56 Timekri. 



Government, and to the Magistrates, and medical men, cruel neglect of 

 duty, and unworthy truckling to the planting interest, and to the planters 

 generally, cruelty, falsehood, and perversion of justice." 



Charges of this nature coming from an official source could not pass 

 unnoticed, and a Royal Commission was appomted to visit the colony, 

 and to make full, ample, searching and impartial inquiry into 

 all such statements and into all mattero to which such state- 

 ments in any way related. 



Mr. Des Voeux failed to support any of the serious charges which he 

 had made. 



Sir Clinton Murdock, in summing up the result of the inquiry, said, 

 among other things, that he considered the report of the Commissioners 

 generally satisfactory, both as regards the Magistracy, the planters and 

 the immigrants. Many defects in the system and mode of working it are 

 no doubt pointed out, but they are defects caused by errors of judgment, 

 by insufficiency of the law, or by want of foresight, not by neglect or in- 

 difference to the well-being of the people, still less by oppression or 

 cruelty. 



Following the report of the Des Vceux Commission a number of 

 amendments were introduced into the immigration laws of the Colony, 

 and from year to year such alterations and additions have been made as 

 experience lias shown to be necessary. As a result of these alterations 

 and additions, the principal Ordinance No. 18 of 1891 " An Ordinance to 

 consolidate and amend the laws relating to Asiatic Immigrants " stands 

 on the Statute Book of thi3 Colony. 



Between the year 1838, the beginning of the system and the year 

 1917, the date of its abolition, 238,979 immigrants were introduced into 

 the Colony. 



Through this regularity of supply and under the beneficent aegis of 

 the system the sugar industry attained its climax of prosperity which ex- 

 tended all over the Colony and made itself felt on the credit sides of the 

 banking accounts of the absentee proprietors. 



But the system of indentured labour into the details of which I do 

 not think it necessary nor desirable at present to enter, while contributing 

 in certain respects to the betterment of the class from which it was largely 

 recruited, was not without its defects and deficiencies. 



Certain abuses had sprung up in the course of its working and these : 

 coming to the knowledge of some of our leading Indian statesmen raised i 

 a storm of indignation in their breasts and produced an agitation to 

 abolish it, and the Indian Government, led by thit great champion of 

 Indian Reform, the late Honourable G. K. Gokhale, gave its veto to the 

 continuance of the system which was decidedly repugnant to the awakened 

 feelings of educated Indians, and the system received its death-blow in 1917. 



