"THINK what one of could do down HINK what one of our progressive

Northern farmers

here with a few thousand dollars!"

Of all the remarks made by tourists through the Caribbean tropics, this is one that is heard most frequently. It is a natural remark. It is almost inevitable. They have steamed along mountain coasts like green clouds under the white ones that smoke on their summits. They have seen monster valleys that were like resistless rivers of vegetation. They have seen tree and flower springing from rock as bare of soil as the pavement of a city street. They have seen that not even the salt sea can blast the prodigal plant life, for cocoanut groves stand on the very surf-line.

That prodigal life has proved a cruel, beautiful lie to many a Northern farmer with "a few thousand dollars." Those mountain-sides, so living that flowering creepers pour down them in cascades, may refuse to produce a crop as obstinately as does the most barren Northern land. The valleys that almost seem to spout trees and blossoms may refuse to produce a banana, a stalk of cane, a single pod of cacao.

The Caribbean tropics are a garden of delight for the rich man, and an El Dorado. In sugar, in cotton, in cattle pastures, that world holds treasure to-day greater than the treasure shipped by the Spaniard through Panama the golden. The Caribbean tropics are good, indeed, to the man strong enough to be master. They are good, too, to their own poor, for they curse their natives with no cold and rarely with famine; but for the poor white man from the North they are hell.

It is not due only to the risks of the crop. It is due to the social conditions that forbid the white man in the tropics from laboring with the hands. No white man can do it in the islands or in Central America and keep his caste. Only in Panama, where an entirely artificial and

unique condition has been made by the creators of the wonder of the isthmus, can it be done.

In the Caribbean tropics there is no such white class as that of our Northern farmer, who works in the fields shoulder to shoulder with his men. The tropical planter does not lay hand to tool, harness, or plow. A man holds his horse when he dismounts. A man must hold his stirrup when he mounts. Anything that requires more than the motion of a hand must be done for him. In the British colonies the master would not demean himself to stoop for anything that he drops. A laborer must pick it up for him.

He may

It is not because he is lazy. work harder than a dozen of his men together; but he must not do work that seems menial, if he would maintain his superiority. He holds his place because he is a ruler. He would wither you if you called him a farmer. In the Caribbees the farmer is a peasant or peon who cultivates a small patch. In the British tropics the peasant is black or brown, or an East Indian coolie. In the Spanish tropics he is more often half-breed or Indian.

Such a peasant farmer lives in a hut just large enough for shelter. If it is pretentious, its sides are made of wattles, woven in basket-pattern. Where there is coral stone, the wattle is daubed with lime obtained by burning the coral. The roof is of cocoanut-leaves. The commoner hut is not made even of wattles. It is simply a bower made by braiding cocoanut-fronds for roof and sides.

The owner needs nothing except food, and he desires food only for sustenance, not for the pleasure of eating. His clothes are cotton trousers and a cotton shirt. His household furniture is a cotton hammock or a litter of cocoanut-husks for bed, an iron pot, and a few vessels made of calabash- or cocoanut-shell.

The Northern white man may dream that his superior knowledge or industry or breeding will make a wall between him and the tropical caste of laborer. Unless he is exceptionally lucky, the conditions of life will overpower him as surely as the eternal jungle eternally overpowers the land. In the glorious tropics there is doom for him that is not less terrible because it is so sordid. The tourist who occasionally sees a white man in rags slink through the streets of a Caribbean port does not realize that what he sees is not so much a personal tragedy as a tragedy of his race.

For years, but especially since the Spanish-American War, attempts have been made to overcome this condition by forming white men's colonies. Many have succeeded, some brilliantly. The unsuccessful ones cannot be counted or ever will be. They have vanished-vanished in the jungle or vanished in the black or half-breed population.

The successful colonies are those that contained exceptional members or members that had money enough to buy really good land, and plenty of it, to build good houses in a land where house-building is unexpectedly expensive, and to exist during those first few years during which the Northern farmer, however expert he may be, must unlearn much that he has learned at home.

The farmer with "a few thousand dollars" cannot survive these expenses of learning. The vast parade of the unchanging, wildly beautiful days passes over his fields and leaves them burned dry. The painted jungle, so lovely to see, pours forth armies of ants to eat his seed or the leaves of the crop, and sends forth rats to eat his corn and sugar-cane. The rains may come too heavily, and there will be river-beds where his plowed fields were. The plantation cannot withstand what the jungle can. The jungle, left alone, is imperishable; but when man's hand touches the jungle and turns it into plantation, it is as though the touch brought mortality.

Last April, while riding to a sugar-plantation where I was to

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visit, I passed through one of these colonies that was going back to the jungle. Airplants sat, like the shaggy nests of disorderly birds, on the citrus-trees. The convolvulus twisted its hangman's rope about bananas and sugar-canes. Over the plantations of pineapple the viene parar se, the "come, you, and stop," vinc, trailed its tentacles, beset with vegetable snake-fangs.

The perfect alinement of the well-set trees, the straight tracks of good plowing, the signs everywhere, told what real skill these people had brought, and what a fight they had made before they let the jungle in. The gardens about the houses told the same story. Their hedges were rainbow hedges of croton-plants. Bougainvilleavines shed their purple rain. Flower-beds and borders told of the joyous enthusiasm with which the people had established their new homes. But the houses were Northern farm-houses. They did not belong to the tropics. They were pinched things in a land where men build generously for the sake of comfort. They were houses of small rooms and ordinary window-spaces in a frostless climate that permits huge openings and great room spaces.

