Page:Haiti- Her History and Her Detractors.djvu/324

 288, forming a kind of vegetable bread and butter, are of themselves wholesome and sustaining food. Mangoes are such nutritive fruit that people can live on them alone for weeks, and they are so plentiful that they are used for feeding pigs. Nature not only lavishly provides food, but her large bushy trees form such a heavy covering overhead that they may serve as resting-places in a country where it is not sufficiently cold to cause inconvenience in sleeping out of doors.

Nevertheless, the Haitian peasants do not yield to these temptations to idleness. In passing through the country one will come across innumerable green patches where vegetables are being raised; perched upon the steep sides of the hills, seeming from the distance as though they were suspended on the very brink of precipices, are numerous fields of plantations of maize, millet, coffee, beans, bananas, plantains, etc., whilst in the valleys there is an equal abundance of sugar-cane, rice, cocoa-trees, etc. The laborer is proud of his cultivated land; and hoe in hand he works, singing the while under the burning rays of the sun.

In the towns the workmen who, for instance, are employed in transporting or embarking coffee, start work at about 5 o'clock in the morning and continue until 5 or 6 P. M.; they will even work beyond this time if adequately remunerated. Until now strikes are unknown in Haiti.

The Haitians entertain neither race hatred nor race prejudice. Consequently, they find it difficult to understand why a man should be persecuted and made to endure humiliation solely on account of the color of his skin. They extend a welcome to all who arrive on their territory, irrespective of their color. When, therefore, they hear that in some countries people of different races are not allowed even to pray together in the churches, in the house of God, they wonder if the God of the Christians can be the same in those countries as in theirs; for they look upon their God as the Father of all mankind, as a benevolent Being who listens to the prayer of the humblest of His children, unmindful