But intervention in Dominica is only one part of the story, even according to the confession of the State Department. Side by side with Dominica on the same tempting island is the Black Republic of Hayti, with a numerous population, which more than two generations ago achieved national independence, and at a later day, by the recognition of our Government, took its place under the Law of Nations as equal and peer of the Great Republic. To all its paramount titles of Independence and Equality, sacred and unimpeachable, must be added its special character as an example of self-government, being the first in the history of the African race, and a promise of the future. Who can doubt that as such this Black Republic has a value beyond all the products of its teeming tropical soil? Like other Governments, not excepting our own, it has complications, domestic and foreign. Among the latter is chronic hostility with Dominica, arising from claims territorial and pecuniary. To these claims I refer without undertaking to consider their justice. It is enough that they exist. And here comes the wrong perpetuated by the Great Republic. In the effort to secure the much-coveted territory, our Government, not content with maintaining the usurper Baez in power, occupying the harbors of Dominica with the war-ships of the United States, sent other war-ships, being none other than our most powerful monitor, the Dictator, with the frigate Severn as consort, and with yet other monitors in their train, to menace the Black Republic by an act of war. An American admiral was found to do this thing, and an American minister, himself of African blood, was found to aid the admiral. The dispatch of the Secretary of State instituting this act of war does not appear in his Report; but we are sufficiently enlightened by that of Mr. Bassett, our Minister Resident at Port-au-Prince, who, under date of February 17, 1870, informs the State Department in Washington that he had “transmitted to the Haytian Government notification that the United States asked and expected it to observe a strict neutrality in reference to the internal affairs of San Domingo”; and then, with superserviceable alacrity, he lets the Department know that he communicated to Commander Owen, of the Seminole, reports that “persons in authority under the Haytian Government were planning clandestinely schemes for interference in San Domingo affairs.”[37] But a moment of contrition seems to have overtaken the Minister; for he adds, that he did not regard these reports “as sufficiently reliable to make them the basis for a recommendation of _severe or extreme measures_.”[38] Pray, by what title, Mr. Minister, could you recommend any such measures, being nothing less than war against the Black Republic? By what title could you launch these great thunders? The menacing note of the Minister was acknowledged by the Black Republic without one word of submission,--as also without one word of proper resentment.[39]