Under the constitution as it is at the time of this
writing, the president is elected for a term of seven
years by the National Assembly in joint session of
the two houses. The Assembly consists of a Senate
of thirty-nine members and a House of Deputies of
ninety-five. The deputies are elected for a term
of three years by popular vote to represent the communes,
and the senators are elected for a term of six
years by the House of Deputies from a list of candidates
furnished by the president and a college of
electors, one third going out every two years.
There is a judicial system with a Court of Cassation,
which is the tribunal of appeal, a superior court
at the capital of each department, and subsidiary
and primary courts in the arrondissements and communes
; and the framework of the law is the Code
civil. According to law, education is gratuitous
and compulsory, but the law is not enforced, and
ignorance is general. A degenerate French patois
is in common use, and few know any other language,
or have any doubt that the Haitians are as intelligent
and highly educated as any people on the face
of the earth. Most of them have a patriotic pride
in their government, which is always arbitrary, generally
inefficient, and notoriously corrupt.
Nine tenths of the million and more of free and
independent citizens are of pure African blood, and
most of the rest have an intermixture of it. The
French whites who were not slaughtered were expelled
after the revolution, and no alien is allowed
to own land in the republic. The religion of the
old French colony was Roman Catholic, but the
slaves were not very thoroughly inoculated with it,
and while they nominally retained it in their state of
freedom, it became deplorably mingled with an inherited
African paganism. Voudooism and the
mystic rites of Obeah prevail more or less openly,
with all the horrid practices of serpent worship,
sometimes including the sacrifice of infants— “ the
goat without horns ” — and the eating of human
flesh. Reports of heathen practices in secret places
are doubtless exaggerated, but there are authentic
accounts of the hideous orgies which attend the Vou-
doo, or “ V au d o u x ,” worship; and serious but unavailing
attempts have been made to suppress the
cannibalism which is still a feature of it.
There is certainly a general lack of enlightenment
and progress in the Black Republic. Public improvements
are almost wholly neg lected; the roads are bad,
and the bridges so dilapidated as to be generally
avoided. T h e y are hardly ever renewed or repaired.
The villages are, as a rule, slovenly collections of shanties,
and most rural habitations are squalid and unkempt.
The old plantation buildings have gone to
decay,and industrial enterprise has fled. Agricultural
and commercial methods are crude and primitive, or
negligently conducted, and business honour is as
scarce a commodity as social and domestic virtue.
The currency of the nation is disordered and its
finances are ignorantly conducted; and of the $9,-
000,000 or so of government expenditures, a large proportion
is misapplied or fraudulently appropriated,
while corruption in the collection of revenues is almost
universal. Such is the unqualified testimony