187 



Miscellaneous. 



food for the ensuing year, and he is content if he can raise that. By nature he has 

 no trade instincts, and he raises food for consumption, and not for sale. He has to 

 be taught that that state of things, although it answered well in the past, will not 

 do to-day. He has not only to be taught but he has to be forced to suit himself to 

 the times. He has been used to be thus forced to do things good for himself in the 

 long past, and a habit thus inherited will not disappear for a long time to come. 

 Therefore it would not be an unjustifiable act if Government were to adopt 

 measures to make the villager work more in his own interest in extending and 

 improving his cultivations. The maxim — " Interference with the liberty of the 

 subject" will not apply in the treatment of a people like the Kandyan peasant. He 

 is so simple, so ignorant, and so conservative, that he would not do anything that 

 would bring him a fair amount of remuneration until he has seen for about the 

 hundreth time that others have done the same thing and have been fairly remu- 

 nerated. With these few prefatory remarks I will proceed to give a brief descrip- 

 tion of our school gardens and experimental gardens, and what success they have 

 achieved in the past. 



MAHAWALATENNE EXPERIMENTAL GARDEN. 



In the year 1891 when 1 went on circuit in the district of Kadawataand Meda 

 Korles as the R.M. for the first time, I visited the very few schools it then had. The 

 plots of land attached to the schools were bare, and on my suggesting to the teachers 

 to plant them up, they pleaded all sorts of difficulties such as want of tools and objec 

 tions on the parts of the parents of the boys to allow the latter to work. I saw 

 numbers of boys who had left school idling in the villages not doing any work, prob- 

 ably thinking that ' govitena ' was a humiliating work after a school career. This 

 is the villager's boy — the hope of the future of the village — the strength of the 

 country. Of an evening these youths with handkerchiefs thrown hanging over 

 their shoulders, cigar in mouth, promenade the village paths admired by the 

 village lasses, no doubt, while their strong sturdy fathers plough the fields, or 

 gather in the harvest silently sighing at the demoralization of the sons owing 

 to the school education given them under compulsion. They would not have 

 willingly sent them to school, but their Chief and their Government Agent told them 

 under pain of punishment that the boys must be sent to school which would 

 make them good men. In blind faith they obeyed, and the result was that instead of 

 good men the schools turned out a lot of lazy good-for-nothings living on the hard 

 earnings of the fathers. Besides, the boys being a tax on the fathers, the latter even 

 had to pay the road tax and the Gansabhawa tax to Government for the for- 

 mer — for school education has made the boys unfit for manual labour. That 

 was the state of things here in 1891. I approached the prominent men among 

 the villagers, and persuaded them to consent to the boys working in the gardens for 

 a short time daily, and obtained the permission of the Government Agent to supply 

 garden implements out of Gansabhawa funds, and started a few school gardens. 

 In 1892 I opened up a garden myself near my residence, in which I used to get all the 

 village boys and children of my tenantry to work, and to encourage them, and to show 

 them that manual labour was in no way a mean occupation, I used to work 

 with them myself for a short time. The garden was a success which encouraged me 

 to approach the then Government Agent, the Hon'ble Mr. Wace, the friend of 

 Sabaragamuwa, with a request for an experimental garden and for a school for 

 Mahawalatenne. Readily he granted my application, and soon after an Agricul- 

 tural Instructor was appointed to the Balangoda school and a boys' school opened 

 at Mahawalatenne. The Teacher as well as the Instructor were industrious useful 

 practical men. Neither of them are now alive I regret to say. At once I opened 

 up a garden attached to the Mahawalatenne school at my own expense simultaneously 

 with the experimental garden at Balangoda. The Government Agent a year after 



