barely begun. Irrigation is an example of this. The report of John W.
Noble, Secretary of the Interior for 1891, said, "One hundred and
twenty million acres that are now desert may be redeemed by irrigation
so as to produce the cereals, fruits, and garden products possible in
the climate where the lands are located." That is an area nearly twice
as large as the Philippine Islands, and it is open to the American
settler, while there is an indication that the Philippines may be
inaccessible on account of their climate. Moreover, they are four
times as densely populated as is the United States; and while we deem
the Chinese so undesirable that we exclude him from our shores, all
authorities agree that his race is superior to that of the Malays,
Tagals, and Negritos who inhabit the Philippines.
The irrigable area is much larger than the States of New York,
Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Massachusetts combined. Those States at
the present time are supporting a population of over seventeen
millions, and many authorities claim that they will in the future
support at least fifty millions. The regions of scanty rainfall that
can be irrigated are fairly crusted with potash and other soluble
mineral ingredients that nourish plant life, and give to the valleys
already irrigated their astonishing fertility. This enables the
farmers to support themselves on such small areas that the life is
almost a communal one. The irrigated West can sustain a population as
great as that sustained on an equal area in the East, or even
greater.[F] For years that dry climate has been a health restorer to
the sojourner there. This is not claimed for the Philippine Islands.
The building up of this Western empire with its canals and irrigating
ditches, its railroads and cities, will absorb a vast amount of
capital, and it is a natural and easy line of development for us. Mr.
Irwin has said, "To capital seeking investment in a large way,
irrigation enterprises in the West offer a most solid, lucrative, and
tempting field."[G] Secretary Noble has said, "No one can now compute
the money value that will concentrate in these reservoirs and canals
and ditches, carrying water to the fields of the husbandman, and upon
which the people must depend for their prosperity."[H]
[Footnote F: If we accept the reclaimable area given above as
approximately correct, and apply a system of irrigation, it can be
cultivated, "and made the happy home of an industrious people more
than equaling in number the inhabitants of the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Ireland."--_J. N. Irwin, in Forum, vol. i, p. 742._]
[Footnote G: Forum, vol. xii, p. 750.]
[Footnote H: Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 1891.]
Five centuries ago large parts of eastern and western England were
impenetrable morasses. These have entirely disappeared before the
skill of the engineer.
N. S. Shaler says, "The total area of the inundated lands of the
United States probably exceeds 115,000 square miles, counting only
those flooded areas which are at present unsuited by their excessive
humidity for agricultural use, but which may be won to the service by
engineering devices such as have been applied in the regions occupied
by older civilizations."[I] This is more than 73,000,000 acres of
drainable swamps and marshes. Lands more easy of access have, in the
past, so occupied our attention that these lowlands have thus far been
almost entirely neglected. They are located along our northern,
eastern, and southern borders in close proximity to water
transportation and to the large cities of the seaboard. They can be
drained, as were the swamps of England. Their fertility will make this
profitable, and they will support a large population.
[Footnote I: The United States of America, vol. i, p. 382.]
The public highways of the United States are, on the whole, in
anything but a desirable condition, and their improvement is a good
investment for the commonwealth. We have railroads to build, harbors
to deepen, and canals to dig. The United States is young yet, and
tremendous tasks await her labor and capital.
In this country, so full of promise for the future, we are still using
borrowed foreign capital. In The Forum for February, 1895, Mr. Alfred
S. Lauterbach said, "That the people of the United States require
European capital for the full development of the great resources of
our country there can be no doubt." The same author made a "very
conservative estimate," and said that we owed to Europe annually:
"For dividends and interest upon American securities
still held abroad, minimum $75,000,000
"For profits of foreign corporations doing business here,
and of non-residents, derived from real estate,
investments, partnership profits, etc., about 75,000,000
------------
$150,000,000"
That is to say, we were paying a five-per-cent interest on
$3,000,000,000 of foreign money.
