American policy had, however, somewhat changed. In 1899 the United States entered into possession of Porto Rico and into control of Cuba. Santo Domingo was one half of the island that lay between. Rather than see a foreign power installed, America decided to control Santo Domingo also.
The republic was asked if she still required aid from Washington, and the United States agreed to control the customs, organize receipts, pay interest on debts and pension the government. This she has done very effectively and remains in economic and military control to-day; Santo Domingo with a constitution in suspended animation having become an American Protectorate.
Apparently now most Dominicans would like the Americans to go, but they have no power to make them. The Americans for their part can point justifiably to the improved conditions on the island. If they went, the human dogfight would begin anew. However, let us to the country!
3
I have heard it said in London that those who live in half-houses are the aristocrats of the slums. The quaint expression may also be applied to the colored folk who live in cabins. They are the black aristocracy of the islands. It was in vain that I pitied the plight of the dwellers in the marine- and saffron-colored dolls' houses of Porto Rico. The real underdog of these parts does not pretend to any little wooden hut. He lives gregariously in the bush like the larvae of the Lackey Moth. He squats in the shadow and shine of tattered palm branches, he is rustling with his family just beyond the green fans of the wild bananas. In crossing the island of Haiti only two things share the attention—the magnificence of untamed nature and the wildness of man.
Not that the men and women have relapsed to primitive savagery. They are fully dressed, as fully as any one could care to be, and, except for little children, seem to be afraid of nakedness. In Russia, in some parts, you may see scores of men, women, and children promiscuously naked upon a river bank; but the wild children of the sun of Haiti will not even bathe in the sea unless discreetly covered. In the Africa whence they came they wore little more than a cache-sexe, but the slaves learned a decorum of dress from the Spaniard in the old Colonial days and it has remained.
They are very civil too, and talk to you willingly in a French patois or in a broad Spanish which is far from the Spanish of Madrid. But they are poor, live largely on fruit, have none of the amenities of life, and being exposed to the tropical heat, they are also exposed to the exhalations of the jungle and to its insects. They are magnificent specimens of the human race till disease touches them. What erect and beautiful women, what positively Adamlike men! My eyes fed on many pictures of human perfection. But alas for disease! Smallpox rages among them. You see beautiful boys and girls the color of the mahogany trees amongst which they live, but all blurred and shadow-marked as if there were a fault in the tissue. And when one of them dies he is just buried somewhere at the back, like a dog or a cat.
Little smallpox-stricken girls with the disease still on them come up with bunches of bananas or mangoes for sale, their open faces looking out from a hundred disease-eyes. It makes the heart ache, and also prompts the thought—what a place for a medical missionary!
The island swarms with bandits. There is only one road across it and that was opened only a month before. Its interior is extremely obscure, unvisited, and uncontrolled. It offers in an otherwise unqualified way a divine adventure for a young doctor willing to devote his life to human beings.