fleet" made periodical visits to islands suspected of harboring unauthorized or buccaneering colonies. Woe to those luckless pioneers upon whom fell the wrath of the Spaniard! And woe to the SpanishAmerican city that found itself obliged to entertain such unwelcome guests as French or English buc caneers. Under these circumstances, when the Old World nations were struggling against each other for commercial supremacy in the New World, the aboriginal inhabitants of the islands completely disappeared. The last places upon which the Caribs managed to maintain themselves were Santa Lucia and Dominica in the Windward Islands. The difficulty of enforcing in the New World the treaties that had been negotiated in the Old, was complicated by the presence of the buccaneers and the custom of encouraging them privately by the issuing of "letters of marque" and by the peculiar admission of inability to control the conduct of citizens on this side of the Atlantic by excluding from the terms of the treaties the lands beyond the line." It was under such uncertain conditions in the New World, and in the midst of a dynastic revolution in England, that Jamaica was seized by an expedition sent by Cromwell in 1655. The French remained, nevertheless, the strongest Caribbean power until the prestige of France began seriously to decline as a result of English victories in the War of the Spanish Succession. The West Indian islands were, indeed, as Professor Egerton has well said, "The natural cock-pit of the European nations in the struggle for hegemony." Some of the islands, like Santa Lucia and St. Kitts, had indeed changed hands a dozen times. And these were but typical in stances. By way of contrast with the small islands, the tenure of the larger islands has been relatively permanent. Cuba and Porto Rico remained in Spanish possession, except for the brief occupation of Havana in the Seven Years' War, until the Spanish-American war of 1898. Jamaica has remained in continuous English possession ever since 1655. Haiti remained under the Spanish and the French until the French Revolution, and since that time has managed to maintain its existence as a "black republic." But the smaller islands of that great "bow of Ulysses," stretching in a magnificent sweep of seven hundred miles from Porto Rico to Trinidad, have had a most bewildering sort of political history. What is the key to this swarming of nationalities upon the eastern boundaries of the American Mediterranean? Why is it that Englishmen and Frenchmen, Dutchmen and Courlanders, Danes, Brandenburgers and Knights of Malta, hastened to settle upon every up-jutting rock, like flies around the bung of a molasses cask? The answer has already been hinted at. Spanish-America had gained a wonderful reputation as а source of wealth, especially of those metals from which money was coined. The prevailing idea that the more silver and gold a nation was able to lay its hands upon, the more prosperous that nation would be, an idea that was held by economists as well as by common people who were interested in trade, was responsible for directing the attention of Northern Europe to Spanish America. In the minds of the men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the consuming problem that suggested itself for solution was, how best to entice that gold and silver away from the Spaniards? The sixteenth century solution was the temporizing one of smuggling by interlopers or private traders. Then came the period of buccaneers, who were practically legalized pirates. By settling on some inaccessible island or swampy coast, like Tortuga or Honduras, they could become a permanent menace to Spanish trade monopoly. In time of war their possessions became a valuable point of vantage from which to carry on hostilities against Spanish commerce. A more respectable method of separating Spanish treasure from its owners was private establishment of regular colonies, whose possession was recognized by treaties with Spain. It was the treaty of Madrid, negotiated in 1670, between England and Spain, that put AngloSpanish New World relations upon a fairly permanent footing. It was this treaty that marked the end of buccaneering and transformed the buccaneers into pirates. It was this treaty and the continuance of diplomatic relations which followed it, that eventually enabled various Old World states to prosecute with signal success the growing African slave trade. It only requires an examination of the map to realize the value of such colonies as Tortuga, St. Kitts, St. Thomas, Providence, San Andreas and Curaçao. These islands will be seen to guard the routes of commerce between the Spanish mainland of America and the continent of Europe. As an illustration of the advantage of geographical position in this struggle for the commercial spoil of Spain may be cited the experiment known to history as the "Darien Company." It was a wily Scotchman, William Paterson, by name, who conceived the idea, during the brief interval of peace following the war of the Augsburg League, of striking directly at the heart of the matter by establishing a colony upon the Isthmus of Panama itself. The judgment of this gentleman, the distinguished founder of the Bank of