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MISCELLANEOUS. 



THE CEYLON AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



The address delivered by H. E. the Governor at the Ceylon Agricultural 

 Society meeting on Monday might appropriately enough have been preceded by 

 the singing of Cowper's hymn, one line of which runs " Ye fearful saints fresh 

 courage take." The address was stimulating and encouraging, and just the right 

 stamp of address to give the Society the right send-off for the New Year. We 

 do not propose to criticise the address exhaustively. We hope our readers will 

 make a point of diligently perusing it for themselves, and keep it for refereuce 

 against the evil days of pessimism and doubt. The Society has settled itself on 

 a solid foundation. It has taken firm root in the somewhat loose and shifting 

 soil of this Island. That in itself is something to have accomplished. Any new idea, 

 especially if supported by H. E. the Governor, may always rely on being received with 

 boundless enthusiasm. That enthusiasm, however, is mostly of the effervescent 

 order. The old experienced Civil Servant does not take kindly to new suggestions. 

 The support which he is prepared to accord to them is of a pronounced non- 

 committal sort. He likes to leave a loophole, so that when the days of adversity come 

 he may apply this flattering unction to his soul: "Well,! told you so, but you 

 would go on." A Governor who can carry his Civil Service with him, get them to 

 emulate his enthusiasm, and see things with his eyes is no ordinary mortal. Then 

 there are the people of the country —the people who are to be more directly benefited. 

 There is first the wealthier and secondly the great masses of peasant cultivators, the 

 gentlemen we speak of when we wish to be thought profound as the goiyas. The mood 

 of the former class is a very changeable one, while the latter are popularly represented 

 especially by the principal Revenue Officers of the Island as steeped in an impenetrable 

 conservatism and inoculated with the deadly virus of stagnation and paralysis, firm 

 believers in the comfortable doctrine that what was good enough for their fathers 

 is good enough for the.n, and as inveterate stickers in the ancestral groove. 



The first difficulty then of sustaining enthusiasm in a movement possessing 

 such wide-spreading ramifications has been successfully overcome, and for that 

 the chief credit must be given to H. E. the Governor and upon the happy choice 

 he made of Mr. E. B. Denham as Secretary. The Ceylon Agricultural Society is 

 still, to use an expressive vulgarism, " going strong." Its influence has not yet 

 reached the mass of the population, but it is beginning to, and nothing was 

 more significant at Monday's meeting than the prominence given to Mudaliyar 

 Wickremeratne's paper. But a Society which can boast of 1,000 members in the 

 first fifteen months of its existence, and point to the fact that forty-one local Societies 

 have sprung into being, and have been glad to be affiliated to the Parent Society 

 cannot be described as being in a languishing condition. On the contrary, it is in 

 sound and vigorous health, and is just entering on anew lease of life, promising 

 greater activities and greater benefits in the future. One of the greatest achieve- 

 ments during the year was the acquisition of the '• Tropical Agriculturist," and one 

 of the most striking benefits that will be witnessed during the coming year will 

 be the improvement and greater interest witnessed in the various Agricultural 

 Shows which will be held under the Society's auspices. We congratulate all concerned 

 on the very promising outlook, and hope that when another year has passed 

 we /shall be able to report that the masses have been awakened, and that they are 

 as keen about improving their methods of agriculture as they were formerly 

 indifferent, and that an era of general agricultural prosperity especially affecting 

 the poorest cultivator has been inaugurated as a result of the missionary efforts 

 of the Ceylon Agricultural Society. —Ceylon Independent. 

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