ut mean forbidding her to trade with anybody except the
United States.

[Sidenote: Importance of the Question.]

The importance of the question from an economic point of view has been
ludicrously exaggerated on both sides. The original proposal would have
in itself done far less harm than its opponents imagined and far less
good than its supporters hoped. Yet to the extent of its influence it
would have been a step backward. It would have been the rejection of
the modern and scientific colonial method, and the adoption instead of
the method which has resulted in the most backward, the least
productive, and the least prosperous colonies in the world--the method,
in a word, of Spain herself. For the Spanish tariff, in fact, made with
some little reference to colonial interests, we should merely have
substituted our own tariff, made with sole reference to our own
interests. A more distinct piece of blacksmith work in economic
legislation for a helpless, lonely little island in the mid-Atlantic
could not well be imagined. What had poor Porto Rico done, that she
should be fenced in from all the Old World by an elaborate and highly
complicated system of duties upon imports, calculated to protect the
myriad varying manufactures and maintain the high wages of this vast
new continent, and as little adapted to Porto Rico's simple needs as is
a Jorgensen repeater for the uses of a kitchen clock? Why at the same
stroke must she be crushed, as she would have been if the Constitution
were extended to her, by a system of internal taxation, which we
ourselves prefer to regard as highly exceptional, on tobacco, on
tobacco-dealers, on bank-checks, on telegraph and telephone messages,
on bills of lading, bills of exchange, leases, mortgages,
life-insurance, passenger tickets, medicines, legacies, inheritances,
mixed flour, and so on and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam? Did she
deserve so badly of us that, even in a hurry, we should do this thing
to her in the name of humanity?

All the English-speaking world, outside some members of the United
States Congress perhaps, long since found a more excellent way. It is
simplicity itself. It legislates for a community like Porto Rico with
reference to the situation and wants of that community--not with
reference to somebody else. It applies to Porto Rico a system devised
for Porto Rico--not one devised for a distant and vastly larger
country, with totally different situation and wants. It make