If this island could be planted, say, alongside the Isle
cf 1Vight and left in enjoyment of its present climate, the land would, I am convinced, be regarded as agriculturally worthless except in the few places where it falls into flatness. There would be next to no little gardens covered with sugar cane and banana and potatoes, nor a multiplicity of cottage homesteads that now enable Madeira to be more thickly populated than any country in Europe, not even Belgium excepted. Within Britain it would be a trippers' paradise, that and little else, well littered with imported orange and banana skins but with no growing fruit. For the fertility has been achieved by generations of labour which has raised heavy solid walls six feet in height for the sake of making a garden sometimes no bigger than the superflcies of the wall itself. A passion for cultivation, such as the industrial revolution expelled from the English, is the root cause of the production of so great a population on such acclivities. Almost every man, woman and child is a Candide, feeling the full weight of the immortal maxim : 4l feat canker noire jardin.
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