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.[1] 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,[2] 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.[3] In 1897 we imported into this country from all sources the crops that would be yielded by 3,400 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 margin soil, because we have been too busy with our own internal development to give them needed attention. They need
- ↑ W. Allyne Ireland, in an address before the University of Pennsylvania.
- ↑ See Coffee and India Rubber Culture in Mexico. By Matias Romero, late Mexican minister to the United States.
- ↑ The average yields of tropic produce were made out with the assistance of the Cyclopædia Britannica, Coffee and India Rubber Culture in Mexico (Romero), and statistics obtained at the Philadelphia Commercial Museums. The amounts of the imports were taken from the United States Report on Commerce and Navigation for 1897.
