CH. I] VILLAGE OR PEASANT AGRICULTURE 147 



the races of tropical mankind, that of rice-growing, the white 

 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 

 twenty 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 the tropics. 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 consiiming 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, 

 and that an ideal to aim at is to create a native class of capitalist 

 planters who shall grow produce for export, just as the European 

 planters now do. Furthermore, as already pointed out, ttie 

 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 to a large extent 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, either by 

 his carrying it to the towns or villages, or by his selling it to 

 peripatetic purchasers at his own door. He also learns, it may 

 be as well to point out, that in many cases he can make a little 

 more money and more easily, at other pursuits than agriculture. 



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