notorious; a full
account was published in one of the local newspapers, and the only
result was that the president imprisoned the editor for exposing his
country. A few years ago persons guilty of these infamies were tried and
punished; now they are left alone, because to prosecute and convict them
would be to acknowledge the truth of the indictment.

In this, as in all other communities, there is a better side as well as
a worse. The better part is ashamed of the condition into which the
country has fallen; rational and well-disposed Haytians would welcome
back the French but for an impression, whether well founded or ill I
know not, that the Americans would not suffer any European nation to
reacquire or recover any new territory on their side of the Atlantic.
They make the most they can of their French connection. They send their
children to Paris to be educated, and many of them go thither
themselves. There is money among them, though industry there is none.
The Hayti coffee which bears so high a reputation is simply gathered
under the bushes which the French planters left behind them, and is half
as excellent as it ought to be because it is so carelessly cleaned. Yet
so rich is the island in these and other natural productions that they
cannot entirely ruin it. They have a revenue from their customs of
5,000,000 dollars to be the prey of political schemers. They have a
constitution, of course, with a legislature--two houses of a
legislature--universal suffrage, &c., but it does not save them from
revolutions, which recurred every two or three years till the time of
the present president. He being of stronger metal than the rest, takes
care that the votes are given as he pleases, shoots down recusants, and
knows how to make himself feared. He is a giant, they say--I did not see
him--six feet some inches in height and broad in proportion. When in
Jamaica he was a friend of Gordon, and the intimacy between them is
worth noting, as throwing light on Gordon's political aspirations.

I stayed no longer than the ship's business detained the captain, and I
breathed more freely when I had left that miserable cross-birth of
ferocity and philanthropic sentiment. No one can foretell the future
fate of the black republic, but the present order of things cannot last
in an island so close under the American shores. If the Americans forbid
any other power to interfere, they will have to interfere themselves. If
they find Mormonism