October, 1910,1 



347 



Miscellaneous. 



blacksmiths, who would in all prob- 

 ability be paid, as they still are paid in 

 many parts of India, by a levy on the 

 produce of the fields of the village for 

 which they work. The area cultivated 

 would thus have to be increased by that 

 necessary to feed these men, and the 

 first germ of agriculcure for other than 

 immediate persoual consumption would 

 appear. 



Fields in general want drainage, a 

 subject that is left entirely neglected 

 upon the chenas, and gradually attention 

 would be devoted to this subject. Irri- 

 gation also would prove to be necessary 

 in certain cases, e.g., for rice. 



The cultivator who had fields would 

 thus be in many respects a long way 

 ahead of him who merely subsisted on 

 chenas. He would not get the bumper 

 crops that sometimes reward the chena 

 cultivator, but on the other hand he 

 would get regular annual crops, and in 

 the long run get much more out of the 

 ground. This would enable the country 

 to support the denser population and as 

 the peopling became more and more 

 dense, the proportion of fields to cheuas 

 would increase to match it, till at length 

 there might be no chena carried on in 

 the country at all. This, in fact, is the 

 case in the most densely peopled part of 

 Ceylon, the Western Province, though 

 there is gocd reason to believe that at 

 one time the bulk of this province was 

 cultivated in chenas, and is the case in 

 most of India, e.g., in Madras. 



Before we go on to consider the further 

 progress that has taken place in tropical 

 agriculture, it will be well to sum up our 

 present position in a more analytical 

 way, to discover the factors that have 

 been operative, 



Land, at first occupied in a casual 

 manner, and subsequently chenaed in a 

 more or less haphazard way, would 

 gradually come into private ownership 

 under the chena system, and into well 

 defined ownership under the field sys- 

 tem. This ownership might be of two 

 kinds— individual, or joint. In the 

 latter case the whole population of a 

 village owns jointly the laud belonging 

 to that village, whereas in the former 

 case, which on the whole is perhaps 

 commoner in the tropics, each man owns 

 his own patch of ground. 



Now it may seem as if this had nothing 

 to do with agricultural progress, but in 

 fact the system upon which land is 

 occupied is of the very greatest impor- 

 tance for that progress. Supposing the 

 ownership to be joint, the consent of all 

 the owners is required before any agri- 

 cultural changes can take place, and this 



means that the difficulties in the way of 

 progress are enormously increased, if 

 indeed progress by other means than 

 actual compulsion is not absolutely pre 

 vented. Laud settlement upon the best 

 system for progress is therefore one of 

 the most important problems before any 

 tropical government. Mete separate 

 ownership is hardly enough, for in 

 Ceylon, for instance, property descends 

 to all the children equally, and when 

 the land becomes too little to divide, 

 they retain it as joint property, and the 

 same evils as in the case of the joint 

 village make their appearance. 



With the progress that we have indi- 

 cated, labour becomes more of a neces- 

 sity. Very little regular and syste- 

 matised labour is necessary iu the work- 

 ing of root and fruit collecting, or in 

 that of chenas, but once field cultivation 

 begins, labour must be applied in definite 

 amount at definite times. The amount 

 of labour available will limit the amount 

 of land under cultivation. 



With the decay of the custom of living 

 upon jungle produce, capital — in very 

 small amount it is true — becomes another 

 necessity of the case. To sow a crop, 

 and then wait till it has yielded its 

 return, some capital is necessary. This 

 may be, and in early times probably 

 always was, provided by the small 

 amount of produce kept from the pre- 

 ceding crop, which would be sufficient 

 to subsist upon till the new crop came 

 in. But of course no capital beyond this 

 amount of food would be of any value, 

 until it could be used to pay for more 

 labour, to enable a crop to be gathered 

 in that would more than suffice for the 

 wants of the cultivator, and such a crop 

 would be useless till means of transport 

 had developed, as we shall presently see. 



Lastly, we may call attention to the 

 fact that in the appearance of the car- 

 penter and the blacksmith the elements 

 of differentiation in the agricultural 

 community have begun to make their 

 appearance. 



In brief, then, among the factors which 

 have begun to show themselves as oper- 

 ative in agricultural progress are land 

 and its availability, labour, and capital. 



These early stages of agriculture may 

 therefore be summed up in brief iu the 

 maxim— groto ivhat you ivant, and con- 

 sume what you grow. Anything grown 

 beyond these simple requirements will 

 simply be wasted, for there exist as yet 

 no means of disposing of such produce, 

 and we must now go on to trace how 

 such means have arisen. The great 

 bulk of the people at present existing in 

 the tropics are only a very small degree 



