188 AGRICULTURE IN THE TROPICS [PT. Ill 



richer for its planting enterprises. Further, though at first the 

 planters and capitalists engaged in the planting industry may 

 be all foreign, sooner or later a number of natives are also 

 found to engage in the same industry, and their savings and 

 profits are not taken out of the country like those of the foreign 

 planters. This, for instance, has occurred to a large extent in 

 Ceylon, where there are now a large number of native capitalists, 

 large and small, engaged in the tea, coconut, and other industries. 



Evidently, therefore, we require to arrive at some mean or 

 compromise between these two extremes. Nearly all those 

 who have had to deal with the agricultural problems of such 

 countries as Ceylon or the West Indies, have pronounced in 

 favour of diversification of agricultural industries, or in other 

 words, the encouragement of the cultivation of "new products," 

 i.e., products not as yet cultivated in the country. I propose to 

 enlarge the significance of this expression, and to say that the 

 best course to adopt is to encourage the diversification of agri- 

 culture, so that not only shall the country grow many products 

 and so not place all its eggs in one basket, but that it shall 

 have as many kinds of agriculture as possible, from the largest 

 capitalist organisation, working on the very large scale with 

 hired labour and machinery, down to the smallest and simplest 

 forms of villagers' cultivation, carried on upon small blocks of 

 land by the labour simply of the owner and his family. 



At present there is plenty of room in most tropical countries 

 for every form of agriculture, so that there is no need to cal- 

 culate with great exactness, or consider whether one form is 

 becoming too dominant. Until the various countries are much 

 more fully opened up and populated, it would seem most 

 advisable to encourage both forms of agriculture, capitalist and 

 peasant, to the utmost. But there are a few points to which 

 attention is necessary from the first. For instance, in any 

 given district, unless it is very conspicuously suited to one 

 kind of agriculture only, or to one product only, like a district 

 irrigated for rice, too large an area should not be allowed to 

 become devoted to one form of agriculture only. If a large 

 area is taken up for planting, sufficient area should be reserved 

 for small holders within a moderate distance, so that in the 



