3. Writers still under the spell of the root-and-branch abolitionists who were wont to exalt Toussaint, the Haytian general, above our Washington, strain hard to conceal the real cause of the lamentable conditions now prevailing in Hayti and San Domingo. One tells us that because of the many mountains, there being no railroad system, separate communities are defended by almost impregnable natural barriers, and as neighboring peoples are hereditary enemies, there is always war somewhere. The remedy recommended is to build railroads in the island as the English have done in Jamaica. Another writer tells us that we must not jump to the conclusion that all the inhabitants of San Domingo are degraded negroes; that while the population of the interior are sunk in ignorance, superstition, and barbarism, yet in the capital and the coast towns there are some people of apparently lily-white strain, well educated, speaking two or three languages, who supply the mulatto republic with generals and political leaders. The masses of these Dominicans are very patriotic, and would indeed do finely if they were not divided into hostile parties by self-seeking agitators. And you may consult many others who keep back the real explanation. There is one cardinal fact which stands forth in the history of Hayti as prominently as slavery does in the train of American events which brought on the brothers' war. It is this: soon after the outbreak of the French revolution the mulattoes were accorded political privileges, and then a little later--it was in 1794--France equalized the negroes of her colonies just freed with the whites in political and civil rights. This made the negroes of Hayti, who were in intelligence and development somewhat below those of the south when the latter were emancipated, full-fledged self-governing republicans. The whites were but few. What of them were not massacred at once by the blacks fled for their lives. The history of both the Haytian and the Dominican republic (the latter achieving its independence in 1844) is the same. Their people make a hell on earth of the most beautiful and fertile of islands. As slavery was plainly the cause of the southern confederacy, the grant of political power to the mulattoes and negroes not at all qualified to use it is just as plainly the cause and sole author of chronic civil war and anarchy in Hayti and San Domingo.