Columbus' panegyric on the beauty, fertility and resources of the Island has been echoed by every writer and traveler who has since visited the country. The United States Commission of Inquiry to Santo Domingo reported in 1871: "The resources of the country are vast and various, and its products may be increased with scarcely any other limit than the labor expended upon them.... Taken as a whole, this Republic is one of the most fertile regions on the face of the earth. The evidence of men well acquainted with the other West India Islands declares this to be naturally the richest of them all." Yet the country's wonderful resources are to-day in almost virgin condition; in the greater part of the Republic's extent they remain absolutely untouched; in the remainder the beginning of development has scarcely been made. In the first days of the colony it appeared that agricultural prosperity would quickly be attained. Great plantations were set out and the remains of palaces and convents in Santo Domingo City testify to the wealth they produced. But the prosperity was founded on the basis of slavery. The laughing aborigines soon succumbed under forced labor, the importation of negroes was found expensive, and hopes of better fortune attracted the colonists to the American continent. While the country languished under restrictive trade regulations, stock raising became almost the sole pursuit of the Spanish section of the island. In the meantime the French settled the western coast, and the name of their colony, also founded on slavery, became a synonym for wealth and luxury. The development of the Spanish section had scarcely begun at the end of the eighteenth century when it was blocked by wars, the Haitian occupation, and later by the civil disturbances. The native had no incentive to accumulate property, which would only attract revolutionists, and the foreigner was chary of investing his money in so turbulent a community. What progress has been made is due to the short periods of peace, principally the period of Heureaux's ascendancy, from 1880 to 1899, and the periods from 1905 to date. The rapid and gratifying strides made since the Dominican-American fiscal treaty increased the probabilities of peace are an indication of what the country may and will in time attain. As an English-speaking resident put it, paraphrasing a familiar saying in the United States, "If the people will only raise more cacao and less Hades, the country will soon be a paradise." At the present time the most serious obstacle to rural development is the lack of adequate means of communication--roads and railroads. It is evident that the interior cannot be developed so long as the cost of transportation is prohibitive or the roads are impassable during a great part of the year.