Railways ; Ten Years After. 37 
reasonable proportion of the cost of our work in providing them with a 
modern state in which to earn their livelihood. 
Borrowing from the able rhetoric of the First Lord we may ask: ‘‘ What 
shall a colony have in exchange for its soul? A cheaper gin or whisky 
swizzle ?’’ Such estimates, however, must be merely a working hypothesis 
pending a report by skilled engineers after an exploration survey and after 
consideration of the present cost of materials and labour, which varies 
from year to year. 
The most important recent factor in the local railway problem has 
been the formation, on the invitation of the Hon. George Garnett, of a 
Railway Joint Committee by delegations from the Chamber of Commerce, the 
Planters’ Association, the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society and the 
Balata Association to study the question. The members of this Joint Com- 
mittee are pledged to no particular scheme, not even to the acceptance of the 
principle that a railway would open up anything at all, and its personnel is 
well known to be representative in every sense of the mercantile and agricul- 
tural communities (sugar being especially safeguarded) and to be naturally 
conservative in leaning. The scheme involves the formation of a sister com- 
mittee in London of proprietors and others to advance the interests of the colony 
in regard to this question while ensuring all proper precautions. This may be 
the present Demerara sub-Committee of the West India Committee or may be a 
body less exclusively representative of sugar, for the fact (for which I can sug- 
gest no remedy) that Mr. Mewburn Garnett is almost the only non-sugar repre- 
sentative of the colony permanently resident in London, exposes the West 
India sub-Committee to such a criticism. The Joint Committee will be 
prepared to give any necessary information to properly accredited individ- 
uals or syndicates who may desire to institute negotiations and will be ready 
to give assurances of a fair consideration of any proposals and, if 
they are found to have a business basis, of active assistance, to secure 
a full enquiry at the hands of the Government and the Legislature. 
The theory of the Committee at least is sound and should re-assure 
any nervous sections of the sugar interest that no proposals involv- 
ing increased taxation upon that harassed industry or a diminution of their 
present labour supply will be accepted without full provision for their special 
case. To this the industry is fully entitled as that with which the very exist- 
ence of the colony is connected. It-is, of course, expecting too much from 
human nature to ask the sugar people to be very enthusiastic about the open- 
ing up of the interior. The old individual proprietors have been replaced by 
companies centralised in London or Liverpool, which naturally can see very 
little benefit likely to accrue to an industry confined to the alluvial deposits of 
the foreshore from the large expenditure and increasing demand upon the 
available labour resources which the opening up of the interior will entail. 
They will have grave doubts as to the sufficiency of any safeguards in the 
long run. We believe that their Directors will be sufficiently patriotic not to 
stand in the path of the acknowledged interests of the colony. Many of them, 
as a matter of fact, have come out of their shell as advocates of a forward 
