Labour and Colonisation — The Problem. 27 



It may now be asked what the extensive scale meant and here we 

 must again study conditions. Of the 86,000 people who were emancipated 

 only about a third would be able-bodied men, the remainder being old 

 and young, weak and infirm or women who now did little work. We may 

 say that about 30,000 labourers might have been available and that the 

 plantations could have been kept up had these people worked five days 

 a week. But the best working people clubbed together and formed the 

 villages, leaving the malingerers to do one or two days' work a week to 

 keep themselves from actual starvation. It may be safely stated that 

 two-thirds of the labour supply was now unavailable and that immigration 

 must supply enough to make up the difference, i.e., 20,000 strong healthy 

 people were wanted immediately. Immigrants were brought from the 

 West Indies but never enough, hence the sugar export was reduced and 

 one plantation after another sold for what it would fetch, or abandoned. 



Mr. George Ross, a Stipendiary Magistrate, reviewed the position in 

 1845 ; as an independent observer we can take his view as fairly 

 accurate. I can only give a few brief extracts : — 



" The negro-yards were half deserted and the planters were glad to 

 purchase the labour of those who remained, by ra'sing their wages, out- 

 bidding one another as at an auction, offering them plantains at a much 

 lower rate than the market price, and putting themselves to a great 

 expense in the erection of new cottages, with a view to tempt labourers to 

 reside upon their estates, of which by far the greater portion still con- 

 tinued short of hands ; and the new freeholders had to be induced by 

 offers of a higher rate of wages than that paid to those who remained in 

 the negro-yards, to come back and work on the sugar plantations." 



In connection with efforts made to get estates worked on the 

 Mctnirie system, i.e., of the canes being cultivated by the labourers for 

 half the return of sugar, he says : — 



" It must be recollected that sugar is not exactly the simple relation 

 of landlord and tenant which exists in Europe, The sugar manufacture 

 being intimately and hitherto indissolubly connected with it makes it 

 essentially a system of partnership in trade, which, before it can be 

 successfully carried on, requires some degree of confidence between the 

 planters and labourers. 



" This unfortunately subsists only in a very limited degree throughout 

 British Guiana." 



Mr. Ross goes on to advocate cane-farming as we know it to-day, of 

 which he had great hopes. The Metairie system failed in every case 

 hough at first it looked promising. 



Immigratiou made some impression on the labour market in the late 

 forties, but the Government's restrictions hampered the planter so much 

 that he wanted to get free from such rules and regulations. A meeting 



