An Aching Industrial Void. 69 



immigrant on completing his term of indenture having been overlooked. 

 He must necessarily pass through a period of transition during which 

 he cannot live by the produce of land worked on his own account, but is 

 compelled to divide his time between working for hire and cultivating his 

 own land. The settlements founded by immigrants of their own free 

 enterprise have been more successful because those who have founded 

 them have been forced in the selection on sites to recognise the necessities 

 of the immigrant during the period of transition from the position of a 

 hired labourer to that of an independent occupier or trader." He goes on 

 to say that the arrangement by which the immigrant works out his 

 emancipation is in every way advantageous to the proprietor of a great 

 estate. " The most intelligent of the proprietors have learned to offer 

 every possible inducement to the immigrant freed from hie indenture to 

 establish himself on or in the immediate neighbourhood of their estates." 

 By this arrangement, the rice industry has developed in most gratifying 

 fashion, until now the area under cultivation is approaching that under 

 sugar cane. 



The greatness of the East Indian peasant continues to ripen. Of 

 this there is evidence everywhere you turn. He looms increasingly in 

 the consideration of the great industrial problem which is holding atten- 

 tion just now. It is he and his fellows who constitute " the people " of 

 British Guiana, and not those who for convenience are dubbed " the 

 native population." He is an industrious agricultural labourer. As an 

 economic unit he has no compeer. He is remarkably thrifty ; and, so 

 far as human foresight can discern, he is destined to hold a very im- 

 portant and valuable place in the social economy. It stands to the ere lit 

 of the East Indians that the colony can boast of a rice industry, growing 

 and to grow, an industry that already successfully competes against the 

 premier industry for labour, and promises also to wrest the primacy from 

 it, in the same way as the cocoa industry in Trinidad came abreast of and 

 then outstripped the sugar industry. To the enterprise of an East 

 Indian in the Mahaicony district, we owe the importation of caterpillar- 

 traction engines, labour saving devices, which it seems, before long time, 

 will be as familiar a sight as rice mills. And, by and by, as farmers, 

 roused by the bayonet of ambition, become acquainted with other in- 

 ventions of mechanical ingenuity, the more accelerated will the progrest 

 of the industry be seen to be. It is estimated — probably a conservativs 

 estimate —that there are 64,814 acres of land under rice cultivation. We 

 need not stop to enquire what emotions are stirred by this achievemene 

 in the heart of a step-motherly Government which treats the crying 

 need for irrigation and drainage as if it were a request for the moon. It 

 is clear that any encouragement in this regard would further react on the 

 attenuated labour supply available for the sugar estates. It is so 

 obviously the fact that an abundance of labour is wanted, that one feels 

 ashamed to state it, were there not in this community a set of men who 

 are afflicted with an indurated conscience, an impaired perspicacity, a 

 myopic sense of proportion, an undying hate of the sugar planter, and an 



