The proprietor of an absentee estate is necessarily entirely in the power of his manager; and whatever the number of accounts, reports, and returns may be is of little consequence, as the proprietor cannot get behind them, i.e., he cannot count the coolies that enter the estate in the morning, and that being the case, he is wholly dependent on the honesty of the manager.  But the proprietor, it might be urged, can call for the check-roll of people.  So he can, but there is nothing to prevent the manager keeping two check-rolls, one to pay the people with and the other to send to the proprietor, and I have heard of this being done.  Nor is there anything to prevent a manager representing himself to be present on the estate and attending to his duties, while in reality he may be amusing himself fifty miles away.  It is, if a little amusing, certainly very instructive to read in “Balfour’s Cyclopaedia"[59] that “coffee is liable to fail from leaf disease, Bug, Borer, and the absence of the eye of the owner,” and the statement would have been quite complete had the writer added that it is the absence of the eye of the owner which, in Mysore at least, I may certainly say, is responsible for much of the leaf disease and nearly all the Borer.  But the reader will readily understand that money is very easily frittered away in employing large bodies of labourers unless an active personal interest is taken in seeing that full value is obtained from them, and that their efforts are rightly directed.  It is no wonder, then, that Dr. Balfour treats the absence of the eye of the owner as an equivalent for the presence of Borer or leaf disease.  I know of two estates in Mysore, of about similar size, one of which gave a clear profit of over L5,000 one year, while a neighbouring estate as well situated, and with better soil, yielded a small loss.  Both estates were started in the same year.  But in the case of the first, the eye of the owner was always present, while in the case of the second, the owner was totally absent for many years, and afterwards only visited his property at long intervals, sufficiently long to enable him NOT to estimate its steady decadence.

Every estate should have an information book,[60] so complete that, in the event of a new manager being appointed, he should hardly have to ask the proprietor a single question.  The book should either be type written, or written in a hand as clear as type, should of course be paged, and have a well drawn up table of contents, and a blank page opposite every written page, for the insertion of notes and observations.  The book should give, firstly, a history of the estate, then a list of the various fields, the dates on which they were planted, a description of the soil of each field, and an account of the manures put down in it, with notes on the results observed from the various manures applied.  A list should be given of the native staff, and of the character and capabilities of the individuals comprising it, their pay and length