A History of Assam c24.14

c24.14

During the next few years the new industry made rapid strides. The conspicuous success of the Assam and Jorhat companies, the latter of which was formed in 1858 from the estates of the Messrs. Williamson, led to the most extravagant ideas regarding the prospects of tea cultivation, Fresh gardens were opened in all directions; and a period of wild excitement and speculation supervened. The mania extended even to Government officers; and three Deputy Commissioners, four assistant commissioners and several police officers threw up their appointments to engage in tea-planting. Clearances were made wholesale, often with the sole object of selling them to companies at a large profit; land was taken up irrespective of its suitability for the object in view, or of the supply of labour available, and was planted out with a wholly insufficient number of tea bushes. The result was a general collapse; many of the new companies, unable to meet their liabilities, were wound up, and those which were still carried on suffered a serious depreciation of their shares, through the ignorance of the shareholders who, as remarked by Sir John Edgar in a paper written at the time, "showed as much folly in their hurry to get out of tea as they had a few years before in their eagerness to undertake the speculation."