that tie could not be considered to have been a wealthy man. General Boisrond Canal, who was at three different times at the head of the administration of his country, lived on the pension granted him and on the products of his plantation up to the time of his death, which occurred in 1905, upon which Congress granted a pension to his widow. Ex-President Légitime's sole income is the pension which the country grants to its former rulers.
Those who charge all the Presidents of Haiti and the Haitian people at large with being dishonest and corrupt are merely propagating slanders in more or less good faith.
At times there are grave scandals in France; nevertheless, no impartial-minded person will infer from this that the French people are corrupt, for their probity is proverbial; a whole nation cannot be made to suffer for the faults or the failings of a few of its citizens.
In the United States the administration of some important cities—unnecessary to name here—has often been in the hands of very unscrupulous men who have enriched themselves at the expense of the people. Even among the members of a body as deserving of respect and as justly esteemed as is the Senate of the United States there have been some men who have forgotten the duty they owe to themselves and to the States which placed their trust in them. Does it follow that because a few men have transgressed the rigid code of honor, that the Americans are as a whole a corrupt people, or that the Senate is undeserving of the universal respect it enjoys? Most assuredly not. The foreigner who, in making use of a few particular cases in generalizing, makes the whole nation or all Congress responsible for the misconduct of a few individuals, the "black sheep" among them, would be guilty of gross slander toward the United States in thus misrepresenting the solid qualities and virtues of a thoroughly honest people. When there is question of the Senate, its tradition and its reputation place it so high in the public opinion that it does not suffer by the failings of any of its members.
