TRANSPORTATION AND AGRICULTURE 159 



work was done by prison labor, the laborers getting four 

 and one half pence per day. 



The island has more or less regular communication by 

 vessels with Spain, England, Cuba, Santo Domingo, St. 

 Thomas, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and South America. 

 Moreover, two lines of steamers circumnavigate it, stopping 

 at the various ports. 



Probably no part of the Antilles is more fertile than 

 Porto Rico, and none so generally susceptible of cultiva- 

 tion and diversified farming. A single acre of cane yields 

 more sugar there than in any other of the islands except 

 Cuba, Possessing every variety of tropical landscape, 

 fertile from the mountain-tops to the sea, rich in pasture- 

 lands, shaded with beautiful groves of magnificent palms, 

 moistened by thirteen hundred streams, with here and there 

 a hot spring, its agricultural possibilities are immense. 



Porto Rico is essentially the land of the farmer, and the 

 most highly cultivated of the West Indies. In fact, it is 

 the only island where agriculture is so diversified that it 

 produces sufficient food for the consumption of its inhabi- 

 tants, in addition to vast plantation crops of sugar and 

 coffee for exportation. Furthermore, the land is not mo- 

 nopolized by large plantations, but mostly divided into 

 small independent holdings. Stock-raising is also an 

 extensive industry. 



There are in Porto Rico some twenty-one thousand 

 smaller holdings, the property of the peasantry of the in- 

 terior, who live cheaply and work lazily, but contrive to 

 raise a small quantity of sugar, together with provisions 

 and cattle. If such rough cultivation as this succeeds at 

 all, it can only be in consequence of the vast productive- 

 ness of the soil, which gives the planter the same advan- 

 tage over his brethren to windward and leeward as the 

 settler of Illinois has over the cultivator of the worn-out 

 "old fields" of the Atlantic coast. 



The agricultural properties of the island, according to the 

 last census, were distributed as follows : tobacco-farms, 66 ; 



