It is now clear that the United States made a great mistake, after the war with Spain, in taking over territories that were already populated by aliens. Previously the territory that was acquired was largely empty and suitable for settlement by the old stock. What has been done is not easy to undo, but it may at least serve as an emphatic lesson against any further acquisitions of inhabited territory in the future. Meanwhile there is an embryonic movement for independence in Puerto Rico, which may have to, indeed should, be encouraged in order to give the United States protection from its own folly.
The Virgin Islands, which the United States bought from Denmark in 1917, have, like other West Indian islands, a population almost exclusively Negro or Mulatto.
The British West Indies are overwhelmingly black, though many of them, such as New Providence, Barbados, Bermuda, and the Bahamas, have substantial English aristocracies that guard jealously their racial heritage. These British islands, particularly Jamaica and Barbados (the latter one of the most densely populated spots in the whole world) have been fertile sources of black emigration to other islands and to the mainland.
Haiti is a purely Negro Republic, and offers a good illustration of what the Negro accomplishes if left to himself, even though given all the advantages of easy access to European civilization. The republic of Santo Domingo occupies the other part of the same island; its hybrid population has more Spanish and less Negro blood but it is not by any means civilized.
In general the islands of the West Indies now contain nearly 8,000,000 people, the descendants of Negro slaves with a very small but undiscoverable admixture of Indian blood and a somewhat larger but still unimportant admixture of European stock. They present a standing menace to the United States immigration policy, and afford one of the principal arguments for extending stringent restrictions to the Western Hemisphere. The whole Caribbean is in the process of becoming a Negro territory. Such a result may be inevitable, but adjacent nations which desire to remain white must protect themselves while there is time.
In broad outline, the picture of Latin-America is the picture of a diversified region occupied by some 80,000,000 people, mainly Indians, but with varying proportions of White and Negro blood, the former usually small in amount, the latter often large. The few countries that may properly be called white are not emigrant-exporting countries, and their inhabitants are for the most part non-Nordic, therefore not particularly well adapted to incorporation in the United States.
In conclusion, it may be remarked at this point that each successive revolution in Latin America has tended toward hastening the elimination of European blood and influence. It is usually the half-breeds who revolt and they, in turn, are subject to the increasing self-assertion of the pure native.