There are four political parties in Porto Rico. The Republicans, who have little in common with our “G. O. P.,” though they send delegates to its conventions, want immediate statehood. The Unionists, contrary to their title, demand independence. There is a strong socialist and labor party, and a minor group that desires a return to Spanish rule. These divisions are not so definite as they seem, if we may believe an unusually informative native postmaster of the interior.

“The people with small government jobs,” he asserted, “many school teachers among them, secretly long for independence, chiefly in the hope of getting more graft. The Spaniards still mix secretly in politics and are really independentistas, though pretending to want statehood. Porto Rico would be wholly Americanized now if the governors had not ignorantly put in anti-American políticos. There has really been only one competent governor since the Americans took Porto Rico. We are decidedly not yet ready for jury trial; there was one of the most serious mistakes. It was also a mistake to make us American citizens collectively. We should have been given individual choice in the matter. Now if you accuse a man of not acting like an American citizen he cries, ‘Pah! They made me an American citizen. I had nothing to say about it.’ The best people think we need twenty years of military rule before we are given even local liberty. A plebiscite would give a false opinion because the politicians and the small-estate owners, who are chiefly Spanish, would send their peons down to vote for independence without any notion of what it means. And the best class wouldn’t vote. Do you think I would have my photograph and thumb-print taken, like a common criminal, in order to cast my ballot? The people do not know how to be free, after centuries of Spanish slavery. If independence were signed at eight o’clock to-morrow morning, I should leave Porto Rico at nine!” he concluded, vehemently.

There is, of course, no more reason why Porto Rico should have her independence than that Florida should. That she is entitled to be made a fully incorporated territory now, and a state in due season, seems the fitting course. But she is decidedly not yet ready for statehood. For one thing she must first know English. The partial autonomy she already enjoys shows her far from prepared for self-rule. Uncle Sam is always in too big a hurry to give his wards local government; also we listen perhaps too much to Latin-American criticism. We are not used to the sob-eloquence of the race, which at bottom means very little. The legislature and native insular officials are by no means free from intrigue, graft, and dishonesty. Towns with $100,000 incomes spend half of it in salaries to the mayor and his colleagues. Teachers were forced to pay ten per cent. of their wages into political funds, and the native court found that “they can do what they wish with their salaries.” The great socialist senator himself, rumor has it, bought land in Santurce at a dollar an acre, had public streets put in, and sold out at three dollars, though that, to be sure, might have happened in Trenton or Omaha. Even the post-offices are said to be corrupt with local politics.

So long as there is a great apathetic, illiterate, emotional mass of voters self-government can be no more than a farce, in Porto Rico or elsewhere. No Anglo-Saxon party leader can hope to keep pace with the suave machinations of Spanish-American politicians. They can think of more tricks overnight than he can run to earth in a week. Some years ago a youthful American was approached by a Porto Rican political leader with a request to come and address a public meeting.

“But I don’t know a word of Spanish!” he protested.

“All the better,” replied the politician; “we want you to speak in English.”

“I never made a speech in my life,” continued the American.

“Talk about anything whatever,” pleaded the other, “the weather, the scenery, baseball.”

The youth, who was not averse to a “lark,” mounted the platform and began to expound in choppy words the glories of baseball. At the end of each sentence the politician silenced him with a gesture and “interpreted” his statements to the crowded peons, who, to the speaker’s astonishment, greeted each well-rounded Spanish phrase with howls of delight. Not until the meeting was over and one of his hearers had addressed him by a name that was not his own, did the youth awaken to the fact that he had been introduced as the son of the governor, and that the Spanish portion of his speech had been an explanation of how anxious his “father” was to have the “interpreter” elected to the office he sought. “Dice el americano (the American says)” is still one of the by-words of Porto Rican politics.

But after all one does not visit so beautiful and fascinating a country as Porto Rico to chatter of its problems, but to meet its curious people and to marvel at its glorious scenery. More mountainous than even Haiti and Santo Domingo, the island is such an unbroken labyrinth of hills, ranges, and high peaks, of deep valleys, perpendicular slopes, and precipitous canyons, that its rugged beauty seems never-ending. That beauty, too, is enhanced by the great amount of cultivation, by the character it gains over the often uninhabited island to the westward in being everywhere peopled, by the great variety of colors that decorate it especially in this tropical spring-time of February. Even along the rolling coastal belt the highways are lined with the green- and red-leaved almendras, or false almond-trees, which here and there carpet the roads with Turkish rugs of fallen leaves. Higher up comes the roble, or flowering laurel, with its masses of delicate pink blossoms, then the bucaré-trees, used as coffee shade, daub the precipitous hillsides with splotches of burnt-orange hue; still farther aloft come beautiful tree ferns, symbolical of high tropical altitudes, and everywhere stand the majestic royal palms and the dense, massive mango-trees, in sorrel-colored blossom at this season, to crown the heavy green vegetation that everywhere clothes the island. For although almost every acre of it was denuded of its native forest growth by the tree-hating Spaniards, nature and the necessities of man have replaced its unbroken verdure.

It would be hard to say which of the several splendid roads across the island offers the best glimpse of this scenic fairyland. Some swear by the Ponce-Arecibo route, through the magnificent Utuado valley; others find nothing to compare with the stretch between Comerio and Cayey, the heart of the tobacco district; the most traveled certainly is the great military highway of the Spaniards, from San Juan to Ponce, the first half of it rivalled now by an American-built branch through Barranquitas. Perhaps the most beautiful bit of all is the journey from Guayama up to Cayey, that, too, by a route that antedates our possession. One unconsciously compares these achievements of the old Spanish engineers with our more recent efforts, and the comparison is not always favorable to the Americans. The Spaniard built in that leisurely fashion of European highways, which prefers wide detours to over-steep grades; his successor here and there betrays the impatience of his race by a too abrupt turn or a sharper slope. Yet the works of both are splendidly engineered, with never a really dangerous spot to a sane driver, for all the hairpin curves, the precipitous mountain walls above and below, the lofty bridges over profound canyons at the bottom of which insignificant brooks meander or roaring torrents tear seaward as if fleeing from the wrath of the towering peaks above, according to the season. There are reminders of Europe at every turn,—crenelated bridge-parapets, kilometer-posts and white fractions of them at every hundred meters, squatting men wielding their hammers on roadside stone-piles, caminero huts every few miles. It is the latter, in particular, that explain the unfailing near-perfection of Porto Rican highways. Brick or stone dwellings for the capataces, or road foremen, who must proceed at once to any broken roadbed, rain or shine, are interspersed with the too miserable huts of the peones camineros, who toil unceasingly day after day in the up-keep of the highways, like scattered railroad section-gangs. This system, a direct legacy from Spain, would be the answer to our own road troubles, were it possible to find men in our country willing to spend their lives at low wages in such an occupation.

