NATURAL PRODUCTIONS. 
G7 
Being an absentee, he has to employ an attorney, the 
attorney employs the manager, and perhaps the attorney 
is the agent who advances money to carry on the estate. 
As attorney, he has a salary, and as banker he gets 
interest for his money. The sugar is made, but it is 
exported, and export duty, freight, insurance, import duty, 
storage, brokerage, &c., &c., has to be deducted before the 
net proceeds reach the hands of the p>roprietor. 
Cheap labour seems absolutely necessary, if agricul- 
ture is to be remunerative, and this as well elsewhere 
as in Trinidad. Seven shillings a week seems a small 
sum for a farm labourer with a wife and family to 
support, but this I believe is the weekly wage of fann 
labourers in some English counties. The pay of the 
labourer in Trinidad is from one shilling to fifteen pence 
per day during the v/et season. In the crop one shilling 
and eightpence, two shillings, and two shillings and 
sixpence is earned by the labourer. It is true that the 
employer finds a house rent free and medical attendance 
for his work-people, but even then it cannot be said that 
sugar does not pay, because of the cost of labour. I 
have already remarked that in the management of 
immigration sufficient economy is not exercised, but 
admitting that the cost of indented Coolies is somewhat 
high, still it is not in this matter that the money is so 
much wasted. 
Those who have estates free of mortgages or heavy 
debt, are their own managers, buy their own supplies, 
and sell their produce in the country, seldom fail to clear 
their expenses, and, as a rule, they make money. The 
markets may be at their lowest, still this class of pro- 
prietors will hold their own, and when prices are good, 
they clear hundreds or thousands of pounds sterling, 
according to the quantity of sugar they have made. 
But, unhappily, these free-men, so to speak, are few ; the 
greater number of proprietors being merely nominal pro- 
prietors. The estates are heavily mortgaged ; money has 
to be borrowed at the rate of six per cent, (the lowest 
