The fishermen complained bitterly--there are no more fish, only the little young ones, but they went on fishing relentlessly, taking every one, destroying those that were so small they fell through the fine meshes of the net on to the beach. “Oh, they take all,” said a man looking on who spoke a little French, and he laughed. In Jamaica the peasant is a very wasteful, a ruinous agriculturist, the only thing he does not waste is his own health and energy. In West Africa the same accusation held good. The peasant ruthlessly burnt down the forest trees to make a place for his patch of food-stuffs, and when the land was worn out there he chose another spot and repeated the destruction. He does the same in Jamaica. In France it is the other way. The country is carefully tilled. The hillsides that would be barren anywhere else are blooming gardens, but the working out bears cruelly on the individual, especially on the women. Look at the people, white people all, industrious, thrifty, admirable in many ways--and about as far advanced in civilisation as they were at the end of the eighteenth century! Their women are worn with toil, they are haggard and old, toothless crones, before they are thirty. All the joy and loveliness has gone out of their life. Up in the mountains they are devout enough, but they have no use for modern science, and as I saw them they are not as far advanced as many a negro I have met in Jamaica, even as the negroes are far behind the farmers of Australia and New Zealand. Now I am sure that most people will agree with me that the capable business man--and in “man” I include the capable of both sexes--the man with modern knowledge and training, the farseeing man who will settle in a country and give it the best of his years, will educate and help the peasant to get the most out of the land and better his lot, who will bring up his children to follow in his footsteps, must be a boon in any land. The ignorant peasant wastes; in France his labour and strength in archaic methods of labour and life, in Jamaica and West Africa he wastes the timber, he wastes the animals he has under him, he wastes the soil, the earth brings forth not one-tenth of what it might under more enlightened rule. And I need not say what that increase would mean, not only to the peasant but to a great manufacturing country like Great Britain.