England, is surely not to be scoffed at so far as the commercial side of the business was concerned, but the stars in the political firmament that controlled the destiny of the Darien Company were not in conjunction. William the Third of England was not prepared to back up this bold scheme for establishing a company in the heart of the Spanish commercial empire; while the Dutch and English African companies were gravely alarmed at the prospect. So Spain was permitted to retain her annual fair at Porto Bello undisturbed. These tropic colonies, so strategically placed with respect to commercial and sea power, were ideal in the minds of the seventeenth and eighteenth century Europeans. They furnished an outlet for the surplus population, and were in no sense economic rivals of the home country. The means employed for the exploitation of those islands and for the development of their possibilities and resources, were commercial joint-stock com in the age of Colbert, when Charles II courted good relations with Denmark, that the Danish West India Company established itself on that island St. Thomas which we have recently purchased. The success of these companies as commercial enterprises was due, more than to any other one thing, to the economic revolution that followed the introduction of sugar cane. In the latter half of the seventeenth century, as as in the eighteenth century, sugar was indeed king. To make the raising of sugar profitable, the problem of labor was solved by the introduction of negro slaves from Africa, at first as a means of saving the Indians from to the Dutch and English traders, were frequently enormous. The magnitude of this trade is in itself a measure of its economic importance. It has been estimated that from 1680 to 1786 there was imported into the British Islands a total of 2,130,000 negroes. No one was too exalted or noble to refrain from profiting in this traffic. Shares of Guinea and West Indian Company stock were held by royalty, by ministers of the Gospel, as well as by ministers of State, alike by merchant princes and university professors. The widow invested her mite and the capitalist his surplus. An important result of this trade on its European side was that big business entered into alliance with government, was indeed often an integral part of government. The result in the West Indies was the rise of a class of capitalist planters, a class so influential that as early as the middle of the seventeenth century it broached the plan of sending representatives to the British Parliament. It is when we bear in mind that sugar was king that we may understand why England should hesitate between taking from France Guadalupe or Canada in the Treaty of Paris in 1763. It helps us to understand why the English Admiral Nevell struck at the power of Louis XIV during the War of the Augsburg League by searching for the Franco-Spanish fleet in the West Indies. It enables us to comprehend why Pitt's plans embraced the defeat of the schemes of the French prime minister Choiseul in the American as well as in the European Mediterranean. It helps us to realize how Rodney was able to save the situation for Great Britain by his victories over the French fleet in the West Indies during the War of American Independence, and why Lord Nelson should hasten to those waters in search of the French fleet before he finally found and conquered it at Trafalgar. But the economic structure that had been reared so splendidly upon the single apex of the sugar industry was finally to be overturned. This was due mainly to a Berlin chemist of French extraction, Achard, who in the quiet of his laboratory discovered a practical process of extracting sugar from beets. The development of the sugar beet industry was accompanied by the agitation for slave emancipation. That achievement, which was reached in 1833 in the British West Indies, and in 1848 in the Danish Islands, sounded the death-knell of West Indian planter aristocracy. Steadily, but with a fatal certainty, the West Indian possessions of Europe have deteriorated from colonies to mere dependencies. Today the colonies of France, England and the Netherlands are a source of annual loss to the home government. Lotteries, and other financial devices of questionable character, are resorted to that Madame Deficit's perennial hunger may be appeased. Now that Spain has been excluded from the Caribbean, possibly with more injury to her pride than to her prosperity; now that France has found use for her colonizing and commercial energies nearer home on the African shores of the Old World Mediterranean, and the work of de Lesseps has been completed by Shonts and Wallace and Goethals; now that England has within the past dozen years withdrawn her last garrisons from Jamaica and Santa Lucia, what is the situation in the American Mediterranean? It seems perfectly clear that for good or ill, the "Colossus of the North," as we are sometimes called by our neighbors on the other side of the Rio Grande, has its hand on the throttle. A friend of mine in Copenhagen, to whom I had been protesting that we were not an imperialistic nation, that public sentiment was not likely to permit a war of conquest against weaker neighbors (we had