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Mr. KINCHELOE. I think that is true and that is the pathetic thing about all our possessions as far as that goes.

Mr. ROOSEVELT. Now, what we are striving to do is to change this fundamental basis, and I have every confidence that with your aid and understanding in this matter we can start and get inaugurated a program which will change it. I do not mean it will change it tomorrow or next year, but it will change it, given this idea and the time, because we are working on a proposition which fundamentally is sound. We are striving for just what you were talking about—that Denmark situation, and we are going to get it.

Mr. KINCHELOE. Let me ask you one more question, and I won't bother you any further. What has the Department of Agriculture done in the past to assist Porto Rico in establishing these experimental stations throughout the island?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. There is a Federal experiment station. Outside of the Federal experiment station there, in so far as our homestead commission, in so far as our rural schools, in so far as our farm bureaus, in so far as our experimental farms, and similar types you are talking about, are concerned, nothing.

Mr. KINCHELOE. You only have one on the island?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. One down at Mayaguez.

Mr. FULMER. These large holdings you speak of belong to the sugar interests?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. Practically you can say that the largest holdings belong to the sugar interests.

Mr. FULMER. Do they own the holdings outright?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. In many cases; yes. In other words, there is a complicated system, and it is sometimes difficult to tell exactly where it begins and where it leaves off. There is the central, which, so far as the grinding is concerned, and the colono, which, so far as the produce is concerned, either own or control the situation.

Mr. FULMER. You said you have about four very large holding interests?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. I would say if I am accurate on this-I want you to check me, Doctor Chardon, if I am wrong on it-I would say that, roughly speaking, four companies control 40 per cent of our sugar production.

Mr. CHARDON. Fifty per cent.

Mr. FULMER. What per cent of your agricultural area would that cover?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. I could not tell you that.

Mr. FULMER. I mean of the most valuable land, not waste land. Mr. CHARDON. That would be approximately 50 per cent of the valuable land, because all of the valuable land is in cane.

Mr. FULMER. In other words, four large holding companies own, control, and operate about 50 per cent of your valuable farm land? Mr. ROOSEVELT. Of our most valuable farm land. We have a lot of other farm land which is good farm land.

Mr. KINCHELOE. Are you acquainted with the manner in which Great Britain has helped Jamaica?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. Yes; I am acquainted with the help Great Britain has given Jamaica, but in Porto Rico we are aiming for a very different thing than we are aiming for in Jamaica. Our people are ethnologically of different stock. We have by this last census report,

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I should say, roughly speaking, ethnologically the island divided as follows: Seventy per cent white, 20 per cent mixed, 10 per cent colored.

Mr. KINCHELOE. Of course, the Island of Jamaica is nearly all colored.

Mr. ROOSEVELT. That is right. I should say 95 per cent of our small agriculturists, the people we are trying to get back on to fårms, are mountain folk. That is what they amount to. They are the descendants of the Andalusian peasants from Spain. Isn't that about correct?

Mr. CHARDON. Yes, sir.

Mr. LARSEN. Those people are now literate?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. A large percentage of them are literate now. We are spending 40 per cent of our revenues now on school work. We have about 500,000 children or more of school age. We have about 220,000 children in schools. Our schools—and this is normalyou see that is what would ordinarily happen-are mainly in the populous centers. It is there where most of the children are getting the schooling. Our schools have not reached back as we would wish to have them reach back into the interior, for the farmer and for the little fellow, the workingman. I would say, roughly speaking, this is a case that I have not got the figures out, gentlemen, but I know the situation that of the 220,000 children that are attending school, 70 per cent comes from the cities; that in contradistiction to that, of our population of 1,543,000, 1,200,000 are either living in the absolute country or in towns of 5,000 or less, and that the country people have, proportionately, for one country child that has a chance at school, three urban children that have a chance at school. That is what we are trying to change.

