the most reckless and improvident manner, are on the increase. Antelope are fast disappearing, and in the jungle tracts night shooting is clearing out spotted deer especially. As for cruelty nothing can exceed the indifference of net-workers to any pain they may cause their captures. Snipe are caught and their legs and wings broken, and in this condition they are kept alive and carried to market. The wounding, necessarily reckless during night shooting, is horribly cruel. Pea fowl, jungle fowl, or anything fairly big, have their eyes sewn up. I have often seen this. In the case of hares the tying is very cruel, the thong cutting down to the bone; and the same is the case with any deer they may catch alive."
The rapid destruction of game of all kinds has been as melancholy as it has been remarkable, and I confess I never could have believed how complete, especially as regards small game, the deadly work has been had I not had occasion in recent years to drive, by easy stages, and early in the morning, along the whole of the western frontier of Mysore, and also much of the adjacent district of Coorg. In the old days, when riding, we always went at a walk and took our guns with us for shots at pea fowl, jungle fowl, pigeons, and other small game. But now you can neither see nor hear anything to shoot. And yet one of the favourite accusations of the Indian Congress against the Indian Government is that in consequence of the Arms Act the natives are unable to obtain guns and ammunition in order to defend themselves and their crops from the attacks of wild animals, though the scarcity of large game, and, in many cases, its absolute extinction, is notorious to sportsmen all over India. But the Mysore Government, I am happy to say, has at last directed its attention to the subject, and I have every reason to believe that a Game Act will soon be introduced in Mysore.
The last want I have to allude to is that of a Government agricultural chemist, who should be empowered at a rate of fees, fixed by the State, to analyze soils and manures for private individuals, and to consult with planters and others as to the requirements of their soils and the best way of supplying them with manure. Such an officer would be very useful in searching for coprolites and new manurial resources. My life-long experience in agriculture on a large scale both in Scotland and Mysore has shown me more and more the great value of an agricultural chemist for discovering new manurial resources, and perhaps more especially economizing those that already exist; and the great want of such an officer was brought to the notice of Government by me when I was a member of the Representative Assembly in 1891.
I may conclude this chapter by alluding to a discovery, or rather, I should say, a probable discovery, of the greatest importance, of a new hybrid coffee plant—a cross between the Liberian and the coffea Arabica. This has occurred on the property of a friend of mine, but, at his request, I do not publish his name, as he would be inundated with applications for seed. This magnificent hybrid, of which there are only two trees in existence as yet, has enormous bearing powers, and leaves which are apparently absolutely impervious to leaf disease, for I could not discover a trace of it though the hybrid is standing next to a coffee plant which is covered with it. It is of course uncertain as yet whether the new plant can be established as a distinct variety, nor do we know anything of the flavour of the coffee, as the quantity produced is yet so small that berries are reserved exclusively for seed; but should it be possible to establish the new variety (and I know of no reason why it should not be established), quite a new departure will take place in coffee production in India, and the value of coffee land will be enormous, as, from calculations made, the hybrid can produce at the rate of eight or nine tons an acre, while as many hundredweights an acre would be considered an unusually heavy crop in Mysore.