“A planter informed the author that he should spread all of his molasses upon the cane fields this year as a fertilizer, rather than send it to a distant market and receive only what it cost.  He further said that thousands of acres of sugar cane would be allowed to rot in the fields this season, as it would cost more to cut, grind, pack and send it to market than could be realized for the manufactured article.  Had the price of sugar remained this year at a figure which would afford the planters a fair profit, it might have been the means of tiding over the chasm of bankruptcy which has long stared them in the face, and upon the brink of which they now stand.  But with a more than average crop, both as to quantity and quality, whether to gather it or not is a problem.  Under these circumstances it is difficult to say what is to become, financially, of the people of Cuba.  Sugar is their great staple, but all business has been equally suppressed upon the island, under the bane of civil laws, extortionate taxation, and oppressive rule.

“The sugar cane yields but one crop a year.  There are several varieties, but the Otaheitan seems to be the most generally cultivated.  Between the time when enough of the cane is ripe to warrant the getting up of steam at the grinding mill, and the time when the heat and the rain spoils its qualities, all the sugar for the season must be made, hence the necessity for great industry on large estates.  In Louisiana the grinding lasts but about eight weeks.  In Cuba it continues four months.  In analyzing the sugar produced on the island, and comparing it with that of the main land, the growth of Louisiana, chemists could find no difference as to the quality of the true saccharine principle contained in each.

“The great sugar estates lie in the Vueltra Arriba, the region of the famous red earth.  The face of this region smiles with prosperity.  In every direction the traveler rides astonished through a garden of plenty, equally impressed by the magnificent extent, and the profuse fertility of the estates, whose palm avenues, plantain orchards, and cane fields succeed each other in almost unbroken succession.  So productive are the estates, and so steady is the demand for the planter’s crop, that the great sugar planters are, in truth, princes of agriculture.

“The imposing scale of operations on a great plantation, imparts a character of barbaric regal state to the life one leads there.  Looking at them simply as an entertainment, the mills of these great sugar estates are not incongruous with the easy delight of the place.  Everything is open and airy, and the processes of the beautiful steam machinery go on without the odors as without the noises that make most manufactories odious.  In the centrifugal process of sugar making, the molasses passes into a large vat, by the side of which is a row of double cylinders, the outer one of solid metal, the inner of wire gauze.  These cylinders revolve each on