We import about $100,000,000 worth of sugar per annum.[K] Approximately two fifths of it is beet sugar and comes from the continent of Europe, and the rest is cane sugar from scattered sources in the tropics. Only one sixth comes from the Eastern Hemisphere. We are getting sugar from Europe, not because it is the natural development of the industry, but because those countries are willing to give an export bounty on all that is exported. This makes exportation possible. Meanwhile the American sugar industry is left to unprogressive and slovenly methods, but it needs only a reasonable addition of capital and labor to enable it to supply the markets of the world. An Englishman of much experience in the sugar-growing colonies of Great Britain says that by the introduction of improved methods all the sugar that we use in this country could be grown on one half of the little island of Porto Rico.[L] This would cause heavy complaint from the sugar-cane region of Louisiana, and from those sections of our country that are beginning to hope for a future in the beet-sugar industry. Certainly America can supply herself in this particular.
India rubber is another of our tropic imports that promises to increase in importance with improvements in our ability to use it. Nearly the whole supply comes from the American tropics. There it thrives everywhere. We are importing it from almost all of our sister republics, and although it responds readily to cultivation and yields a profitable crop,[M] the main supply is yet taken from the wild trees of the forests. Like the other products it waits for the capital which it will well repay.
By a comparison of the average yields per acre of the leading tropic imports with the amounts of those imports, we shall find the area of the territories that are in cultivation to meet our present needs.[N] In 1897 we imported into this country from all sources the crops that would be yielded by 1,400 square miles of coffee, 30 of bananas, 40 of cocoa beans, 60 of India rubber, 10 of oranges; a total of 1,540 square miles. Add to that the area that will be needed for our sugar, and the result does not equal the whole of Porto Rico. The area of Porto Rico is less than 4,000 square miles. Multiply these crop areas by ten, to make allowance for crop rotation and for the time taken for new plantations to come into bearing. The result will be less than 40,000 square miles, a territory not half as great as the area of the West India islands. They in their turn do not comprise the fiftieth part of the area of tropic America.
When the time comes that American industry needs to develop more lands, there they lie. They are our opportunity. They have an almost virgin soil, because we have been too busy with our own internal development to give them needed attention. They need capital, and we have been borrowing money abroad to meet our needs at home. Their inhabitants are idle for lack of employment; they will respond to our capital. The United States is the natural market for the West Indies; they lie close to our shores, and when the Nicaragua Canal comes they will be but islands in an American lake—parts of the industrial unit of Greater America. They can give us the things that are needed to round out our consumption, and we can do the same for them.
It is illogical and unlike American shrewdness to go seven thousand miles for tropic lands when an equally valuable, a more valuable, area is within seven hundred miles of us. The comparison becomes even more striking when it is remembered that the control of the Philippines brings to us a burden of problems from which industrial development in this country is free.
The Government at Washington may spend our millions and establish government in the Philippines, but will American capital go there? Will our citizens invest their money seven thousand miles away while tropic America is so much nearer, and is, moreover, an equally rich and far more extended field? This does not assume the conquest of American regions. It is not necessary to have governmental control in order to profit by the industries of a country. The conditions of modern industry prove this most conclusively. But for this fact the progress of the world would have been much less rapid. We have an example of this in American railroads: they have been largely built by English capital; the same is also true to a greater or less degree of many of our other industries. What England has done in North America without governmental control, we can do in Central and South America when our industrial condition demands new areas to work over. By the modernized Monroe doctrine our supremacy in this hemisphere is assured, and we have the guarantee of a clear field. Our interests are also furthered by our friendly relations with the American peoples and by our nearness to them.
The American policy of our forefathers is the one for us, even from the industrial point of view. America is an industrial unit, an economic unit, full of undeveloped possibilities that await the hand of American enterprise. Our resources can abundantly provide for our material needs. The continent is controlled by the most ingenious of all the races, and is dominated by the highest political ideals known to man. What need have we to reach out across seven thousand miles of ocean to take lands populous with millions of barbarians?