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