Travel is unceasing along these splendid island roads. Automobiles, creaking ox-carts and massive tarpaulin-covered freight wagons drawn by several teams of big Missouri mules, mail-busses and crowded guaguas, horse carriages and now and then a string of pack-animals to contrast with the flying motors, make endless procession along the way, while countless barefoot pedestrians flank the blurred roadsides. Only the horsemen so frequent elsewhere in Latin-America are conspicuous by their scarcity. In contrast to carefully tended highways are the constant successions of miserable huts, built of anything that will hold together, some of them so close to the precipitous edge of the road that the front yard sometimes comes tumbling down into it in the rainy season. Others are pitched up the mountain sides to the clouds above, many of the slopes so sheer that the little garden patches stand almost on end. A case once actually came to court of a man who sued his neighbor for pushing his cow off his farm, entailing great labor to hoist her up again. Little American-style schoolhouses, the Stars and Stripes always flying above them, the whole interior from teacher to pupils visible through the wide-open doors, flash past. Lounging men are frequent, women everywhere making lace or drawn-work squat like toads in the doorways of their patched hovels, no one of which is insignificant or inaccessible enough not to have the census-enumerator’s tag tacked in plain sight on its bare front wall.

From Guayama almost at sea-level the old Spanish carretera climbs quickly into the cooler air, in snaky fashion, the town and the cane-green valley below diminishing to a picture framed by the white beach-line and the fuzzy mountain-slopes, then mounts by tortuous curves and serpentine loops around the brinks of dizzy precipices to a height of three thousand feet. For a time it clings along the cliff of a magnificent little valley, giving an endless succession of vistas, panoramas of mountains, ravines, and forested slopes, enhanced by frequent glimpses of the deep-blue Caribbean. No one of these highways is twice alike; morning or evening, under the blazing tropical sun or veiled with mountain showers, there is always a different aspect. Then suddenly it bursts out high above the valley of Cayey, the roof-flecked red of the town surrounded and packed as far as the eye can see with cloth-covered tobacco-fields, the crowning beauty of Porto Rican scenery. As we drop downward by more hairpin curves and climb again into the hills beyond, the steep mountainsides are everywhere covered in enormous patches with what look like the snowfields and glaciers of Switzerland, transported to the tropics. All through the region the big unpainted wooden barns of the American Tobacco Company bulk above the shade-grown immensities, as if half buried by drifted snow, until the entranced beholder finds it hard to remember that he is in a land of perpetual summer, despite the royal palms that here and there spring aloft from the white landscape. Elsewhere the unclothed fields are planted in endless rows of tobacco, on, up, and over hill after mountain, some of them so steep as to make cultivation seem impossible, and all looking as if their velvety green fur had been put in order by a gigantic comb.

Here one meets wagon-loads of tobacco plants and men carrying them in baskets on their heads, tiny plants in the transplanting season, great clusters of the full-grown leaves in cutting-time. He is a simple fellow, the stubby-footed toiler of these regions, so naïve that he often tucks away for years the checks with which the company pays for his produce, instead of cashing them. They are always “good,” he argues, and easily concealed, and he seems never to have heard of the word interest.

“Where does all this stuff go?” demanded an American tourist who had been motoring for hours through these tropical glaciers, “I have never seen much Porto Rican tobacco in the States.”

“Ah, but when it reaches New York it becomes Habana,” explained the tobacco agent. “You see, we mix it with the Cuban.”

“About one leaf of Habana to a bale of this,” suggested the tourist.

“Well, something like that,” admitted the tobacco-man.

The holy place of Porto Rico—for it would be a strange Latin-American country without one—is the old church of Hormigueros, a yellow church high on a hill, conspicuous afar off and with the inevitable cane of the coast lands stretching away from it as far as the pilgrim can see. The pious still climb its great stone stairway on their hands and knees, though rarely now except during the big fiesta in September. The story is that, some time back in the days of legend, a bull attacked a man in the field below. The man prayed to the Virgin, promising to do something in her honor if she would save him, and at the very instant his life was about to be gored out the bull dropped dead at his feet. There is a colored picture of that miracle in the church on the hill, which was built by the grateful man, who also entailed the estate he owned below to support it in perpetuity. To-day the lands are producing sugar cane for the Guánica Central, which pays rent to the church—and which also hastens to contribute when the parish priest suggests that money is needed for a fiesta or for some other purpose. For if the company does not respond, the priest calls a holiday, digging up some old saint out of the church calendar, and the fields round about go begging for laborers.

There is at least one other “sight” which the visitor to Porto Rico should not miss, for it throws a striking side-light on Latin-American character. In the hilly little town of Barranquitas is the birthplace of Luís Muñoz Rivera, often called the “George Washington of Porto Rico.” A cheap, thin, little clapboarded building, uninviting by our standards, though almost palatial to the simple country people, it has been turned into a museum to the dead insular hero, such a museum as cannot often be seen elsewhere. At the back of the house a lean-to garage has been built to accommodate the expensive touring-car in which his remains were carried to the cemetery. Not that Rivera owned an automobile; he was too honest a servant of his country to have reached that degree of affluence. It was loaned for the funeral by one of the dead man’s admirers, a senator and the owner of a large sugar central. When the mourners returned, it was decided to make a Porto Rican “Mount Vernon” of the humble residence of the departed statesman, to which end the rich senator not only contributed generously in money, but added the improvised funeral-car. There it stands to this day, its brand new tires lifted off the garage floor by wooden horses, the license of four years ago still on its blunt nose, the plank framework that was built out the back of it to hold the coffin still intact. Inside the house is the narrow spring cot on which the hero died, covered with those poetically lettered purple ribbons of which the Latin-American mourner is so fond, and a score of other belongings, similarly decorated. These include a tin bath-tub on wheels, a leather valise, the high-hat box indispensable to diplomats, several photographs of the deceased, death-masks of his face and of his hands, his last umbrella—one almost expects to find his last toothbrush, with a purple bow on the handle—all of them more or less covered with cobwebs. On his writing-table lies a specially bound volume of his book of poems, called “Tropicales,” and, most striking tribute of all, an elaborate bit of embroidery done in the various shaded hair of his female admirers.

Rivera differed from most politicians in being strictly honest. Not only did he live within his government salary; he gave a large share of it to the poor. Bit by bit hatchet-and-cherry-tree stories are already growing up about his memory. As the leader of the Unionist party he was violently anti-American, went to the United States to fight for the independence of the island—and came back ardently pro-American. His admirers assert that “he would have been the salvation of Porto Rico had he lived,” though exactly what they mean by the statement they probably have little notion themselves.

There are two drawbacks to walking in Porto Rico, though the ardent pedestrian will not let them deter him from his favorite sport. For one thing an American attracts attention, and loses the incognito that makes walking in Europe, for instance, so pleasant. Then the roads are too good. The hard macadam surfaces which are the joy of the motorist are not soft underfoot, and the rushing automobiles have small respect for the mere foot-traveler. There are, of course, many unpaved trails in and over the mountains, but they were scarcely passable at the time of our visit, for Porto Rico seems to have no definitely fixed wet and dry season.

