An Aching Industrial Void. 71 



able, especially in a country where local capital is wanted It 



will be a drawback to the development of the country if coolie immigration 

 diminishes or ceases." 



Yet another certificate as to the economic value of the East Indian 

 coolie. It takes the shape of a resolution of the Combined Court passed 

 in 1874, and is as valid to-day as it was then : "This Court is of opinion 

 that immigration has benefited not the planters only, but every class and 

 every interest in the community, and that although the planters in the 

 first instance have had the services of the immigrants, yet apart from 

 the proportion of the expense heretofore imposed on the planter for the 

 introduction of immigrants, the planters have more than compensated 

 for the continued services of the immigrant during the first five years of 

 his residence by the obligations imposed on them by law to provide 

 hospitals, medicines and nurses for the immigrants, and also to feed them 

 during sickness, all in addition to paying the immigrant the same rate 

 of wages for the work he does as is paid to Creole labourers, who obtain 

 by law no .luch exceptional advantages and comforts. That it would be 

 difficult to say what the state of this colony at the present time would 

 have been had immigration not been promoted at all, or to the extent it 

 has been ; but there can be little doubt of this, that, if not almost entirely 

 abandoned, the colony would have been in a very deplorable condition, 

 and unable to raise the funds required to maintain, with efficiency, the 

 different departments of the Government and public institutions. This 

 Court therefore considers that it is entirely to immigration that the 

 present progress and advanced state of the colony are to be attributed, 

 and that it has been beneficial to the planter, the merchant, tradesman 

 and mechanic, as well as to the Creole farmer and labourer ; as to the 

 latter two, it has opened up to them wider fields for their energies, if 

 they choose to avail themselves of them, and the means of raising 

 themselves to a higher position by perseverance and industry." 



I am not aware that there has ever been a glut of agricultural 

 labour here. Were there a sufficiency of it, British Guiana would not 

 be, as it is to-day, in a state of economic stationariness. for the captains 

 of industry interested in the staple product, the value of whose exports 

 is as much as 80 per cent, of the total exports, are confessedly men of 

 energy and enterprise. And, moreover, there would have been an 

 appreciable influx of capital to energise the vast but sadly neglected 

 resources of a country for whose backwardness the Imperial Government 

 is largely responsible. The War had not been in progress a year, when 

 Unaccustomed but by no means surprising phenomena came to the surface, 

 not the least conspicuous being a scarcity of labour, and in consequence, 

 a rise in wages. Employers of labour, their product fetching remunera- 

 tive prices, grudged not the expansion of the Wages Fund, but 

 experienced an emotion akin to chagrin at the realisation that, for the 

 want of more labour, they were shut out of a larger share of the contents 

 of the cornucopia. For a long time it has been evident to the least 



