NEW ENGLAND MAGAZINE March, 1906 VOLUME XXXIV PUBLISHED MONTHLY Facts About Santo Domingo By WINTHROP PACKARD WH CITY OF SANTIAGO HATEVER else may be the outcome of President Roosevelt's Santo Domingo policy one result seems certain. That is that the truth about the island will come out. The place has been for half a century a breeding ground of strange tales. Its people have been said to be truculent and cruel, dangenerous to all strangers and foreigners; voodooism and human sacrifice has been pictured as rampant among a savage crew of degenerates. who practiced all the rites of fetish. worship that have come down from aboriginal African ancestors; in fact NUMBER I the island has been described as dangerous to visit, unhealthy to inhabit and peopled by a mongrel mixture of races in whom there is no hope of good. Now there is just enough truth at the foundation of all this to uphold a tottering structure of misstatement which has endured for years. The facts are entirely another matter. The island is inhabited by two "republics," one that of Santo Domingo, the other that of Hayti. Mighty mountain. ranges divide the two and the inhabitants have but little intercourse might well have been another England, but it was not; it was a mixture of races which cannot weld into a harmonious whole. The result was not a race, but a mongrel. That is what the Dominican is to-day and that is what is the matter with his republic. You find in the island a few men of the uncontaminated Spanish stock. Of such Don Emiliano Tehera, well is EX-PRESIDENT MORALES, CENTRE; U. S. MINISTER T. C. DAWSON, RIGHT; SANCHEZ, MINISTER OF FINANCE, LEFT They built churches of great architectural beauty, some of which have survived the decay of the centuries. Others are but crumbling ruins. Could they have remained there, their blood unmixed, it is easy to believe that the island would have to-day been civilized, a place of fair cities, prosperous plantations and no political problem for the United States or Germany or anybody else to grapple with. Unfortunately there were the negroes. They thrived and multiplied in the favorable climate and their blood and that of the Spaniards mingled. Could it have been Saxon, Norman, Celt and Briton, Santo Domingo named "the grand old man" of the island. Another is Miguel A. Roman, governor of Santiago province in the interior. These, and a few like them, are the brains and the stability of the people, and when the mongrels reach a deadlock in |