94 SUGAR 



the consumer. The crop now beginning to be reaped 

 is estimated in some quarters at 3,620,000 tons. 



The British West Indies and British Guiana were very- 

 hard hit by the beetroot competition, and in some of 

 them sugar has given place to other industries. Bar- 

 badoes still holds its own, but is now substituting 

 modern factories and centrifugal sugars for the good 

 grocery muscovado kinds for which it was once so 

 celebrated. Trinidad makes some very good sugar, 

 and will go ahead now that unfair competition has 

 been stopped ; so will Demerara, a British sugar colony 

 which has for long been in the first rank as a producer 

 of choice sugar. Larger factories are now being erected 

 in many of the islands. The first were in the islands 

 of Trinidad, Antigua, and St. Lucia ; presently there 

 will be several in Jamaica. There is now one in St. 

 Kitts. The machinery is first-class and comes from 

 British makers, who are now very up to date and know 

 everything that is to be known about modern sugar 

 production. The revival of the industry in our oldest 

 colonies is a matter for much congratulation, especially 

 when it brings a large increase of work for British 

 engineers. 



Before leaving the subject of our West Indian 

 Colonies, something more must be said about their 

 condition before and since the great fall in the price 

 of sugar in 1884-5, caused entirely by the over-pro- 

 duction of European bounty-fed sugar. Barbadoes and 

 Trinidad seem to have held their ground fairly well : 

 the first on account of the popularity of its fine grocery 

 muscovado sugar and of its syrup, its good soil and 

 climate, and its large population ; the second on account 

 of its very good soil, its prosperity in other respects, 

 and its fairly well-equipped factories, which ought, how- 

 ever, to get a better yield of sugar per 100 of cane than 



