Gold in British Guiana. 259 
been created for any other purpose than the aggrandise- 
ment of sugar, but " the whirligig of time brings about its 
revenges," and we see a once mighty industry fast totter- 
ing to its fall. If not at the present day, yet a few years 
more and we are likely to find from one end of the 
seaboard to the other — the only cultivated portion of 
Guiana — in places where the cheerful, if unpi6luresque 
signs of industry and prosperity, in the form of towering 
fa6lory chimneys, were to be seen formerly, dotting the 
landscape from point to point, the familiar landsmarks 
have either disappeared, or are seen rising desolate and 
negle6led from fields fast lapsing into wilderness, amid 
surroundings rapidly succumbing to the rush of rank im- 
petuous vegetation which sweeps like a deluge over the 
land dire6lly the fostering care of man is withdrawn ; 
while perhaps the eye of the wondering traveller is 
arrested by the spectacle of some aggressive wild fig- 
tree waving jubilantly from the summit of some lofty 
but fast mouldering pile of masonry, as if vindicating the 
vital force of tropical vegetation, and the triumph of 
nature over the perishable monuments of human industry. 
A great philosopher has observed that we can control 
nature only by obeying her laws, and second only to 
nature itself in obduracy is circumstance, that unspiritual 
god ; and the enquiry suggests itself how far the deca- 
dence of the sugar industry could have been foreseen 
and obviated. The whole question appears to turn upon 
the cost of production of which the prime fa6lor is labour. 
It is evident that the production of sugar in Guiana for 
many years past has only been maintained by the aid of 
extensive introductions of Asiatic labour. Immigration 
which implies a permanent addition to the agricultural 
