fishermen's village in a chain of sand-hills on the north coast of Africa.

Russia, with her fifteen hundred regiments of iron-fisted conscripts, has thus far always contrived to suppress the insurrections of her colonial helots, but neither her swarms of Cossack cavalry nor her elaborate methods of espionage have enabled her to prevent their escape. After her system of civilization had once come to be generally understood, the advance of her armies was dreaded as the approach of a plague, and whole nations avoided bondage by relinquishing their birthland, like the sixteen tribes of East Circassians, who braved the winter storms of the Euxine to seek refuge in the Turkish province of Adrianople. But it is a noteworthy fact that, when the champion of those highlanders surrendered on the plateau of Ghunib, after having defended the fastnesses of the Caucasus for twenty-eight years, his captors treated him with all the respect that military chivalry could concede to a hero of primitive habits. In Spain he would probably have been given the choice between a monk's cowl and a halter, but the Czar dismissed him with a present of sporting rifles and a liberal contribution to his traveling expenses, when he asked permission to end his days in the Land of the Prophet. His conqueror, Prince Baryatinski, added an invitation to his Crimean highland castle, in case the climate of Mecca should fail to agree with his health.

Altogether, it must be admitted that the despotism of the Russian satraps is tempered by a soldierly appreciation of valor -a touch of Nature, which, however, modifies their treatment of individuals rather than of races and tribes.

In conclusion, we must add a few words on the tendencies of a plan that can hardly be called a system, viz., the method of the opportunists who change their colonial policy with the course of events and the varying aspects of party interests. Their connivance affords a welcome latitude to the program of enterprising campaigners; but it has the fatal disadvantage of opening a door to the chicanes of avarice and selfish ambition, and the often still more irremediable blunders of bigotry.

That plan characterizes the colonial policy of non-migratory races, of nations who have no homeseeker's motive for projects of expansion, but covet colonial possessions for the sake of their supposed commercial or strategic advantages.

It has been practised by ortuguese spoliators in the coast-lands of the Indian Ocean, by Italian adventurers in Abyssinia, by Belgian syndicates on the Congo; but the most characteristic illustration of its methods is perhaps that afforded by the stratagems of the French conquest of Algeria. The aggression began in 1830, by fastening a quarrel upon the Dey; and during the next eighteen years the work of reconstruction was intrusted to almost as many different military governors, each with an administrative plan of his own, and most of them resolved to advertise their personal importance by revoking the edicts of their predecessor.

The yoke of France, on the whole, was not heavier than that of the Dey, but, as a historian of Napoleon's exile remarks in his comments upon the pranks of Sir Hudson Lowe: "A captive can get accustomed to a considerable weight of iron fetters, after learning the best manner of carrying them, but is goaded to revolt by the caprices of a jailer who insists upon adjusting them every morning in a different manner." The distracted aborigines at last flew to arms, and the tactics of Abd-el-Kader cost the invaders a sum which the tax-farmers of the colony cannot hope to repay for the next hundred years.

Absurd insults to the creed and the customs of the Mohammedan natives completed the defeat of the government program of assimilation. After the prohibition of the prizefights and religious festivals, thousands of hill-dwellers who had formerly been attracted to the cities transferred their patronage to the border-towns of Morocco. The markets remained unsupplied, and for a while the government extortion tax was actually levied upon imports from France.

As a financial enterprise, the conquest of the old granary of the Mediterranean had grievously disappointed the expectations of its managers; but the verdict of intelligent foreign residents makes it certain that the causes of that failure had

more to do with gratuitous aggressions upon the liberties of the natives than even with the excise outrages.

The despotism of stupid intolerance is, in fact, more irritating than that of rapacity. It seems to lack the palliation of a practical motive, and is more apt to be ascribed to malevolence, unqualified. Unprofitable tyranny marks the limit of human patience, and there is no doubt that the edict of the bigot who suppressed the holiday pastimes of the sport-loving Cubans was a more mischievous blunder than the Puerto Rico tariff trick.

An American resident of Johannesburg often noticed the bitter resentment of native refugees from Delagoa Bay, and was surprised to learn that the Portuguese Government pays the Kaffir chiefs of its colony an annual subvention, while the aborigines of the British possessions have to content themselves with a few nominal franchises. The southern tribes, however, enjoy the blessing of independence, while their subvented northern kinsmen are subjected to endless chicanes, restrictions, fines, reprimands, injunctions, and inquisitorial tribulations.

"Men can make shift to live under a tyrant," says the biographer of Frederick the Great, "but to be ruled by a busybody is more than human nature can bear."

Nor should the opportunists fail to remember the results of the negotiation with the Circassian chiefs who had taken refuge in the dominions of Abdul Hamid, the Grand Protector of their faith. They had settled in the province of Adrianople, assisted as far as the precarious resources of the Sultan would permit; but a series of drought years had reduced them to the verge of starvation, and in 1896 it became known that they contemplated a second migration. French land agents invited them to Algeria, offering to put them under the special protection of a government committee. Emissaries of the Czar, about the same time, urged them to return to the land of their fathers, the forest-shaded Caucasus-promising them all the privileges of the settlers who had been attracted by the advertisements of liberal land grants.

The tribes consulted. Votes were about evenly divided, and before signing any contract they decided to send out agents of their own to investigate. The Algerian delegates ascertained that there was still a good deal of fine pasture-land in the foot-hills of the Atlas; but their fellow-Moslems warned them that their French guardians would corral them on a reservation and harass them night and day. The Caucasian committee reported that all the best farms in the land of their ancestors had been preëmpted, and that only the uplands still abounded with game and pastoral resources. They also stated that tax-collectors would call in October for their tithe of grain and in May for their dividend of lambs, calves, and foals; but that for the rest of the year they would be left gloriously alone. Barbarous but clearly specified extortion and equally inevitable neglect in one scale of the balance; paternalism and subjection to incalculable official caprices in the other. The home-seekers decided to return to the Caucasus. FELIX L. OSWALD.

Springfield, Mass.

I

CUBA VS. THE UNITED STATES.

I. THE QUESTION OF RECIPROCITY.

AM interested in this subject, primarily, as a question of the good faith of the United States toward Cuba; second, to voice the interests of American producers and manufacturers, who, under proper conditions, would find a very valuable market in Cuba; and third, the interest of American consumers of sugar.

For many years I was one of the largest distributers of sugar in the United States, and am familiar with that industry. For the last five years I have been president of the United States Export Association, whose object is to widen the market for American products, and whose membership comprises leading houses in ninety-eight principal lines of industry, situated in thirty-four States.

During the last year I have had occasion to make a special study of the tariff relations between Cuba and the United States-with the result of arriving at the belief that the greatest good to the greatest number of the people of both countries will be subserved by placing Cuba, so far as our tariff relations are concerned, as nearly as possible on the same free basis as Puerto Rico and Hawaii; and the same may be said of the Philippine Islands.

Strange as it may seem, the Dingley tariff imposes on the chief Cuban products-sugar and tobacco-a duty amounting to about 100 per cent., while on the dutiable products of all other countries imported into the United States it averages about 50 per cent. This is anomalous in itself, and is rendered still more so by our changed relations with Cuba, which virtually make her the ward of the nation. She has accepted the Platt amendment, which imposes upon her duties and obligations that prevent her from making advantageous treaties with