the sick and the well, the good and the bad, their market value
averages about $1000 a head. Yet of these, allowing for those too young
or too old, for the sick, and for those who must tend the young, the old
and the sick, and for those whose labor, like that of the cooks, only
sustains the others, not more than one half are able-bodied, productive
laborers. The value of this chief item in the investment depends largely
on moral and intellectual considerations. How unsatisfactory is it,
then, to calculate the profits of the investment, when you leave out of
the calculation the value of the controlling power, the power that
extorts the contributions of labor from the steam and the engine and the
fire, and from the more difficult human will. This is the "plus x" of
the formula, which, unascertained, gives us little light as to the
result.

But, to return to the changes wrought by this substitution of sugar for
coffee. The sugar plantation is no grove, or garden, or orchard. It is
not the home of the pride and affections of the planter's family. It is
not a coveted, indeed, hardly a desirable residence. Such families as
would like to remain on these plantations are driven off for want of
neighboring society. Thus the estates, largely abandoned by the families
of the planters, suffer the evils of absenteeism, while the owners live
in the suburbs of Havana and Matanzas, and in the Fifth Avenue of New
York. The slave system loses its patriarchal character. The master is
not the head of a great family, its judge, its governor, its physician,
its priest and its father, as the fond dream of the advocates of
slavery, and sometimes, doubtless, the reality, made him. Middlemen, in
the shape of administradores, stand between the owner and the slaves.
The slave is little else than an item of labor raised or bought. The
sympathies of common home, common childhood, long and intimate relations
and many kind offices, common attachments to house, to land, to dogs, to
cattle, to trees, to birds--the knowledge of births, sicknesses, and
deaths, and the duties and sympathies of a common religion--all those
things that may ameliorate the legal relations of the master and slave,
and often give to the face of servitude itself precarious but
interesting features of beauty and strength--these they must not look to
have. This change has had some effect already, and will produce much
more, on the social system of Cuba.

There are still plantations