

TIMEHRI" AND DEVELOPMENT. 



By the Rev. J. Aiken, M.A. 



After a quarter of a century of discussion the time seems to be near 

 when the dreams of the last two decades will crystallise in some definite 

 form. It is true that the sanguine have had hopes of this sort before and 

 that those hopes have been disappointed, but it does not need an exces- 

 sive optimism to go the length of saying that something nearer a 

 practical proposition in railways to the interior has been evolved. 

 Certain shibboleths circumscribing the area of support to the scheme 

 have at least been got rid of. The Bartica jump off, for example, 

 obsessed for long earnest railway projectors. Even if there had been 

 stronger arguments from an engineering point of view than fuller enquiry 

 have established for this starting point, the vested interests endangered 

 by the threat of a new centre of traffic were strong enough to warn the 

 practical man of the opposition with which proposals with that base in 

 view would meet. 



In the earlier years of railway projection in the colony this factor 

 did not appear so important. In the first excitement of gold exploitation 

 it was expected that the local mercantile community would be so deeply 

 interested in the mines that other interests would be dwarfed by the 

 immediate object of access, by some means, to the golden land from which 

 colossal fortunes were to be easily won. 



Time has brought the gold-fields into more correct perspective. 

 While it has added new arguments for the opening up of the interior, it 

 has brought home the necessity of a comprehensive view of all the econo- 

 mic factors in planning the means to this end. We need not conclude that 

 at the point now reached railway planning has attained the ideal of 

 adjustment to all interests, or that wisdom will die with us, but at any 

 rate we may reckon that, allowing for inadequate knowledge of the 

 hinterland, the proposition of railway building has assumed a sane 

 business-like form in the minds of those who are wrestling with its 

 problems. 



It may be some help to review the steps by which the schemes now 

 before the colonists have been reached, and to recall the names of the 

 men who have contributed their quota to the discussions. 



The last Spanish expedition in search of Eldorado was in 1775. 

 The first gold prospecting in less romantic but more practical lines was 

 about 100 years later, when Caman and D'Amil struck pay dirt in the 

 Essequibo and Cuyuni. The Spaniards of course did not think of a 

 railway to Eldorado, but it was not long before their more modern 

 successors did. Between 1884 and 1891 the output of precious metal 

 rose from 250 ozs. to 101,298 ozs. per. annum, and in 1891 at the 

 instance of the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society a " Commission 

 on the opening up of the country : ' was appointed. 



