14 AGRICULTURE IN THE TROPICS [PT. I 



By a judicious handling of this principle of cooperation, there 

 is little doubt that the agricultural prosperity of many 

 eastern villages might be increased, while at the same time 

 those villages could produce products for export a thing they 

 at present do not. Were they for example to devote a certain 

 portion of the "common land" a thing that exists in very 

 many eastern villages to the growing of " export " crops, a 

 considerable industry might gradually come into being. But it 

 is highly improbable that this could be effected at present 

 without compulsion. 



In sharp contrast to the tropical races are the settlers among 

 them from the north the Europeans, the Americans, the 

 Chinese. Of these, the last named seern to be the only race 

 capable of settling and breeding in the tropics without any 

 serious loss of stamina, for the " country bred " Europeans or 

 Americans of the West or East Indies have to an appreciable 

 extent the character of the native races among whom they 

 were brought up. The planter born and bred in England, 

 and retiring thither in his old age, is often superior in energy 

 and enterprise to the planter born and bred in the tropics, 

 while at the same time he has the enormous advantage of 

 a certain capital at his back, for he does not go out to the 

 tropics without it. 



In such densely peopled countries as India and Java the 

 people have necessarily to work comparatively hard to acquire 

 a living at all, and when the density, as in parts of Madras, is 

 so great that the people live upon the borders of famine, they 

 are more or less willing to emigrate to other countries where 

 they can get greater wages, though they are rarely prepared 

 even then to settle down in such countries. The hundreds of 

 thousands of Tamil coolies who go from South India to Ceylon 

 to work upon the tea estates and at other occupations practi- 

 cally all go back again at one time or another. Their great 

 object is to save enough money in their temporary home to be 

 able to return to India after a few years, there buy land and 

 settle down in their old home. Even the bulk of the Indian 

 coolies who go so far afield as Africa and the West Indies 

 ultimately return to their old country. Only in Mauritius and 



