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