If Grant could have lived until to-day he would find considerable satisfaction in the protectorate the United States has assumed over Santo Domingo, which really amounts to American control. The same course must be taken with helpless Hayti, and it may well be that before these lines are read the administration of the finances of the “Black Republic” will have been taken over by American officers; and the American minister, acting under orders from Washington, will be the real ruler of the land, as he is in Santo Domingo. Let me digress here to express the conviction that within ten years every European possession in the West Indies, with the possible exception of Barbadoes, will come under the Stars and Stripes. Even if economic conditions do not compel this change, as they would do sooner or later, it will be made necessary by the completion of the Panama Canal. The United States, though seldom given to any riotous display of good sense, is still too wise a nation to permit a foreign power to have a naval base almost within gunshot of Colon, from which it could strike a quick and destructive blow at the inter-oceanic waterway. Conditions are ripe for the change. England has made a failure of governing her islands and, in advance of formal retirement, has abandoned her great naval station at Saint Lucia, on which millions of pounds were spent, and withdrawn her warships from the Caribbean. The Danish Islands are a heavy and continuous drain on the Copenhagen treasury that cannot be maintained for many years longer, and Washington years ago, through clear-visioned John Hay, served formal notice on Denmark that the sale of these islands to any nation except the United States would be regarded as an unfriendly act. It was the determination then to keep these islands away from the outstretched hands of Germany, because of their proximity to South America, and there are many more reasons now to prevent their transfer to any foreign power. They are so largely owned by Americans that they are practically American colonies to-day. The French Islands are the most prosperous of all, but only because of a bounty on sugar which the national government is anxious to drop. Holland has no reason for retaining her islands, which are an expense to which no glory attaches. Under American ownership these beauty spots would be restored to their old-time prosperity and no one knows this so well as the islanders themselves. In my judgment it is a matter of only a comparatively few years until England, France, Denmark, and the Netherlands will enter into some arrangement, the details of which I do not attempt to predict, by which all of their Caribbean islands will be turned over to the United States. The only possible exception is Barbadoes, which England may wish to retain as a midway station on her commercial highway to South America, but as that poverty-stricken islet, which has twice disappeared under the sea and then bobbed up again, has no