With the impression of that religious procession upon my young and inexperienced mind I wrote then in my journal: "Poor, poor Haiti! As a nation it is the veriest humbug; and yet there is something splendid about it." Fourteen days later I was able to write differently. I was riding on the road leading from L’Arcahai to St. Mark in company with some young friends. "On both sides of the road were luxuriant fields of sweet potatoes, bananas and sugar cane. Mountain streams were sending down their pure waters by which the plains below were irrigated. It was the fête of St. Pierre at the bourg, and on the road we met hundreds of people, some on foot, some on donkeys, and many on beautiful horses with most magnificent saddles and trappings, all going to the bourg. Fine country gentlemen, mounted on these steeds and riding as though born on horseback, pass us very frequently, every one of whom lifts his hat entirely off his head and gives the Bon jour, monsieur. Ladies dressed in snowy white dash by us at full galop, but never so fast, but they have time to say in the sweetest voice: Bon jour, monsieur." The constitution of Haiti contains a very complete Bill of Rights bearing testimony to the idea of liberty, but unfortunately there is nowhere any adequate defense of these rights against the encroachment of government. There is no check and balance system between executive and legislative departments; nor can the courts guarantee the rights of individuals. Governments we know are ever ready to encroach; typo demagogues ever ready to arise in professed defense of constitutional rights; hence revolutions. The soul of Haiti is military. General Legitime speaking before the Universal Races Congress in London in 1911 said: "Born in troublous time, Haiti is essentially a military state; and though he cannot entertain ideas of conquest, its head must nevertheless retain the character of a noble gendarme, the guardian of its institutions." Still there is another side. The great statesman Firmin was not a devotee of militarism. He deplored the existence of so much of it which he described as a burden falling heavily upon the rural classes. He says the "only thing the soldier learns by his long military apprenticeship is passive obedience, the absence of all moral initiative, of all exercise of personal volition, with the complete annullment of the view of human liberty struggling against injustice and wrong. When a Haitian wearing epaulettes says to you, I am a soldier, that means that he is ready to commit the most horrible crimes, to rob, to burn, to kill, just so he has the order to do so from his immediate chief." There is in fact a decidedly brilliant literary element in Haiti, including editors, authors and lawyers who are not so thoroughly military as the general trend of her history would lead us to believe. It is now time to inquire in what light Haiti regards herself in relation to the whole Negro Race. What is her mission as she understands it?