KEW GARDENS. 
238 
cotton. Last year the value of the raw cotton exported from 
India was between fourteen and fifteen millions of pounds 
sterling. In 1840 China had a monopoly of the tea trade. In 
1883-4 the value of the tea exported from India was 408 lakhs 
of rupees, or over four millions of pounds sterling. In 1850 
the area under cultivation for tea in India was not more than 
a thousand acres, yielding an annual crop of 250,000 pounds. 
In 1880 the area under cultivation was 206,700 acres, yield¬ 
ing an annual crop of forty millions of pounds, representing 
an invested capital of £15,000,000, an annual expenditure of 
two millions in wages, and, at the rate of five to an acre, 
yielding means of subsistence for over a million natives. 
The annual export of coffee from Ceylon, instead of being as 
it was in the years between 1865 and 1878, five millions 
sterling a-year, has now dropped to a million and a half. 
The Recent History of a Tropical Colony. 
Take a tropical colony like Ceylon, and study how all the 
conditions of life there are revolutionised by the entrance of 
the irrepressible Anglo-Saxon. In 1837, when coffee-planting 
was started, Ceylon was a mere military dependency, with an 
annual revenue amounting to £372,000, or less than the 
expenditure, costing the mother country a good round sum 
every year, the total population not exceeding one million 
and a half, but requiring nearly 6,000 British and native 
troops to keep the peace. Now we have the population 
increased to two millions and three quarters, with only 1,200 
troops, all paid for out of an annual revenue which exceeds 
£1,300,000; a people far better fed, educated and cared for 
in every way. The total export and import trade since 
planting began, has expanded from half a million sterling to 
eight or ten millions, according to the harvest. During the 
forty-five years referred to some thirty or forty million of 
pounds have been paid away in wages earned in connection 
with the plantation to Kandyan axe-men, Tamil coolies, 
Singhalese carpenters, domestic servants, and carters. Over 
200,000 Tamil coolies were saved from starvation in Ceylon 
in the Madras famine in 1877-78. 
According to official papers there are more than sixteen 
million of people in Southern India, whose annual earnings, 
taking grain and rice at its full value, do not average per 
family of five more than £3 12s. a-year, or about a half¬ 
penny a-liead per day. In Ceylon each family can earn from 
nine shillings to twelve shillings a-week and save half or 
