link that binds the 50-million-dollar railroad in China and the 2-million-dollar industrial plant in South Africa to the small American investors. What will the merchant in St. Louis, the school teacher in Boston, the doctor in Denver, say when they are asked to buy a bond of a railroad with an unpronounceable name in China. or a share of stock in a fertilizer factory at Stellenbosch, Cape Colony? There is no doubt about what they would have said three years ago: politely, precisely, or profanely they would have told the salesman that they had better use for their money at home where they could watch it, and that he had better run along and not try to palm off his foreign gold bricks on them. To-day, they may see things differently. If the railroad with the unpronounceable name in China is managed by an American corporation allied with the biggest bank in the country, they may feel safer in buying its bonds, with interest payable in good American gold coin in New York. If the fertilizer factory at Stellenbosch is owned and operated by an American corporation with 50 million dollars of capital, and if the interest they are asked to buy is not merely a share of stock in the fertilizer factory, but is practically a promissory note (called a debenture bond) of that American corporation, they may not mind risking some of their surplus cash in buying it.

That word "may" is the crux of the question of the ultimate success of the American International Corporation, and of whatever other big concerns may enter the foreign field in competition with it. Americans as a race are conservative in money matters, and they have been a home-keeping people. They have not roamed the seven seas so long as their British cousins. Foreign lands and unpronounceable names make them a bit suspicious of everything connected with them. And, of course, not every excursion of even British or French trading or development companies has been a success. Most Americans have heard, however

vaguely in detail, of the South Sea bubble and of the fate of the East India Company; and our achievements at Panama have recalled vividly to their memories the history of Ferdinand de Lesseps, who, after his brilliant success with the Suez Canal, carried with him to spectacular disaster, in the French Panama Canal Company, the savings of thousands of the small investors of France. Quite naturally, and quite properly, the small investors of America are going to look twice before they follow financial leadership, however sound, into a novel path of investment, however good. How fast and how far they will follow will depend upon the genius and integrity of their leaders.

The European war has done much to alter the state of mind of Americans toward things foreign. Names like Przemysl and Kraguievatz and Sidd-el-Bahr are as alien and unreal as Stellenbosch and Han-Yang and Rio Grande do Sul: yet the war news has made these first three words familiar in appearance and vivid in their reality as the names of actual places. And when British ships have seized American cotton, and when the price of mules in Missouri has soared with the demand for draft animals in France, even the most rural American has acquired a living sense of the actuality and importance of foreign trade. And again, with as much easy money as is now in circulation in this country, the speculative instinct asserts itself. It breeds the willingness to take a "sporting chance" with money in a small way that is characteristic of the Englishman as an investor in foreign enterprise.

In any event, the United States is now committed to at least one big effort to employ American capital abroad. We shall hereafter probably look as much outward upon the world as inward upon ourselves. We have at last become a "creditor," or "lending," nation. And our immediate problem of a too-heavy supply of gold is being solved by sending it forth on what our commercial ancestors called an "adventure," abroad.

M

BY

R. R. B. DAVIS, Jr., American Chargé d'Affaires at Port au Prince, was wakened out of a sound sleep by the rattle of musketry early in the morning of July 27th last. Late in the afternoon of the 16th of September, with a new Haitian Minister of Foreign Affairs, he signed the treaty which needs only the ratification of the United States Senate to make a healthy, self-supporting community out of what had been for three years a kind of bankrupt purgatory. In between those dates lies the whole story of American intervention in Haiti: the urgent necessity for it, the way it was done, and the result of it.

When Davis awoke daylight was just reaching over the mountains. Eleven months in Haiti had accustomed the American Chargé to the noises of endemic revolution. But this was a new noise: no halting stammer of shots but a continuous rattle; machine guns were in it, and a great squandering of ammunition in many magazine rifles. Something like a battle was going on down in the shadowy city. Davis looked at his watch. It was a quarter-past four. He remembers the time because that was for him the beginning of an uninterrupted period of fifty-two hours of waking nightmare.