As to the second assumption: It is claimed by some that we should have
the Philippines because they will furnish us the tropical products
that we are using in ever-increasing quantities. Two things are
revealed in the examination of our needs of tropic products and a
comparison of the Philippines with the American tropics: 1. That the
Philippines are at a great disadvantage in location. 2. That America
is of sufficient area and natural wealth to meet all our needs, and
more.
As to location: It is a first principle of commerce to get supplies
where they are most accessible. It is about ten thousand miles from
New York to Manila, twelve hundred to Havana, and eighteen hundred to
the continent of South America. Under these conditions the freight
rates must always discriminate in favor of tropic America. The
disadvantage of the Philippines is increased by the fact that the
ships going from San Francisco or Panama to Manila are compelled to
carry their coal three thousand four hundred miles at one
stretch--from Honolulu to Yokohama, the most available route. Then,
again, a large part of our tropic trade, and one that shows promise of
the most growth, is in the green fruits, such as cocoanuts,
pineapples, lemons, oranges, and bananas. Of the last article our
imports have doubled every five years since 1865. On account of
distance it is not practicable to bring any of these fruits from the
Philippines, but there is no limit to the amount of trade that can
grow up on the lines that are now beginning to form between us and our
southern neighbors.
As to the fitness of tropic America to supply our needs: There are
Central America, South America, and the West Indies. An examination of
their area and productiveness shows that there is little to induce
American industry to control any part of the Eastern Hemisphere. Of
the 17,000,000 square miles that make up the Western Continent, the
tropics make up 5,000,000 square miles--an area sufficient to make
more than one hundred States as large as Pennsylvania; an area nearly
fifty times as great as the Philippines. The variety of its
productions is scarcely excelled even by the East Indies. There are
only two important tropic products imported into the United States
that are not already largely produced on this continent. They are
Manila hemp and tea, and it would appear that the reason they come
from the East is because of present labor conditions there. Manila
hemp is a sort of half-wild product that may yet have an introduction
to our rich tropics just as the potato was introduced into Europe, and
many of our crops have been introduced from Europe. Even the tea plant
thrives in the warm regions of America as far north as Tennessee.
Small quantities of tea are now grown in various parts of America,[J]
but the cheap labor of the East has made it unprofitable here. We are
at the present time getting nine tenths of our tea from India, where
Anglo-Saxon care has developed the industry and is fast driving China
out of the tea market of the world.
[Footnote J: United States Report on Commerce and Navigation for
1897.]
There is a difference when it comes to the two great tropic staples of
coffee and sugar. Our imports of these two articles in 1897 were
valued at $180,000,000, while the imports of tea were less than one
twelfth as much. At the present time nearly all the coffee used in the
United States comes from Central and South America, whence also comes
the greater part of the world's supply. The declining price of coffee
indicates that we shall get it under more favorable terms in the
future.
We import about $100,000,000 worth of sugar per annum.[K]
Approximately two fifths of it is beet sugar and comes from the
continent of Europe, and the rest is cane sugar from scattered sources
in the tropics. Only one sixth comes from the Eastern Hemisphere. We
are getting sugar from Europe, not because it is the natural
development of the industry, but because those countries are willing
to give an export bounty on all that is exported. This makes
exportation possible. Meanwhile the American sugar industry is left to
unprogressive and slovenly methods, but it needs only a reasonable
addition of capital and labor to enable it to supply the markets of
the world. An Englishman of much experience in the sugar-growing
colonies of Great Britain says that by the introduction of improved
methods all the sugar that we use in this country could be grown on
one half of the little island of Porto Rico.[L] This would cause heavy
complaint from the sugar-cane region of Louisiana, and from those
sections of our country that are beginning to hope for a future in the
beet-sugar industry. Certainly America can supply herself in this
particular.
[Footnote K: Ibid.]
[Footnote L: W. Allyne Ireland, in an address before the University of
Pennsylvania.]
India rubber is another of our tropic imports that promises to
increase in importance with improvements in our ability to use it.
