If a farmer bought a farm for, say, twenty-five hundred dollars, and found, when he came to take possession of it, that it would cost him fifty dollars a year out of his pocket to run it, that it was inhabited by a happy-go-lucky lot of negroes who expected him to do many things for them, from curing their wide-spread disease to sending them to school; if, furthermore, he discovered that the former owners still held everything on the farm that was worth owning except the title-deed, he would probably give it away to the first unsuspecting tenderfoot who happened along. Unfortunately, governments cannot indulge in that dying-horse method of laying down their burdens. Even had the purchase price of almost three hundred dollars an acre included everything of monetary value on the islands, from the wardrobes of the inhabitants to the last peasant’s hut, we should have made a bad bargain. But about all we got for our twenty-five millions is the right to fly our flag over the islands, and half a dozen old forts and government buildings entirely stripped of their furniture. The Danish Government has the reputation of being conservative and economical. It surely is, in more senses than one. By the terms of the treaty “the movables, especially the silver plate and the pictures, remain the property of the Danish Government and shall, as soon as circumstances permit, be removed by it.” By virtue of that clause they sold at auction every stick of furniture in the public buildings; they tore the mirrors off the walls; they removed the gilt moldings from them; they tried to tear off the embossed leathery wall-paper, and left the rooms looking as if a party of yeggmen had gutted them; they took down and carried away the rope on the government flagpole! Economy is a splendid trait, but they might have left us a chair in which to mourn the loss of our twenty-five—and more—millions.
Everything worth owning in the islands is still in private, principally Danish, hands. When we planned to erect a naval station on an utterly worthless stony hill on St. Thomas harbor, the owners demanded twenty-five hundred dollars an acre for it. We must maintain all the grants, concessions, and licenses left by the Danish Government. “Det Vestindiske Kompagni” retains most of the harbor privileges; another Danish company, of which the principal shareholder is Prince Axel, cousin of the king, holds the coaling rights, the electric lighting rights, the right to operate a dry-dock. We cannot even use American money in our new possessions. The Danish West Indian bank has the exclusive concession for issuing notes until 1934, paying a ten per cent. tax on profits to the Danish Government, and the good old greenback must be exchanged for the domestic shin-plasters. Naval men stationed in St. Thomas are forced to pay this institution as high as two per cent. discount on their U. S. government pay checks; the yearly budget of our new colony must be made in Danish francs. But though the domestic money is officially in francs and “bits,” the people talk in dollars and cents as universally as they speak English instead of Danish. It is difficult to find anything left by the old régime that is not protected by that curiously one-sided treaty. An American remarked casually to an old Danish resident one evening as they were strolling through Emancipation Park:
“I think we’ll tear down that old bust of King Christian IX and put one of Lincoln in its place.”
“Vat?” shrieked the Dane. “You can’t do that. Eet ees in de treaty.”
By some oversight the Danes failed to provide for a few of the minor concessions. There were the apothecaries, for instance. Under Danish rule one was given exclusive rights in each of the three towns and its contiguous territory. They were inspected often, old drugs being thrown out; and they were not allowed to sell patent medicines. Their prices are reasonable as monopolies go, their stores well kept, and their stock ample, within Danish limits. When the islands were sold, the apothecaries complained to the king that they were in danger of being ruined by American competition; whereupon the king, out of the goodness of his heart—and the fullness of the twenty-five million—gave them $30,000 each. Four years have passed since the druggists pocketed this salve to their injured profits, and they are still doing business at the old stands without a rival in sight.
Indeed, there is little evidence of that influx of American business men which was predicted as sure to follow the flag. So far the only one is a young ex-marine who is breaking into the restaurant and soda-fountain business. He has been fought at every step by the local merchants. Living exclusively on trade, with hundred per cent. profits customary from time immemorial, the wealthier class of the islanders have the cuteness of the shopkeeper developed to the nth degree, and they will not readily consent to competition by rank outsiders from the United States.
Among the things which the Danes left behind were their laws, and their own judge to administer them. True, Judge Thiele has become an American citizen, but it is a curious sight to see Americans-born brought into court by negro policemen, to be tried by a man who is still a foreigner in point of view and thinking processes in spite of being no longer officially a subject of the King of Denmark. There are those who claim he sides with the favorites of the old Government to the decided disadvantage of Americans, though there are more who speak well of him. It is enough to know that Americans are being tried in American territory under the Napoleonic code, in that laborious old-fashioned style by which the judge questions the witnesses, dictates their answers in his own more cultured words to a clerk, who writes them all down in laborious longhand in a great ledger, to be sure that a change should be made in the judiciary system of our Virgin Islands.
Having bought them, and being forced to support them for the rest of our natural existence, it might be of interest to make a brief inventory of our new possessions. The total area of the three islands, with their seventeen keys, only three or four of which are inhabited, is about 140 square miles. The census taken soon after the raising of the Stars and Stripes showed something over twenty-six thousand inhabitants, but several signs indicate that these are decreasing. The only real value of the Virgin group proper is the splendid harbor of St. Thomas. St. Croix, forty miles distant from it is considerably larger than all the rest of this group put together, more populous, more fertile, and could easily be made self-supporting governmentally, as it always has been privately, particularly with the introduction of an extensive system of irrigation.
A couple of trails zigzag up the reddish, dry hillside behind Charlotte Amalie, scattering along the way a few hovels. They really lead nowhere, however, for there is no other town than the capital on the island. The hurricane of 1916 blew down most of the farm-houses and many of the trees, and they were never rebuilt or replanted. Once heavily forested, later Nile-green with sugar-cane, St. Thomas is now brown, arid, and dreary, with scarcely a tenth of its acreage under even half-hearted cultivation. Being all “mountain,” fifteen hundred feet high in one spot, with buttresses running down to the sea in every direction, it can hardly be expected to compete with modern agricultural methods. Moreover, eight of its ten thousand inhabitants have been drawn into town by the higher wages of harbor work, and though there is now a scarcity of that, they still remain, to the detriment of what might be moderately productive plantations, forcing the island to draw its food from St. John, the British Virgins, or Porto Rico. A journey over the “mountain” brings little reward except some marvelous views and yet another proof of how primitive the human family may become.