Preface XXXIX. 
crops, produced by these innumerable large 
and small landholders in varying degrees of 
quality, can perhaps be standardized, and 
offered for sale ‘‘ to type,” to the advantage 
of everyone, and the small proprietor, perhaps, 
most of all. If the authorities, therefore, wish 
to attract and keep such people to the land as 
owners, they must see to it that they do not 
allow them to ‘lose their market” through 
shipping an inferior and mixed, hence de- 
fective, article. I would claim that the action 
of the Governments in some of the tropical 
colonies support me in this contention, since 
they have, I understand, discouraged, if not 
actually forbidden, company-promoting syndi- 
cates from buying up small coco-nut estates 
belonging to many independent owners and 
forming them into one big company-controlled 
concern. Apart from having a crowd of un- 
employed, listless natives hanging about—for 
they soon lose their purchase-money—I have 
no doubt that the authorities feel that, both for 
the natives themselves as well as for the 
general trade and prosperity of the colony, 
a thousand small garden settlements are pre- 
ferable to ten big company-controlled areas ; 
and if this is true with owners of a few acres, 
who have but a few dollars at stake, it is trebly 
true if we wish to draw capitalists from the 
United Kingdom and the self-governing 
colonies to take up their own lands and invest 
capital in planting them up, that is, either 
