Vilas County news. [volume] (Eagle River, Vilas County, Wis.) 1896-1927, 1899-05-29

is always spending year at home.
Or else the senior member lives at
home and sends junior assistants to
India, to the detriment of British
trade. And yet, though croakers
croak, trade in Calcutta is still a great
and imposing business If in cotton
its ten mills cannot compare with
Bombay's III, it has a monopoly of
jute spinning, and over a score of
tall chimneys smirch the lucid Indian
air.
For every kind of retail trade it is
the finest center in India; it has the
largest white population among the
cities, and it is the emporium for the
largest white country population-the
indigo and tea planters of Behar and
Darilling and Assam. And of late
years Calcutta's trade has received
powerful impulse from the develop
ment of the Bengal coalfelds. The
mines are mostly within $50 miles
west and northwest of Calcutta; the
production has leaped in twenty
years from 957, 900 tons to 3,142, 900
tons; the expectation, in ten years
from 300 tons to $4,000.
AS steam coal it may not be so good
as the Cardiff product; nothing is. 1t
makes much more ash; but then, east
of Suez, it is very much cheaper. When
you can buy it in Colombo at %
shillings a ton, and have to pay 20
shillings for Cardiff coal, the expense
of an extra hand or two in a stoke
hold is a small matter.
If you want to be convinced that
Calcutta is first of all city of bust
and docks. On any day, at any hour
the Hugh carries a traffic that would
not disgrace the port of London. Here
is the British India Company with a
fleet of over 100 steamers, alongside
of the boat with which every Bengal
peasant goes to market as the London
tradesman goes with his cart. UP
and down they ply-narrow open
canoes with tiny deck house; Indian
gondolas; or fat barges, as broad as
they are long, built all over with BAN
boo into floating cottages, a platform
above the roof for the captain, and
q post and rail to fence the cargo.
The bigger ships lie three and four
deep along the shore, liners and
tramps, and especially sailing ships
You wondered why you never see the
big full rugged ships and four masted
barks about the sea or in ports of call;
the reasons seems to be that they are
ali in the Hugh.
Here is the Comali, of Liverpool, the
biggest British sailing ship, and here
is the broadcast beamed boat in the
world, who twice tore her own masts
out by the weight of her cargo. By
the side of the new boats with their
big freeboard, the long, low-waisted
ships Of older date look like toys
but toys of what beauty! Their spars
and tackle are like a web of gossa-
mer, and their bulls, black and white,
gray or green, sit down to the caress-
ing water as a swan sits.
You can travel 10 or IL miles on a
t. olley round the wharfs and docks of
Calcutta. Here are ships coaling
or loading by basket, which is cheaper
than machinery; here a steamer COM
ing into dry dock to be cleaned,
dumpy masted Dutch boat, her decks
mere mounds of coal, filling up for
Sumatra, tank ship waiting for
job, British India boat tied up by
the cats cradle of railway siding, dis
charging a cargo from MOmbasa. And
among them all crawl dredges and
barges of gray mud, and the docks
are checkered with brick fields, for
the port is ever increasing.
Labor is not extraordinarily cheap
a good coal coolie makes a rupee a
day, or s shillings a week; which
is as much as some English country
! laborers-but it is abundant. For
Calcutta is stuffed with people as a
pod with peas.
You have only to look at the map.
In most maps of cities the ground
represents open space and the blots
on it houses; in Calcutta the ground
is all dwellings with little squares of
open space dotted over it. You can
twist and turn for hours in passages
| that rub each elbow as you walk
through them. In some places you
have to go sidewise and edge along
thoroughfares like crab, so narrow
are they. The rest is dwelling place,
pigsty, cesspoo1, or whatever you like
| to call it.
The workshops are smoke BACKED
sheds, and the workers sit with just
room between them to half use their
arms. Other shops are all counter
and the keeper squats on his heels
among his groceries and sleeps among
them at night. Many huts are built
of bamboo, mating stretched on poles
or transparent wattlework; but these
are clean and wholesome compared
with fostering lanes in which people
sleep and breed and sicken because
there is no room in the dens.
These people are of new type to
the stranger coming in from the north
west. The Bengal is of a yellow
brown complexion; his face shows
n11ick intelligence but his eve is