CONGRESS. (TiiE PORTO Rico MEASURES.) 



165 



United States. The Secretary of War had also 

 recommended it in his report; and without con- 

 sultation with any one, on my own individual 

 motion, I introduced a bill and had it referred to 

 the Committee on Ways and Means, establishing 

 customs ports in Porto Rico, giving to the people 

 of that island free trade with the United States, 

 and between the United States and the ports of 

 that island, and also extending the internal rev- 

 enue laws to the island and the islands adjacent 

 to Porto Rico. I wanted to relieve these people 

 from the position in which they were placed. 



" My own sympathies were entirely enlisted in 

 their behalf. I sympathized with their distress 

 then as I sympathize to-day. They have not re- 

 belled; they have not raised their arms against 

 the Government of the United States; they have 

 .submitted quietly, and I wanted to do something 

 for their relief." 



Mr. Payne then went on to state the consid- 

 erations which led him to change his original _ 

 scheme, and gave reasons why he thought the new 

 one more benevolent: 



" The first thing that was to be considered in 

 devising a plan for the revenues of the island 

 because the money was to be expended there was 

 to provide a government for the island. Gen. 

 Davis, a careful investigator, says that the ex- 

 penditure would amount to $1,943,678.71 next 

 year. It would only allow about $350,000 for the 

 schools and about $300,000 for the highways. We 

 must meet this question, therefore, and provide 

 revenue for the support of the island. If we are 

 to provide for these necessities it must be done 

 by taxation in some way, or else we can not help 

 the island. Where would it be best, then, to direct 

 out attention in placing that taxation ? That was 

 the nature of the question that confronted us, and 

 that we had to consider. 



" I sought Gen. Davis. I sought other men who 

 were acquainted with the circumstances, knew the 

 imports, knew the revenues, knew all the sur- 

 roundings in Porto Rico, and I was assured that 

 we could collect not exceeding $500,000 from the 

 tariff and $500,000 from the internal revenue, in 

 all $1,000,000, to meet $2,000,000 of expenditures. 

 Then I began to look around me and saw w r hat 

 effect the internal revenue taxes would have upon 

 the people of these islands. 



"They manufacture there annually 1,500,000 

 gallons of rum. It is sold all over the island. It 

 is a necessity of life, or they think so, for the 

 poor people of that island. These 1,500,000 gallons 

 retail at from 25 to 40 cents a gallon. The in- 

 ternal revenue tax upon that, under the law that 

 we were about to extend, would amount to $1.20 

 a gallon. The price to these people would be mul- 

 tiplied by four. How could they get their rum? 

 We were cutting it off. 



" Well, now, some gentlemen may say they 

 uld be better off without the rum. I think that 



yself ; that constitutionally and in the matter of 

 laying up money they would be better off with- 

 out the rum, but they have been used to it all 

 their lives. They are poor people, and when a 

 government comes along and arbitrarily cuts off 

 rum from a community that has been accustomed 

 to it, every man of whom wants it, why there is 

 bound to be trouble, and there would have been 

 trouble with those Porto Ricans if we had passed 

 that act in that way to cut off their supply of rum. 



" In addition to that, Porto Rico has been im- 

 porting from Cuba $1,500,000 worth of cigars from 

 year to year. The Porto Ricans have made 

 1,000,000 pounds of their own tobacco up into 

 cigars and cigarettes and sold them over the island 

 each year. 



VVf 



5 



" Gen. Davis says it will be very difficult to 

 collect this tax on tobacco. ' I suppose there are 

 2,000 or 3,000 shops in Porto Rico. A man has 

 a hut in which he lives in one room, and in another 

 sells a little rum, rolls cigarettes and sells them, 

 and sells tobacco, and cigars, and fruits, and beans, 

 and codfish, and has a general store, and he is in 

 himself a tobacco manufacturer and retailer, sa- 

 loon keeper and grocer.' 



" Suppose we applied our internal revenue taxes 

 to these items ? This is the cheap tobacco, cheaply 

 made up, thrown together into cigars for the poor 

 people of the island, these people whose coffee 

 crop has been annihilated, and hundreds of thou- 

 sands of whom have depended upon the charity 

 of the good people of the United States to keep 

 them from starving and to furnish them shelter, 

 the only relief that they have received thus far 

 from becoming a part of the territory of the 

 United States. 



" Mr. Chairman, the taxation would simply have 

 destroyed these industries and would not have 

 given us any appreciable revenue, no money for 

 schools, no money for highways, no money for 

 anything except the hard, stern realities of gov- 

 erning those people. So as a revenue raiser the 

 bill which I first introduced was a failure, and, as 

 1 understand it, the first and paramount thing 

 in a tariff bill, under the idea of the Republican 

 party, always has been to raise sufficient revenue 

 to support the Government as we go along. 



" Then the further question came along, Mr. 

 Chairman, how much we were giving to these pro- 

 ducers 'of sugar under the bill as first introduced. 

 It would only benefit a moderate percentage of the 

 people. They had been selling and sending abroad 

 58,000 tons of sugar, on an average, annually. 



" According to the statistics, they have 76,000 

 acres in sugar plantations. Other gentlemen say 

 that they average a production of a ton to an acre, 

 and that it takes a man to cultivate an acre, or 

 60,000 people to cultivate this sugar during the sea- 

 son. These men would be benefited by free sugar, 

 and the owners of the plantations, some of them 

 small ones and some of them with 700 and the 

 largest with 1,500 acre plantations, would receive 

 the direct benefit. If the Porto Rican is the shrewd 

 man that they say he is, and I hope and trust he 

 may prove so, the laborers on those sugar planta- 

 tions would get a part of this benefit, but largely, 

 of course, as we all know, it would go to the 

 planter and to the factory and to the merchant. 



" I understand there are some 3,000,000 pounds 

 of tobacco now in the hands of the merchants 

 ready to be exported. Who will get the benefit 

 of the reduction of the duty on tobacco? Why, 

 the merchants in the first instance; afterward the 

 planter. Would it not be fair that these people 

 who get the greatest benefits should pay the ex- 

 pense of the government? 



" Suppose we cut off 75 per cent, of the duty 

 which they now have to pay to get into our mar- 

 kets and present it to them. How much does 

 that mean to the producers of sugar and to the 

 producers of tobacco in these islands? 



" The estimate is that they will produce and sell 

 and export 45,000 tons of sugar this year. Jt must 

 all come to our market, because the Spanish mar- 

 ket is absolutely cut off. Suppose we remit this 

 duty. What does it mean ? 



" This will not injure our industries. We con- 

 sumed 2,000,000 tons of sugar last year. We im- 

 ported about 1,400,000 tons on which we paid duty. 

 We also imported 300,000 tons from Hawaii, which 

 came in free of duty. The balance was produced 

 in this country. " Our increased consumption 

 amounts to from 50,000 to 100,000 tons annually. 



