CH. l] VILLAGE OR PEASANT AGRICULTURE 147 



man is able to produce a larger crop at less cost; while his 

 labour is ten times as costly, he produces, man for man, about 

 twelve or more times the crop. Similar phenomena are seen 

 in the results in the tropics themselves of European enterprises 

 worked with native labour. The Ceylon tea planters, by the 

 use of large machinery, and by good methods, have been able 

 almost completely to undersell on the markets the produce of 

 China, made by the most cheap and industrious native labour 

 in the world, and similar results have followed other similar 

 enterprises. The same phenomenon is apparently about to 

 occur in a competition between the rubber grown in Ceylon 

 and the Malay peninsula, and that collected in the forests 

 of Africa, etc. It is not easy to improve upon native methods 

 in agriculture, and the improvement must be gradual and 

 cautious, but of its possibility there can be no doubt. 



Though this ideal of a vast population of small cultivators, 

 growing all that they require and consuming all that they 

 grow, has long held a more or less acknowledged sway, it is 

 now rapidly disappearing, and it is being recognised that native 

 agriculture is just as susceptible of improvement as European. 

 Furthermore, as already pointed out, the directly contradictory 

 course of opening up roads and even railways has already been 

 embarked upon beyond the possibility of drawing back, and 

 this course is necessarily more or less fatal to such simplicity 

 in agriculture. Such extreme simplicity may yet be found in 

 villages in India and elsewhere far removed from the stream of 

 traffic. But with the opening up of the country, it almost 

 necessarily becomes gradually obsolete. The villager learns 

 new wants and needs money to satisfy them, and at the same 

 time markets for his produce become available to him. 



The wants of the poor villager, other than those that can 

 be satisfied by his own labour or that of his women folk, are 

 even yet of the simplest, but the essentially important point is 

 that they now exist, and in all reasonable probability will grow. 

 This then, being a natural tendency, is one of the features of 

 agricultural progress to be encouraged, and we must consider 

 what are the chief difficulties in the way of such progress, and 

 what may be done to remove or lessen them. 



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