There is a Japanese effect in the density of population of our little West Indian colony. When the traveler has motored for hours without once getting out of sight of human habitations, when he has noted how the unpainted little shacks speckle the steepest hillside, even among the high mountains, when he has seen the endless clusters of hovels that surround every town, whether of the coast or the interior, he will come to realize the crowded condition. If he is a trifle observant, he will also see everywhere signs of the scarcity of work. Men lounging in the doors of their huts in the middle of the day, surrounded by pale women and children sucking a joint of sugar-cane, are not always loafers; in many cases they have nowhere to go and work. While the women toil at making lace, drawn-work, or hats, the males turn their hands to anything that the incessant struggle for livelihood suggests. The man who spends two days in weaving a laundry basket and plods fifteen or twenty miles to sell it for sixty cents is only one of a thousand commonplace sights along the island highways.

A job is a prize in Porto Rico. If one is offered, applicants swarm; many a man “lays off” in order to lend his job to his brother, his cousin, or his compadre. Naturally, employers take advantage of this condition. The American labor delegates told the chief of police that he should be the first to lead his men on strike, for certainly he could not keep them honest at forty-five dollars a month.

“Oh, yes, I can,” retorted the chief, “for while we have barely eight hundred on the force, there are twelve thousand on the waiting-list, and every policeman knows that if he is fired, he will have to go back to punching bullocks at a third as much.” Mozos and chambermaids in the best hotels seldom get more than five dollars a month. Street-car men get from sixteen to twenty-five cents an hour, depending on the length of service. In a large clothing factory of Mayagüez, fitted with motor-run sewing-machines, only a few of the women get a dollar a day; the majority average fifty cents. The law, of course, requires that they be paid a minimum wage of a dollar; but what is a mere law among a teeming population which the Spaniards spent four centuries in training to be manso and uncomplaining? The favorite trick is to pay the dollar, and then fine the women fifty cents for not having done sufficient work. Among the regrettable sights of the island are groups of callous emissaries frequenting the leading hotels who have been sent down as agents of certain American department stores to reap advantage from the local poverty. These comisionistas motor about the island, placing orders with the wretched native women, but by piece-work, you may be sure, to avoid the requirement of paying a dollar a day. American women who are paying several times what they once did for Porto Rican lace, blouses, and drawn-work, may fancy that some of this increase goes to the humble mujeres who do the work. Not at all. They are still toiling in their miserable little huts at the same ludicrous prices, while their products are being sold on the “bargain” counters in our large cities, at several hundred per cent. profit. So thoroughly have these touts combed the country that the individual can nowhere buy of the makers; their work has all been contracted far in advance.

CHAPTER XII
WANDERING ABOUT BORINQUEN

The American who, noting the Stars and Stripes flying everywhere and post-offices selling the old familiar postage-stamps, fancies he is back in his native land again is due for a shock. Though it has been Americanized industrially, Porto Rico has changed but little in its every-day life. Step out of one of the three principal hotels of the capital and you are in a foreign land. Spanish is as necessary to the traveler in Porto Rico who intends to get out of the Condado-Vanderbilt-automobile belt as it is in Cuba, Mexico, or South America. Though it is not quite true that “base-ball and poker are the only signs of American influence,” the other evidences might be counted on the fingers. There is the use of personal checks in place of actual money, for instance; venders of chickens carry them in baskets instead of by the legs. Offenders are tried by a jury of their peers; the native regiment wears the uniform of our regular army; it would take deep reflection to think of many more instances. Only one daily newspaper in Porto Rico has an English edition. The first American theatrical company to visit the island since the United States took it over was due the week we left. There are barely ten thousand American residents; except in the capital and the heart of two or three other cities one attracts as much gaping attention as in the wilds of Bolivia. In a way this conservatism is one of the charms of the island. The mere traveler is agreeably disappointed to find that it has not been “Americanized” in the unpleasant sense of the word, that it has kept much of its picturesque, old-world atmosphere.

English is little spoken in Porto Rico. That is another of the surprises it has in store for us, at least for those of us old enough to remember what a splurge we made of swamping the island with American teachers soon after we took it over. It is indeed the “official” language, but the officials who speak it are rare, unless they come from the United States, in which case they are almost certain to be equally ignorant of Spanish. The governor never stirs abroad without an interpreter. The chief of police rarely ventures a few words of Castilian, though there is scarcely a patrolman even in the heart of San Juan who can answer the simplest question in English. Can any one think up a valid reason why a fair command of the official tongue should not be required of natives seeking government employment? Spanish is a delightful language; its own children are no more fond of it than I am. But after all, Porto Rico differs from the rest of Spanish-America, in that it is a part of the United States. She aspires some day to statehood. That day should not come until she knows English; it is not a question of one language in place of another, but of mutual understanding.