Pretty soon Mr. Williams, director of the Franco-American Bank, came running down from the Hotel Montaigne. By this time the day was clear and bright over the red roofs and the green trees of the town and the blue water of the bay.

Williams and Davis got into a buggy and drove downtown, Davis bound for the Legation and Williams for the bank. and both of them to find out what the row was all about.

As they drove close by the French Legation and the President's "Palace" the Americans could see that a tramway locomotive and tender had been capsized as an impromptu breastworks just in front of it, and they could make out a few quiet forms lying near the tracks. The firing continued with gusts of recurrent spirit down in the city as the neutral buggy held on for the American Legation. Men were lying in the gutters, shooting around the corner, and firing from windows: soldiers and citizens-in Haiti a cap is generally the only distinction-armed with old Mausers, machetes, and heavy walking sticks, and all of them talking and yelling at once, were running wild through the streets and in and out of the houses. Haitians speak either French or Creole, according to their station in life, and it is hard enough to understand anything they say in cold sobriety. Drunk with blood and revolution and Haitian rum, they sound like a pack of dogs barking. As Davis said, "It looked like the whole place had gone crazy with the heat."

At the Legation the facts were obtained which proved the seriousness of the situation, and Davis immediately cabled to the Department of State at Washington.

Guillaume Sam, who had become Presi dent of Haiti in March, 1915, had been for four months maintaining his position with

increasing difficulty. The revolutionary party of Dr. Ronsalvo Bobo was smouldering with revolt in the south of the is land; in the north, with Bobo himself, a big, freckle-faced, red-headed mulatto, at the head of a ragged army, they had broken out into open brigandage. The Legations of Port au Prince-all except the American Legation, which would not receive themwere full of political refugees, actually members of the Bobo faction or sympathizers with the preceding administration of Davilmar Théodore, whom Guillaume Sam had starved out of Haiti into exile at Curaçao.

In addition to these interned patriots the Presidential faction, becoming more apprehensive and panicky as the revolution slowly spread, had arrested 175 political suspects, all of whom, boys and men, generals, doctors, merchants, lawyers, were packed together in the city jail. For these unfortunates there were no rocking chairs, no gardens, for many of them no food. They were jammed by fives or tens into close cells or barricaded in a corral. Two of them were actually seen fighting for a stalk of sugar cane which had been chewed and thrown away by one of their guards. Among these prisoners were Oreste Zamor, an ex-President of the Republic, two ex-Cabinet Ministers, and the three young sons of General Polynice, one of the best known and respected citizens of the capital.

It was the interned group which organized the outbreak, and-their numbers swelled by half a disloyal "regiment" that had been broken up by Guillaume-fought the battle of July 27th. One of them, Delva by name, managed to send about the city the letters and plans of the conspirators by means of which the plot was hatched and arms and ammunition were assembled. The noise that awoke Davis and Williams half a mile away up the hill was the attempt made by these revolutionists to rush the Palace from the Champs de Mars. The Palace guard, about 200 strong, had been honeycombed with sedition. These traitors got control of the machine guns and turned them on the rest of the guard at the same time the rush was made. Fifty of the guard were killed along the

tramway and inside the Palace gates, the rest dispersing in every direction after a running fight. Enough of them, however, found refuge with the President in the Palace, which they barricaded and held all through the early morning against a continuous fire. continuous fire. The attempt to rush the Palace failed but the revolution was now on in full blast and it spread in a fitful way all over the city. Net result up to this point, about 64 dead Haitians, a Palace full of bullet holes, and a completely terrorstricken President.

Right here is the key to the atrocities which followed. During the night of the 26th, being warned of the brewing outbreak, Guillaume Sam sent a letter to General Oscar, the officer in charge of the huddled prisoners in the city prison. This letter has been seen and authenticated. It runs something like this:

If in the morning I am unable to hold the Palace, do at once that which you have promised me you would do.

