30 Timehri. 
great depression in 1909-10 (induced by a decline of the gold industry and a - 
collapse of the export market for rice) and never victimized or, as a matter of 
fact, even profited by the colony. I have no hesitation in making this 
reference to a man so much in the public eye whose name will always be 
associated with the railway question as the first propounder of an adequate 
even if over costly solution. If he had been successful we should long since 
have recollected that Strathcona, Rhodes and Hays were also company 
promoters. 
In the United States they have a slang phrase: “I am from Missouri. 
You must show me.” The Colonel did not realise that Governments and 
legislatures confronted with a large and possibly highly expensive proposition, 
like his countrymen of Missouri, require to be shown. Whoever takes up the 
Sisyphean task of trying to convince the colonists that they can only expect the 
interior to be developed on the same terms which more popular and perhaps 
more favoured countries have been compelled to accept, viz., of paying for the 
benefit at the market rate, will have to avoid his predecessor’s mistakes. He 
will have to bear in mind that British Guiana is a cul de sac not alone 
geographically but in many other respects, the home of shibboleths discarded 
for many decades elsewhere, and almost unaware that the world has during 
those same years been spinning down the ringing grooves of change. The languor 
of the Land of Drowsy-head even affects the latest arrivals as they touch 
the stelling. In amonth they are more inert than the most apathetic of the 
native-born. As a matter of fact the creole shines by comparison with new- 
comers clearly selected on the principle that anybody out of the colony is 
better than anybody init ; but, none the less, the community as a whole 
has none of the vigour of a new people and is devoured by a cynical self- 
distrust. It betrays some of the features of premature senile decay. 
When the railway propagandist is informed, for instance, by some pundit 
who has never left Georgetown or has only just reached it from abroad, 
that no railway can ever pay in this colony, no solitary fact being 
adduced in support of this damnation of our future, or when someone 
solemnly announces with the air of enunciating an original but universal 
truth, that rail-traffic can never compete with water-traflic, or, reversing 
the policy of Brazil, the Argentine, Canada, Australia and all but the long- 
settled and over-peopled European countries, says that we must first 
of all bring in a population (no scheme of accomplishing it being sug- 
gested) he must only keep his temper and supply the requisite elementary 
information in words of the necessary modicum of syllables. He must learn 
to suffer fools gladly and he must consider logic and business as hkely in 
some quarters to count less than the personal equation. The fierce light 
that beats upon a swizzle party must leave him unashamed. My remarks, I 
should admit at once, are not of universal application but we are burdened 
with many who, if they were in a similar position official or non-official in 
any other country, would be assumed by virtue of that position to be 
acquainted with a number of general principles and established results of 
secular experience. No such assumption can be made in this colony. 
