splendor. By importing beet sugar into England it became impossible for them to continue with advantage to themselves the cultivation of the sugar-cane. The preponderance of the English in these colonies, or in other words and to use an expression familiar to the calumniators of Haiti, the supremacy of the white man, was unable to preserve the former prosperity of the British possessions in the West Indies. It is therefore more than unjust to impute to the laziness of the Haitians or to their so-called incapacity for governing themselves the abandonment of the cultivation of many products which for economic reasons are no longer profitable.
Will the English writers of the school of St. John now admit that more than one century was necessary to their country in order to attain political stability, to conquer its liberty and achieve its full development? From her many severe trials England has emerged stronger and more powerful; and she is the more justly proud of her present condition in that it has been acquired at the cost of great effort and the lives of a great number of her sons.
Haiti, which has comparatively come into life but yesterday, need not be disheartened; she knows that the struggle for progress is a hard one and that success is not easy to be obtained. Were she inclined to ignore this fact, the tribulations through which France has passed would have been sufficient to make her realize the difficulty of the task. This nation, which was and still is one of the greatest exponents of civilization, should have long ago been struck off the maps of the world if intestine dissensions and civil wars were to prove the incapacity of a people to govern itself. With France, as with Germany and Great Britain, almost every step on the thorny road of progress has been paid for with the blood of her children. Her history, to go no farther back than 1789, is at least as agitated and surely more bloody than that of Haiti. It took this people, who rank to-day as one of the leading nations of the world, more than eighteen centuries to obtain
