WH

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

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

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