Amiable to a degree, yet possessing scarcely a single qualification for a Governor of a Commercial Settlement, Sir Colin had the rare fortune to quit his Government without leaving an enemy behind him, and the equal satisfaction of knowing that he left the Colony in a far more advanced state than he had found it on arriving at Colombo. He quitted its shores in time to avoid the political and financial troubles which had so nearly overtaken it. On the eve of his departure a banquet was given him by the community of Colombo, and we cannot better express the feelings with which he was regarded than by quoting a portion of the address of Sir Emerson Tennent, then Colonial Secretary :

"He, (Sir Emerson Tennent), felt no hesitation in declaring that the records of England present no instance of a settlement whose advancement had been so rapid as that of Ceylon* during the interval between the arrival and departure of Sir Colin Campbell. Whatever be the future fate of the Colony, those six years must be regarded as the most remarkable in her annals. It was the boast of Augustus that he found Rome brick and left it marble; and it may with equal truth, and less pretension, be said of Sir Colin Campbell that he found Ceylon a forest and left it a garden."

It is not a little remarkable that the two articles which once formed the staples of Ceylon trade, have been for a number of years mere cyphers in the commercial statistics of the island. From 1837 until the present year the far-famed Pearl Banks have yielded no fishery, whilst Cinnamon, which in former days formed so large an item in the Colonial revenues, has produced a gradually lessening amount of income, until at length it has ceased to figure in the official balance sheet, whilst private cultivators have reaped almost as little advantage from it. Fortunately coffee and the products of the cocoanut palm have done more than replace these two articles in their effect on the advancement of the colony, which must be considered as on a more stable footing, seeing that it has replaced two items of mere luxury by others which are amongst the every-day necessaries of life, and therefore in far more steady demand.

The yield of the Ceylon Pearl Fishery has amounted to as much as £100,000 in one year. In 1830, the produce had fallen to £21,520. Two years later it gave but £3887. In 1835, it produced as much as £40,846. In 1837, which was in fact the last year in which the Aripo Banks were fished, the amount realized was but £10,631. This year the beds have been once more productive to about the same amount, with a prospect of progressive increase, though to what extent it is impossible to form an opinion at present.

Victoria had not then astonished the world with its wondrous progress from a sheep walk to a wealthy State.

A good deal has been said and written on the subject of the failure of this Fishery, and a very general opinion appears to prevail that in 1836 the then Governor of Ceylon, Sir Robert Horton, anxious to swell the balance in the Colombo Treasury, had caused the beds to be swept of oysters in an indiscriminate manner, to the ruin of subsequent fisheries. This was so far from being the case that the yield in that year was scarcely more than half that of 1835. The truth lay, however, in a very different direction: the cause of the after failures arose, it is true, from the improper fishing of young oyster beds, but not from any design, it having occurred from the ignorance or carelessness of the newly appointed Inspector of Pearl Banks, who evidently disregarded the minute and careful instructions of Mr. James Stewart, who had for so many years conducted the Fishery with the utmost care and success.

The revenue from Cinnamon, which, equally with that from the Pearl Fishery, the British Government had inherited from the Dutch, amounted during comparatively recent years, to upwards of a hundred thousand pounds sterling per annum. Between the years 1830 and 1840 the income from this source averaged £110,000 a year, and arose from the sale, by monthly public auctions in Colombo, of the spice cut from the Government Plantations. These plantations, or gardens as they were termed, were five in number, containing about fourteen thousand acres, and were cultivated on account of the Ceylon Government. In 1833, the Secretary of State instructed the local authorities to cease this cultivation, and to dispose of their interest in the properties at as early a date as practicable. Nothing was however done with these plantations until 1840, although a beginning was certainly made previously by advertising the abandoned gardens-tracts of land which had been planted with Cinnamon by natives for the Government, but which had never been well cultivated, and had been for some years left to their fate. From 1834 to 1839 about 2000 acres of these lands were sold at prices varying from 10s. to £12 the acre. A great part of these were no longer retained for Cinnamon; the laws against rooting up the spice being no longer in force, the purchasers destroyed a vast number of bushes; and if we add to these, the number rooted up by permits in private gardens, and those eradicated at a more recent date by coffee planters in the interior, we may be able to form some idea of the extent to which the production was becoming limited. After 1833, Government of course ceased to cut from jungles or other than their own gardens. Their peelings from the five plantations for the following eight years were thus:

which was a great falling off from previous years' crops. Morotto and Ekelle were sold in 1840 and 1841, so that in the latter year only 900 bales were peeled by Government, and this was the last spice ever cut by them, for before the crop time of 1842, the rest of these gardens were sold, except Marendhan..

Before putting up these properties to auction, tenders were received by private parties wishing to purchase them. Among the offers made were £500 for Ekelle, or 10s. per acre; £1000 for Kaderain, or 4s. per acre; and £40 for Wellisere of 600 acres; whilst a Modeliar of the Mahabadde, better acquainted with their real value, offered £15,000 for all the gardens, which was at the rate of £1 4s. per acre, and about the figure at which most of them afterwards sold.

