These people have been accustomed to military rule all their lives, and to withdraw it in toto and tell them to go in and govern themselves is an experience which many regard as dangerous. Of a race excitable, with blood that courses quickly and with wrongs of many years' standing, the natives are intoxicated with their freedom. Their delirium has but one course—revenge—and when the entire population is fully awake to the opportunity offered there may come a break from all restraint, and then it may be shown that the depletion of our army was a blunder.
Without the menace of the Spanish soldiery, without the fear of the Church, and without the guiding hand of a good American officer and wisely-located American army of occupation, there may be trouble ahead.
With the going of the soldiers comes the influx of the mercantile classes. Salesmen are arriving in large numbers and promoters and speculators abound. Everything is being boosted from its former lethargic tropical calm. Prices of commodities are rising. Land has quadrupled in value in the owners' minds, and even the street gamins now demand twenty-five cents American money for a single button alleged to be cut from the coat of a Spanish soldier, which they formerly had trouble at disposing of at the rate of twelve and one-half cents per dozen.
These commercial avant couriers are bright, active 'hustlers,' who make the native nabobs gasp at their breezy ways, but, all the same, these nabobs are pretty shrewd persons and know how to buy closely.
There is one thing the native merchants have to learn, and that is to display their goods and wares. Not a single show window exists, and if some enterprising Yankee will just tear out the forbidding front of one of these business houses, replace it with one on the showcase style and set forth a dazzling array of merchandize, arranged by the deft hand of the artistic window decorator, there will be a revolution in trade in this place.
Another portion of the business life to be renovated is the sugar industry. The crudest system exists for the transformation of the juice of the cane into the saccharine crystals of commerce. Machinery so ponderous that it requires a volume of steam all out of proportion to the energy actually needed, and wasteful methods in the extraction of the syrup residue after crystallization, obtain. Yankee machinery, coupled with Yankee push, will cause a wonderful difference in the cost of the finished product.
"At the same time the manner of herding the hangs on these huge plantations must surely be changed. Such conditions exist in the quarters that a mere recital would be unprintable, and from an examination I made of the quarters of a very large estate I came away ill mentally and physically."
Members of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals have a great field before them in this island. The inhabitants are the most cruel in their handling of beasts of burden and, in fact, of all living creatures below the grade of mankind that could be imagined.
Oxen and bulls furnish the principal means of merchandise transportation. They are yoked together with a huge horn rising upon the neck just back of the horns and held in place by bandages around the forehead. The driver carries a goad about five feet in length, in the end of which is inserted a sharp steel point about one inch long. This is used so freely that it is common to see streams of blood running down the sides of the poor maltreated beasts. Not satisfied with using the sharp end, the inhuman drivers frequently deliver terrific blows with the butt across the tender noses of their charges.
Many an American soldier has knocked down these cruel drivers for their abuse of the patient beasts, but the drivers do not improve with the thrashing. The American military authorities have imported several American yokes and an effort is to be made to compel their use instead of the timber of torture which now obtains.