Tyrannies and revolutions--The action of climate and miscegenation--A republic of negroes: Hayti.
In Central America and the islands of the Antilles civil wars are the result not merely of racial conflict, but also of the enervating action of the Tropics. Precocious, sensual, impressionable, the Americans of these vast territories devote their energies to local politics. Industry, commerce, and agriculture are in a state of decay, and the unruly imagination of the Creole expends itself in constitutions, programmes, and lyrical discourse; in these regions anarchy is sovereign mistress.
Five republics came into being here, which have lived in a continual state of conflict, their aim being political domination. Internal disorders and international wars are continual. Ambitious generals have sometimes forced a provisional unity upon the continent, but it is soon divided by the anarchy and dictatorships which continually overwhelm the soil of the Tropics.
It is impossible to distinguish a military period and an industrial period in the history of Central America. Intellectuals and generals govern alternately, it is true, but thanks to identical methods; they all exercise the same sanguinary tutelage. A few dictators whose rule has been slightly more { 223} prolonged have at times contrived to increase the number of schools or develop the national finances, but personal initiative and the importation of foreign capital are equally out of the question under the rule of autocracies which govern solely by grace of the military element. Liberty, wealth, and human rights are the appanage of inhuman dictators.
The Republic was proclaimed and the political Constitution adopted in Central America on the 10th of April, 1825. It was then that the autonomous life of the five united provinces commenced. General Manuel Joseph was the first President of Central America. The Federal Statute of 1824 attributed all powers to Congress: it initiated a parliamentary dictatorship. As against the popular assembly the Executive was powerless, and the Senate, to which the Constitution confided the final sanction of the laws promulgated by Congress, was weak in point of numbers. As in all republics, the government was popular, representative, and federal. The equality of all citizens and the abolition of slavery being decreed, it was a new era that opened, liberal and romantic.