I rambled about several sections of the island on foot. There was the trip to and about Lares, for instance, in the heart of the coffee district. The men of the over-developed big toes are less in touch with the outside world than either the cane or tobacco planters. The coffee industry is the only one that suffered by the island’s change of sovereignty. Though it was not introduced into Porto Rico until more than two centuries after the sugar-cane, the Arabian berry was the king of the island when General Miles landed the first American troops at Guánica. The loss of their free markets in Spain and Cuba, however, caused the coffee men to succumb under a discouragement from which they have not wholly recovered to this day. It is this, no doubt, which accounts for the careless methods of the cafetales, where jungle, weeds, and parasites often choke the bushes, while the berries are dried on half-cured cowhides laid in the open streets or on hut floors, with chickens, dogs, goats, and naked children, to say nothing of pigs, wandering over them at will. Such conditions will of course improve when the United States, the greatest coffee-drinking nation on the globe, finally learns that a berry equal to any in the world can be produced on American soil.

In Lares region the crop is taken a bit more seriously. There are brick coffee-floors in many a yard, and the bushes cover even the crests of the mountains, though the stranger might not suspect it, hidden as they are by the sheltering trees. They are pretty in their white blossoms in the February season, and the bucaré trees flame forth everywhere on the steep slopes. The Spaniards, who own many of the estates, pay fifty cents “flat” a day to their peons. The more generous Porto Rican growers, if their own assertions may be taken at par, pay sixty cents, with the right to eat the oranges and guineos, or small bananas, that fall from the trees, the rent-free possession of an acre of ground on which to build a hut and graze a cow, a pig, or a few chickens, and plant a garden, and such free firewood as may be picked up on the estate. Formerly they paid thirty cents and gave two meals a day, but the cost of food has caused them to “advance” wages instead. The women and girls of the region spend most of their time making lace or drawn-work, as elsewhere, unless they are attracted to the cafetales in picking season by the higher inducement of forty cents a day.

I paused to talk with a youth who kept a roadside “shop.” It consisted of a few plantain leaves and pieces of boxes laid together into a kind of shelter and counter. He rarely made a half-dollar daily profit, he admitted, but that was all he could earn in the coffee fields, and there he wore out his shoes, which cost much money. He was an ardent friend of Americans, like many of the country people. Asked to explain his friendship, he based it chiefly on the fact that they required the police to speak politely to everyone, did not allow beating, and punished their own people as well as Porto Ricans, whereas the Spaniards always used to be let off free. Then the Americans gave free schools. He had gone to one himself, “but he was not given to learn.” It is a familiar refrain all over Porto Rico, even from persons who have every outward evidence of being bright as our average. Doctors say there is a special reason for this backwardness.

The peons of the region, silent-footed, listless, are often pure Caucasian in type; indeed their pasty-white complexions frequently contrast with the tanned faces of northern visitors. Now and again one wanders by looking startlingly like a three-day corpse. They are victims of the hookworm. There is more hookworm in Porto Rico, those who should know tell us, than in any other country on the globe, with the possible exception of India and Ceylon. The disease was brought by African slaves—along with most of the troubles of the West Indies—and while it does little harm to negroes, it is often fatal to the whites. The population in the rural areas makes no sanitary provisions, and soil pollution is wide-spread; they invariably go barefooted, with the result to be expected. Ninety per cent. of the laboring class was infected with hookworm when we took over the island. An active campaign was waged at once and had good results, but with partial autonomy the populace has fallen back almost into its first pitiable condition. The Rockefeller Foundation has recently offered three fourths of the preliminary expense of a new attack on the disease, if the insular government will bear the rest. For the cure is simple; it only requires persistence. Drafted soldiers were treated for it, and one may easily detect the superiority in energy of the camineros and laborers who are still to be seen in remnants of their old uniforms. In a way it is Porto Rico’s most serious problem. Even a light infection causes serious mental retardation, and much money that is spent on schools is lost because of this defective mentality.

The hookworm is troublesome chiefly in the rural districts. The poor of the cities, who are bread eaters, have sprue instead. Of late only certified yeast from the United States has been permitted on the island; moreover, sprue may be cured by vaccination. A more serious thing is the prevalence of “t. b.”—which missionaries on the island dub “tin box.” Since the Americans came, there has been a constant increase in zinc roofs and sheet-iron houses over the old open-as-wool thatch hovels, and as the countryman persists in closing by night even the single tiny window, like that in the end of a box-car, up under the eaves of his shacks, weak lungs are increasing.

Fruit is abundant along the roads of Porto Rico. Mere bananas are so plentiful that they are often abandoned to the goats and pigs; in Lares a man with a wheelbarrow full of them was selling the largest and best at seven cents a dozen. Wild oranges, sweet, and juicy, for all their seeds, line the highways in what seems quantity sufficient to supply the entire demands of the “Mainland.” Most of them never reach the market. Here and there one runs across a crude packing-house among the hills, but the fact that a box containing an average of one hundred and fifty oranges, picked, sorted, crated, and hauled to the coast, sells for fifty cents answers the natural query. In the trade these are known as “east-side oranges,” and are generally sold by pushcart men in the tenement districts of our large cities—at how many hundred per cent. increase in price purchasers may figure out for themselves.

Vegetable growing has never been favored by the inhabitants of our strictly agricultural little West Indian possession. Like all Latin-Americans, they are content to do as their forefathers have done, and stick to the yams, yautías, and ñames, a coarse species of sweet potato, which grow almost wild, and will have nothing to do with Yankee innovations, though radishes mature in twelve days, and even Irish potatoes may be grown in the higher altitudes, and the market price of such vegetables is high. Bit by bit the jíbaros may be coaxed to improve their opportunities. Clusters of beehives are already common sights in the island, which can be said of no other section of tropical America. The Federal Agricultural Experimental Station at Mayagüez is to be thanked for this improvement. The old legend that bees lose their custom of laying up honey after a few seasons in a winterless land was found to be a fallacy, though they mix with the wild black bees of the island and the queens have to be killed and replaced periodically to keep the swarms from following the example of tropical man and refusing duty. Dyewoods, cabinet woods, and timber for building are wholly lacking in Porto Rico. Imported lumber costs $100 a thousand square feet. No wonder huts are made of yagua, thatch, and odds and ends. Indeed, the Federal institution mentioned above finds it can get better lumber out of packing-boxes than it can buy on the island. Porto Rico’s peculiar condition, a tropical country in which practically all that the people produce is shipped out of the country, and nearly all they consume shipped in, makes eventual improvement of these conditions imperative. It strikes the casual observer as extraordinary, for instance, that there are no large manufacturing industries on the island, with its excellent sources of water-power and its unlimited supply of cheap labor.

