444 
THE TRDPIOAI. AORTDULTURIST. 
[December i, 1890. 
EOmewtat in excess of yours ; 
70,000 1 cres at 340 lb. per acre = 23,800,000 lb. 
45,000 „ 
300 
13,500,000 
35,000 „ 
25) 
= 8,750,000 
30,000 
)60 
ft 
= 4,500,000 
20,000 „ 
10) 
ff 
= 2,000,000 
Total 
say .52,550,000 
Deducting; the odd 550,00!) lb. ibr 
Icoal consumption 550,000 „ 
We get probable exports at say ... 52,000,000 „ 
Uva will make a distinct mark on tea exports this 
season and if no serious labour difficulties inter- 
vene, I fancy my estimate of 52 millions will be 
overtaken. — Yours very truly, 
ARTHUR E, SOOVELL. 
PADDY OR RlOE CULTIVATION IN 
CEYLON. 
Nov. Cth. 
Sir, — A controversy has been for long carried on 
and still continues as to whether the cultivation 
of rice is a remunerative or an unremunerative in- 
dustry. In a recent issue of your paper was printed 
a contribution thereto by a public servant who 
claims to have proved by an account of four ex- 
periments, over three of which he lost money, that 
the cultivation is a profitable one ; while other 
persons have on other occasions published accounts 
of experiments by which they have purported to 
show that the cultivation of rice is the shortest 
and easiest road to ruin, or, as the case may be, 
the readiest route to the heaven of Mr, Andrew 
Carnegie. 
The present writer, who has never sown a grain 
of rice or turned a watercourse or cheated a renter, 
ventures very respectfully to submit to the parties 
to this controversy that they are shooting wide of 
the mark if what they wish to find out is not 
what the returns should be, but w'hat to the 
ordinary unlearned agriculturist they actually are. 
In so far as the question is of other than academic 
interest, it is interesting only as the results will 
enable us to gauge and estimate the condition of 
the ordinary native inhabitant of the country. 
The question is interesting not as an agricultural 
but as a political problem, and as such it is solved 
by demonstrations which employ factors that are 
outside the lines of native usage. The Govern- 
ment Agent of the Eastern Province has tried his 
experiment with an English plough in his hand 
and an agricultural primer in his pocket ; other ex- 
periments and experiences of which accounts have 
been published, though lacking these advantages 
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 culti- 
vation. If then what wo want to find out is how 
the native agriculturist gets on in his native sim- 
plicity, and personally that is what we desire ; 
then and in that case our experimentalists throw 
no light on the question. 
It has occurred to your correspondent, who 
has been pondering over the little results 
of BO much misapplied ingenuity, and he is 
not a little vain of being the first person to 
make public so recondite a suggestion that the 
proper way to ascertain whether a native industry 
^ remunerative is to enquire what classes of 
-workers are engaged upon it, and to ascertain first 
the outgoings and then the distribution of the 
•^et 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 
that 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 advantage 
to the parties concerned to have done so earlier 
in the dispute — what precisely the question at issue 
is. Is or is not the cultivation of paddy a remu- 
nerative industry ? Remunerative to whom ? The 
answer which is bound to come — “the goyiya ” — is 
not sufficient, for Mr. Elliott clearly is answering 
the question as if it referred to a capitalist land- 
owner, 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 ex- 
clusion 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. 
Let us appeal for a moment to Political Economy. 
It is a maxim of that science, undisputed even 
in Ireland and probably unsuspected by the parties 
to this argument, that the three elements and the 
only three elements of production are land, labour 
and capital, the returns for their services received 
by the three cooperative elements being respec- 
tively 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 ha 
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 thb em- 
ployment 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 whatever 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 the 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 harvest 
being present, and the crop having been reaped, 
threshed and cleaned, the whole as it lies is 
divided as follows : — 
(a) 1-lOth gross crop to the landowner to meet 
his liability for the Government tithe. 
(ft) l-7th gross crop, for the cost of reaping 
and threshing. 
(a) li 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 rendered : 
huwanditam, measuring, the soothsayer, &e., iSto, 
After the above deductions have been made, the 
balance is divided into three equal parts, of which 
the owner takes one (e), the person who supplied 
