Preface xxxix. 



crops, produced by these innumerable large 

 and small landholders in varying degrees of 

 quality, can perhaps be standardized, and 

 offered for sale " to type," to the advantage 

 of everyone, and the small proprietor, perhaps, 

 most of all. If the authorities, therefore, wish 

 to attract and keep such people to the land as 

 owners, they must see to it that they do not 

 allow them to "lose their market " through 

 shipping an inferior and mixed, hence de- 

 fective, article. I would claim that the action 

 of the Governments in some of the tropical 

 colonies support me in this contention, since 

 they have, I understand, discouraged, if not 

 actually forbidden, company-promoting syndi- 

 cates from buying up small coco-nut estates 

 belonging to many independent owners and 

 forming them into one big company-controlled 

 concern. Apart from having a crowd of un- 

 employed, listless natives hanging about for 

 they soon lose their purchase-money I have 

 no doubt that the authorities feel that, both for 

 the natives themselves as well as for the 

 general trade and prosperity of the colony, 

 a thousand small garden settlements are pre- 

 ferable to ten big company-controlled areas ; 

 and if this is true with owners of a few acres, 

 who have but a few dollars at stake, it is trebly 

 true if we wish to draw capitalists from the 

 United Kingdom and the self-governing 

 colonies to take up their own lands and invest 

 capital in planting them up, that is, either 



