More conservative opinions, entitled to serious and careful consideration, have been expressed to the effect that first class new and virgin cane lands, favorably located and now available, can still be purchased in Cuba at figures as low as twenty dollars an acre and in sufficient area to make possible the profitable production of 3,000,000 tons of sugar above the present output, which approximates 4,000,000 tons; increasing the total to 7,000,000. It does not seem that such great areas could easily be hidden under a bushel in as small an island as Cuba, and it is probable that not more than one half of the total area of the new lands, purchasable at such a price, would be suitable for cane-growing purposes; in which case the cost would be raised to approximately forty dollars an acre for the actual cane-producing area. If these opinions and claims are accepted, it would seem unreasonable to expect that such large areas of land, yet remaining and now available, could average as good or prove as economically productive as the lands now actually under cultivation; and it would not, therefore, seem unreasonable to assume that to produce 3,000,000 additional tons of sugar would require an area nearly if not quite as large as that now required to produce the present annual output of approximately 4,000,000 tons. It is certainly difficult to believe that the area of land now producing sugar could be duplicated from the new and virgin lands now available in Cuba. The recent purchase of considerable acreages along the line of the newly constructed Northern Railway by the American Sugar Refining Company and the Czarnikow-Rionda interests, at prices ranging from seven hundred and fifty to one thousand dollars a caballeria, or about seventy five dollars an acre, for the actual cane-growing and sugar-producing area, would seem to emphasize the conclusion that first class new and virgin cane lands, yet remaining and now available in Cuba, are not so plentiful or so cheap as claimed by some and generally supposed.