Istwa Nou

Harry Johnston, a British colonial administrator and writer, toured the Black republics for a book published in 1910. He found the Haitian elite highly educated, quick, witty and widely read, and then could find almost nothing in that education fitted to the country they lived in. France, he observed, trained young men for practical work in Africa and Asia, and gave the youth of Haiti a schooling suited to life in Paris or a French provincial town. Haitian lawyers knew the fine points of the Code Napoleon and showed no interest in building a plain civil and criminal law that would work for the population actually living on the island. In agriculture, forestry, botany, mineralogy and bacteriology he could find no Haitian at work at all. Johnston had his own reasons for saying it, since a colonial official who finds self-government wanting is arguing for his own trade. The observation still landed, and Haitian writers spent the next fifty years answering it.

Under its charter the Banque Nationale de la République d'Haïti owed the government its revenues only at the close of the fiscal year, while the government needed cash every month. Cincinnatus Leconte asked for a supplementary convention to keep the old arrangement running. The bank refused, hinting that a monthly allowance might follow some form of control over the customs. Its New York group, run by Roger Farnham of the National City Bank, assured the State Department that no such thought had crossed anyone's mind. A convention was patched together anyway, and honest collection under Leconte and Tancrède Auguste left the government square with the bank and more than eight hundred thousand dollars in hand when the 1913 fiscal year closed. The bank opened a second front instead. It held ten million francs in gold meant to retire the debased paper gourdes, was lending that gold at twelve and a half percent, and would not give it up. When the assembly closed the loopholes, the bank called in loans and stopped making new ones.