Mr. LARSEN. This change you are hoping to bring about-home ownership-will, naturally, be pretty slow until you get these people educated, will it not?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. That is exactly what we are doing, you see, with these rural schools. If we had the money, I would like to have a hundred rural schools in there this coming year. We have only got the money for about 25. We are hoping that way, gradually building, building the prosperity, building, building, building, that each year our revenues will increase and enable us to extend this work; and, as you know, when you get the snowballs rolling one thing contributes to the other, and you gradually build up. We are trying to run a tandem; that is what we are doing, with the homestead commission on the one hand, educating the people on the other hand; and, of course, it is really quite interesting, gentlemen, to see the effect of those rural schools on the surrounding community. You can tell by looking at the children whether there is one of those schools in the district. You can tell by looking at the farmhouses where the farmers live. There is, I should say, about 25 per cent difference in the looks, health, and the whole thing where you have got a rural school.

Mr. JONES. What percentage of your 500,000 children of school age are now going to school?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. Two hundred and twenty thousand.

Mr. KETCHAM. In view of the situation you have described, and with the provisions of the bill in mind, supposing these instrumentali

ties were set up, to what extent could they be used advantageously by the people with the rather limited educational opportunities they have had?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. I would like to repeat what this gentleman just said a moment ago—what to my mind was a very notable statementnamely, that the first thing that you have to do is to educate the people. The principal thing that I see through here is the furnishing of teachers to educate this mass of people. All these people whom we will be handling through this provision will be not only instructing themselves, but will be in turn forming a nuclei of instruction throughout the community.

Mr. KETCHAM. That is to say, you have no immediate hope of interpreting the extension work which we provide by similar funds in this country in the same way in Porto Rico as we would here? You would have to begin in a very much more fundamental way?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. Absolutely. You are quite correct. We have made two or three times in Porto Rico just the mistake that you are outlining there; in other words, we have attempted, before laying the foundation, to jump into something that was going very well in this country. It could not be done. So the significance of this work here will be very largely of the teaching of information that the people that we are helping out through this provision will spread through the community at large. I just want to emphasize again we are good people down there and we are citizens and we are loyal citizens and we are going to be very valuable citizens, and given aid of this sort at this particular time it is not going to be so very many years before we get into the position where we are able to carry our own load the same way that any other American citizen carries his own load.

Mr. LARSEN. In anticipation of the program set up here, to which Mr. Ketcham refers, have you made an estimate in your budget for the island of that and on which the island will be able to put up in conjunction with this program?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. Yes; we have it right here. Doctor Chardon will give it to you.

Mr. CHARDON. We are providing funds to the amount of $427,000 for agriculture and labor.

Mr. LARSEN. You start out with how much the first year?
Mr. CHARDON. In the case of the experimental station?

Mr. LARSEN. What do you anticipate?

Mr. CHARDON. We are spending $120,000 in our own experimental station, and in extension work we are already spending $122,000 from similar funds.

Mr. LARSEN. The idea is that the budget made up you are more than meeting?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. Oh, yes.

Mr. LARSEN. That is the point.

Mr. ROOSEVELT. We are matching it much more than dollar for dollar as we go on.

Mr. KETCHAM. May I refer again to my line of thought, for just one or two further suggestions?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. Yes.

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Mr. KETCHAM. If this service were provided, will you tell us what you think the response would be by the people themselves? That is, are they eager for it looking at the question from the standpoint of both the climatic and ethnological conditions?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. They are. Our people in the mountains are real mountain people. Is there anybody here who is from a mountainous district? Well, they are conservative. You know what mountain folk are. They are very conservative. They are hardworking. They want things explained to them. Once they get the hang, they go right straight ahead, and they are interested in this and eager for the work. Now, I am not talking at random, because I visited myself personally every municipality on the island. I have been back with Doctor Chardon into the mountains. I have been on the farms. I talked with the people there on their problems, and they are keen about it. I have been over these homestead commissions, finding out if there was anything particularly that they wanted. They were merry as crickets at having their own property there. Occasionally somebody would want a little more property if he could get it, and wonder if there was any way he could get a little more property, and they are working hard. They are very good people, very good people. Of course, you have got to build them up physically, too; the people can't work hard until they get something in their stomachs. The best shock troops in the world aren't any good unless you put beans and bacon into them before they make their attack.

