The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-08-14

it exactly-''Where every prospect pIeases and only man is viIe'' Every trace of the fine old civilization that ex- isted here under the polished French planters-when their Capitol
 was appropriately called The Paris of the West Indies''-has vanished as completely as that of the early Span iards, and the lovely island has retro
 graded under negro rule from wealth and prosperity to poverty and semi
 barbarity. There are now no manufac-
 turies, nor home industries of any sort; the government is bankrupt, the towns
 in ruins, and the men spend their time
 in idleness, when not ''revoluting,'' sup
 ported by the women. The paper money issued by the successive governments is enormously depreciated by frequent re-
 pudiation of nature, the people of
 Espanola find existence so easy a bur
 den that they rarely exert themselves
 to labor; and so mild is the climate the
 whole year through, severity being only
 in the way of added heat, that the younger portion of the population goes
 entirely without clothing, winter and
 summer
 Holding our noses with one hand and
 our skirts with the other while picking
 precarious way through fndiscribably filthy streets of Port au Prince, we
 heartily endorse Froudes' opinion-that the Black Republic presents the most ridiculous caricature of civilization to be found in the world. Listen to his
 eminently truthful description: T had
 seen Jacmel and therefore thought my
 self prepared for the worst. But JacmeI
 is an outlying symptom; Port au Prince is the central ulcer. Long before we
 came to shore, there came off whiffs, not of drains, as at Havana, but of &C.,
 tive dirt fermenting in the sunlight. Calling our handkerchiefs to our help and looking to our feet carefully, we steped up the quay and walked forward
 as judiciously as we could. With the
 help of stones We crossed a shallow
 ditch, where rotten fish, vegetables and other articles wer lying about pro-
 miscuously and entered upon what does
 duty as a grand promenade. We were
 in ''The Paris of the West Indies," with
 boulevards and plazas, fiacres and crimson parasols. The boulevards were filtered with the refuse of the houses
 and were foul as pigstys, and the dark complexioned ladies under their para
 sols were picking their way amid the filth, in Parisian kid boots and trailing silk dresses. I saw fiacre broken down in a black pool, out of which a blacker ladyship was scrambling. Fev-
 CT breeds so prodigiously in that pes tilential squalor that forty thousand people were estimated to have died of it in a single year. There were shops and stores and streets, men and women in taWdry European costume, and ofti- cers on horseback, with a latter of lace
 and gliding. The rank, beauty and fashion of Port au Prince were at their morning mass in the cathedral-fOr they are all Catholics, with African
 belief underneath. They have French clergy, an archbishop and a bishop. paid miserably but still subssting--not
 at all as objects of reverence, as else
 where, but as humble servants and
 ministers of black society. They are
 called white trash" and exists only on
 tolerance Black dukes and marquises
 drive over them in the streets and
 swear at them. If this was the worst,
 or even if the dirt and disease were the
 worst, 1t might be borne. But this is
 far from being the worst. Immortality
 Is so universal that it ceases be a
 fault, for a fault implies an exception,
 and in Haiti it is the rule. Behind the
 immortality. behind the religiosity,
 there lies, active and alive the horrible
 revival of the worst African super
 stitions; the serpent worship, the child
 sacrifice, the cannibalism There is no
 room to doubt it--facts are notorious.
 A full account of a certain heather rite,
 involving murder, which took place
 here, in secret, not long ago was pub
 lished in one of the local papers; and
 the only result of the expose was that
 the president imprisoned the editor. A few years ago, persons guilty of these infamies were sometimes tried and
 punished; now they are left alone, be- cause to convict them would be to acknowledge the truth of the indict- ment.
 When Port au Prince was laid out by Y years ago, its broad. well-paved boule wards were lined with handsome houses and churches, it's numerous parks or namented with fountains and statuary and shaded by the most splendid trees of the tropics. But they have all dis appeared and no trace remains but un- slightly heaps of ruins. The debris of | the two great earthQuakes-one in 1S5=, the other nineteen years later-has never been clard away, but added to by | incendiary fires of innumerable revolu- tions The principal church of the present time is an over-grown wooden
 shed, and the Houses of Assembly are
 shabbiIy built of the same material
 Every year or two whole quarters of the city are burned, and the people
 make no rpairs byond putting up a few | more slight wooden structures. that fall
 ready prey to the torches of the next revolutionists The remains of the cele-
 brated palace of Salnave, majestic even | in ruins, show something of the impos- | ing order of the architecture that once existed; but the negro presidents of to- | day are content to live in a rambling,
 misshapen house of inferior construc- | ton, which is situated at one side of the Champs de Mars, opposite the Ho- 1 tel Bennevue Except for the ragged
 and barefooted black soldiers guarding | the entrance, you will never suspect it | to be the palace" of high and mighty