The government will give him
no assistance; accordingly, the whole of his crop must be
conveyed on coolies' heads along an arduous path to the nearest
highway, perhaps fifteen miles distant. Even this rough path of
fifteen miles the planter must form at his own expense.
Considering the risks that are always attendant upon agricultural
pursuits, and especially upon coffee-planting, the price of rough
land must be acknowledged as absurdly high under the present
conditions of sales. There is a great medium to be observed,
however, in the sales of crown land; too low a price is even a
greater evil than too high a rate, as it is apt to encourage
speculators in land, who do much injury to a colony by locking up
large tracts in an uncultivated state, to take the chance of a
future rise in the price.
This evil might easily be avoided by retaining the present bona
fide price of the land per acre, qualified by an arrangement that
one-half of the purchase money should be expended in the
formation of roads from the land in question. This would be of
immense assistance to the planters, especially in a populous
planting neighborhood, where the purchases of land were large and
numerous, in which case the aggregate sum would be sufficient to
form a carriage road to the main highway, which might be kept in
repair by a slight toll. An arrangement of this kind is not only
fair to the planters, but would be ultimately equally beneficial
to the government. Every fresh sale of land would ensure either
a new road or the improvement of an old one; and the country
would be opened up through the most remote districts. This very
fact of good communication would expedite the sales of crown
lands, which are now valueless from their isolated position.
Coffee-planting in Ceylon has passed through the various stages
inseparable from every "mania."
In the early days of our possession, the Kandian district was
little known, and sanguine imaginations painted the hidden
prospect in their ideal colors, expecting that a trace once
opened to the interior would be the road to fortune.
How these golden expectations have been disappointed the broken
fortunes of many enterprising planters can explain.
The protective duty being withdrawn, a competition with foreign
coffee at once reduced the splendid prices of olden times to a
more moderate standard, and took forty per cent. out of the
pockets of the planters. Coffee, which in those days brought
from one hundred shillings to one hundred and forty shillings per
hundred-weight, is now reduced to from sixty shillings to eighty
shillings.
This sudden reduction created an equally sudden panic among the
planters, many of whom were men of straw, who had rushed to
Ceylon at the first cry of coffee "fortunes," and who had
embarked on an extensive scale with borrowed capital.