I drifted out along the road from Aguadilla southward one day. The first man to arouse my interest was a little peon caminero clearing the highway edge of weeds, who was so pretty he would have made a charming bride in proper garments. His wages were $27.60 a month. He rented a “house” at $1.50 monthly, so large a house because he kept his wife’s mother and two sisters, “for they have no other shelter.” He said it casually, as one speaks of the weather, without the faintest hint of the boasting an American of his class could scarcely divorce from such a statement. A bit farther on a diseased old beggar sat on the edge of the road, the bottom of the dirty old straw hat on the ground before him sprinkled with copper cents—“chavos,” they call them in Porto Rico, though the beggars soften their appeal by using the diminutive “chavito.” There is a suggestion of India in the island’s prevalence of alms-seekers,—blind men led by a boy or a dog, distressing old women publicly displaying their ailments, cripples and monstrosities wailing for sympathy from the passer-by. Scarcity of land and employment, abetted by the bad Latin-American custom of giving alms indiscriminately even to children, has brought a plague of professional beggars. One such fellow in Mayagüez has pleaded himself into possession of a twenty-acre finca—and is still begging. A mendicant of San Germán complains that the time-table is so badly arranged that he has to run to meet two trains. An American medical missionary offered to remove the cataracts from his eyes free of charge, but he declined to have his means of livelihood cut off. One of our Porto Rican hosts was responding to the appeal of an old woman for a “chavito” when a boy rushed up and cried, “Don’t give her anything, señor, she has a cow!” The crone dashed after the urchin with an astonishing burst of speed, and returned out of breath to wail, “It is true, caballero, I admit it is true. But I have no pasture, and I must beg now to support the cow.”

A long row of men were hoeing new sugarcane for the “Central Coloso,” the tall stack of which broke the almost flat horizon behind them. They watched my approach, plainly suspicious that any man wearing shoes might be a company spy, and worked with redoubled energy. They were paid $1.50 for a nine-hour day, except two who were “sick” and a boy of seventeen, at two thirds that amount, and the capataz, who differed from the others only by the lack of a hoe, at $1.80. As I turned away, the latter asked in a soft voice if I could tell him the time. Then he drew from his pocket an Ingersoll watch and, apologizing for his atrevemiento (“daring”), requested me to show him how to set it, the men under him at the same time protesting that “he should not make so bold with gentlemen.” A stout, pure-white peon patching the road farther on, snatched off his hat as I spoke to him. His wages had gone up during the past year—from seventy-three to eighty cents a day! But he could earn little more than half that in the coffee estates at home, so he had been glad to come down to the coast to work. I drifted upon and strolled for a while along the railroad. The section hands were getting a dollar a day, which sets Porto Rico thirty years back in that regard, for I remember that like wages were paid then on the branch line that passed my birthplace. Perhaps the island’s laborers earn no more than they receive; a gang of ten men were loading a cane-cart in a neighboring field a single cane at a time. The two old women who were picking up rubbish beyond them had never been married, but they had three and four children respectively. They had always been paid forty cents a day, but now they had been promised a dollar. Whether or not they would get it only pay-day could tell. They accepted with alacrity the cigarettes I offered. At noon I stepped into a shop-dwelling to ask for food. The lunch that was finally prepared would not have over-fed a field laborer, yet the cost was eighty cents. The family was moderately clean, and energetic above the average. The four children all went to school. On the wall of the poor little hovel, surrounded on all sides by cane-fields, the oldest boy had chalked in English, “We have no sugar because we have sent it all to the poor people of Europe.”

Along the soft-dirt private road to the central I met an intelligent looking man of thirty or so, capable in appearance as any American mechanic, Caucasian of race, his hair already turning gray. He begged for a peseta. I opened my mouth to ask why a big, strong fellow in the prime of life should be asking for alms, when my eyes fell upon his left-leg. It was swollen to the knee with elephantiasis, both the trouser-leg and the skin having burst with the expansion. A year ago, he said, he had been out on a Sunday excursion in the country, and had stopped to wash his feet in a creek. They smarted a bit on the way home, but he thought nothing of it until, some time later, his left foot began to swell. He was a cigar-maker by trade, and the Sanidad had refused to let him work in such a condition, yet the government would not take care of him. So he wandered about the country, where the people were more kindly than in the towns. The leg did not exactly hurt any more, but it seemed to drag all his left side down with its weight. He would gladly go and have it cut off, if he could find a place to have it done, though people said even that would not do much good. Tears were near the brim of his eyes, but they did not well over. Hopeless cases of this kind seem much more pitiful when one can talk to the sufferer and find him a rational human being, of some education, than when they are merely the dog-like wretches of India, who seem scarcely capable of thought.

One morning I stepped off the night train to Ponce and struck out across the island by the Utuado road. It was an hour before I had emerged from the populous suburbs of the town. Automobiles snorted past without once offering a “lift.” Not that I wanted one, but one gets an impression of selfishness in a community that passes a foot-traveler without a suggestion of help. It was not universal here, however. Before I had climbed a mile into the foot-hills a man in a rattletrap buggy pulled his packages together in the seat and invited me to jump in. It was hard to explain my refusal. There were many little wayside “restaurants” where one would least expect any demand for such accommodations. But people must win a livelihood somehow, as one of the keepers explained. Then came a string of “villas,” of Porto Ricans, Americans, and a few Englishmen, modest little summer homes set where they could look down the valley upon the blue Caribbean. Here and there were the creeper-grown ruins of old Spanish country houses. Finally—a joke? I hardly think so, for the Latin-American countryman has as little sarcasm as sense of humor—a miserable little tin hut, in the yard of which the owner and his boy were forking manure, was elaborately announced in large letters as “Villa Providencia.”

At the first miriametro-post the coffee began, bananas and guayaba-trees shading it. There passed much freight in tarpaulin-covered wagons, the big brakes badly worn. A crowded guagua rumbled by, the chauffeur and most of the passengers staring at me with an air that said plainly, “Look at that stingy americano saving money by walking!” Staring is universal in Porto Rico, at least outside the larger cities. Even the “schoolmarms,” always well-dressed in spotless but cheap materials, pause in their lessons to gaze at the sight that has drawn the pupils’ attention.

Three hours up I had an extended view of the Caribbean, still seeming barely a rifle-shot way. A boy of eight, living a few yards from a school, had never attended it, “because he had to take care of a sick mare at home.” In the hovel-store where I had lunch three little girls read English to me from their textbooks. I could understand them, but only by giving their curious pronunciation the closest attention. Of the information in their Spanish textbooks they had a moderate knowledge for their years. The houses were constant; one was never out of human sight or sound. The scarcity of dogs was in contrast to other Latin-American countries; during an outbreak of bubonic plague some years ago seven thousand were killed in Ponce alone. In a spot where the roadside grew precipitous a sad-eyed peon stood looking at the little garden before his house, which had fallen into the highway, more than fifty feet below, during the night’s rain. Higher still the road reached its point of greatest altitude and descended, more or less abruptly, through artistic tree-ferns and clumps of bamboo to Adjuntas. All I remember of the flat little town are the oranges heaped up at the roadside, the drying coffee laid out on burlap sacks before the sleepy little shops, and that “Ponce de Leon Brothers” kept one of the clothing stores.

