but his government, especially in his later years, was almost as despotic as that of Christophe. Boyer was the first Haytian who united the blacks and mulattoes under his rule. It was mainly through confidence in him that the government of Hayti won the recognition of the European powers. … In 1825 its independence was formally recognised by France, on a compensation of 150,000,000 of francs being guaranteed to the exiled planters and to the home government. This vast sum was afterwards reduced: but it still weighed heavily on the impoverished state, and the discontents which the necessary taxation produced led to Boyer's downfall," in 1843, when he withdrew to Jamaica, and afterwards to Paris, where he died in 1850. A singular state of affairs ensued. The eastern, or Spanish, part of the island resumed its independence (1844), under a republican constitution resembling that of Venezuela, and with Pedro Santana for its President, and has been known since that time as the Republic of San Domingo, or the Dominican Republic. In the Western, or Haytian Republic, large numbers of the negroes, "under the names of Piquets and Zinglins, now formed themselves into armed bands, and sought to obtain a general division of property under some communistic monarch of their own race. The mulatto officials now cajoled the poor negroes by bribing some old negro, whose name was well known to the mass of the people as one of the heroes of the war of liberty, to allow himself to be set up as President. The Boyerists, as the mulatto oligarchy were called, thus succeeded in re-establishing their power," and their system (for describing which the word "gerontocracy" has been invented) was carried on for some years, until it resulted, in 1847, in the election to the Presidency of General Faustin Soulouque. "Soulouque was an illiterate negro whose recommendations to power were that he was old enough to have taken part in the War of Independence, having been a lieutenant under Pétion, and that he was popular with the negroes, being devotedly attached to the strange mixture of freemasonry and fetish worship by which the Haytian blacks maintain their political organisation." {1634} The new President took his elevation more seriously than was expected, and proved to be more than a match for the mulattoes who thought to make him their puppet. He gathered the reins into his own hands, and crushed the mulattoes at Port-au-Prince by a general massacre. He then "caused himself to be proclaimed Emperor, by the title of Faustinus the First (1849)," and established a grotesque imperial court, with a fantastic nobility, in which a Duke de Lemonade figured by the side of a Prince Tape-à-l'œil. This lasted until December 1858, when Soulouque was dethroned and sent out of the country, to take refuge in Jamaica, and the republic was