24 
made arable, but the Governor has given attention to that and 
has estimated that there are 250,000 acres of pubhc and 250,000 
acres of private land which could be made arable if they had 
water. Then we have heard of those products that may be made 
to grow, which Dr. Wilcox has referred to, so that it is unneces- 
sary for me to dwell upon that. But I would like to call your 
attention to what the prosperity of other insular countries some- 
what similarly situated depend upon. 
Java, Sumatra, the Philippines, Porto Rico and Cuba each has 
a limited local market, notwithstanding the eight and a half mil- 
lions in population which they have as compared to our little 
eighty thousand or ninety thousand, so their local market is larger 
than what we have. Our local consumption is very limited. 
Now these countries depend almost entirely upon a certain few 
products which have a world's market, such as vanilla beans, 
tobacco, sugar, hemp, etc. Others have sugar, tobacco, coffee 
and a few such other main articles. Dr. Wilcox has spoken about 
cotton. Then there is coffee, tobacco and sugar. 
Our line of development has been almost entirely along sugar, 
and for very good and sufficient reasons. When the Treaty 
of Reciprocity went into effect, only two products went in free, 
and those were sugar and rice. It was along these lines that the 
prosperity of the country has been built up, but it is a danger- 
ous thing to depend entirely upon one source of supply. The 
sugar plantations on these islands have developed an Experi- 
ment Station with corps of scientific men in the different branches, 
such as plant diseases, entomology and agriculture, and other 
agricultural branches. They have fought against insect pests 
and have developed the work so that the sugar industry, so far as 
dangers to the crops are concerned from pests, has very little 
to fean The dangers from drought are not very great on ac- 
count of the water supply and the development of the artesian 
supply, but we cannot control market. 
With the great development of the sugar industry in Europe 
and the great possibilities of Cuba, there is a constant menace, 
and in order to develop this remaining half million acres of land, 
and we may be sure that ttiere will be development — there will 
no doubt be required a certain proportion of the water not now 
used. There will be further development and conserving of 
water and in due time there will be a larger supply than we now 
have and it is not unreasonable to expect that a certain portion 
of water now used for sugar will be diverted to other crops. 
I do not believe the policy of the Territorial and Eederal gov- 
ernments will ever be unnecessarily to imperil or endanger an 
established enterprise for the sake of experimenting with an 
untried one, but for every reason it is incumbent upon us to 
economize in the use of water, to see in the first place, that it is 
not wasted. No one artesian well should be allowed to have its 
water run to waste. Every one should be capped. A great 
