The Acting Governor of Chinese Turkestan solicits an application of the recent Act of Grace to mvet the case of certain of the convict settlers in that region, After the rebellion it was decided that malefactors from the pro inces of Chihli, Shantung, Shansi, Honan, Szechuan, Shensi, and Kansu, whose cases sentence of death had been commuted to one of banishment, should be sent, with their famil if married, to the New Dominion to ass in bringing the waste lands under cultivation and replenish the population which had been greatly thinned by the ravages of the war. In all 976 convicts of this class have been variously assigned to the Ti-hua, Ch'angehi, Fu-keng, and Ch'i-t'ai districts, where they have supported them. selves by farming. As earlier reported to His Majesty, each householder received a grant of cattle, farming implements, &e., to the value in all of Tls. 73 odd, of which half was to be refunded in the first year, and the balance in the next, With the third year taxation commenced, half the regular land-tax being paid in that year, and the full amount in the fourth. As these convicts were not on the same footing as those whose original sentence was one of banishment, they were to be permitted to resume their status among the people as soon as they had paid the full amount of taxation for which they were liable. In some cases, however, those whose time has come to pay taxes on their land have failed to do so owing to various causes beyond their own control. The recent Act of Grace would be applicable in the case of similar convices in China proper. And it would therefore be hardly fair to leave these convict settlers out of consideration by reason of their banishment to a distant frontier. On the other hand, to set them at liberty to return to their own homes would be at variance with the intention of utilising them for purposes of colonisation. Memorialist would therefore propose as a compromise that all convicts who arrived previous to the 14th April, 1889, should be granted a free pardon and allowed to resume their status among the people irrespective of whether their term of taxation has expired or not; the local authorities being, however, instructed to see that they
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.