[8]"The West Indies and Louisiana in one hemisphere, in the other the Cape of Good Hope, Egypt and a portion of India, with St. Helena and Malta as ports of call—of this he dreamed, but the failure to secure San Domingo and England's evident intention to keep Malta, combined to topple the whole cloud castle into ruins?" "The magnificent French plan of American colonization having lost the supports of both San Domingo and Louisiana, collapsed leaving no trace." —Page 289 et seq.
[9]American Historical Magazine. December, 1915.

The independence of Haiti has been maintained as we have seen for one hundred and eleven years. In 1873 while visiting that country and looking upon her lofty hills, and upon the toiling people at their base, I fancied an appealing cry coming from these masses and I interpreted that cry in the following lines:

"The cry of souls for bread;

The cry of men and woman who

Have done great deeds and

Whose guiding star is liberty.

Who strong in their right arms,

Have won a name, a place,

And who with valor true will dare defend

That place and sooner die

Than wear the badge of slave."

On Sunday, June 15, 1873, I witnessed, in Port-au-Prince a great religious procession to pray against a return of fire upon their city. This is no unusual thing in a Roman Catholic city, although to an American it seems a waste of piety. Mr. Douglass in his graphic way in a private letter to me thus describes one of their outpourings of religious enthusiasm which occurred while he served in Port-au-Prince as United States Minister: "Yesterday," he says, "all over town, a great racket was heard of people driving the devil out of their houses by beating on their doors. On one account I was glad of their efforts to get rid of the devil although I was aware that the devil would laugh at this method of ridding the city of his presence. This is Holy week here and I must say that on account of the stillness, the absence of the tom tom and the apparent serenity of the people, I could wish holy week continued indefinitely."

With the impression of that religious procession upon my young and inexperienced mind I wrote then in my journal: "Poor, poor Haiti! As a nation it is the veriest humbug; and yet there is something splendid about it." Fourteen days later I was able to write differently. I was riding on the road leading from L'Arcahai to St. Mark in company with some young friends. "On both sides of the road were luxuriant fields of sweet potatoes, bananas and sugar cane. Mountain streams were sending down their pure waters by which the plains below were irrigated. It was the fête of St. Pierre at the bourg, and on the road we met hundreds of people, some on foot, some on donkeys, and many on beautiful horses with most magnificent saddles and trappings, all going to the bourg. Fine country gentlemen, mounted on these steeds and riding as though born on horseback, pass us very frequently, every one of whom lifts his hat entirely off his head and gives the Bon jour, monsieur. Ladies dressed in snowy white dash by us at full galop, but never so fast, but they have time to say in the sweetest voice: Bon jour, monsieur."

The constitution of Haiti contains a very complete Bill of Rights bearing testimony to the idea of liberty, but unfortunately there is nowhere any adequate defense of these rights against the encroachment of government. There is no check and balance system between executive and legislative departments; nor can the courts guarantee the rights of individuals. Governments we know are ever ready to encroach; typo demagogues ever ready to arise in professed defense of constitutional rights; hence revolutions. The soul of Haiti is military. General Legitime speaking before the Universal Races Congress in London in 1911 said: "Born in troublous time, Haiti is essentially a military state; and though he cannot entertain ideas of conquest, its head must nevertheless retain the character of a noble gendarme, the guardian of its institutions." Still there is another side. The great statesman Firmin was not a devotee of militarism. He deplored the existence of so much of it which he described as a burden falling heavily upon the rural classes. He says the "only thing the soldier learns by his long military apprenticeship is passive obedience, the absence of all moral initiative, of all exercise of personal volition, with the complete annullment of the view of human liberty struggling against injustice and wrong. When a Haitian wearing epaulettes says to you, I am a soldier, that means that he is ready to commit the most horrible crimes, to rob, to burn, to kill, just so he has the order to do so from his immediate chief." There is in fact a decidedly brilliant literary element in Haiti, including editors, authors and lawyers who are not so thoroughly military as the general trend of her history would lead us to believe. It is now time to inquire in what light Haiti regards herself in relation to the whole Negro Race. What is her mission as she understands it?

The first man I shall call upon in this respect will be our author Antenor Firmin. The following facts will show that he is entitled to a hearing. He was born in Haiti in 1851. Received all of his education there; a lawyer by profession, in 1889 he was a member of their Constitutional Convention, was Minister of Finance and of Foreign relations 1889-1891, as Mr. Blaine had good reason to know; was Minister to Paris 1900-1902; a profound scholar and a very respectable writer, possessed of a large share of common sense philosophy. He says in the preface of his book on Roosevelt and Haiti, written while in exile at Saint Thomas: "No people any more than the individual can live, make progress, and advance with sustained ardor in the walks of civilization, without an end, an ideal, which leads them onward in all the wanderings of their existence. The end is ordinarily more evident, more clear, before the will of the individual; for nations, it is some times veiled in indefinite form; but it exists always, and acts imperiously, like magnetism terrestrial impressing an irresistible direction upon the magnetic needle in spite of the fog which conceals on the horizon the point of orientation. This ideal for Haiti is the sublime effort of a little people striving for the rehabilitation of whole race of men, an effort so noble and so worthy that each one of those who participates in it may justly regard himself as an apostle." Edmund Paul, another brilliant Haitian whose life went out too soon, wrote that the end or goal of this young nation is to prove the aptitude of the whole African race to the present civilization, "An end he says, powerful, gigantesque, capable of devouring generations, ever worthy to demand and to employ all of our activity."

"In Haiti," says the late Minister Price, "the black man is in possession of national responsibility. In Haiti he is called upon to form his character, and to conduct his movements at his own risk; he receives directly the consequences, and suffers the deplorable results, of his own errors and passions. He is not being led along in civilization; he moves on the road by his own efforts. He is marching without any support on which to lean; without any other force than his own. And when he shall become sufficiently advanced to remove all doubt; when he shall become sufficiently free from his errors, and shall have sufficiently conquered his passions which now retard his steps, it will be evident that he has accomplished this result because he willed it, and because he had within his being the necessary force for its accomplishment." According to Mr. Price there will be no one who can say of the Haitians: "We civilized and educated you; none who can say: without us you would soon have relapsed into African barbarism." Haiti's mission as he understood it is to rehabilitate the Negro race. His dying gift to mankind was his splendid work on the Rehabilitation of the Black Race by the Republic of Haiti.

It is Price who says: "The Negro who shows his dainty hands and his little feet, and is piqued because, with adornments the aristocrats, who are also adorned with little hands little feet do not open their doors to him is an ignoramus and a poltroon, and is still a slave."