Many big auto-trucks were carrying bags of coffee in the direction of Ponce, as others like them carry tobacco from the region of tropical glaciers. The road forded a river, but so many stepping-stones had been laid across it that I needed to take off only one shoe. A new highway to Lares chewed its way upward into the almost chalky hills to the left. We certainly build good roads in Porto Rico; the Spanish influence seems to have survived the change of sovereignty. The highway under my feet followed a rock-tumbled river all the rest of the day. Census-tags decorated every hut. The enumerators did not skip their political opponents, as in Cuba, and though the date had passed after which the tags might be removed, not one of them had been touched. Most of the people could not read the printed permission to do so; besides, they would not dream of meddling in a government matter. Sunset came early between the mountain walls piled high above me on either side. Then fell the quick darkness of the tropics, and there began a constant creaking that suggested young frogs. For an hour I plodded on into the warm night, the road barely visible under a crescent moon, in the faint rays of which the feathery bamboos that lined the highway for a mile or more before reaching Utuado, looked weirdly like faintly moving gigantic fans.

Utuado is a large town for its situation, and piled up the first slopes of the hills about it in a stage-setting effect. Dense masses of fog—strange sight in the West Indies, where the fog-horn never breaks the slumber of sea passengers—lay in its very streets until the tropical sun wiped them away toward nine. Great precipices of limestone on either side, a boiling river below, mountains of bold broken outline ahead, marked the journey onward. The road climbed frequently, even though it followed the growing river. Patches of tobacco, as well as coffee, covered the steep hillsides; vegetation and mankind were everywhere. Here and there the highway clung by its finger-nails and eyebrows, as sailors say, along the face of the cliff. Then it regained solid footing and broke out into a broad, flat coastland, hot, dusty, and uninteresting, with cane and smoke-belching sugar-mills, and hurried across it to Atlantic-washed Arecibo.

“It’s all I can do to keep from barking at you,” said a passenger on the Virginia, as he crawled on hands and knees from one of the four kennels that decorate her afterdeck. As a matter of fact, we all did a certain amount of growling before the voyage was over. Yet the four of us who had won the kennels were lucky dogs compared to the unfortunate dozen or more who had to snatch what sleep they could curled up on the bare deck or in a single sour-smelling cabin below, where neither color, sex nor seasickness knew any distinction.

The weakest link in the shipping chain down the West Indies is that between our own possessions. Once a week a little schooner that was built to defend America’s yachting championship, but which never reached the finals, raises its wings in San Juan harbor and, the winds willing, drops a flock of disgruntled passengers, the United States mails, and an assorted cargo in St. Thomas and St. Croix in time to return for a similar venture seven days later. Congressional committees, of course, have their battleships, and the white-uniformed governors of our Virgin Islands their commodious steam-yacht; but the mere garden variety of tax-paying citizen has the privilege of tossing about for several days on the Virginia, subsisting on such food as he has had the foresight to bring with him, and drinking such lukewarm water as he can coax from the schooner’s cask.

It is nearly fifty miles from Porto Rico to St. Thomas. All day long our racing yacht crawled along the coast, San Juan and the island’s culminating peak, El Yunque, equally immovable on the horizon, while the half-grown crew alternated between pumping water from the hold and playfully disobeying the orders of the forceless old mulatto captain. Nine at night found us opposite Fajardo light—more than an hour by automobile from our starting-point! While the crew slept, without so much as posting a lookout, a boy of thirteen sat at the wheel, and the kennel-less passengers tossed restlessly on their chosen deck spots. A half-grown pig—the only traveler on board whose ticket specified ship’s food—wandered disconsolately fore and aft, now and then demanding admission to one or another of the four “cabins.” No doubt he recognized them as built for his own, rather than the human, species.

Sunrise overtook us still within sight of Porto Rico, but with her dependencies of Culebra and Vieques abeam, and the hazy mass of the Virgin group visible on the horizon ahead. Brown, rugged, strangely aged-looking, Culebra showed no signs of life except the lighthouse set upon its highest cliff. Vieques, on the other hand, known to English-speaking mariners as “Crab Island,” is a diminutive replica of Porto Rico, with four large sugar-mills and a population of some eleven thousand, American citizens all. The Danes once claimed this also, but Spanish buccaneers established the more efficacious right of actual possession, and at length the Porto Rican Government sent an expedition to annex it to the Spanish crown.

With monotonous deliberation the Virgin group grew in size and visibility. St. Thomas and St. John took on individuality amid their flock of rocky keys, and British Tórtola gradually asserted its aloofness from the American islands. Far off on the blue-gray horizon we could even make out St. Croix, like a stain on the inverted bowl of sky. Yet, though the breeze was strong, it was a head wind, and the ocean current sweeping in from the eastward held us all but motionless when we seemed to be cutting swiftly through the light waves. For five profane hours we tacked to and fro within gunshot of a towering white boulder jutting forth from the sea, and fittingly known as Sail Rock, without seeming to advance a mile on our journey.

We turned the isolated precipice at last, and headed in toward mountainous St. Thomas. Neither its scattered keys nor its long broken coast-line showed any evidence of habitation, but at length three white specks appeared on its water’s edge, and grew with the afternoon to a semblance of Charlotte Amalie, a city rivaled in its beauty, at a distance, by few others even in the beautiful West Indies. We greeted it with fervent exclamations of delight, piled up white and radiant in the moonlight on its three hills, like occupants of royal boxes at some gala performance in its amphitheatrical harbor below. Scarcely a sound came from it, however, except the languid swish of the waves on what seemed to be the base of its lower houses, as we dropped anchor near midnight within rowboat distance of the wharves. It had been an unusually swift voyage, according to the uncommanding captain, a mere two days instead of the four or five it frequently requires.

In due course of time a negro youth rowed out to examine us. He was an exceedingly courteous negro, to be sure, his white uniform was spotless, and his English impeccable; but there was something incongruous in the fact that American citizens must have his permission to be admitted into one American possession from another. The “Grand Hotel,” which virtually monopolizes the accommodation of transients in St. Thomas, could not house us, or rather, on second thought, it could, if we would be contented in the “annex” over a barber-shop across the street. Its creaking floors were unbroken expanses of spaciousness, but at least there was a mahogany four-poster in one corner. We sat down on it with a sigh of contentment—and quickly stood up again, under the impression that we had inadvertently sat upon the floor. The Virgin Islands have not yet reached that decadent degree of civilization that requires bed-springs. As to a bath—certainly, it should be brought at once; and a half hour later a loose-kneed negro wandered in and set down on the floor, with the rattle of a hardware-shop in a tornado, a large tin pan, red with rust. All we had to do, explained the ultra-courteous octoroon manager, was to call another negro to bring a pail of water when—and the emphasis suggested that the time was still far off—we “desired to perform our ablutions.” The tub-bearer was evidently too worn out from his extraordinary exertion to indulge in another before he had taken time to recuperate.

That loose-kneed stroll of the Virgin-Islander is typical of all his processes, mental, moral, or physical. It is not merely slow, rhythmical, and dignified; there is in it a suggestion of limitless wealth, an untroubled conscience, and an ancestry devoted to leisurely pursuits for untold generations. In local parlance a “five minutes’ walk” means a block. One must not even speak hastily to a native, for the only result is wasted breath and the necessity of repeating the question in more measured cadences. Politeness oozes from his every pore; “at your sarvice, sar,” and “only too glad to be of use, ma’am,” interlard every conversation; but any attempt, courteous or otherwise, to hurry the Virgin Islander brings a sullen resentment which you will never succeed in smiling away. As the navy men who are governing him put it in the technical vernacular of their calling, he has only two speeds,—“Slow Ahead” and “Stop.”