Nearly the whole supply comes from the American tropics. There it
thrives everywhere. We are importing it from almost all of our sister
republics, and although it responds readily to cultivation and yields
a profitable crop,[M] the main supply is yet taken from the wild trees
of the forests. Like the other products it waits for the capital which
it will well repay.
[Footnote M: See Coffee and India-Rubber Culture in Mexico. By Matias
Romero, late Mexican minister to the United States.]
By a comparison of the average yields per acre of the leading tropic
imports with the amounts of those imports, we shall find the area of
the territories that are in cultivation to meet our present needs.[N]
In 1897 we imported into this country from all sources the crops that
would be yielded by 1,400 square miles of coffee, 30 of bananas, 40 of
cocoa beans, 60 of India rubber, 10 of oranges; a total of 1,540
square miles. Add to that the area that will be needed for our sugar,
and the result does not equal the whole of Porto Rico. The area of
Porto Rico is less than 4,000 square miles. Multiply these crop areas
by ten, to make allowance for crop rotation and for the time taken for
new plantations to come into bearing. The result will be less than
40,000 square miles, a territory not half as great as the area of the
West India islands. They in their turn do not comprise the fiftieth
part of the area of tropic America.
[Footnote N: The average yields of tropic produce were made out with
the assistance of the Cyclopædia Britannica, Coffee and India-Rubber
Culture in Mexico (Romero), and statistics obtained at the
Philadelphia Commercial Museums. The amounts of the imports were taken
from the United States Report on Commerce and Navigation for 1897.]
When the time comes that American industry needs to develop more
lands, there they lie. They are our opportunity. They have an almost
virgin soil, because we have been too busy with our own internal
development to give them needed attention. They need capital, and we
have been borrowing money abroad to meet our needs at home. Their
inhabitants are idle for lack of employment; they will respond to our
capital. The United States is the natural market for the West Indies;
they lie close to our shores, and when the Nicaragua Canal comes they
will be but islands in an American lake--parts of the industrial unit
of Greater America. They can give us the things that are needed to
round out our consumption, and we can do the same for them.
It is illogical and unlike American shrewdness to go seven thousand
miles for tropic lands when an equally valuable, a more valuable, area
is within seven hundred miles of us. The comparison becomes even more
striking when it is remembered that the control of the Philippines
brings to us a burden of problems from which industrial development in
this country is free.
The Government at Washington may spend our millions and establish
government in the Philippines, but will American capital go there?
Will our citizens invest their money seven thousand miles away while
tropic America is so much nearer, and is, moreover, an equally rich
and far more extended field? This does not assume the conquest of
American regions. It is not necessary to have governmental control in
order to profit by the industries of a country. The conditions of
modern industry prove this most conclusively. But for this fact the
progress of the world would have been much less rapid. We have an
example of this in American railroads: they have been largely built by
English capital; the same is also true to a greater or less degree of
many of our other industries. What England has done in North America
without governmental control, we can do in Central and South America
when our industrial condition demands new areas to work over. By the
modernized Monroe doctrine our supremacy in this hemisphere is
assured, and we have the guarantee of a clear field. Our interests are
also furthered by our friendly relations with the American peoples and
by our nearness to them.
The American policy of our forefathers is the one for us, even from
the industrial point of view. America is an industrial unit, an
economic unit, full of undeveloped possibilities that await the hand
of American enterprise. Our resources can abundantly provide for our
material needs. The continent is controlled by the most ingenious of
all the races, and is dominated by the highest political ideals known
to man. What need have we to reach out across seven thousand miles of
ocean to take lands populous with millions of barbarians?
THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE WEST INDIES.
BY F. L. OSWALD.
III.--REPTILES AND FISHES.
The present fauna of our planet includes many varieties of mammals and
reptiles, and a few kinds of birds, that are found only on certain
islands--a fact which seemed rather to justify the once universal
belief in the origin of species by separate acts of creation.
A different theory of explanation has, however, been suggested by the
discovery of fossil remains, proving the former existence of closely
allied forms on continents where their battle for existence had to be
fought against beasts of prey and competitors for a limited food
supply.
