POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Hesiod's Works and Days to make 

 any society now existing a good 

 deal better than it is. When people 

 talk of new duties they generally 

 mean some new harum-scarum en- 

 terprise. The old duty would be 

 good enough if they would only con- 

 sider it closely and follow it faith- 

 fully. The Rev. Mr. Berle has spo- 

 ken words in season; and it would 

 be well if all who are like minded 

 would unceasingly proclaim the 

 same doctrines, if perchance they 

 may sink into the heart of the 

 masses, and give to this great people 

 a public policy founded on right- 

 eousness and the love of peace. 



A HUMILIATING SITUATION. 



. "How far, O Catiline, when all 

 is said and done, are you going to 

 abuse our patience ? " So said the 

 great Roman orator on a certain 

 famous occasion. Our Catiline is 

 no individual man; it is the party 

 system which has inflicted on us 

 the Puerto Rican disgrace. It was 

 obvious to the common sense of 

 every one that, having laid our 

 hands on the island of Puerto Rico, 

 there was no decent course to take 

 save to make it, for all practical 

 purposes, an integral portion of the 

 Union. We had cut it off from the 

 market it enjoyed in Spain, and left 

 it to contend with the hostile tariffs 

 of other countries — were we going, 

 in addition to that, to make it a 

 stranger to the land that had seized 

 it, and subject its products to our 

 own high scale of duties? The 

 President, in his message to Con- 

 gress, conceiving the proposition to 

 be almost self-evident, had declared 

 that it was " our plain duty to abol- 

 ish all customs tariffs between the 

 United States and Puerto Rico, and 

 give her products free access to our 

 markets." So thought nearly every 

 disinterested citizen, and yet what 

 have we since seen? The President, 

 terrorized by the cry of party unity 



in danger, repudiates his former 

 emphatic declaration, and gives his 

 approval to a measure which virtu- 

 ally makes our unfortunate posses- 

 sion a foreign country. With the 

 " free access to our markets " which 

 the President had promised, the 

 island would have entered on a new 

 career of prosperity; but with its 

 leading industries weighed down 

 under an impost of fifteen per cent, 

 there is nothing in view but com- 

 mercial stagnation and general pov- 

 erty. That' the island has already 

 languished under American rule — 

 our revolutionary forefathers did 

 not expect that their descendants 

 would so soon go into the " ruling " 

 business — the most disinterested 

 witnesses attest. A leading journal 

 of this city, The Herald, prints 

 in heavy-faced type the following 

 statement of a correspondent : 



" American military officials told 

 me at the outset that the year and a 

 half of American sovereignty had 

 been a blight on the island. This 

 was not the echo of Spanish or of 

 Puerto Rican feelings. They spoke 

 their own views with soldierly frank- 

 ness and sometimes with a word of 

 regret for their own position. Their 

 talk was more pointed than when 

 filtered through official channels." 



It is in these circumstances that 

 our Legislature, at the instance of 

 a benevolent President, decides to 

 refund to the people of the island 

 two million dollars of duties col- 

 lected in our ports on their prod- 

 ucts. Our tariff system breeds pov- 

 erty in the population it oppresses, 

 and then we rush to their assistance 

 with a largess. They ask for justice 

 and we offer them alms — alms for 

 which the correspondent already 

 quoted says he can not find a single 

 individual who is grateful. We rob 

 the Puerto Rican Peter to pay our 

 own tobacco-growing Paul; and then 

 we rob the whole community in order 

 to pay back Peter. And, strange 

 to say, some of us feel very virtu- 



