56 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



commercial and planting community, though not acknowledged 

 in so many words, nor by the more far-sighted. It is an 

 ideal which is forced upon the acceptance of the governing 

 class by the necessity of earning some revenue, and for long 

 their great aim has been to find some means of harmonising it 

 with the other ideal which we have just dealt with. 



The true ideal to be aimed at is, we think, between these two, 

 and we have set forth the position in a recent book dealing 

 with the theory and practice of tropical agriculture.^ To sum 

 it up in a few words, it is to encourage the diversification 

 of agriculture and to get established in any country a fairly 

 dense population, engaged in all forms of agriculture, from the 

 largest capitalist enterprises employing large numbers of hired 

 labourers and exporting most of the produce, down through 

 smaller and smaller concerns working with hired labour to 

 the smallest village agriculture, carried on by the labour of 

 the owner and his family upon small patches of land on which 

 is grown or made whatever that family may require. The 

 larger capitahst concerns will at first almost of necessity be 

 foreign; but the object of the government of the country should 

 be to train up an agricultural class in the country which shall 

 in the end be able to manage these large concerns and 

 practically oust the foreign planter altogether. This must 

 obviously be the work of many years, perhaps centuries; 

 the foreign planter should at present receive every encourage- 

 ment. 



We have now to consider the best means of bringing about 

 such a state of affairs. Tropical agriculture has in the past 

 suffered very much from the efforts of enthusiasts who have 

 not properly thought out the subject and who have each been 

 convinced that his own panacea was the right one and the 

 only one that could effect progress. At present progress is 

 fairly rapid among the capitalist planters and almost absent 

 among the poorer villagers ; if we are to arrive at the ideal 

 mentioned, we must cause it to occur among the latter as much 

 as among the former. 



It is now coming to be recognised that agricultural progress, 

 like growth in the vegetable kingdom, depends upon many 

 factors and cannot go on unless they are all put into operation. 



* Willis, Agriculture in the Tropics, Cambridge University Press, 1909. -js. dd- 

 [Reviewed in Science Progress, January 1910, iv. 517-9.] 