The supposed products of an island genesis by the fiat of supernatural
agencies, demanding recognition in mental penance and the payment of
tithes, may thus be simply animal Crusoes, favored by the positive or
negative advantages of their surroundings.
The dodo, in its struggle for survival, would have had no chance
against South American tiger-cats. Not one of the twenty-odd species
of Madagascar lemurs could have held its own against the competition
of the African daylight monkeys.
Yet there was a time when night apes and large ground birds seem to
have had things all their own way, the world over, and Central America
may have afforded a chance for existence to several species of
reptiles which at present are found only on the West Indian islands.
The Cuban bush tortoise (_Emys nigra_) is found only in the forests of
Santiago and Puerto Principe, and there only on the south coasts. It
is the most sluggish creature of its genus, and does not seem to have
had enterprise enough to crawl around the sand belt of Cape Maysi and
colonize the jungles of the north side provinces. It is as helpless as
a hedgehog, _minus_ its bristles. The darkeys of the Cuban planters
crack its armor with home-made hammers, and the _tortuga prieta_, or
prieta, as they call it for short, forms a factor of holiday _menus_
as frequently as 'possum pie in southern Georgia.
Swift-flowing rivers bear it away as they would a floating log, and it
is wholly incredible that its ancestors should have crossed the
Caribbean Sea in quest of a more congenial home; but it is possible
enough that its eggs may have been ferried across on one of the
driftwood islands which the Sumasinta River often tears from the coast
swamps of southern Mexico and carries into the current of the Gulf
Stream. The evolution of the South American giant cats was probably
the death warrant of its continental relatives, but in Cuba it had no
four-footed enemies except the _hutia_, or jungle rat, that now and
then destroys its eggs.
An equally favored islander is the grayish-yellow rock lizard,
abounding in the uplands of Cuba and Hayti. The lizard-killing cranes
of Honduras have not found their way to the Antilles, and the
_lagartilla_ still basks in the sun that once smiled upon the
indolence of the naked Lucayans.
The _toco_, or Cuban hornbill, however, devours small reptiles of all
sorts, and the West Indian tree lizards have become almost as nimble
as squirrels. They dodge behind branches and wait to ascertain the
origin of every flitting shadow, but from imminent danger save
themselves by a swift descent, followed by a bold leap into the
thickets of the underbrush. Their courtship is quite as grotesque as
that of the strutting bush pheasants. The males will swing their heads
up and down and puff up their throat-bags till their skin seems on the
point of disruption, while the objects of their rivalry sit blinking,
reluctant to risk an open manifestation of preference. Some gorgeously
beautiful varieties are found in Jamaica: greenish-blue, with a
metallic luster, and rows of bright crimson spots, as if the design of
protective colors had been patterned after the flower shrubs of the
tropics.
[Illustration: IGUANA.]
The word _iguana_ is of Mexican origin, and rarely used in the Spanish
West Indies, but the animal itself is--for culinary purposes, though
the Haytian negroes do not go quite as far as the mongrels of Yucatan,
where iguana farmers fatten the defenseless reptiles with cornmeal, in
wickerwork baskets, that are brought to market as a New England
poultry fancier would fetch in a crateful of spring chickens. But,
prejudice aside, there is no harm in an iguana fricassee; the meat is
white and insipid, but takes the flavor of every spice, and is far
more digestible than such hyperborean delicacies as fried eels and
pork fritters. There are two species--one in eastern Cuba, with spines
all the way down to its tail-tip, and in Hayti a smaller one, with a
smoother tail, but with an exaggerated throat-bag and wattles like a
turkey gobbler.
_Lagartos vastecos_, or "tree alligators," the Cuban creoles call the
scampering forest dwellers, that attain a length of four feet, and can
stampede foreigners by leaping to terra firma with an _aplomb_ that
scatters the dry leaves in all directions. If chased, they will take
to water like frogs. They are first-class swimmers, their throat-bag
serving the purpose of a float, and once in the ripple of the stream
are hard to keep in sight, as they have a trick of keeping their legs
close to the body and navigating by means of their submerged tails.
