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fact the sugar tariff is the only natural tax which is distributed over the whole body of the population. The annual consumption of raw sugar in this country is about 56 pounds per capita of the population. At an average

IN THE FRENCH MARKET

of 22 cents per pound duty, the increased cost by reason of the tariff is $1.40 per individual. The duty paid on foreign sugars for the year ending June 30th, 1884, was in round numbers $48,000,000, and the benefit derived by the Louisiana planters from the duty was about $7,000,000. At the same time the planters of the Sandwich Islands received, in effect, a bounty from our Government of over $3,000,000 by the admission of their sugar duty free. Thus the United States practically gave nearly half as much to aid the canesugar industry in a foreign country as it did to foster it in our own State of Louisiana.

The next point in the argument is that the Government, having for nearly a hundred years encouraged the investment of capital in sugar-planting by a protective tariff, has

assumed a certain responsibility in the premises which it cannot honestly throw off. In other words, it has no right to ruin a large class of its citizens who have placed confidence in the continuance of a policy long

since become settled and traditional. It is in honor bound, say the planters, either to maintain a duty on foreign sugars at a point high enough to enable them to compete with such sugars in our home markets, or to compensate them for the losses which would result from the abandonment of the protective policy.

Finally they draw an affecting picture of the ruin and desolation that would come upon the richest districts of Louisiana if the sugar interests should be destroyed. There is only one other crop besides the cane adapted to the alluvial lands of the State, and that is rice. It would not be practicable or profitable to convert more than a small part of the area now cultivated in cane into rice plantations. Rice can only be grown where there are economical facilities for flooding the land. The greater part of the agricultural area below Red River would be abandoned if caneplanting could no longer be carried on. The levees could not be kept up, and the country would become a swampy wilderness. New Orleans would be ruined as a commercial city, the richest parishes in the State would be plunged into poverty and misery, and many thousands of people would die from starvation. In time the negroes who might survive the calamity would make shift to live by raising corn and potatoes on lands not requiring levee protection; but nothing could restore the former prosperity of the lowlands: they would fall into a condition of semi-barbarism, like the coast districts of Central America.

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The area of land now cultivated in cane, in Louisiana, is about 170,000 acres. It is no greater than is embraced in an average prairie county in Dakota or Nebraska; but it is stretched out in narrow strips along the banks of the Mississippi, and of the numerous bayous, which serve as escape-pipes for the waters of the great rivers, and in reality comprises

more than half the tillable soil in the lower half of the State. While a wheat-raising county in the North-west supports only 10,000 or 15,000 people at the most, this sugar country supports half the population of Louisiana. On the plantations it maintains 300,000 souls; and it is but a moderate estimate, to say that there are 150,000 more supported by transportation and the manufacture and sale of supplies used upon the plantations. An acre of wheat does not, on the average, produce more than $15; an acre of cotton will not average $30; but an acre of cane turns out a product in sugar and molasses which at the present low prices will bring from $75 to $100.

No important product of our national industry, with the possible exception of iron, has suffered such a fall in value in recent years as sugar. The grade of sugar which in 1869 sold in New Orleans for 154 cents per pound, sold in the same city in 1884 for 42 cents. It is wonderful that the planting interest managed to resist annihilation under such disastrous conditions. That it still survives is an evidence of the courage and energy of the men engaged in it, and of its inherent vitality. The Louisiana planters have increased the yield of cane by better tillage and the introduction of new varieties, and at the same time have increased the yield of sugar per ton of cane by greater care in the manufacturing processes and by the use of improved machinery. Labor, which is 70 per cent. of the expense of producing sugar, costs them as much, and in most plantations more, than in 1869. They still believe, however, that the country has the capacity of furnishing all the sweets consumed by its people, and think it would do so in two or three decades if a uniform and perma

Kemble

nent tariff policy were adopted by Congress, and if there should be no efforts on the part of the Government to bring in Mexican, West Indian, and Hawaiian sugars free, under the operations of special commercial treaties. Why, they ask, should our statesmen be willing to destroy a home industry, now producing $20,000,000 a year, for the sake of securing $8,000,000 or $10,000,000 of foreign trade? Our interstate trade is more valuable than any foreign trade. Louisiana now buys with the money her sugar brings more food products, manufactured goods, than Mexico and the West Indies combined. If all her alluvial lands were cultivated, and also the much greater area in Texas favorable to cane-growing, the sugar interest would develop a commerce of $200,000,000, most of which would go to the Northern States for clothing, machinery, coal, grain, and cured meats.

