SUGAR CULTURE. 



269 



of a hectar is double what it is in the Antilles, and 

 the daily wages of an East Indian is one-third that 

 of a negro slave in Cuba. 



Supposing, as we should when we speak of the 

 production of all Cuba, that in lands of mean fer- 

 tility a caballeria yields 1,500 arrobes of purged 

 sugar, we find that nineteen and three-fourths 

 square leagues (about one-ninth the area of one of 

 the medium departments of France), suffice to pro- 

 duce the 430,000 boxes of sugar which Cuba yields 

 for domestic use and exportation. It seems surpris- 

 ing that less than twenty square leagues of land can 

 give an annual product, whose value (estimating a 

 box of sugar in Havana at $24), exceeds $10,400,000. 

 In order to supply the 56 or 60 millions kilogrammes 

 of raw sugar, consumed by the thirty millions of 

 people in France, there would be required, within 

 the tropics, nine and five-sixths square leagues of 

 land cultivated in sugar-cane; in the temperate 

 zone, thirty-seven and a half leagues of land in beet- 

 root are necessary. A hectar of good land in 

 France, planted in beet-root, produces from ten 

 thousand to twenty thousand kilogrammes. The 

 average yield is twenty thousand kilogrammes, which 

 give 2-J- per cent., or 500 kilogrammes of raw sugar. 

 One hundred kilogrammes of raw sugar yield fifty 

 kilogrammes of refined (30 of brown sugar and 20 