Like the rainbow hues of the coryphene (miscalled dolphin), the bright
colors of the iguana soon fade after death, and the shriveled
greenish-brown specimens of our taxidermists give no idea of the
appearance of the living animal in the sunlight of its native land.
The _Iguana tuberculata_ (eastern Cuba) is velvet-green above, with
saffron flanks, ringed with blue, black, and brown stripes, and the
pet specimens, basking on the porch of a coffee planter, can challenge
comparison with the paroquets that flutter about the eaves of the
outbuildings like swifts around a martin box.
Cuba has also acclimatized a horned frog, and one species of those
curious half-lizards whose shapes may have suggested the dragon fables
of antiquity. The "basilisk" (_Cyclura carinata_) is only half a yard
long, but can erect its crest and raise its pronged tail in a manner
that will make a dog leap back in affright. It has no goiter-bag, but
the skin of its throat is elastic, and can be made to swell out like
that of the East Indian cobra, while its multiplex spines vibrate
ominously. The little monster is, nevertheless, one of the most
harmless reptiles of the tropics, and subsists on succulent leaves,
with occasional _entremets_ of small grubs and insects. In that case,
however, Nature has rather overdone its efforts at protective
ugliness, and the creoles kill the poor simulator of terrors as the
Mexican rustics would a horned toad.
A plurality of the zoölogical immigrants of the West Indies seem to
have come from Mexico, and it is a suggestive fact that the number of
reptiles steadily decreases from west to east. Cuba, with its western
headland approaching the east coast of Yucatan, thus came in for a
lion's share of lizards, tortoises, and ophidians.
Hayti, though only one fourth smaller, experienced a
seventy-five-per-cent discount, and all natives and travelers agree on
the _curiosum_ that there is _not a single species of serpent_ on the
island of Porto Rico. Trinidad, with an area of only fifteen hundred
square miles, but laved by the giant current of the Orinoco, boasts
twenty-eight species of land serpents, besides several pythons and
swamp vipers. The Trinidad museum of venomous ophidians does not,
however, include the dreaded fer-de-lance, which infests the woods
near Samana Bay on the south coast of San Domingo. The _Bothrops
lanceolatus_ is larger than a rattlesnake, and its bite, though not
always fatal, causes fearful inflammation, but its aggressive
disposition has been greatly exaggerated. Like most venomous serpents,
it is a sluggish brute, relying on its ability to crouch motionless
till its prey comes in range, then get in a snap bite and shrink back
to wait till the virus begins to take effect, and the victim, in its
fever spasms, betrays its helplessness by those eccentricities of
conduct which are apt to be misinterpreted by the dupes of the
"serpent-charm" superstition.
[Illustration: FER-DE-LANCE.]
The fer-de-lance is found also on the islands of Martinique and Santa
Lucia, where the natives counteract its virus with a decoction of
jungle hemlock, and the basis of its grewsome reputation seems to be
the fact that it does not warn the intruders of its haunts, after the
manner of the cobra or the rattlesnake, but flattens its coils and,
with slightly vibrating tail, awaits events. If the unsuspecting
traveler should show no sign of hostile intent he may be allowed to
pass unharmed within two yards of the coiled matador, but a closer
approach is apt to be construed as a challenge, and the _vivoron_,
suddenly rearing its ugly head, may scare the trespasser into some
motion of self-defense--he may lift his foot or brandish his stick in
a menacing manner. If he does he is lost. The lower coils will
expand, bringing the business end, neck and all, a few feet nearer;
the head "points," like a leveled rifle, then darts forward with
electric swiftness, guided by an unerring instinct for the selection
of the least-protected parts of the body.
And the vindictive brute is ready to repeat its bite. For a moment it
rears back, trembling with excitement, and, if felled by a blow of its
victim's stick, will snap away savagely at stumps and stones, or even,
like a wounded panther, at its own body.