2lQ 
carefully before one can hope to succeed. Unfortunately for 
us, we did make a false step about twenty-five years ago, and 
we have not recovered from that. We started with a People’s 
Bank, which was in existence, or about to come into exist- 
ence, at about the time I went to Trinidad; and the people’s 
idea of a People’s Bank was something like this: it must be 
a huge building from which huge sums of money could be 
drawn without any need for repayment. I need not tell you, 
Sir, that that bank did not run long. 
Now we have some advantages in the West Indies, although 
we have many disadvantages. One advantage is that the 
people are very fond of their land. They have the 
land hunger as in other parts of the world, and the 
small proprietor likes to be a small proprietor. We have 
people of different nationalities, but we have 100,000 East 
Indians among a population of over 300,000 people, and in this 
class we have a thrifty population extremely eager to become 
possessed of land, and who, as a general rule, become good 
cultivators, learning Western methods, which they have not 
been able to learn in their own country. Although they are 
first of all trained on sugar estates they become very good 
cocoa cultivators after a time, and even before the period of 
their indenture expires they save up enough money to buy 
land, and in some cases begin to plant cocoa before they are 
free. Now one of the difficulties—the most serious difficulty— 
we have in Trinidad is that we have a great difficulty in getting 
people to pay back what they borrow. My chief hope lies 
in the following direction, and I have been aiming at it 
for some years—to educate the small man into the realization 
of what Sir Horace Plunkett referred to in his opening 
remarks—that agriculture is a pure business. Some have not 
the slightest idea of what it costs them to cultivate, say, an 
acre of land, or how much it gives them back in return— 
absolutely no idea; and they have usually to obtain credit 
for their ordinary domestic supplies, and to pay for it at enor- 
mously high rates. If they borrow money, the rates of interest 
they pay may be anything from 40 to 100 per cent. My hope is 
that the system of education which we have adopted among the 
peasant proprietors for the last few years will develop a better 
class among the cultivators. We have adopted a scheme of 
prize giving to small proprietors in cocoa cultivation, which we 
shall extend in other directions later on. They are men who 
are being educated to understand that they must get a return, 
or ought to get a certain return, for the expenditure of what- 
ever labour or capital may be required on their small holdings. 
They have a great desire to hold on to their small holdings, 
