NATIVE CULTIVATION.

73

Only too frequently the latter becomes at last the possessor
of the land, while the former owner works on it as tenant,
or even as cooly, or drifts away into the town or into the
less settled parts of the country.
To live a strenuous life for the sake of gain or social
advancement is foreign to the habits of mind and body of
the village farmer. Let him but make sufficient for his
wants, to bring up his children, and to pay the interest or
renewals on his debts, and he is generally content. He does
not aim at creating trade ; his caste, unalterable by riches or
poverty, is commonly high, he likes to take his ease and
pleasure with his family and friends. Further, he has not
she capital nor the land necessary for such a speculative
oceupation as growing crops upon which he cannot actually
live, but which he has to sell in a market whose fluctuation
is beyond his knowledge or control, and in which therefore
he is largely at the mercy of the middlemen or combinations
of middlemen who buy his crops. Not that he is averse to
making money, but he cannot afford to risk even a small sum,
most often, probably, has not the sum to risk. 'lhis is the
srue explanation of much of his obstinate conservatism—a
conservatism by the side of which that of the small European
or American farmer is change and progress of the swiftest.
Agriculture as carried on by European planters, chiefly in
the hilly or mountainous regions of the Island, presents a
different picture, comparable to the state of affairs seen in
the great wheat or fruit industries of the Western States.
To some extent this is also true of the larger native
proprietors. The greatest keenness is displayed to take
advantage of every improvement in machinery or methods,
labour-saving and economy in working are made the objects
of strenuous endeavour, large sums of inoney are raised by
a voluntarily imposed compulsory tax on exports to provide
the sinews of war for exploiting new markets, and experiments
 are made with new cultivations, often with farreaching
 results. On the planting industry of Ceylon
depends the larger part of the Island’s export trade and a
very great proportion of the revenue.
The villager rarely goes out to regular paid field work, but
cheap and plentiful labour is provided by the immigration
of hosts of Tamil coolies from Southern India, attracted to
Ceylon by the higher rate of pay obtainable. They are
a hardworking and docile folk under kind and firm
treatment, and most of the harder physical labour in the
Island, apart from that performed by villagers on their own
land, is done by them. They do not as a rule settle in
Ceylon, but return with their savings to their native villages.