Large contractors in Cuba report no unusual loss of tools through the peculations of their workingmen. The owners of retail stores, where there is such a multitude of petty sales that no record of such transactions can be kept, entrust practically their whole business to their clerks. Judging from actual experience with people and their way of doing business, there is nothing to indicate but that a fair degree of private and commercial honesty prevails. As a rule, the Cuban has not a passion for acquisition for its own sake. The question of money is an ever present and insistent one with the middle and working classes in Cuba as elsewhere; but when current demands are met, and they are not excessive, the Cuban is usually satisfied. He is not ambitious to accumulate. Men in political life, with uncertain tenure of office, expensive ambitions, and the worst kind of precedents to influence them, are said not to be trustworthy, but Cuba should not be judged by its politicians. Considering only the industrial classes, there is no reason to reproach Cuba with a particularly low standard of commercial and personal integrity. One will not find there conditions equalling those in countries where greater intelligence and social discipline have long prevailed, and where reasonably good government has been habitual; but the moral standards of the people in the respects mentioned are not such as to present a serious bar to the industrial development of the country. One of the most common and perhaps the most popular charge made against Cuban workmen by Americans is that they are indolent. Disinclination to hard physical labor is a widely disseminated peculiarity of the human race. That is perhaps the reason why it is so confidently brought up as a defect of one’s neighbors. Foreign immigrants to the United States say that the American likes to do all the bossing and none of the hard work. German and Swiss peasants along the Rhine consider the Frenchman’s great weakness his desire to have clean hands and fine clothes, and that the Italian is a “lazy beggar.” And the Italian borderer will assure you that the Germans and Swiss want to “eat and sleep all the time.” Therefore, in forming a judgment about the working people in Cuba, one has to allow for this national equation. The climate of the Island does not encourage long-continued physical labor apart from all question of race. The American, the Spaniard, the native, and the negro are all subjected to this influence. But a moderate amount of any kind of work can be done by any of these under the right conditions. The immigrant from the North brings with him a fund of physical stamina superior to that of the native, which runs for life and is not bequeathed to his successors born on the Island. No statement that can be made is less likely to be controverted than the oft repeated one that the Spaniard is superior to the Cuban, even of the first generation as a laborer. But