If you speak with the planters, they will tell you that their great difficulty is to get a favorable market; that the duty on their sugar imported into San Francisco eats up their profits; and that the only cure—­the cure-all, I should say, for all the ills they suffer—­is a treaty with the United States, which shall admit their product duty free.  Of course any one can see that if the sugar duty were remitted to them, the planters would make more money, or would lose less.  An ingenuous planter summed up for me one day the whole of that side of the case, by saying, “If we had plenty of labor and a free market for our sugar, we should be thoroughly satisfied.”

But I am persuaded that, as there are planters now who are prosperous and contented, and who make handsome returns even with the sugar duty against them, so, if that were removed, there would be planters who would continue their regular and slow march toward bankruptcy; and for whom the remitted duty would be but a temporary respite, while it would deprive them of a cheap and easy way to account for their failure.  Wherever on the islands I found a planter living on his own plantation, managing it himself, and out of debt, I found him making money, even with low prices for his sugar, and even if the plantation itself was not favorably placed; not only this, but I found plantations yielding steady and sufficient profits, under judicious management, which in previous hands became bankrupt.  But on the other hand, where I found a plantation heavily encumbered with debt and managed by a superintendent, the owner living elsewhere, I heard usually, though not always, complaints of hard times.  If a sugar planter has his land and machinery heavily mortgaged at ten or twelve per cent interest; if he must, moreover, borrow money on his crop in the field to enable him to turn that into sugar; if then he sends the product to an agent in Honolulu, who charges him five per cent. for shipping it to San Francisco; and if in San Francisco another agent charges him five per cent. more, on the gross returns including freight and duty, for selling it; if besides all this the planter buys his supplies on credit, and is charged one per cent. a month on these, compounded every three months until it is paid, and pays almost as much freight on his sugar from the plantation to Honolulu as from there to its final market—­it is highly probable that he will, in the course of time, fail.

There are not many legitimate enterprises in the world which would bear such charges and leave a profit to the manager.  But it is on this system that the planting of sugar has been, to a large extent, carried on for years in the Islands.  Under it a good deal of money has been made, but not by the planters.  Nor is this essentially unjust.  In the majority of cases, planters began rashly with small means, and had to borrow largely to complete their enterprises and get to work.  The capitalist of course took