consequence, vast economic changes are impending. He believes firmly that within a period of time, long indeed, when viewed from the standpoint of a man's life, but short enough when compared with the other historical epochs of the world, in a near future, as history marks its periods, the centres of population and the most flourishing civilisation will be found dwelling and flourishing within the confines of those very lands so long shunned, at least so far as our race is concerned, by all save the adventurer and the outcast. Colonel Gorgas, with characteristic modesty, in a recent address to a medical society, put his claim and his prophecy in the following simple words:

"We, therefore, believe that sanitary work on the Isthmus will demonstrate to the world that the white man can live and work in any part of the tropics and maintain good health, and that the settling of the tropics, by the Caucasian, will date from the completion of the Panama Canal."

In a word, there is much reason to believe that the conquest of the Isthmus will not merely bring the Caribbean countries, so long side-tracked, upon the centre of the stage, and exert a far-reaching influence upon the world's channels of commerce and transportation routes. Clearly, on the day now so near, when the water-gates of Panama shall be thrown wide open and the Atlantic and the Pacific joined by the genius. and the industry of man, there will be revealed to the least observant eye the dawn of a new and most interesting era in the progress of our race.

In the conclusion of the canal, the future historian will doubtless see the point of departure for economic

and sociological chances and developments, which it would be folly to attempt to outline here and now. The sanitation of the Isthmus, the making healthy that plague-spot, famous during five centuries as a barrier and a scourge to civilisation, is but the first victory in a campaign for the fuller utilisation of the riches of the tropics, from the enjoyment of which men of our race have, hitherto, been excluded or only enjoyed while taking fearful risks and paying a heavy tribute of valuable lives.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE USUFRUCT OF THE WEST INDIES

THE story of the West Indies is the story of the sugar industry. As far back as the year 1600 there were thirty large sugar-works in operation in Cuba, and wherever in this new world that has become the American Mediterranean settlers went, the cultivation of sugar-cane spread rapidly. The growth of the beet-root industry on the continent of Europe, encouraged by Napoleon, in the hope of ruining the British West Indies, which he had failed to conquer by force of arms, was growing apace, and filled with menace, but perhaps the first serious trouble which the Creole planters had to face was the abolition of slavery, in the English colonies, in 1834.

At this time the estates and the slaves living on them had an estimated value, according to the report of the Royal Commission, of about $1,100,000,000, and the compensation of something under $100,000,000 which was granted to slave-owners was, of course, inadequate to reimburse them even for the direct losses suffered. For a time the West Indian planters were successful in having a prohibitive tariff imposed in the United Kingdom upon all slave-grown sugar. These differential duties, however, were gradually lowered in deference to the catching political cry, which began to be heard-" A cheap breakfasttable for the British working man," and after 1850,