In the iron mines at Santiago the large American enterprises have already adjusted themselves to the new conditions and are paying their labour seventy-five cents per day American currency instead of a Spanish dollar worth sixty-five cents in Cuba and only sixty cents in exchange for United States currency. The author, when in the mining districts of this province, heard no complaints, either from the proprietors or the labourers. Stress was laid in the arguments before the President and Secretary Gage upon the loss to the debtor who has borrowed on a fictitious value and must pay the premium, and the unfortunate Cuban sugar-planter is especially singled out for sympathy. That the planter will suffer cannot be denied, but the advent of the United States into Cuba will lighten so many of his burdens that his condition is not without hope. All the customs duties on his imported food supplies, as will be seen in the chapter on the tariff, have been reduced, and many important commodities put upon the free list. The duty on his sugar machinery has been reduced to ten per cent. ad valorem; on his locomotives and railway supplies to twenty per cent.; and all along the line the taxes have been cut down. It is not probable that his land taxes will be collected during the present fiscal year, and the return of peace, establishment of law and order, and protection of property will immeasurably improve his lot. If, therefore, the sugar-planter of Cuba will gauge his present outlook by a glance backward and compare it with his condition last year at this time, he may face the new year with less gloomy premonitions as to his future than some of the testimony taken by the United States Government on the effects of disinflation would indicate. The action of the President, by and with the advice of the able financier at the head of the Treasury Department, will give Cuba a sound currency, which must be the foundation of her future fiscal prosperity. The proof of the poverty of Cuba is a scarcity of capital, manifest in many different ways. The difficulty, not to say the impossibility, of selling sugar plantations proves the scarcity of capital and at the same time the precarious situation of the sugar industry. The decrease in the price of property is a natural consequence of lack of disposable capital, and this is why the rate of money is so high; it can only be caused by lack of capital, and not of money, since scarcity or abundance of money has only a limited influence on rates of interest. Nearly all the banks established for the last twenty or thirty years in Cuba have disappeared, owing to the losses experienced by the gradual increase of the poverty of the country; the want of resources rendering it impossible to start these banks anew or establish new ones with Cuban capital.