133 



otherwise by such a change. As it is now, ten individual mills of 

 a capacity of 50 tons of cane each require in all from 500 to TOO 

 laborers in the mill house and for sun drying the bagasse, while a 

 modem sugar factory of a capacity of 500 tons of cane per day could 

 do with at least a fifth this number of unskilled laborers, thus leaving 

 a still larger number available for field work. The present low cost 

 of labor in Negros can not be expected to continue indefinitely; the 

 laboring classes of the natives are gradually becoming educated to a 

 higher standard of living, and with this must necessarily follow a 

 higher wage rate, so that the advantages of centralization and me- 

 chanical economy of labor must, with time, become more and more 

 apparent. 



THE FUTURE OF NEGROS. 



Predictions and calculations as to the possibilities of sugar-produc- 

 ing coitntries are notoriously inexact. In the case of Negros much 

 depends upon the first attempt at the introduction of outside capital 

 and modern methods of milling. A successfully operated central factory 

 in any one of the seven different districts, even if run on a compara- 

 tively small scale, would demonstrate its own advantages to the planter 

 more practically than could any amount of papers such as the present 

 one, while if, through mismanagement or lack of tact in dealing with 

 the cane growers, the first factory installed should result unsatisfac- 

 torily, the progress of the country would probably be set back many 

 years. Under the present system of production, even with sugar at 

 a high price and more capital at the disposal of the planter, the total 

 annual production of the island can hardly hope to more than treble 

 itself in the next fifteen years, this on the assumption that two-thirds, 

 instead of as at present one-third of all the kno^Aii available sugar 

 land were to be cultivated, and that the average yield of sugar per 

 hectare could be raised 50 per cent, or to about 4 metric tons, thus 

 yielding in all some 220,000 metric tons of sugar. The advent of 

 more rational methods of sugar manufacture would not in itself, as 

 has been previously shown in detail, cause a greatly increased yield of 

 sugar from the same weight of cane, but its stimulating effect on 

 the industry in general wottld certainly be very great. It may be 

 estimated conservatively that an extent of land equal to the total of 

 that now Imown as good sugar soil, or something over 80,000 hectares, 

 could, given the necessar}' incentive in the way of an increased value 

 and a ready sale for the cane grown, be cultivated in sugar cane an- 

 nually; while it is, of course, true that not all the land now reported 

 as fit for sugar culture is, or ever can be, cultivated each year suc- 

 cessively without giving it a rest during a part of the time by allowing it to 

 lie fallow, or by growing temporarily some other crop, yet there is still 

 considerable virgin forest land as yet undeveloped — in the extreme 



