appear smaller in comparison with the past than it really is. Reference has already been made' to the establishment of an Imperial Department of Agriculture in the West Indies with headquarters at Barbados, the object being to improve the methods of cane cultivation and to encourage technical education in connexion with the industry by which so many of the West Indian Colonies live.

Among other industries fishing, especially the taking of flying fish, is of some importance; and there is also a small whale fishery which contributes to the annual exports of the island. The colony can hardly be said to possess any mineral resources, the only mines being those in connexion with the extraction of asphaltum or manjak, an industry which may be said to be still in its infancy. Petroleum also exists in small quantities.

Considerable attention has been paid to the advancement of subsidiary industries, the most successful of which have been cotton and bananas. The demand for cotton is increasing, and the kind most suitable for cultivation in Barbados is what is known as Sea Island cotton, which commands good prices and gives better results than any other. Some 1,200 acres have been planted already.

The Barbados bananas find a ready market in England. They are different in kind to those shipped from Jamaica, and the two do not compete. Banana cultivation may become a profitable industry, and the possibilities of gain which such cultivation affords should not be overlooked.

Hitherto, as the military headquarters of the British West Indies and the meeting point of the mails, Barbados has been the entrepôt of trade with the other islands, distributing from its roadstead the flour and preserved fish of the United States. Greater facilities of steam communication, however, have interfered considerably with this trade pre-eminence, and the troops are now in course of withdrawal.

1 See above, p. 74.

The imports for 1903 were valued at £821,617, and the exports at £552,891, these figures being the lowest since 1895. The great falling off during the year was owing to the epidemic of small-pox which broke out in February, 1902, and lasted until April 1903, a rigid quarantine being enforced against the island by the other West Indian Colonies during the whole of this period. As a consequence the transhipping and intercolonial trade ceased almost entirely, and the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company were compelled for a time to remove their headquarters to Trinidad.

The volume of trade continued to run very much in the same channels as in previous years. The imports from the United Kingdom amounted to rather less than half of the total, followed by those of the United States about one-third, and British North America about one-tenth; but of late years more than half the total exports have gone to the United States. The bulk of the export trade consists of sugar and molasses, but the rum exported has dwindled down to a negligible quantity 1, the reason being, it is said, that the locally-manufactured article cannot compete in price with that from other colonies.

The public debt is £425,600, incurred for certain public works, and the sinking fund accumulations amount to £57,978. The revenue for 1903 was £180,831, chiefly raised from import duties. The rum duties and licences also produce substantial sums, though the amount derived from these sources is gradually declining.

In addition to the general revenue of the Government, a considerable annual parish revenue, administered by the vestries for parochial purposes, is raised from land-taxes, trade-taxes, and certain other rates. The average receipts and expenditure for three years past have been about £200,000.

Of late years Barbados has, in common with other West Indian islands, been passing through a period of depression, but it is satisfactory to note that the colony appears to have reached 1 Only 2,406 gallons were exported in 1903.

the turn of the tide. According to the latest reports1 the prospects appear to be brighter than they have been for a very long time, and all branches of trade show revival. The long period of distress is at length passing away and giving place to more hopeful times, a change which may be attributed to the prospective abolition of the bounty system, and the assistance granted by the Imperial Parliament in aid of the sugar industry.

Barbados possesses one line of railway from Bridgetown to the parish of St. Andrew, which was commenced in 1880 and completed in 1882. In 1898 it was bought by the Foreign American and General Trust Co., and reconstructed as the Bridgetown and St. Andrew Railway, with a total length of 28 miles. There is an excellent telephone service throughout the island in the hands of a private company, with an approximate length of wire in use of 660 miles.

The population of Barbados in 1901 was estimated at 195,588 souls. This gives 1,178 to the square mile, and makes Barbados one of the most densely populated places, excluding towns, in the whole world. Of this total a comparatively small number only are whites, in great measure the descendants of old Royalists or Puritans, who still reflect the strength and independence of their ancestors, patriotic pride in their community and island being a striking characteristic of Barbadians, white and coloured alike.

