174 



apples into the United States for the three years immediately 

 preceding July i, 1905. While these figures loom up big as com- 

 pared with our present output, yet they show a consumption of 

 only one bunch of bananas per year for every three of the popula- 

 tion and an even smaller consumption of pineapples, and such 

 pineapples averaging ten to the cubic foot. 



While these figures indicate that there is room at the top for 

 all the fruit this Territory can raise in the next twenty years, 

 wise counsels must prevail and the market possibilities be ex- 

 ploited with the same earnestness and enthusiasm as is being 

 evinced in the present extension of acreage in fruit. 



No enterprise can be made successful when handicapped with 

 excessive and discriminating carrier's charges. Sugar carried 

 from mill to port at three cents per ton per mile of haul, while 

 fruit pays from four to six times this amount for the same ser- 

 vice, is a condition to which individual effort is powerless to 

 apply the remedy. 



We have now had about six years of Uncle Sam's influence 

 in these Islands, but there are still wharves and landings where 

 notices informing you that "foods, wares and merchandise can be 

 landed only upon payment of the wharfage fees" to some corpora- 

 tion, are prominently displayed. 



Concerted action is necessary in dealing with problems of the 

 kind hereinabove alluded to. 



Cooperation is needed to secure favorable legislative action on 

 the matter of establishing an agricultural college, to urge such 

 modification of the present school system as will tend to turn the 

 minds and hands of the rising generation to the arts of the hus- 

 bandman, to urge the extension of the exemption of ce'rtam 

 products of industry and making such exemption permanent and 

 to secure the passage of a law and the necessary appropriation for 

 creating a territorial bureau of industrial statistics. 



U. S. iinportations of bananas and pineapples for the years 

 IQ03-04-03: 



BANANAS. 



Bunches. 



1903 29,711,301 



1904 25,757,236 



1905 38,093,863 