To be sure, English is compulsory in all the schools of the island, but few pupils learn it thoroughly enough to retain it through life. Most of them can read it in a parrot-like manner; if they speak it at all, it is to shout some half-intelligible phrase after a passing American. “Aw right” is about the only expression that has been thoroughly Portoricanized. That is not exactly the fault of the pupils. The ear shudders at the “English” spoken even by those teachers who are supposed to be specialists in it; the rest are little short of incomprehensible. Passed on from one such instructor to another, the English that finally comes down to the pupils resembles the original about as much as an oft-repeated bit of gossip resembles the original facts. It might almost be said that there has been no progress made in teaching Porto Rico English in the twenty years of American rule, or at least in the last fifteen of them.

On the whole the state of education in Porto Rico is a disappointment. It is a surprise to the visitor who has thought this essential matter was settled long ago to find sixty per cent. of the population illiterate, few countrymen over thirty who can read, and scarcely a third of the children of school age in school. We had, of course, much to make up. In 1898, after four centuries of ostensibly civilized government, there was but one building on the island specially erected for educational purposes. The total enrollment in the schools, with a population of nearly a million, was 26,000. Three-fourths of the males of voting age were wholly illiterate. Pupils were “farmed out,” teachers drew salaries without ever going near a schoolhouse, all the old Spanish tricks were in full swing. But that was twenty years ago. Yet the department of education asks for twenty years more to bring things up to a “reasonable standard.” Why? Moreover, at the rate things have been moving it will not nearly do that. The thousand and more school-buildings that have been erected, tropical Spanish in architecture, well lighted and ventilated, of concrete in the towns and wood in the country, their names in English over the entrances, are all very well, but they are far from sufficient. The census taken just before our arrival showed almost a half million children of school age, with 181,716 enrolled, and 146,561 in average attendance. Of the 2984 teachers only 148 were Americans. The only inducement Porto Rico offers to instructors from “the States” is an appeal to the love of adventure. Those who wish to make a trip to the tropics may be sure of a position—at a lower salary than they receive at home, and with the privilege of paying their own passages down and back to profiteering steamship companies. No wonder the “English” of Porto Rico is going to seed.

In the graded school system of the towns all instruction is given in that maltreated tongue except the class in Spanish. In the rural schools all the work is given in Spanish except a class in so-called English as a special subject in all grades above the first. The University of Porto Rico, seventeen years old, has fewer than a thousand students. The Agricultural College in Mayagüez has some two hundred. Private institutions like the Polytechnic Institute of San Germán are doing yeoman service, but why should the education of Porto Rico depend on private enterprise? The natives claim that the trouble is that nearly all the commissioners of education sent down from the United States have been political appointees; the latter lay the blame to the fact that salaries and disbursements are set by the native legislature. Somewhere between the two the education of Porto Rico is suffering.

For all their misfortunes, or perhaps because of them, the Porto Ricans, especially outside the large cities, are hospitable and soft-mannered, characterized by a constant courtesy and a solicitude to please those with whom they come in contact, with little of that bruskness of intercourse for which “the Mainland” is notorious. The island has a less grasping, less materialistic atmosphere than Cuba, it is less sinister, less cynical, more naïve, its people are more primitive and simple, though industrial oppression and American influence are slowly changing them in this regard. Their naïveté is often delightful. It is reported that a company of youthful jíbaros drafted into the Federal service during the war waited on their captain one day and asked for their “time,” as they did not care for a job in which they had to wear shoes! The children are rarely boisterous, rather well-bred, even where little chance for breeding exists. As a race they have kept many of the peculiarities of their Spanish ancestry. They are still Latin Americans in their over-developed personal pride and their lack of a sense of humor. Moorish seclusion of women still raises its head among the “best families.” The horror in the slightest suggestion of manual labor, of a lowering of caste, still oppresses the “upper” class. Few of them would dream of carrying their own suitcase or a package from a store, even though they must abandon them for lack of a peon. Though they are far more polite than our own club-swingers in superficial matters, it has required persistent training to get the insular police to forget their high standing and help across the street women or children of the socially inferior class. Finally, Porto Ricans are little to be depended upon in the matter of time; mañana is still their watchword despite twenty years of Anglo-Saxon bustle. But, for that matter, Americans get hopelessly irresponsible on this same subject after a few years in the tropics.