286 Timehri. 
our Yorubas. These people are brought from the interior via Lagos, 
and, says Mr. Hazzledine, ‘“ the Lagos Government charge £1 per head 
registration fee and the registration mounts up when they are shipped 
400 at a time.” I take it if Lagos was pocketing £1 per head on our 
indents we would have no difficulty in finding a Lagos official willing to 
supervise the shipment of the Guiana immigrants during the first few 
years for a modest addition to his salary, seeing that he would be adding 
to his own and his colony’s revenue at one and the same time. And if 
fate did not decree that we were to go to Lagos, similar arrangements 
would doubtless be possible elsewhere. 
I do not think I need elaborate further. A finished scheme is more 
properly speaking the work of the professional Empire-builder of the 
colonial service. I as one of the governed never aspire to do more than 
give a rough-out line of a possibe solution. 
I would point out that in putting the question of the labour supply 
first, I am but following the teaching of political economy, and what is 
perhaps quite as important, the teaching of plain commonsense. 
A QUESTION THAT CANNOT WAIT. 
In conclusion, may I be allowed to point out that other schemes of 
development will be helped, not hindered, by what I propose? In British 
Guian well provided with labour for present needs and possessed of the 
means of obtaining as much more as it wants, industries will multiply, 
no man exhorting, and capitalists will be attracted by promising oppor- 
tunities for investment not by honeyed words, and the demands of the 
railway builder will shrink as the prospects of traffic for the finished line 
brighten. 
The labour question cannot wait. The Northern peoples are using 
up the northern supplies of wood, iron and coal at a rate that makes a 
resort to tropical supplies in the near future imperative. We are already 
at the beginning of the lumber famine. When the great rush comes 
those countries which have tropical possessions inhabited by fecund 
races of tropical men will enjoy an advantage in the struggle for the 
economic development of the tropics similar in kind to that conferred by 
a rich coal-field in establishing a flourishing manufacturing industry. 
But the tropical man will rise in value. He will be the new black 
diamond of that period. It is because I believe that British Guiana will 
get on faster if she gets to work now when there are but few rivals that 
I have written as I have written. 
