F.— ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS 119 



outside planters and peasant farmers, though sometimes they have plan- 

 tations of their own ; and in Fiji, where the industry is under the control of 

 the Colonial Sugar Refining Co. of Australia, almost all the cane used is 

 bought from peasant farmers occupying their own lands or lands leased 

 from the company. Only in British Guiana and East Africa is there in 

 general that complete integration, to be met with in the tea industry, in 

 which the cane is grown on estates connected with particular factories 

 and under the same ownership and control. Nor is peasant cultivation 

 falling away. The tendencies in recent years have been towards (i) in- 

 creased size and centralisation of factories ; and (ii) greater development 

 of peasant farming as the most economical method of producing cane. 2 

 Everywhere in North and South India one notices the small and isolated 

 clumps of sugar-cane. Over broad, continuous sugar fields, one is told, 

 the jackals would plunder without hindrance. There is thus a balance 

 between large and small. Sir William Ashley taught us to recognise the 

 complementary relation between first and final producers — -the former 

 large, the latter small, in the old-time textile and metal industries of 

 England. In sugar we have a similar relationship, with the difference 

 that the first producer is the small peasant and the final producer the 

 large factory. 



The course of land settlement in Australia was different from that in 

 North America, being dominated by the large sheep run of the pastoralist, 

 which has held its place in the Australian economy. The sheep property 

 is, indeed, not a plantation, but structurally it is not far removed. It 

 has a large area, it requires a manager and at certain seasons, though not 

 throughout the year, it has an important labour force on it, the sheep- 

 shearers. It may be owned by capitalists overseas, such as the Australian 

 Estates and Mortgage Company, which administers sheep and cattle 

 properties, operates stud farms and has an agency business as well. The 

 desire for agricultural settlement makes these properties difficult to 

 administer, especially at long range ; and while the large property may 

 be a permanency in the dry interior, it is likely to disappear in time, at 

 any rate as an investment for overseas capital, in other parts of Australia. 

 Messrs. Drabble Brothers, the Buenos Ayres representatives of Geo. Fraser, 

 Son and Co., of Manchester, a cotton business with which the writer's 

 father was connected for over sixty years, formed with capital raised in 

 Manchester the River Plate Estancia Company. After yielding 10 per cent, 

 in dividends for many years it was wound up in 1 910 as the result of the area 

 coming into demand for building and other purposes, and over a million 

 pounds was available for distribution among the shareholders of a com- 

 pany with a nominal capital of £80,000 only. Fruit-growing, however, 

 has not been developed by the company fruit ranch. Alike in California 

 and Australia, it is the stronghold of relatively small-scale and highly 

 intensive agriculture. Perhaps if oriental labour had not been excluded 

 from America and Australia, horticulture would have developed on the 

 plantation pattern. 



Outrivalled and dispossessed in North America, kept out in our own 

 time by the policy of government from the tribal economy of West Africa, 

 2 Cf. Economic Survey of the Colonial Empire, ed. 1935, p. 515. 