been reading of Huerta recently), took a map lying on the table, pointed first at the Rio Grande, next to Panama Canal (then still unfinished), and remarked, "You are there-and there—you can't help yourselves." There was a disconcerting finality about my friend's remark that left me with an uncomfortable feeling. Did he mean that we were destined to become an imperialistic, statedevouring, New World Rome-or was he firmly convinced that we were so already? Let us review briefly those events and circumstances that have placed us in our present commanding situation north of Panama. The position of the United States at the time when the Monroe Doctrine was first proclaimed affords some instructive contrasts with its position at the present time. The sympathies of this country, for economic as well as for sentimental reasons, were altogether with the revolted American colonies of Spain. This, with fears of Russian aggression southward on the west coast, made the President's point of view a popular one. The support of that strongly nationalistic Westerner, Henry Clay, represented fairly the state of popular opinion. That the "doctrine" then proclaimed might ever be construed into a weapon of aggression certainly never .entered the minds of John Quincy Adams or his contemporaries. So far was the thought of American domination from the minds of political leaders in the first half of the nineteenth century that the ClaytonBulwer treaty, giving Great Britain equal rights with the United States in the construction of an interoceanic canal, was not seriously opposed on nationalistic or patriotic grounds. Napoleon III's intervention in Mexico while we were in the throes of civil war led to our putting new meaning, new force, into the Monroe Doctrine. The difficulties under which the Union navy labored in its efforts to suppress blockade running during that struggle helped to keep up the interest in Cuban affairs, and to encourage the hope of ultimate annexation. It led incidentally to the first definite proposal of a treaty with Denmark for the purchase of the island of St. Thomas-a plan that fell through because of the passive opposition of the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in the United States Senate, Charles Sumner. It was not until the French Canal Company under de Lesseps undertook the construction of a canal at Panama that American sentiment began to crystallize in favor of the abrogation or amendment of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty and the building of an Americanowned and American-operated canal. The failure of the French Company allayed American fears of foreign domination of this strategic commercial highway; but it only required a new occasion to bring the latent American opposition to the English treaty more strongly into relief than ever. President Cleveland's rather sudden and vehement championing of Venezuela's point of view in her dispute with England in 1895-96 revealed an astonishing degree of national sensitiveness with respect to our foreign relations in the Caribbean. But the great turning-point, the event that turned the national attention in a compelling way towards Panama and the West Indies was our war with Spain. With Cuba an American protectorate, and Porto Rico an American territory, the Clayton-Bulwer treaty was doomed for the waste paper basket. England's graceful yielding to the American position strengthened immensely those cordial relations that have remained unbroken for a century. During the period since the Canal was begun, the United States has taken charge of the financial and military administration of the negro republics of San Domingo and Haiti-surely not because of our imperialistic designs against weaker states, but through the logic of events. If this country refused to intervene, France or Germany or England would feel obliged to take a hand. However much we might desire to permit our Latin American or African neighbors, situated between us and Panama, to "stew in their own juice," the financial interests of other nations, especially the Great Powers of Europe, seem to be so aggressive that the government of the United States may be expected to take an increasing paternal interest in the region that lies between the Rio Grande and the Canal. The slaves of this region have long since been freed, and sugar has been dethroned; but the comple tion of the great Canal has revived those hopes that spring eternal, and has led West Indians to believe that they are at the dawn of a new and glorious era in their economic history. Improved plantation machinery, the wonderful organization of oceanic fruit lines, diversity in tropical agriculture, the sharing by cacao, coffee, the banana, of the prestige once monopolized by sugar, the proximity of the new trade routes these are among the hopeful signs in those lands. The purchase of the Danish Islands in the West Indies at the highest price ever paid by the United States for any of its territory is indicative of the increased importance of the Caribbean lands to the American people. On the one hand, their acquisition affords the historical student an opportunity to see in the perspective of the centuries the relation of this episode to universal