The first attack on the Palace was abandoned before eight o'clock on the morning of the 27th. About nine, the President with his wife and four children and a few others of his party made a break from the Palace across about thirty yards of garden and scaled the wall over into what they hoped would be sanctuary in the French Legation. Their escape was not made without notice. Several shots were fired; one man was killed in the Palace garden, and the President got a Mauser bullet through his leg.

"BALKAN ATROCITIES"

About eleven o'clock a man came running wildly into the American Legation babbling an almost incoherent narrative. Oscar had murdered all the citizens in the prison-he had run to the Dominican Legation-Oscar was several unmentionable kinds of thing-but he was deaddead in the street-tried to hide in the Dominican Legation-and the President had been driven out of the Palace and escaped caped... this was the way the Creole-French ran, as nearly as Davis could understand him. Davis understood enough to go at once to the Dominican Legation. There, in the street sure enough, lay

what was left of General Oscar. It was not pleasant to look at. He had carried out what he had promised the President to do. With five of his jailers he had gone into the prison and with their own hands they had deliberately butchered 168 of the 175 defenseless prisoners there. Six managed to escape in the mêlée and one, shamming death, lived to tell the story of the horror which had gone on over his body.

When Oscar had finished his job he had run to the Dominican Legation. But out of the crowd which surged around the shambles of the prison came old General Polynice, father of the three boys who lay sacrificed inside. He jumped on his horse and rode to the Dominican Legation, dismounted, and ran straight inside. He is a slight man, gray-haired, sixty years old. He went right up to Oscar, smashed him over the head with his walking stick, and dragged him out into the street, where he emptied his revolver into him. Then he rode away. The crowd did the rest.

THE CALL FOR ADMIRAL CAPERTON

From this sight Davis ran on down the street to the prison, finding himself in the midst of a rabble streaming from all parts of the city and converging toward the prison. What he saw there cannot well be described. They lay like old shoes piled in heaps, scattered in every kind of distorted attitude, ghastly, sickening. Oscar and his fellow fiends had worked their way from cell to cell cutting, stabbing as they went, ahead of them the frantic cries of the unfortunates who heard their butchers coming, behind them a sodden silence.

Quickly the relatives and friends of the slaughtered political prisoners, many of them representative people of Port au Prince, arrived on the scene to search for their friends, their fathers, brothers, husbands, son3. Charles Zamor ran out from nine months' hiding in the French Legation to recognize his brother, the ex-President, by the clothes the dead man wore. And as fast as they found something which could be identified as their own there would go up from the stricken ones sounds indescribable, demoniacal. One by one the corpses were lifted out to be carried away on stretchers, shutters, planks, on anything

available. And so the funeral processions trailed away to different parts of the city, each with its group of frantic mourners.

With these images blasting his eyesight and these sounds in his ears, Davis made his way back to the Legation and telegraphed to Admiral Caperton on board the Washington at Cape Haitien to come at once to Port au Prince. It was then about half-past one o'clock, and Davis reflected that even if the Washington left the Cape at once it would take her eighteen hours under forced draught to get clear around the west coast into the harbor.

THE SIEGE OF THE FRENCH LEGATION

After sending his dispatch Davis drove back up the hill to his house. There seemed to be an odd lull in the firing, but from all parts of the city came the howling and yelling of the mourners, more like the howling of animals, dogs or wolves, than of men. of men. Late in the afternoon a note written on the stationery of the French Minister came up from Mr. Kohan, the British Chargé. The President, he wrote. had taken refuge at the French Legation, where he himself then was. Both he and the French Minister wanted the American Chargé to join them there so that they might act together in meeting the difficulties and dangers of the situation.

Davis at once complied with this request. He spent that afternoon and all that night in the French Legation. The Legation building is large, surrounded by verandas, two stories high. It held all that night of the 27th a curious assemblage of sleepless human beings. On the top floor ranged President Guillaume, with his family and the other refugees who had escaped with him from the Palace. All together there were about a dozen of them. On the floor below camped the diplomatic corps; that is, all that was functioning of the diplomatic corps. Dr. Perl, the German Minister. was presumably up in his house near the Cercle Bellevue on the hill. He never showed up once during the revolutionary proceedings and bore no part in them The Dominican Minister might just as well have been in Santo Domingo. As for the other consulates and consular agencies, they seemed to have had their hands full

eeping out of the way, although each one f them was harboring some refugees. The French Minister, M. Girard, had ome to Port au Prince from Egypt au Prince from Egypt nd, like both Kohan and Davis, had had ess than a year's service in his new post. Minister Girard had a wife and two pretty aughters, Christine and Alice. Madehoiselle Alice Girard in her white dress efore the trouble began was the most raceful dancer at the Cercle Bellevue alls and on the quarterdecks of the warhips when they held receptions at their nchorages in the harbor. She and her ister shine like stars in the night of all hat Haitian madness and deviltry.

When Charles Zamor had looked upon all that was left of his brother on the red floor of the prison he came back to the French Legation, livid with quiet vindictiveness. He is the most feared of all Haitians because he is himself fearless, and this man, with a machete in his hand, walked into the French Legation to kill Guillaume Sam. But Alice Girard, eighteen years old, standing on the stairs, stopped him; did not stop him negatively but flew at him with vehement reproaches, reminding him of the months her family had sheltered him from probable death at the hands of the man whom now he would kill and of his ingratitude in thus seeking to violate every right of their hospitality. She saved the President that time. actually threw away his machete and walked out of the house, not to return, although he was of course active in what subsequently took place.

Zamor

So the French Minister and his family and the British and American Chargés dragged out the tense hours until daybreak on the 28th. Hourly they expected

to be attacked. None of them then knew whether the sanctuary they were giving to the President and his followers might not, in the growing frenzy of the mob, involve them also in the retribution which they knew the mob must eventually seek. The Negroes on the top floor were terror-stricken. From time to time they begged not to be abandoned. The President became abject. He was a big man, six feet or more in height, stooping shoulders, a low Congo type in appearance,

with receding forehead and coarse features. When he had to pass in front of a window he dropped on all fours below the sill, dragging his wounded leg after him. From time to time, as false alarms would come, the little group on the lower floor would brace themselves for the ordeal. Both Kohan and Davis were unarmed and there was no possible means of defending the gardens or the house from attack even by a half dozen men. Their only defense lay in the protection afforded by the French flag and the traditionally inviolable premises of a foreign legation.

The long night wore itself out at last and the worn-out watchers began to take heart again. About nine o'clock Davis left the French Legation to go to his own office for dispatches. No attack on the President having been made during the night, they all concluded that it might be postponed until the following night and that in the meantime the Washington might arrive in time to save them all. At the Legation he found Admiral Caperton's brief dispatch advising him of his immediate departure from the Cape. He went back to his house to get cleaned up and change his clothes. Looking seaward as he climbed the hill he saw the welcome smoke of a steamer which had cleared the western Cape of Mont Rouis and was standing in between Gonaive and the mainland twenty miles away. That, he thought, meant relief, and considered the situation saved.

THE ATTACK ON THE FRENCH LEGATION

It must have been about an hour later that he heard a yell so appalling as to discount all the other sounds of the menagerie in which he had been living. That outcry could mean only one thing-the mob had rushed the French Legation. As he ran down into the town he noticed that the ship coming in was a white one and reflected with dismay that she could not therefore be the Washington. The smoke lay out thick and black behind her and she was carrying such a bone in her teeth that, bow on, she did look white. But it was the Washington, and she dropped anchor a mile off shore, just about an hour too late; about an hour after Guillaume Sam, President of Haiti, horribly died.