Spice grown by private cultivators, when assorted by the Government sorters at a fixed charge, was shipped with a certificate of origin and quality.

"The following table shows the yearly quantities of private grown spice approved of by Government, with the total exports of Cinnamon, and the prices ruling at home during those periods:

1844 to Aug. 31 ... 6572 "From these data we perceive, that although the opening of the trade to private dealers was a step which gave a stimulus to exports at the time, and threw the operations in the spice into their legitimate channel, yet the good effects were not permanent, and even the reduction of export duty in 1836 failed to call forth any increased consumption of the article."*

* Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, 1841.

The sale of the Preserved Plantations realised prices ranging from five shillings to four pounds the acre, their condition being by that time most deplorable.

The conduct of the local officials in this matter, fully bore out the old proverb which tells us that Government invariably make the worst possible traders and cultivators. Being restricted from continuing these Cinnamon gardens, their policy should have been to have sold them as soon as possible, whilst .in good condition. But the delay of seven years which arose between the order to sell and the actual commencement of selling, told most prejudicially on the condition and market value of the properties, resulting in their realising in many instances very little more than the ordinary price of uncultivated land.

In this manner nearly the whole of the Cinnamon plantations passed into private hands, the Government still realising a good income by placing an export duty on the shipment of the spice. The competition of Java spice equally with that of the Cassia of Malabar and China, in due course drew away many of the old purchasers of Ceylon Cinnamon, and in self-defence the Government reduced the tax in different years from three shillings and six pence to four pence. These gradual reductions appear to have been without effect, for up to 1854 the average annual consumption of Ceylon Cinnamon throughout the world remained at precisely the amount it had stood during the first half of the century, when the selling price was quite five times as much. More recently however, the export duty has been repealed altogether, and this added to the improved culture of many of the gardens, enables shippers to sell the spice so as to compete successfully with Cassia, which since the outbreak of the civil war in China has been unusually dear.

Scientific cultivation has done as much for this spice as for Coffee or Indigo, and lands which formerly averaged annually twenty pounds weight of Cinnamon per acre, and which were thought to be highly cultivated in the old days of monopoly if they yielded as much as one hundred pounds, have been made to produce five and six hundred pounds per acre. As an instance of how completely this spice was an article of luxury and fancy, and how strong is prejudice in dealing with non-necessaries, we will mention an instance in which a merchant of Colombo making a large consignment of the finest Government Cinnamon to France direct, and wishing to distinguish some portion of the bales which were unusually fine, from the remainder of the shipment, caused the packages to be marked with black letters and figures instead of the usual red markings. So strong was the prejudice of the French buyers that they refused to purchase those black bales, although accompanied by the usual certificates of origin from the

Ceylon Government, and we believe the goods had eventually to be repacked, and marked afresh in the legitimate red letters before they could be sold, and then only at a considerable sacrifice.

It is fortunate for the Cinnamon growers of Ceylon that Cassia has become a scarce and dear article in the home market. During the past twelve months it has ranged at a price at which the inferior qualities of plantation-grown Cinnamon can be sold in London, consequently consumers are taking a good deal of the Ceylon article to replace that from China. The consumption of Cinnamon, now that the export duty has been removed, is at the rate of about eight thousand bales a-year, and as this is taken at a rate that pays the economical growers, there is no doubt of the Ceylon trade assuming a more favorable position.

Whilst great modifications were going on in the Government of the Island between 1833 and 1837, other changes not less important in their effects were taking place in the industry of the Colony. Sir Edward Barnes, always anxious to promote the welfare of the Island, had planted a tract of land in the Kandyan country with Coffee. His example was followed by one or two amongst the civilians and merchants, and on the last mentioned date five or six estates had been commenced on a large scale in the vale of Dombera, at that time a new region. Europeans in the interior were still but little known, and a white face seen in one of the Kandyan villages was regarded as a curiosity.

The spur which Coffee planting in Ceylon received between the years 1838 and 1842 arose not only from the first success of the early planters, but from causes operating elsewhere. This is pointed out very clearly in a memorial printed by the Ceylon Planters to the House of Commons in 1848 wherein it is said

:

"The Coffee produced by the West India Colonies had from 1833 to 1835 fallen below the annual consumption of Great Britain, and in the latter year it was 7,000,000 lbs. short of the demand. In this last named year British East India Coffee was admitted on the same terms as West Indian, viz. 6d. P lb. in lieu of 9d. which was at once giving Ceylon Coffee the advantage over Foreign by 3d pb. This at once acted as a spur to capitalists to invest in Coffee planting in Ceylon in the following year (1836) forest land was sought for and selected, and in 1837 several Plantations were formed by Europeans who had unquestionably taken into account the extent of the protection held out to them, just as much as they reckoned the cost of land, labor, tools and rice. The success met with by these, soon drew others into the field, and in 1840 and 1841 a very large number of estates were opened. It has been urged and with some shew of truth, that the great mass of capitalists who flocked to Ceylon knew or cared very little about discriminating duties and their effects upon the fruits of their undertakings, but neither had they calculated the cost of land, labor or tools; they had in fact acted on the