history; on the other, it will serve to direct the thought of the practical statesman and the politically inclined citizen to a renewed and more serious consideration of the policy that the United States should adopt in the lands that lie to the north of Panama. Blackboard Work in History Teaching BY WILLIAM W. WUESTHOFF, STATE NORMAL SCHOOL, MILWAUKEE, WIS. The blackboard should play an essential part in the history recitation. By this method the teacher can appeal to a larger number of pupils. The adolescent pupil as a rule learns much and easier by visualization. Such pupils who find it difficult to acquire information by reading or are naturally slow by way of auditory sense, very often gain the greater share of their information by visualization. The attention of these pupils especially must be held. Textbooks which are not illustrated as a rule do not appeal to boys and girls, which is a good indication that they want and need instruction by way of pictures, diagrams and the like. If this is what the pupils want and need, why not give it to them, providing the concession improves the standard of instruction? A textbook can not include all that every teacher might want to use to illustrate a lesson and therefore the teacher must turn to the blackboard. In many cases blackboard illustrations are better than the textbook method. The blackboard illustration is constantly before the pupil. Pupils may slight textbook illustrative material, but such diagrams which are put upon the board will receive the pupils' special attention. You can hold this attention easily and it is the special attention which is the most instructive. The blackboard work emphasizes points and fixes them in the pupil's mind. The history teacher has considerable material with which to make the teaching have more drive. The following is a list of diagrams for each field of history which can be put upon the blackboard. The list in cludes references to books in which diagrams can be found. There are other references, besides foreign publications, but this reference list includes books more accessible to the average teacher: GREEK HISTORY. VERTICAL SECTION OF A PYRAMID. Rawlinson, Story of Ancient Egypt, 73, 76, 86. PLAN OF ATHENS. Botsford, Story of Orient and Greece, 179. Davis, A Day in Old Athens, 7. Howe, Essentials in Early European History, 34. Morey, Outlines of Greek History, 229. Robinson and Breasted, Outlines of European History, Part I, 173. Tucker, Life in Ancient Athens, Frontispiece. Webster, Ancient History, 627. West, Ancient World, 202. GROUND PLAN OF THE ACROPOLIS Fowler-Wheeler, Greek Archæology, 137, 138, 146, 151. Guhl and Koner, Life of Greeks and Romans, 11, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 23, 24, 26, 33, 35. Hamlin, History of Architecture, 54. Harper, Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquity, 1533, 1534. Howe, Essentials in Early European History, 233. Reber, History of Ancient Art, 208, 213, 222, 225, 227. Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, Vol. II, 775, 776. Tucker, Life in Ancient Athens, 41. Tuckerman, Short History of Architecture, 56. ROMAN HISTORY. THE SEVEN HILLS OF ROME. Fairley, Seign obos' History of Roman People, 16, 28. How and Leigh, History of Rome to Death of Cæsar, 38. Howe, Essentials in Early European History, 85. Morey, Outlines of Roman History, 23, 27. Robinson and Breasted, Outlines of European History, Part I, 250. West, Ancient World, 311. CIRCUS MAXIMUS. Cornish, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, 163. Guhl and Koner, Life of the Greeks and Romans, 422. Harper, Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquity, 352. Johnston, Private Life of the Romans, 229. Seyffert, Dictionary of Classical Antiquity, 137. Shumway, A Day in Ancient Rome, 70. Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, Vol. I, 432. CROSS SECTION OF ROMAN ROAD. Byrne, Highway Construction, 81. Cornish, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, 668. Johnston, Private Life of the Romans, 285. Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, Vol. II, 951. Tillson, Street Pavements and Paving Materials, 178. ROMAN MILITARY CAMP. Cornish, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, 145. Harper, Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquity, 291. How and Leigh, History of Rome to the Death of Cæsar, 140. Seyffert, Dictionary of Classical Antiquity, 117. I, 372. Webster, Ancient History, 351. West, Ancient World, 355. BATTLE OF CANNE. Breasted, Ancient Times, 540. Fairley, Seignobos' History of Roman People, 108. Morey, Ancient Peoples, 371. Morey, Outlines of Roman History, 118. Myers, Ancient History (Rev.), 422. GROUND PLAN OF BASILICA. Gwilt, Encylopædia of Architecture, 110. Harper, Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquity, 198. Howe, Essentials in Early European History, 233. Lubke, Ecclesiastical Art in Germany, 18. Mathews, Story of Architecture, 245. Reber, History of Medieval Art, 18. Seyffert, Dictionary of Classical Antiquity, 93. Tuckerman, Short History of Architecture, 89. GROUND PLAN OF ROMAN HOUSE. Breasted, Ancient Times, 556. Dyer, Pompeii, 308, 312, 315, 319. Fairley, Seignobos' History of Roman People, 352. |