The principal vice of the country is gaming. Men of the better class play cards, dominoes, chess, checkers and billiards, for money, but they do so rather for pastime than for gain. Among the poorer classes, however, the predominant idea is that of making money quickly. Cards and dice are often used, but the typical form of gambling, the one at which the poor countryman is fondest of staking his hard-earned wages, is the cockfight. Every town has its cockpit where on Sundays and holidays the barbarous sport is carried on in the presence of crowds of whooping, screaming spectators who often ride miles to attend. The authorities claim that efforts have been made to stop this sport, but that they have all been unavailing. It constitutes a source of municipal income, the right to open cockpits being annually conceded to the highest bidder by the various municipalities. Raffles and lotteries are also permitted by law, being subject to taxation by the municipalities, and in one or two cities there are municipal lotteries.
With respect to morality the same conditions may be said to prevail in Santo Domingo as in other southern countries, the women being in general virtuous and pure and the men inclined to amorous intrigues. The official statistics relating to marriages and births show that of the children born in the Republic almost sixty per cent are illegitimate. These figures, while serious, are rendered less alarming than would appear at first sight by the large number of what the census-takers term "consensual unions" among the humbler classes, or cases where a man and woman, though not united by marriage ceremony, live together publicly as man and wife, rear a family and are as faithful to each other as if they were legitimately married. "Married but not parsoned" is the way in which such unions are referred to in some of the British West Indies. The considerable number of these unions may be explained by the high cost of the marriage ceremony,--for while there are some priests ready to waive their fees for a religious wedding and some alcaldes who are satisfied with what the law allows for the civil ceremony, others are not so complaisant--also by the fact that such unions have become so common that the parties see nothing wrong in them, and further by the circumstance that the parties often believe it more to their advantage to remain single rather than to be married. A friend of mine had a respectable colored man working on his plantation, the head of a large family, but not married to the woman with whom he had been living for over a score of years and to whom he was devotedly attached. My friend endeavored to persuade him to marry the woman, but the answer was a determined negative. "If I marry her she will know I have to support her and she may get careless and lazy. Knowing that I can leave her when I like she will continue to behave herself." Persuasion was then tried with his wife and her refusal was almost identical: "If I marry him he will know that I am bound to him and then he may go and fall in love with some other woman. Knowing that I can leave him when I like he will continue to behave himself."