270 



The Supplement to the Tropical Agriculturist 



experiments and experiences of which accounts 

 have been published, though lacking these ad- 

 vantages and differing among themselves in 

 other respects, all agree in this that the system 

 on which the labour has been employed and 

 paid is different to that used in the ordinary 

 course of native cultivation. If then what we 

 want to find out is how the native agriculturist 

 gets on in his native simplicity, and personally 

 that is what we desire ; then and in that case 

 our experimentalists throw no light on the 

 question. 



It hasoccurred to your correspondent, who has 

 been pondering over the little results of so much 

 misapplied ingenuity, and he is not a little vain 

 of being the first person to make public so re- 

 condite a suggestion that the proper way to 

 ascertain whether a native industry is remune- 

 rative is to enquire what classes of workers are 

 engaged upon it, and to ascertain first the out- 

 goings and then the distribution of the net 

 proceeds, and he has thought that these parti- 

 culars, if correctly ascertained and reported, are 

 likely to go further to throw light on the matter 

 than the experiments of a whole college of agri- 

 cultural instructors. 



But before going further it would be well to 

 define— it would have been of no small advan- 

 tage to the parties concerned to have done so 

 earlier in the dispute— what precisely the ques- 

 tion at issue is. Is or is not the cultivation of 

 paddy a remunerative industry? Remunera. 

 tive to whom ? The answer which is bound to 

 come — "the goyiya' : — is not sufficient, for Mr 

 Elliott clearly is answering a question as if it 

 referred to a capitalist landowner, and most of 

 the other contributors to the discussion have 

 done the same ; some appear by the 'goyiya' to 

 mean the day-labourer to the exclusion of the 

 landowner, and yet others (among them the 

 editor of the 'Independent,') take him in his 

 double capacity as landowner and labourer and 

 do not hesitate to state that he makes nothing 

 in either capacity. 



Lot us appeal for a moment to Political Eco- 

 nomy. It is a maxim of that science, indisputed 

 even in Ireland and probably unsuspected by 

 the parties to this argument, that the three 

 elements and the only three elements of produc- 

 tion are land, labour and capital, the returns 

 for their services received by the three co-opera- 

 tive elements being respectively rent, wages and 

 interest. Our goyiya in his native simplicity 

 may represent one, or two, or all three of the 

 elements at once, and the returns he draws from 



the cultivation may be either wages only, or 

 wages and rent if he is the landowner as well as 

 the cultivator, or wages, rent and interest if he 

 supplies from his own resources his seed paddy, 

 and the other needful, if scanty, capital. The 

 industry will be unremunerative if it returns to 

 the landowner less rent than he would have 

 obtained had he devoted his land to some other 

 cultivation : unremunerative to the labourer 

 if he draws less wages in it than he would have 

 gained if he had devoted an equal quantum of 

 industry to other pursuits : unremunerative to 

 the capitalist if he draws from the capital 

 advanced for employment in it a lower return 

 than he would have obtained if it had been used 

 in some other way. 



It is then apparent that the question resolves 

 itself into three ; and an endeavour will now be 

 made, by a statement of the native practice in 

 the employment of labour and the distribution 

 of crop, to show how answers must be sought 

 to those three questions. It is to be premised 

 that by the native agriculturist nothing what- 

 ever is paid for, neither the labourer's wage, nor 

 the capitalist's interest, nor the landowner's 

 rent, until the harvest is reaped, and that the 

 wisdom of immemorial antiquity going before 

 the wisdom of tho Education Department 

 ordained that the labourer in the rice field, like 

 the modern schoolmaster, should be paid by 

 results. The system is this : All those persons 

 who have had any share in producing the har- 

 vest being present, and the crop having been 

 reaped, threshed and cleaned, the whole as it 

 lies is divided as follows : — 



(a) l-10th gross crop to the landowner to 

 meet his liability for the Government tithe. 



(b) l-7th gross crop, for the cost of reaping 

 and threshing. 



(c) 14 times the amount sown to the person 

 who provided seed paddy— the supply of seed 

 paddy being a privilege of the owner. 



(d) Sundry small payments, for services ren- 

 dered : huwandiram, measuring, ithe soothsayer, 

 &c, &c. 



After the above deductions have been ma , 

 the balance is divided into three equal parts, of 

 which the owner takes one (e), the person who 

 supplied cattle (usually the owner) a second (/), 

 and the cultivator the remainder (.</). 



Clearly {a) and (ei are rent, (c) and (/) the 

 profits on capital, (b), (d) and (g) are wages. 



If the crop fails wholly, no one gets anything ; 

 but («) and (c) remain a debt to be discharged 

 out of the next harvest. If in part, the deduc- 