Mr. KETCHAM. The reason for following this line of questioning is simple because of the reference repeatedly made to Denmark. I was drawing out a sort of comparison. if there was any justifiable comparison.

Mr. ROOSEVELT. There is some. Now, far be it from me to praise our own more than others, but I think our people are every whit as competent and as interested in taking advantage of an opportunity.

Mr. KETCHAM. Their climatic conditions, of course, would be very much more advantageous.

Mr. ROOSEVELT. Very much more advantageous. There is a general belief, that people in the tropics are lazy, lanquid and debilitated. In the first place, though we are in the Tropics geographically, we are never as hot in Porto Rico as Washington is. You never suffer from heat the way you do here. You never could fry an egg on the pavement the way one Congressman I know did by dropping a couple outside of this building one day. Our temperature is a mean temperature, not mean in one sense but mean in the other. It does not vary very much. It is never cold, but it is rarely very hot, and in the mountains it is never hot, in the hills.

Mr. HALL. A minute or two ago, Governor, you mentioned health. What is being done in the island to eradicate or lessen the effects of malaria that comes about by the mosquito?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. We are putting every effect we can into that with our limited resources. This year Mr. Hoover sent down a committee on child health and they made a survey of the situation down there; and they are going to help us from private sources in combating certain of our particular problems, the three principal ones being tuberculosis-we have a death rate in tuberculosis higher than any

other place in the Western Hemisphere, a death rate of four and a half times that of the United States.

Mr. LARSEN. To what do you attribute that?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. We attribute that to malnutrition primarily and the coincident things that go with great proverty.

Mr. LARSEN. There is nothing attributed to the climatic condition? Mr. ROOSEVELT. No; nothing climatic at all about it. But, for example, you take our chronic cases. In tuberculosis we have no place to isolate chronic cases; they live, perhaps, in a little room with 9 ohther members of the family, including 7 children.

Mr. LARSEN. What are the hospital facilities?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. We have hospital facilities for only a comparatively small percentage of our T. B.'s down there. That is one of the things that we are trying to do, and when we go to New York we are going to take it up with some of the big philanthropic organizations there which are interested in health work, to see if we can get aid in that.

Mr. LARSEN. Do you have competent physicians and nurses available?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. Yes; we have competent physicians. We are training nurses down there. We are training them all the time. We are training the social workers who will strike out particularly into this.

Mr. LARSEN. It is your judgment, then, that the dangers now resulting as to tuberculosis can be overcome?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. Anything in the way of health can be overcome. The whole thing is this daily cycle that is based on the economic condition, the economic condition which we have described here; in other words, the health is directly due to the economic condition, and that is the long and short of it.

Mr. LARSEN. After all, in order to remedy that, it must depend somewhat upon the attitude of the person who is receiving treatment. Mr. ROOSEVELT. They are pathetically grateful whenever you can give them treatment.

Mr. LARSEN. And willing to cooperate?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. Absolutely willing to cooperate. They are only too anxious. What we are trying to do there is we are trying to organize and we have some going now-health units just like our health units in the United States, to reach out into the districts and help them.

Mr. LARSEN. I was a little interested on one point. I did not have the opportunity of asking you about it at the time. You spoke of these homestead ideas.

Mr. ROOSEVELT. Yes.

Mr. LARSEN. They are going to buy those homes, as I understood, to let the citizens living in this territory and perhaps in some other sections, have homesteads and eventually pay for them?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. Yes, sir.

Mr. LARSEN. What would be the probable prices and conditions under which this land would be sold to the people, and would they eventually be able to clear the indebtedness?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. Oh, yes; they would, the illustration of that being that out of the 900 farms that we are starting now on that basis, we have got only 1 per cent in failures to pay.

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