212 THE DIRECTION OF INDUSTRY 



tradition, and a mass of saws and rural rhymes which 

 are ever on his lips. He is cautious; but caution 

 is enforced for him by the conditions under which he 

 lives. The climate is always rigorous, and often very 

 uncertain. He is dependent on the amount and time- 

 liness of the annual rainfall, which in many parts of 

 the country is very precarious. His crop is exposed 

 to many disasters : a day or two of fierce sunshine, a 

 few hours of drenching rain, frost and hail, locusts, 

 and many other forms of insect life or blight, a bout 

 of fever attacking him at some critical time, murrain, 

 which is endemic in the land, seizing his plough cattle. 

 And when the crop is ripe, a night snatched for rest 

 may let in the thief, the wild boar, the antelope, or 

 one morning of neglect may set the green parrots 

 tearing down the ears. Such are some of the many 

 risks to which he is exposed. His capital is narrow 

 in the extreme, and he is often obliged to borrow his 

 seed grain. A man like this dares not make experi- 

 ments. Life is much too serious to permit him to 

 leave anything to chance. Still less can he afford to 

 listen to the ill-instructed censors who presume to 

 criticise his methods when they should be at school 

 themselves. 



* It is, again, a mistake to say that the cultivator is 

 absolutely destitute of enterprise and opposed to all 

 improvement. In fact, he is quite ready to cultivate 

 new staples, if they suit his land and modes of tillage, 

 and are likely to be profitable. Thus, during the 

 American War he turned his attention to cotton, and 

 in quite recent times he has largely extended the 

 culture of crops, like sugar, potatoes, indigo, and 

 opium, the advantages of which have been made 

 apparent to him. 



* It is true that he has adopted, on an extensive scale, 

 only one modern machine — the iron roller sugar-mill ; 

 but, as regards most of the other machines which a 

 well-meaning but ill-instructed zeal has endeavoured 



