54 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



advantage of being near to an almost inexhaustible supply 

 of labour from the densely peopled districts of the Madras 

 Presidency. With this supply of cheap labour the estate 

 at Peradeniya was soon made a financial success ; the great 

 planting industry of Ceylon and of other eastern countries 

 sprang up, and at this day is probably in the most prosperous 

 position it has ever known. 



A little later than Barnes, Governor Van den Bosch of the 

 Dutch East Indies, made his famous attempt to push forward 

 in agriculture the natives of a tropical country by establishing 

 the Java Culture system. The idea at the root of this system 

 was an excellent one and had it been carried out with scrupulous 

 honesty, the results might have been even more far-reaching. 

 In brief, the natives, who were taxed a certain proportion of 

 their crop — usually rice — were to give instead a certain pro- 

 portion of their land and of their labour, to growing, not rice, 

 a comparatively unremunerative crop, but coffee or other 

 things in which there was a good trade with Europe and a 

 large profit to be made. The Government promised to bear 

 any loss there might be, if it was not directly the fault of the 

 cultivators. Coff'ee, indigo, sugar and other things were grown 

 under this system and enormous profits were made. The 

 Government made good roads, and the natives of Java un- 

 doubtedly learnt much about agriculture that they would 

 otherwise never have known. But the system has gradually 

 fallen into desuetude; Java, like the rest of the countries 

 with labour available, has become the home of a great industry 

 carried on by white planters. 



The great success of the white planting industry is to be 

 ascribed not only to the superior energy and intelligence of the 

 white men but also to the fact that they have possessed enough 

 capital to lay out land, employ labour and wait some years 

 for a return. As their enterprises have shown success, they 

 have been imitated by numbers of native capitalists, and these 

 latter have done sufficiently well to show that capital has a 

 very great deal indeed to do with success in this line, and that 

 racial differences are not enough to account for the great 

 contrast between the agriculture of the immigrants and that 

 of the natives of the country. 



It is important that these points be clearly understood, for 

 the present state of tropical agriculture is simply that we have 



