CH. Il] SUGAR 55 



machinery. Such estates continue to show a good profit, 

 though the small West Indian concerns do not. There is prob- 

 ably no industry in the tropics in which specialisation has 

 gone so far, and in which consequently large estates, and giant 

 factories, are so much required. The small maker of sugar can 

 only survive by being specially bolstered up, but the small 

 cultivator is of course all right, for he can devote his attention 

 to growing the cane in the best way, and sell it to the large 

 factory near by, as in fact is done on a fairly large scale in Java, 

 the Malay Peninsula, and elsewhere. 



What the writer saw in Cuba may very well illustrate the 

 general tendency in sugar cultivation. An American merchant 

 many years ago had a small sugar estate left to him in payment 

 of a debt. At first intending to sell it and be done with it, he, 

 on second thoughts, went down to look at it, and soon decided 

 that the expenditure of a little capital would perhaps give it 

 a chance. This was done, the estate paid its way ; presently 

 one of the owner's Cuban neighbours was so hardly pinched by 

 bad trade that he sold his estate to the American, who closed 

 the factory upon it, dealt with the cane at his own now enlarged 

 factory, and put the former owner, a careful man, upon the 

 place as cane-growing superintendent. This process went on, 

 and one by one the surrounding estates were sold to the grow- 

 ing American business, till now, after thirty years, its rich 

 proprietor owns about 15,000 acres of sugar-cane, and runs a 

 colossal factory dealing with the whole produce of this area. 

 I was informed that the same process was going on in four or 

 five districts of Cuba, and that the whole sugar industry of the 

 island was falling into the hands of a few wealthy Americans or 

 American companies. Something similar will probably go on in 

 time in the larger British West Indian islands, unless their 

 sugar industry largely dies out in favour of cotton or other 

 products, or it may be that, as in Montserrat, their sugar 

 industry will sink to a peasant cultivation, the landowner pro- 

 viding the land and the sugar works, the peasant cultivating 

 and manufacturing the sugar, each party then taking one half of 

 the net proceeds. Sugar is thus very cheaply produced, for the 

 peasant does not set much value on his time, and the land- 



