Of thirty-four plantations, the number worked in all the islands at this time, only six or seven are in the hands of their founders.

Some, which cost one hundred thousand dollars, were sold by the sheriff for fifteen or eighteen thousand; some, which cost a quarter of a million, were sold for less than a hundred thousand.
If you speak with the planters, they will tell you that their great difficulty is to get a favorable market; that the duty on their sugar imported into San Francisco eats up their profits; and that the only cure--the cure-all, I should say, for all the ills they suffer--is a treaty with the United States, which shall admit their product duty free.
Of course any one can see that if the sugar duty were remitted to them, the planters would make more money, or would lose less.

An ingenuous planter summed up for me one day the whole of that side of the case, by saying, "If we had plenty of labor and a free market for our sugar, we should be thoroughly satisfied." But I am persuaded that, as there are planters now who are prosperous and contented, and who make handsome returns even with the sugar duty against them, so, if that were removed, there would be planters who would continue their regular and slow march toward bankruptcy; and for whom the remitted duty would be but a temporary respite, while it would deprive them of a cheap and easy way to account for their failure.

Wherever on the islands I found a planter living on his own plantation, managing it himself, and _out of debt_, I found him making money, even with low prices for his sugar, and even if the plantation itself was not favorably placed; not only this, but I found plantations yielding steady and sufficient profits, under judicious management, which in previous hands became bankrupt.

But on the other hand, where I found a plantation heavily encumbered with debt and managed by a superintendent, the owner living elsewhere, I heard usually, though not always, complaints of hard times.