lanters to compete with the beet sugar producers of
Europe. In truth, it is a question how long they will be able to do so
at any rate of wages. The modern machinery being so generally adopted
by the sugar-cane planters, while remarkably successful, both, as to
the quality and the quantity of the juice it expresses from the cane,
not only is expensive in first cost, but it requires more intelligent
laborers than were found serviceable with the old process. To supply
the places of the constantly diminishing slaves, emigrants, as they
were called, have heretofore been introduced from the Canary Islands;
men willing to contract for a brief period of years, say eight or ten,
as laborers, and at moderate wages. These people have proved to be
good plantation hands, though not so well able to bear the great heat
of the sun as were the negroes; otherwise they were superior to them,
and better in all respects than the Chinese coolies, who as workers on
the plantations have proved to be utter failures. The mortality among
these Mongolians, as we learned from good authority, had reached as
high as sixty-seven per cent, within eight years of their date of
landing in Cuba, that being also the period of their term of contract.
None have been introduced into the island for several years. This
coolie importation, like the slave-trade with Africa, was a fraud and
an outrage upon humanity, and never paid any one, even in a mercenary
point of view, except the shipowners who brought the deceived natives
from the coast of China. Slavery in Cuba and slavery in our country
were always quite a different thing, and strange to say the laws of
the Spanish government were far more favorable and humane towards the
victims of enforced labor than were those established in our Southern
States. When the American negro ceased to be a slave, he ceased to
cultivate the soil for his master only to cultivate it for himself.
Not so in the tropics. The Cuban negro, in the first place, is of a
far less intelligent type than the colored people in the States;
secondly, the abundance of natural food productions in the low
latitudes, such as fruit, fish, and vegetables, requires of the negro
only to pluck and to eat; clothing and shelter are scarcely needed,
and virtually cost nothing where one may sleep in the open air without
danger every night in the year; and finally, the negro of the tropics
will not work unless he is compelled to.

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