CHAPTER II

HISTORY—GOVERNMENT—AMERICAN
OCCUPATION

Santo Domingo is almost as unknown to the outside world
today as it was when discovered by Columbus, notwithstand¬
ing the fact that it is the second largest, the richest and the
most fertile of the Antilles; that it was the seat of the first
European settlement in the New World; that its capital is
the oldest European city in the Western Hemisphere, and
that within its borders repose the bones of Columbus him¬
self. It may well be called "The Island Where Time Has
Stood Still," for, with all its beauties and the richness of its
natural resources, much of it is as primitive and crude as in
the days of the first Spanish settlement four hundred years
ago.

Nowhere is the rise, decline and fall of Spanish Colonial
power so vividly exemplified as in Santo Domingo with its
history teeming with great names and with deeds now bloody,
now paltry, with conquest and quarrels, discovery and piracy,
with exploits and exploitation, slavery and revolution. No¬
where was there builded into the foundations of the civil struc¬
ture that love of home, of popular education and of equality
before the law that have given to the United States what¬
ever of stability its institutions may boast. Religious zeal
was there, but it was exotic and misguided, seeking its finest
expression in a monasticism that contributed little more than
faint intermittent protests against the general decay of popular
morals caused largely by the brutal exploiting of subject
peoples in the general greed for riches without labor.

Santo Domingo is more than an island or a Republic. It
is a monument, an object lesson in modern history of the
ancient truth that "Righteousness exalteth a nation" and that
"Sin is a reproach to any people." Of course, the Island is
not alone in this rather unenviable distinction. All lands, all
histories, speak constantly of reward and of retribution: But
about the crumbling walls of that ancient colonial capitol,
Spain's first proud citadel in the New World, seem to linger
more than elsewhere the flavor of mortality, the lesson of
the strength of the meek and the futility of force.

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