The large majority of the people belong, and always have belonged, to the Church of England, which is endowed from the general revenue. The Bishop of Barbados includes the Windward Islands in his see, and the parish church of St. Michael's is his cathedral. A small annual grant is made to the Wesleyans and Moravians, and one of £50 to the very limited Roman Catholic body.

'See the Governor's speech at the opening of the Legislative session of 1904-5.

2 No census was taken in 1901 owing to the state of the public finances.

In its system of elementary education Barbados does not differ much from other West Indian colonies: in respect of higher education it stands far ahead of them. It is the only colony where a school may be found, viz. Harrison's College, of the type of the large English public schools; and in Codrington College, affiliated to Durham University, it has the one collegiate institution in this part of the world, endowed by a Barbadian, who had learnt at Oxford to value University teaching and college life1. Of the elementary schools, all of which are denominational and the majority connected with the Church of England, there are 167 in receipt of Government grants; there are also five second-grade schools, and a high school and two second-grade schools for girls, while four scholarships are granted by the colony, tenable at any University or College in Europe or Canada, or at any Agricultural or Technical College in Europe or America that may be approved by the Education Board.

Barbados, as has been said, lies by itself beyond the ring of the Caribbean Islands. It is further to the east than the rest of the West Indies, and is therefore the natural point of call from the mother-country, from which it is separated by 4,000 miles of Atlantic ocean. It is about 100 miles due east of the island of St. Vincent, about 400 miles from British Guiana, 280 from Antigua, 1,000 from Jamaica, and 1,200 from the Bermudas. The nearest foreign neighbour is the French island of Martinique.

In history, as in geography, it stands apart from the other

1 Barbados owes Codrington College to the bequest of Christopher Codrington, a member of the family of that name so well known in West Indian history. He was born in Barbados, and was an undergraduate of Christ Church and a Probationer Fellow of All Souls, to which latter college he left his books and a sum of money to build a library. He succeeded his father as Governor of the Leeward Islands in 1698, and died at Barbados in 1710. By his will he left two plantations in Barbados, called Conset's and Codrington's, to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, then recently incorporated, for the maintenance of professors and scholars to study divinity and medicine. The building was begun in 1716, but was not finished for many years afterwards.

West Indian islands. Of all the West Indies it is perhaps the purest specimen of a colony as opposed to a dependency, and of all the British possessions in the Caribbean Sea it has the most unbroken British traditions. The English found it an empty island, and they peopled it, bringing in after them African slaves. No native element was ousted by them, no foreign nation ever had Barbados in its keeping. Englishmen came there to live, not to trade merely or to rule. The rapidity of its growth is almost unparalleled in the history of colonization; and it is evidence at once of the prosperity which free trade brought in early colonizing days, and of the number of emigrants who, in the middle of the seventeenth century, were leaving England for the West. On the other hand, the story of the Civil War shows that there was quality as well as quantity in the emigration, that the men who went out were whole-hearted men, who meant to make the island their home, and meant that home to be a free, self-governed one. From its geographical position as an outpost in the Atlantic, Barbados in early days attracted English sailors and English settlers, and, lying so far out to sea, its climate was better suited to Englishmen than that of the other parts of the western tropics. In tropical lands Englishmen, as a rule, cannot settle, live, and thrive. In Barbados they could and did, and the history of the island, with its long generations of English inhabitants, is the most striking exception to the rule that the tropics must be peopled by others than the nations of northern Europe. Yet even in Barbados, once the black race was introduced, it soon outnumbered the white, and the terrible mortality of the white servants imported into the plantations showed that, even if Europeans can live in the tropics, they must at least find coloured races to do the manual work.

Barbados is an island of which the utmost has been made; almost every available acre of its surface is, and always has been, under careful cultivation; and, if the question were to be asked, how far the capabilities of a land and its people are developed under British rule, it would be well to instance this densely