The first man I shall call upon in this respect will be our author Antenor Firmin. The following facts will show that he is entitled to a hearing. He was born in Haiti in 1851. Received all of his education there; a lawyer by profession, in 1889 he was a member of their Constitutional Convention, was Minister of Finance and of Foreign relations 1889-1891, as Mr. Blaine had good reason to know; was Minister to Paris 1900-1902; a profound scholar and a very respectable writer, possessed of a large share of common sense philosophy. He says in the preface of his book on Roosevelt and Haiti, written while in exile at Saint Thomas: "No people any more than the individual can live, make progress, and advance with sustained ardor in the walks of civilization, without an end, an ideal, which leads them onward in all the wanderings of their existence. The end is ordinarily more evident, more clear, before the will of the individual; for nations, it is some times veiled in indefinite form; but it exists always, and acts imperiously, like magnetism terrestrial impressing an irresistible direction upon the magnetic needle in spite of the fog which conceals on the horizon the point of orientation. This ideal for Haiti is the sublime effort of a little people striving for the rehabilitation of whole race of men, an effort so noble and so worthy that each one of those who participates in it may justly regard himself as an apostle." Edmund Paul, another brilliant Haitian whose life went out too soon, wrote that the end or goal of this young nation is to prove the aptitude of the whole African race to the present civilization, "An end he says, powerful, gigantesque, capable of devouring generations, ever worthy to demand and to employ all of our activity." "In Haiti," says the late Minister Price, "the black man is in possession of national responsibility. In Haiti he is called upon to form his character, and to conduct his movements at his own risk; he receives directly the consequences, and suffers the deplorable results, of his own errors and passions. He is not being _led along_ in civilization; he moves on the road by his own efforts. He is marching without any support on which to lean; without any other force than his own. And when he shall become sufficiently advanced to remove all doubt; when he shall become sufficiently free from his errors, and shall have sufficiently conquered his passions which now retard his steps, it will be evident that he has accomplished this result because he willed it, and because he had within his being the necessary force for its accomplishment." According to Mr. Price there will be no one who can say of the Haitians: "We civilized and educated you; none who can say: without us you would soon have relapsed into African barbarism." Haiti’s mission as he understood it is to rehabilitate the Negro race. His dying gift to mankind was his splendid work on the Rehabilitation of the Black Race by the Republic of Haiti.