If the reader has now in mind a few cardinal points about the cane-sugar industry and

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CAPTAIN, MATE, AND CLERK OF THE "ALVIN."

its relations to the general government, let us go on board one of the sugar-boats that carry supplies to the plantations on rivers and bayous and bring the crops to New Orleans. The artist and the writer thread their way through the French market with its polyglot chatter, its fragrant coffee-stands, and its queer medley of meats and calicoes, fish, oranges, and toys, and passing the open many-gabled sugar-sheds, come out on the broad levee. A group of steamboats lie with their noses against the bank. These are the sugar-boats, and this particular portion of the city's great protecting embankment is called the sugar levee. There is a mild stir of business upon the levee in the way of weighing and testing barrels of sugar, and a good many people, black, white, and yellow, saunter about as if they had nothing in particular on their minds. We are bound for the Lower Coast. The country on both sides of the Mis

of freight. Finally the Alvin backs out from between the other boats and begins a voyage en zigzag, crossing and recrossing the river more times than any one cares to keep account of, to land at plantations on one bank and the other. Every time the boat lands she must make a great circle so as to get her bows against the rushing yellow current. A great deal more space is traversed in these zigzags and curves than in a direct line down the river, so that we are all the afternoon making twenty-eight miles. But what matter? Is not the February air as mild as that of a Northern May, and does not the warm breeze bring grateful odors of the new-plowed earth, the budding cane, the orange groves, and the delicate green foliage of the willows and cypress? Besides we see in our leisurely progress much of the life of the plantations, the gangs of negroes with plows and hoes, and

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sissippi from New Orleans up to the mouth of the Red River is known as the Upper Coast; that below the city down to the Jetties, as the Lower Coast. Was it a tribute to the might

of the great river,

this use by the early French

settlers of a name for its banks

usually applied to the shores of the sea? They did not say les bords du Mississippi, as they would say les bords du Seine, but always les côtes du Mississippi. We make choice between the Daisy, a preposterously small and dirty boat, which carries the mail, and is therefore bound to make good time, and a large and reputable looking craft called the Alvin, which transports freight and stops at every plantation named on her manifest, preferring the latter. She does not start until an hour after her advertised time of leaving. Nobody grumbles or seems to think this extraordinary. It is the way of the country. Captain, mate, and clerk stand at the shore end of the long landing-stage, chatting and laughing, while keeping a desultory outlook for a belated passenger or dray-load

UNLOADING THE CRADLE.

the great cane-carts carrying the plant cane to the freshly tilled fields. Our boat is a traveling storehouse of curiously mixed merchandise. At one plantation we put off a consignment of crackers, at another a baby's cradle, at another a mule. Before the bows touch the bank a row of roustabouts stand on the plank, one with a barrel, another with a bag of fertilizer, a third with a box or bale-eight or ten of them ready to rush ashore. The moment the last article is landed, the mate shouts "get aboard" and "hoist away," and up goes the great plank into the air while the crew comes running in.

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At night the landing scenes are still more picturesque. The electric headlight suddenly irradiates a few rods of the levee, causing a negro cabin, the colonnaded mansion of a planter, or the dingy walls of a sugar-house to flash out of the obscurity for a moment, and then to relapse into the surrounding blackness. The boat feels her way with the light to the landing-places, and when she stops for a few moments, to put a passenger or a box ashore, the illuminated scene on the levee seems to have been conjured out of chaos and black night for our momentary wonder.

