tes in March 1873.

The New York Herald in its special correspondence has much to say about
the inhabitants that is of undoubted interest, and from this article we
have culled considerable that follows. The article in question was
written after the virtual surrender of Porto Rico.

These people have been accustomed to military rule all their lives, and
to withdraw it in toto and tell them to go in and govern themselves is
an experience which many regard as dangerous. Of a race excitable, with
blood that courses quickly and with wrongs of many years' standing, the
natives are intoxicated with their freedom. Their delirium has but one
course--revenge--and when the entire population is fully awake to the
opportunity offered there may come a break from all restraint, and then
it may be shown that the depletion of our army was a blunder.

Without the menace of the Spanish soldiery, without the fear of the
Church, and without the guiding hand of a good American officer and
wisely-located American army of occupation, there may be trouble ahead.

With the going of the soldiers comes the influx of the mercantile
classes. Salesmen are arriving in large numbers and promoters and
speculators abound. Everything is being boosted from its former
lethargic tropical calm. Prices of commodities are rising. Land has
quadrupled in value in the owners' minds, and even the street gamins now
demand twenty-five cents American money for a single button alleged to
be cut from the coat of a Spanish soldier, which they formerly had
trouble at disposing of at the rate of twelve and one-half cents per
dozen.

These commercial avant couriers are bright, active 'hustlers,' who make
the native nabobs gasp at their breezy ways, but, all the same, these
nabobs are pretty shrewd persons and know how to buy closely.

There is one thing the native merchants have to learn, and that is to
display their goods and wares. Not a single show window exists, and if
some enterprising Yankee will just tear out the forbidding front of one
of these business houses, replace it with one on the showcase style and
set forth a dazzling array of merchandize, arranged by the deft hand of
the artistic window decorator, there will be a revolution in trade in
this place.

Another portion of the business life to be renovated is the sugar
industry. The crudest system exists for the transformation of the juice
of the cane into the saccharine crystals of commerce. Machinery so