Part of this was due to narrow means, but part was due to habit. It was habit that made them put their kitchens in the houses in a hot world where people build their kitchens in separate structures. It was habit that made them use glazed sashes in a climate where jalousies are cheaper, more comfortable, and more convenient.

A little old woman sat on one of the little verandas. I rode in through the open garden gate, and asked for a drink in English. She jumped up with a smile on her brave, worn face.

"Are you an American?" she cried. Would I let her call her husband? Would I be so kind as to talk with him a little? It had been many months, she said eagerly, since they had seen any stranger who spoke anything but Spanish.

The husband, leather-skinned, leanfaced, did not need to tell me that he was from the Middle West. Others joined him soon, hungry to talk to an American, any American. They were all from the same region, and they were all alike, stiffnecked, shrewd, and yet simple, unalterably honest, and unalterably set in their

ways.

Their story was the story that can be heard in all the Caribbean lands from Cape San Antonio to the Gulf of Paria.

They had sold out their Northern farms to buy land in the magic tropics, where fruit grew all the year and where the land needed only modern cultivation to produce three crops of corn every twelve months. They had figured carefully, and they had brought enough money to keep them till the citrus-trees were in bearing. They had borne well, too. But then they found that there was no market. They had shipped to the United States, but transportation to the coast, lighterage to the steamers, and steamer charges to America had eaten up the profit and more.

Drought had wasted their corn. They were only beginning to learn just how and when the best seasons for planting occurred. Their bananas did not produce full bunches. They had found out that though banana-trees will spring up everywhere, they will do commercially well only on a special soil, and now an expert had told them that their soil was useless for the culture. They had wasted three years and much money in planting and replanting. Their sugar-cane was poor. The big mills and big colonies had cut down thousands of acres of primeval forest, and were raising mighty crops of huge canes on the fat, black soil. They could not compete, even if the mills were willing to bother about the crop of a few acres, when they commanded enormous shipments every day to feed their enormous machinery.

They did not complain. There was something more sad than complaint in their seamed, weary faces and their surroundings. The slackness that is picturesque or amusing only in native holdings was mournful here, because it existed side by side with forlorn efforts to maintain old customs of precision. It was the slackness of men beaten.

They were people of strong roots. They never could cease to be Northerners. They did not accommodate themselves to the life, the customs, or the speech of this new land. They never would, now that it had mastered them. Penniless, they must remain alien among an alien people. They asked me incredulously if I liked the land. When I said, "Yes," they shook their heads, and said that all they desired was to get back to God's country.

"God's country!" The expression is heard so constantly from loud-talking,

emptily boastful tourists that it makes a dweller in foreign lands sick. It did not make me sick when these men and women used it. Whatever their condition may have been at home, now they look toward home longingly, and it is God's country to them, indeed.

Perhaps in time some of them will manage to drift back home, to curse the tropics, the "land of the nigger, the land of the Dago." More of them must stay till they are buried under the parasite-hung trees that they have come to hate. That, said the little old woman to me, was the worst thought of all to her-that she and her husband must be buried down there. She pointed down the trail.

When I rode on, I stopped to look at it down there. It was a little cemetery, half hidden in the bush. The floods of the rainy season had cut ugly gorges into the graves. Wooden crosses and lovingly planted flowers were being swallowed by the vegetation that writhes and creeps and twines and crawls with almost reptilian life. There were ugly things scuttling in and out of burrows in the little mounds. They were land-crabs.

That afternoon I rode into the sugarplantation. My way was under plumed Egyptian pillars of royal palms, with gardens on each side. I reached a long, stately house, its graceful, peaked roof red with fluted Moorish tiles. The great verandas were flanked with palm and blossom. A servant ran out to hold the horse, another to lead it to the stable. Half a dozen merry men, in cool white linen or silks, roared welcome. One clapped his hands, and a white-clad butler brought a long, golden drink.

I was taken to a mighty room, with raftered ceiling twenty feet high, paneled with lustrous, velvet-green wood. On both sides it opened upon broad verandas that looked on gardens. The tradewind swept it with its lusty storm.

A servant took off my riding-clothes and led the way to the private bath, tiled and perfectly appointed. When I emerged, more men were coming in. Some were sauntering up the flower-lined paths from the mill and plantation offices, red-roofed buildings set in gardens of their own. Others were riding in from the fields that stretched in all directions to the circle of the horizon. At the side of the house some were playing tennis, furiously, as if they were playing anywhere but under the tropic of Cancer.

We sat down to a dinner served by menservants arrayed in radiant white. There were Castile melons, picked at their choicest moment. There was green-turtle soup. The turtle had been brought alive from the coast, fifty miles away, that morning. There was a gorgeous crimson silk-fish from the same place. There were wild blue pigeons and wild guinea-fowl. There were mounds of desserts. I remember a fairy of a pudding, with cream, pressed out of green cocoanuts, as thick and rich as the cream from a pedigreed Jersey cow. There were great dishes of fruit-oranges and grape-fruit ripened on the tree, mangos, pineapples, bananas, starapples, naseberries.

With the coffee came cigars that awed me. They were the kind that cost a dollar each in the States.

The men ate their dinners like giants. Afterward, in hammocks and wicker