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The protective duty being withdrawn, a competition with foreign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. These were
the first to smash.
