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carefully before one can hope to succeed. Unfortunately for 

 us, we did make a false step about twenty-five years ago, and 

 we have not recovered from that. We started with a People's 

 Bank, which was in existence, or about to come into exist- 

 ence, at about the time I went to Trinidad; and the people'? 

 idea of a People's Bank was something like this : it must be 

 a huge building from which huge sums of money could be 

 drawn without any need for repayment. I need not tell you, 

 Sir, that that bank did not run long. 



Now we have some advantages in the West Indies, although 

 we have many disadvantages. One advantage is that the 

 people are very fond of their land. They have the 

 land hunger as in other parts of the world, and the 

 small proprietor likes to be a small proprietor. We have 

 people of different nationalities, but we have 100,000 East 

 Indians among a population of over 300,000 people, and in this 

 class we have a thrifty population extremely eager to become 

 possessed of land, and who, as a general rule, become good 

 cultivators, learning Western methods, which they have not 

 been able to learn in their own country. Although they are 

 first of all trained on sugar estates they become very good 

 cocoa cultivators after a time, and even before the period of 

 their indenture expires they save up enough money to buy 

 land, and in some cases begin to plant cocoa before they are 

 free. Now one of the difficulties the most serious difficulty- 

 we have in Trinidad is that we have a great difficulty in getting 

 people to pay back what they borrow. My chief hope lies 

 in the following direction, and I have been aiming at it 

 for some years to educate the small man into the realization 

 of what Sir Horace Plunkett referred to in his opening 

 remarks that agriculture is a pure business. Some have not 

 the slightest idea of what it costs them to cultivate, say, an 

 acre of land, or how much it gives them back in return- 

 absolutely no idea; and they have usually to obtain credit 

 for their ordinary domestic supplies, and to pay for it at enor- 

 mously high rates. If they borrow money, the rates of interest 

 they pay may be anything from 40 to TOO per cent. My hope is 

 that the system of education which we have adopted among the 

 peasant proprietors for the last few years will develop a better 

 class among the cultivators. We have adopted a scheme of 

 prize giving to small proprietors in cocoa cultivation, which we 

 shall extend in other directions later on. They are men who 

 are being educated to understand that they must get a return, 

 or ought to get a certain return, for the expenditure of what- 

 ever labour or capital may be required on their small holdings. 

 They have a great desire to hold on to their small holdings, 



