The people we met in Holland wear wooden shoes to teach them patience and humility. With wooden shoes no frenzied financier of Holland will ever travel the fast road of speculation, slip on a bucket-shop banana peel, and fall on the innocent bystander who has coughed up his savings and given them to the honest financier to safely invest.
The bank of Holland is an old woolen stock ing, and money never comes out of the stocking unless there is a string to it, and the string is the heart string of an honest people, that will stand no trifling. If a dishonest financier came to Holland from any other country, and did any of his dirty work, the women of Holland, who handle the funds, would give him such a hazing that he would never open his three-card monte lay-out in any other country.
It is a country where you get the right change back, and the cows give eighteen carat milk, and the hens have not learned to lay small, cold storage eggs. It is the country for me, if the women would wear corsets, and not be the same size all the way down, so that if you hugged a girl you wouldn't make a dent in her, that would not come out until she got her breath.
And we left such a country and such a people, to come here to Cuba, where the population now comprises the meanest features of the desperate and wicked Spaniards, beaten at their own game of loot, the trickiness of the native Cuban, flushed with pride because his big American brother helped him to drive away the Spaniard that he could never have gotten rid of alone, and with no respect for the American who helped, and only meets him respectfully because he is afraid of being thrown into the ocean if he is impudent, and the worst class of Yankee grafters and highway robbers that have ever been allowed to stray away from the land of the free. That is what Cuba is to-day.