We go ashore at Belair, a plantation celebrated for its careful and systematic field work. The planter is waiting upon the levee for his guests. Two negroes seize our portmanteaux, and we are shown the way to an old-fashioned, square house, completely surrounded on all sides and on both floors by broad galleries supported by columns. It stands in perilous proximity to the menacing yellow flood of the river, and the owner explains its need of repairs by saying that as the water is eating into the land in front of it at the rate of seven feet a year, it must soon fall into the stream, which is a hundred feet deep at this VOL. XXXV.-17.

point. He does not, therefore, think it worth while to spend any money on the old structure. After supper we go to the store. The store is usually the center of the business life and of much of the social life of a plantation. It is owned by the planter, who keeps in it a stock of clothing, provisions, and knick-knacks to supply his laborers. A book account is kept with each head of a family, and a settlement made on every weekly or monthly pay-day. We find a score of negro men and boys in the store listening to the music of an accordion, a fiddle, and a triangle, and with some little coaxing and the promise of a quarter to the best dancer we succeed in getting up an amusing competitive double-shuffle and heel-and-toe dance. The contestants, who have been toiling in the fields all day, throw off their coats and get down to the work with evident relish, amid shouts of " Hi! hi!" "Go in, Jim!" "You, dah, Gawge!" and "Let youssef out, Mose!" and clapping of hands on knees from the delighted sable spectators. When the fun begins to get monotonous I manage to have a talk with an intelligent old negro named Squire, who was a "driver" in slave days and is still a "driver" - not of mules, be it under

stood, but of men. A "driver" is the foreman of a gang of laborers. On some plantations the title of foreman is coming into use, the negroes objecting to the old word. I ask Squire if the field hands do as much work in a day as they did in slave times. "Nuffin like it, boss," he replies; "befo' de wah, de plow gang had to be in de field long befo' sun up, all drawn up in line and ebery man a-hold of his plow, waitin' foh de first daylight to start. And de hoe gang was dah, ebery man a-leanin' on his hoe, ready to start at de word jist as soon as dey could rightly see de rows of cane." "If a man did not keep up his row, what did you do?"

"Give him a lick wid de whip. Dat mostly brought him to his senses. Times is not what dey was, boss." The old man evidently regrets the days when his authority as driver enabled him to give a lazy fellow a whipping. Next morning we are up in good season, but our host has been in the saddle since six, starting the field work

for the day. After breakfast we

all mount and ride out over

the smooth plantation
roads to see the gangs
at work. The place
fronts for three miles
on the river, and ex-
tends back about a
mile to the swamp.
There are more than
twenty-five miles of
roads upon it.
About a thou-
sand acres are
under cultiva-
tion. The great
enemy of the
planters in all
lower Louisi-
ana is water.
They must con-
stantly be on their
guard against it,

throwing up their de-
fenses in front and rear

in the form of strong dikes;

keeping open with constant labor a checkerboard system of drainage ditches and pumping out into the swamp the water that falls as rain or soaks through from the river. Belair has two protection levees on the swamp side, so that if one is overflowed a defense can be made on the second line. In sugar-culture an enormous amount of labor must be expended in diking and ditching that has no direct result in the production of the crop.

How delightful is a February morning in

these warm lowlands! The atmosphere is like that in Corot's pictures, misty, vague, and dreamy. The gigantic live-oaks seem like ghosts of trees. The figures of men and animals moving across the shrouded fields against the gray sky loom up into strangely exaggerated proportions. A soft breeze blows from the Gulf. The line of faint green on the horizon shows that the cypress-trees in the swamp are beginning to put on their spring colors. Flocks of noisy blackbirds are holding mass meetings on the new-plowed ground and passing resolutions in favor of immediate migration to the North.

Let us follow in their sequence the processes of planting. First is the uncovering with plows of the furrows in which the seed-cane has been

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buried since last fall, the pulling it out of the ground with great iron hooks attached to poles, and the loading it into carts. In the "hooking-up" gang I observe two white men working with the negroes. They are Spaniards from the Terre aux Bœufs country, the other side of the swamps. There are two others who are neither whites nor negroes. They have a

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