Once the visitor has shaken off the no doubt ridiculous notion that things should be done in a hurry, or done at all, for that matter, he will find our newly adopted children an amusing addition to the family. Like all negroes in contact with civilization, they are fond of four-jointed words where monosyllables would suffice, and of pompous, rounded sentences in place of brief-to-the-point statements. “Presently” means “now”; “He detained from coming” is the local form of “he can’t come.” Talking is one of the Virgin Islanders’ chief recreations. They buttonhole the unknown passer-by and unburden themselves to him at endless length, ceaselessly chattering on until he can forge some excuse to tear himself away, when they hasten to ask their friends if they, too, have seen “the stranger with the beard,” “the American who arrived last night,” “that rich-looking gentleman in a white helmet,” that the friends may not lose their chance of waylaying the victim who is already listening to a new monologue around the corner. If they can not find a hearer, they do not for that reason abandon their favorite sport; it is commonplace to meet a pedestrian, particularly a woman, chattering volubly to herself as she shuffles along the street.

Their lack of self-restraint is on a par with their loquacity. When the first navy hydroplanes flew into the harbor, the entire population became a screaming mob of neck-craning, pointing, shoulder-clapping, occupation-forgetting children. The winner of a dollar at the local “horse” races, in which the island donkeys are now and then pitted against one another, may be seen turning somersaults in the midst of the crowd, or throwing himself on the ground, all fours clawing the air, as he shrieks his ecstasies of delight. It is their joy to parade the streets in their gayest costumes on any holiday, American, Danish, or imaginable, that can be dragged into the calendar, dancing and capering with an energy which their work-a-day manner never suggests. Once a month, at full moon, the local band marches through the town playing “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” the population trailing en masse behind it, singing, clapping hands, and swaying their rather slender, underfed bodies violently in cadence with the music. They are ardent church-goers in theory, there being six large churches of as many denominations in town—but it takes a rousing round of hymns to bring the majority to indoor services, though boatmen far out in the bay recognize a street meeting of the Salvation Army by the howling chorus of “Lord, ha’ mercy on mah sou-ul,” which the cliffs echo out to them.

The Sunday evening band concert, on the other hand, is staid enough to make a Spanish-American retreta seem uproarious by comparison. It begins at nine, after the last church service of a Britishly dead Sunday. The native band, recruited by the administrative Americans, jet black in features and snow-white in uniform, mounts to the roof of the old red fortress, while outwardly immaculate negroes, stroll rather funereally about little Emancipation Park and along the edge of the quay. The élite of the town sit in their houses, piled steeply up the pyramidal hills, and let the music float up to them on the harbor breeze. Our new fellow-countrymen are ostentatiously patriotic in all that concerns mere formalities. Every morning at eight all St. Thomas becomes static when the marine band plays our national anthem. The market-women on the wharf halt as if suddenly turned to stone, holding whatever posture they happen to be caught in until the last note has died away; the very boatmen in the bay sit with their poised oars motionless. Flags burst forth not merely on our own holidays, but on Danish, on every possible fête day, public or private, even on the birthdays of distant relatives or mere friends. Curious superstitions enliven the quaint local color. The appearance of a lizard in the house is sure proof to the lower classes that there is soon to be an addition to the family. Servant girls cannot be induced to remove their hats, whether cooking, making beds, or waiting on table at the most formal dinner, for fear of sudden death from “dew” falling on their heads—though it be full blazing noonday.

The great majority of the population is undernourished. Even when their earnings are sufficient, most of the money is spent on dress. The chief diet of the rank and file is sugar. A sugar-cane three times a day seems to be enough to keep many of them alive. The morning meal for the rest consists of “tea” only, the local meaning of that word being a cupful of sugar dissolved in warm water. Then along in the middle of the afternoon they indulge in their only real food, and not very real at that. This is a plate of “fungee,” a nauseating mixture of fish and corn-meal, which to the local taste is preferable to the most succulent beefsteak. The natural result of the constant consumption of sugar is an early scarcity of teeth. Barely three men in twenty could be enlisted in the native corps, chiefly because of their inability to cope with navy rations.

It goes without saying that such a population does not furnish model workmen. From Friday night to Tuesday morning is apt to be treated as “the Sabbath.” The man who works two days a week at eighty cents has enough to provide himself with sugar-cane and “fungee.” On the whole, the women are more industrious than the men, perhaps because the great disparity of sexes makes the possession of a “man” something in the nature of a luxury. Time was when the women of St. Thomas were able to support their husbands in a more fitting manner than at present. In the good old days hundreds of ships coaled here every month; now many a day passes without one bringing a throng of negresses scampering for the coaling-wharf far out beyond “Bluebeard’s Castle.” In a constant stream the soot-draped women jog up the gang-plank, balancing the eighty-pound basket of coal on their heads, often without touching it, thrust out a begrimed hand for the three cents a trip which a local labor leader has won them in place of the original one, drop the coins into a dust-laden pocket, dump their load into the steamer’s chute, and trot down again. Sometimes the ship is a man-of-war that unfairly speeds up the pace of coalers by having its band play rousing music on the upper deck. Here and there a man may be made out in the endless chain of black humanity. At least one of them works with his wife as a “team”—by carrying the empty basket back to be filled while she mounts with the full one. But most of the males have the point of view of the big “buck nigger” who was lying in the shade of the coal-pile watching the process with an air of languid contentment. “Why de coalin’ is done by women, sah?” he repeated, scratching his head for a reply. “Why, dat’s woman’s work.”

The population of our Virgin Islands is overwhelmingly negro. Even Charlotte Amalie cannot muster one white man to ten of African ancestry, and not a fourth of the latter show any Caucasian mixture. Once upon a time the Jews were numerous; there is still a Jewish cemetery, but the synagogue has been abandoned for lack of congregation. Though the islands were Danish for nearly two and a half centuries, their language has always been English, probably because their business has ever been with ships and men who, though it may not always have been their native tongue, spoke the language of the sea. Some six years before we purchased the islands the Danes made an attempt to teach Danish in the schools. But though many little negroes learned to chatter more or less fluently in that tongue, to the detriment of more essential studies, the local environment proved too strong, and the very Danish officials became proficient in English in spite of themselves, though even the British school superintendent was required to write his correspondence and reports in the official tongue.

The only element of the population that has never succumbed to its environment, either racially or linguistically, are the “Chachas.” They are a community of French fishermen, who have themselves lost any certain notion of how they came to be stranded on rocky St. Thomas. Some two hundred of them live in their own village on the outskirts of Charlotte Amalie; others are scattered along the trail to a similar village called Hull, on the opposite side of the island. Intermarriage has given them all a striking family resemblance, and it is hours before the newcomer realizes that it is not the same man he has met over and over again, peddling his fish, his goats, or his crude straw hats in the streets of the town, but a score of more or less close relatives. They have preserved their blood pure from the slightest negro strain; but their aloofness has given them a sort of sick-bed pallor, an anemia both of physique and manner, especially among the women, an almost complete loss of teeth, and little power to resist disease. Yet the men at least have by no means lost their old “pep.” They can still fight in a two-fisted manner that is the awe of their negro neighbors, and they venture fearlessly far out to sea in their little narrow-chested fishing boats.

