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?