Coorg is now fairly well off for labour, and the old labour difficulties which used to be experienced have to a great extent disappeared.  The average cost of Mysore labour—­men, women, and children, and including the commission of the Maistries (as the men who collect and bring the labourers to the estates are called), is from 3 annas 6 pie to 4 annas a day (or say 5d. to 6d. a day, calculating the rupee at par, or 2s.).  In quite recent times the maistries, who obtained large sums from the planters to make advances to the coolies, sometimes absconded with the money and thereby great losses ensued.  But a better class of maistries have arisen, and Messrs. Matheson and Co. have now, with the aid of their permanent European labour agent, established a system of private registration by which the antecedents, status, and resources of the maistries are duly recorded.  And though the services of doubtful maistries cannot as yet be altogether dispensed with, a preference is of course given to those of well established reputation, and the class of maistries generally is beginning to understand and appreciate the system of registration, which has every prospect of becoming general, and will, I need hardly add, be of great advantage to planters.  But if maistries sometimes swindle their employers, the former are often liable to be swindled by the coolies to whom the advances have been made, and until a system of compulsory Government registration of advances to coolies is introduced, as recommended in one of my chapters on coffee planting in Mysore, it will be impossible to put our peculiar system of giving advances to coolies on a reasonably safe footing.

The plantations in Coorg have suffered, and still suffer considerably from leaf disease and Borer, to both of which I have, for practical purposes, sufficiently alluded in the chapter on the diseases of coffee.  The effects of the former, though entailing much injury on coffee in Coorg, have not been so fatal as in Ceylon, as the long stretches of dry weather, often of four or five months’ duration, seem to kill off large numbers of the spores, and so mitigate the damage arising from the disease.  Messrs. Matheson and Co., at the instance of the chemist previously mentioned, sent out Strawsoniser spray engines for the purpose of treating afflicted trees with various solutions, but, though good effects were noticeable on individual trees, it was found that to treat whole estates in this way was quite impracticable, both from the cost and the immense amount of labour that would be required, and this fatal obstacle to the use of such remedies has been amply proved in Ceylon.  But in Coorg the Borer is much more to be dreaded than leaf disease, and its ravages are such that even on the best estates fully twenty-five per cent.[50] of the acreage is under supplies (i.e., young plants to take the place of the old ones which have died), and the late Mr. Pringle—­the chemist—­was of opinion that the loss of crop from Borer was not less than