The adults speak a perfectly comprehensible French, but the “creole” of the children is but little improvement on that of Haiti. For many years they had their own school, taught by an old Frenchman who drew the princely salary of five dollars a month. Since his death the children have been attending the English-speaking Catholic school, and some of them already mispronounce a certain amount of that tongue—and can beg as fluently as the little black urchins that swarm about any white stranger. But their aloofness from the colored population remains. The latter scorn them as only a negro can the white man who has fallen socially to his own level, though they take care not to refer to them by the popular nickname within reach of their hardened fists. The term is said to have had its origin in the word chasser with which the fishermen interlard their cries. They call themselves français, and have a simplicity which suggests they have followed the same calling for many generations. Their houses are mere cabins, with shingled walls and thatched roofs, scattered about the sand knolls at the edge of the bay. These are always floored, decorated with a few chromo prints of a religious nature, and have a better claim to neatness than the hovels of the negroes about them. While the latter loaf, the “Chachas” ply their chosen calling diligently, but on Sunday afternoons they may be found in groups, playing cards in the shade of their date palms, their curious hats of sewn ribbons of straw tossed on the sandy soil about them. They profess complete indifference to their island’s change of sovereignty, except to wonder in vague voices if it is this that has brought the appalling increase in the prices of food.

Seen from any of its three hills, Charlotte Amalie looks more like a stage setting than a real town. Its sheet-iron roofs, many of them painted red, seem to be cut out of cardboard, and the steepness of the slopes on which the majority of its houses are built suggests the fantasy of the scene-painter rather than cold practicability. A single long, level street, still known, on its placards at least, as Kronprindsens Gade, runs the length of the town and contains nearly all its commerce. The rest start bravely up the steep hills, but soon tire, like the inhabitants, and leave their task incompleted. On the eastern side, where the storms come from, the houses have glass windows, almost unknown in the larger islands to the westward, and are fitted on all sides with heavy wooden hurricane-shutters. If these are closed in time, the roofs can withstand the frequent high winds that sweep down upon the island, but the local weather prophet has an unenviable task, for to give the signal for closing the shutters when there is no need for it is as reprehensible from the native point of view as to fail to foresee real danger. Bulky stone or brick ovens, separate from the houses, are the only buildings with chimneys, and many of these were mutilated by the hurricane of four years ago. Palm-trees and great masses of red and purple bougainvillea add a crowning beauty to a scene that would be entrancing even without them.

Of a score of solemn old buildings the most imposing is the residence of the governor on the middle of the three hills. Higher still stands a grim tower known as “Blackbeard’s Castle,” about which cling many legends, but no other certainty than that it was built by a turbulent colonist of long ago, who was credited, justly no doubt, since that clan has not wholly died out in St. Thomas to this day, with being a pirate. But this structure is of slight interest to the average visitor compared to a similar one on the eastern hill, reputed far and wide as the original “Bluebeard’s Castle.” Just how it gained this reputation is not easily apparent, for its real history is almost an open book. Built by the Danish government in 1700 as a fort, probably to overawe the slaves in the town below, it remained the property of the king until a century ago, when it fell into private hands. If any other proof of its entirely unromantic character is needed, it is sufficient to know that it now belongs to an Episcopal clergyman living in Brooklyn!

With stone walls five feet thick, three rooms one above the other, and all in all a pitiless visage, the tower easily lends itself to the imagination as the scene of marital treachery. The old negro caretaker will assure you that the dreadful crimes took place in it “jes’ like de storybook tell.” The yarn that has a wider local belief is somewhat different. According to this an old trader married a beautiful girl of Charlotte Amalie and locked her up in the castle while he left the island on business. During his absence she discovered a mysterious old chest in the upper story and finally yielded to the feminine impulse to open it. In it she found letters from a dozen of her husband’s discarded sweethearts, all of whom still lived in the town. She invited them to a banquet in the castle—the significant detail of how she got the door open being passed over in silence—and poisoned them. From there on the tale forks. One ending has it that the husband returned, repented, and committed suicide while the beautiful wife was being tried for murder; the other, that he rushed in and carried her off just as she was about to be burned at the stake.

The eyes of the modern visitor are sure to be drawn to what looks like an attempt to pave a large section of the steep hill behind the town. A great triangular patch of cement gleaming in the sun on one of the slopes brings to mind the island’s greatest problem. St. Thomas depends entirely upon the rains for her water-supply, for the water to be had by boring is so brackish that it ruins even a steamer’s boilers. When renting or buying a house the most important question is to know the size and condition of its cistern and what provision has been made for filling it. In the dry season, which is heartlessly long and appallingly dry, the poorer people wander from house to house begging a “pan” of water, and the word means a receptacle of any size or shape that will hold the precious liquid. The town is convinced that its commercial decline is due to its lack of water, and that it will come into its own again if only Uncle Sam will cover its hillsides with cement or galvanized iron. If they had immense cisterns and a means of filling them, they say, ships would no longer go to Ponce for water, and perhaps pick up their coal in Porto Rico also, but would put in at St. Thomas for all their supplies. To make matters worse, the change of sovereignty has brought with it the inability to furnish other liquids for which sea-faring men have looked to St. Thomas for centuries. That seemed the last straw, but another has since been added to the already crushing burden. St. Thomas has long been famous for its bay rum. As a matter of fact the bay oil comes from St. John and the rum came from St. Croix, until the colonial council voted the islands “dry”—“as if we were not dry enough already.” But the mixture and sale thereof brought many a dollar into local pockets. Soon after the “dry” law went into effect, the natives, to say nothing of our thirsty marines, made the brilliant discovery that the addition of a bit of bay oil to their favorite refreshment left it none the less exhilarating. Banished hilarity returned. The governor was shocked beyond measure, and the sale even of bay rum is now forbidden except on a police permit, issued only on proof that it was not to be used for beverage purposes. It is almost as easy to prove that the moon is made of green cheese. The Virgin Islanders have several grievances against the Americans who have adopted them, the strictness of their color-line, for instance; but the greatest of these is prohibition.

The cluster of islands just east of Porto Rico was discovered by Columbus on his second voyage; anything that escaped him on the first journey seems to enjoy at least that secondary distinction. He named them the Eleven Thousand Virgins; just why, not even his biographers seem to know. It may be that he had just been awakened from a bad dream, or possibly the expression was an old-fashioned Italian form of profanity. It would be easy to think of a more appropriate name, but they have remained the Virgin Islands to this day.

The Spaniards stopped long enough to exterminate the Indians, but it was a long time before any one thought it worth while to settle in such a region. Nothing is more natural than that the name should finally have attracted to it a party of Frenchmen. Evidently they found it disappointing, for they did not increase. Then the Danish West India Company laid claim to St. Thomas and its adjacent islands, and in 1671 a governor was sent out from Denmark, who founded the town of Charlotte Amalie, which he named for the then Danish queen. Of course the British captured the place a few times, and it was often harassed by fires, hurricanes, and slave rebellions, all of which it more or less successfully survived. St. Thomas became a harbor of refuge for pirates, and it frequently became necessary for the English governor of Nevis to raid it—for the British, you remember, did not believe in piracy. When the gentlemen enlisted under the skull-and-cross-bones banner had gone the way of all rascals, the island soon won a place of importance as a distributing center for slaves.

