74

AGRICULTURE,

No fewer than about 400,000 such coolies are at present
working on some 2,000 Ceylon “ estates,” ¢.e., plantations of
at least 20 acres. The total cultivated area of the estates
amounts to about 466,000 acres.
As the Island does not grow enough rice for its own
consumption, the villager seldom having much to sell after
supplying his own wants, an immense importation of rice
from India is constantly going on, and the import duty
on this figures largely in the Colonial revenue. A large
part of this rice goes to feed the immigrant coolies in the
mountain distriets,and so a further large contribution to the
revenue is made through the rail freight paid on it, the
railroads being Government property. The chief traffic is
due to the planting industry—tea and cacao going to the
ports, manure, rice, and materials for tea manufacture and
packing going the other way. Thus, through the Customs
and the railway, the planting industry contributes an
immense proportion of the total revenue of the Island, and
it has been largely through this that the Government has
been able to do so much for the opening up of the Island
generally by public works of all kinds, bridges, roads, rail
roads, and great irrigation works. A conspicuous illustration
of how greatly the Island depends on the planting industry
for its prosperity was afforded by the way in which all
public works were crippled during the period of the collapse
of the coffee industry. Not merely did this react directly
on the Customs and the rail receipts, but indirectly it ruined
more or less the numerous subsidiary industries which
depend on planting, and impoverished thousands of natives
of all classes, as well as the planters and the mercantile
community of Colombo, who are mainly dependent on the
trade created by the planting industry.
The history of European planting in Ceylon is a wonderful
story of brilliant successes chequered by dismal failures,
which again have been retrieved by indomitable pluck and
energy. With the conquest of the Kandyan kingdom—the
mountainousregion of the centre of the Island—and the opening
 of the road to its capital, the country was thrown open to
English enterprise. Conspicuous among the first pioneers of
planting was Sir Edward Barnes, the then Governor, who in
1825 opened the estate of Gangaruwa, near Peradeniya, now
the Government Experiment Station. Much money was
vainly experded at first in trying sugar, indigo, and other
[ndian crops, but presently it was discovered that the
cleared forest land was eminently suited to the growth of
coffee, The time was favourable, the duty on coffee in
England had just been reduced, its consumption was