Report of Society's Meetings. 427 



in any sense be said that the fittest had survived, but rather that 

 the sugar industry had survived in that country where the Gov- 

 ernment considered it most advisable in the interest of the people it 

 should be maintained. Again, in beet sugar growing countries on the 

 continent of Europe, bounties are paid on all sugars exported, whilst 

 heavy import duties shut out all foreign sugar from competition in the 

 markets, and French and German sugar is about treble the price in 

 Paris and Berlin that it is in London. Under existing conditions the 

 English sugar growing colonies have in every country to meet heavy 

 duties on sugar, except in England, and there they have to compete 

 with sugar cheapened by bounties, the Russian beet sugar manufac- 

 turers aftually binding themselves not to sell more than a certain 

 quantity of sugar annually in Russia, so as tc maintain the local price, 

 the balance, at whatever loss, they export to the only free dumping 

 ground in the world, viz., England. So that it is no wonder if we 

 faint and grow weary in the race, seeing our competitors favoured by 

 our Mother Country, England, whose interests in her Colonies should 

 surely be paramount to the benefit she derives by getting for a time 

 cheap sugar, at the cost of the continental labourer and taxpayer. The 

 sugar industry in this Colony has also been heavily handicapped by the 

 indolence of our peasantry, and to this fadl also will to some extent be 

 attributable the result, should the present wave of depression com- 

 pletely swamp us. There are notable exceptions, some of our peasantry 

 being industrious, steady, persevering men, but the great majority of 

 them are indolent and unreliable. The labour available in this Colony, 

 would have easily produced all the exports that have ever left our 

 shores, without the assistance of a single coolie, and yet we all know that, 

 had coolie labour not been procured, the sugar industry would probably 

 have disappeared from our midst long years ago. It is absolutely 

 necessary for the continuance of the industry in this Colony, that labour 

 should be certain and cheap. We compete in sugar growing against 

 countries such as France and Germany, where every labourer in good 

 health can be relied on for six days' work per week, and where the average 

 wages paid to field hands would be equivalent to about 24 cents per day. 

 We may not enforce a vagrancy law to save our peasantry from the evil 

 results of their own indolence, but the Government, the Clergymen, 

 the Schoolmasters, and the more intelligent of our peasantry, should 

 use every endeavour to impress upon our labourer the value and the 

 necessity of steady industrious habits, and the faft that during the 