Meanwhile St. Croix, which is neither geographically, geologically, nor historically a bona fide member of the Virgin group, had been having a history of its own. The Knights of Malta colonized it first with three hundred Frenchmen, but these soon decided that Santo Domingo offered better real estate possibilities. Then when the Dutch and the British had concluded that France had a better armed right to it, the latter sold it to the Danish Company for 750,000 livres. Just how much that was in real money I am not in a position to state, beyond the assertion that it would buy far more then than it will nowadays. Thenceforth St. Croix has followed the fate of the other Danish West Indies.

Many of the colonists were disturbers of the peace or agitators, the Bolshevists, in short, of those days, who found it to their advantage to abandon the near-by French and British Leeward Islands. They became too much for the Company, which in 1764 sold the whole collection to the Danish crown. All three of the islands of any importance were long planted in sugar-cane. It covered even the tops of the hills, those of St. Thomas being cultivated by hand in little stone-faced terraces. To-day sugar-cane has completely disappeared from St. Thomas, almost entirely from St. John, and is grown only on the level southern side of St. Croix. Several slave uprisings had been suppressed with more or less bloodshed when Denmark subscribed to the then astounding theory that slavery should be abolished. The agricultural importance of the islands began at once to decline. Free labor was cheap, but it would not labor. Then, too, the competition of sugar grown more economically elsewhere and Napoleon’s establishment of a bounty for beet-sugar growers began to make life dreary for all West Indian planters.

However, as their agriculture declined, the importance of the Danish islands as a shipping and distributing center increased, though their days of greatest prosperity were from 1820 to 1830, when the two coincided. St. Thomas harbor was forested with the masts of sailing vessels, carrying goods to and from the four points of the compass. Then along came Robert Fulton with more trouble for the poor harassed islanders. Steam navigation made it easy for the West Indies and South America to import goods direct from Europe, and the Virgin Island merchants began to lose their rake-off. They picked up, however, by establishing a coaling station and making St. Thomas a free port and a general depot of sea-going supplies. Before the World War scores of ships entered the harbor every week; now the pilot often does not drop his feet from his hammock to the floor for several days at a time.

For all this, the islands were a liability rather than an asset to the Danes, and they had long been looking for some kind Samaritan to take them off their hands. Under Lincoln, Secretary Seward negotiated a treaty by which we were to have all the group except St. Croix for $7,500,000. A vote of the population showed them overwhelmingly in favor of the change; the Danish Government was paternal, but it was far away and unprogressive. The treaty was ratified in Denmark. The king issued a manifesto telling his loyal subjects how sorry he was to part with them, but assuring them, as fathers always do, that it was for their own good. He did not mention that he needed the money. Two years later he was forced to admit in another royal document that he was not parting with them, after all. Senator Sumner, chairman of our Foreign Relations Committee, did not walk hand in hand with President Johnson. For two years he kept the treaty in his official pocket, and when it did at length reappear under Grant, it was adversely reported.

In 1902 a better bargain was struck. A new treaty setting the price of the whole group at $5,000,000 was drawn up, and ratified by the American Senate. But this time the Danish Rigsdag turned the tables. Perhaps they had inside information on the future development of American politics. If so it proved trustworthy, for by 1916 we were in the hands of an administration to whom mere money was no object. The Danes quickly caught the idea, the people themselves voted to sell while the selling was good, and on the last day of March, 1917, old Danneborg was hauled down and the Stars and Stripes raised in its place.

I have yet to find any one who knows just why we bought the Virgin Islands, still less why we paid twenty-five millions for them. As a navy man engaged in governing them put it, “They are not worth forty cents to us, or to any one else; though” he added, “it would have been worth a hundred million to keep Germany from getting them.” If the loss of the twenty-five millions were an end of the matter, we might forget it; but it is costing us more than half a million a year to support our little black children. Furthermore, the Danes made the most of their ripe opportunity not only in the matter of price, but in an astonishing number of concessions in their favor. Evidently our Government said to them, “Go ahead and write a treaty, and we’ll sign it”; and then in the press of saving the world for democracy we did not have time to glance it over before adding our signature.

If a farmer bought a farm for, say, twenty-five hundred dollars, and found, when he came to take possession of it, that it would cost him fifty dollars a year out of his pocket to run it, that it was inhabited by a happy-go-lucky lot of negroes who expected him to do many things for them, from curing their wide-spread disease to sending them to school; if, furthermore, he discovered that the former owners still held everything on the farm that was worth owning except the title-deed, he would probably give it away to the first unsuspecting tenderfoot who happened along. Unfortunately, governments cannot indulge in that dying-horse method of laying down their burdens. Even had the purchase price of almost three hundred dollars an acre included everything of monetary value on the islands, from the wardrobes of the inhabitants to the last peasant’s hut, we should have made a bad bargain. But about all we got for our twenty-five millions is the right to fly our flag over the islands, and half a dozen old forts and government buildings entirely stripped of their furniture. The Danish Government has the reputation of being conservative and economical. It surely is, in more senses than one. By the terms of the treaty “the movables, especially the silver plate and the pictures, remain the property of the Danish Government and shall, as soon as circumstances permit, be removed by it.” By virtue of that clause they sold at auction every stick of furniture in the public buildings; they tore the mirrors off the walls; they removed the gilt moldings from them; they tried to tear off the embossed leathery wall-paper, and left the rooms looking as if a party of yeggmen had gutted them; they took down and carried away the rope on the government flagpole! Economy is a splendid trait, but they might have left us a chair in which to mourn the loss of our twenty-five—and more—millions.

Everything worth owning in the islands is still in private, principally Danish, hands. When we planned to erect a naval station on an utterly worthless stony hill on St. Thomas harbor, the owners demanded twenty-five hundred dollars an acre for it. We must maintain all the grants, concessions, and licenses left by the Danish Government. “Det Vestindiske Kompagni” retains most of the harbor privileges; another Danish company, of which the principal shareholder is Prince Axel, cousin of the king, holds the coaling rights, the electric lighting rights, the right to operate a dry-dock. We cannot even use American money in our new possessions. The Danish West Indian bank has the exclusive concession for issuing notes until 1934, paying a ten per cent. tax on profits to the Danish Government, and the good old greenback must be exchanged for the domestic shin-plasters. Naval men stationed in St. Thomas are forced to pay this institution as high as two per cent. discount on their U. S. government pay checks; the yearly budget of our new colony must be made in Danish francs. But though the domestic money is officially in francs and “bits,” the people talk in dollars and cents as universally as they speak English instead of Danish. It is difficult to find anything left by the old régime that is not protected by that curiously one-sided treaty. An American remarked casually to an old Danish resident one evening as they were strolling through Emancipation Park: