The Republic of Haiti is not a country of the twentieth century. Plagued by questions of race and color, illiteracy, an exhausted soil, a population explosion, a history of ineffectual and corrupt governments, and the worst poverty of the hemisphere, little has been accomplished since independence in the welter of civil wars, coups d'état, and assassinations. An inevitably large body of social legislation, therefore, does not hide the fact that the Haiti of today is a poor, underdeveloped land, relying for its food on archaic and destructive agricultural methods, packed rather than inhabited by a cheerful but disease-ridden negro people.