r a moment at the sight of this blood, and then
hastily turned its eyes away. In its impatience to reign alone, it had
not the time to display pity. There was, besides, between the Girondists
and the Jacobins a contest for leadership, and a rivalry in going a-head
of the Revolution, which made each of the two factions afraid that the
other should be in advance. Dead bodies did not make them pause, and
tears shed for too long a time might have been taken for weakness.

VIII.

However, victims multiplied daily, and disasters followed disasters. The
whole empire seemed ready to fall and crush its founders. San Domingo,
the richest of the French colonies, was swimming in blood. France was
punished for its egotism. The Constituent Assembly had proclaimed, in
principle, the liberty of the blacks, but, in fact, slavery still
existed. Two hundred thousand slaves served as human cattle to some
thousands of colonists. They were bought and sold, and cut and maimed,
as if they were inanimate objects. They were kept by speculation out of
the civil law, and out of the religious law. Property, family, marriage,
all was forbidden to them. Care was taken to degrade them below men, to
preserve the right of treating them as brutes. If some unions furtive,
or favoured by cupidity, were formed amongst them, the wife and children
belonged to the master. They were sold separately, without any regard to
the ties of nature, all the attachments with which God has formed the
chain of human sympathies were rent asunder without commiseration.

This crime _en masse_, this systematic brutality, had its theorists and
apologists; human faculties were denied to the blacks. They were classed
as a race between the flesh and the spirit. Thus the infamous abuse of
power, which was exercised over this inert and servile race, was called
necessary guardianship. Tyrants have never wanted sophists: on the other
hand, men of right feeling towards their fellows, who had, like
Gregoire, Raynal, Barnave, Brissot, Condorcet, La Fayette, embraced the
cause of humanity, and formed the "_Society of the Friends of the
Blacks_" had circulated their principles in the colonies, like a
vengeance rather than as justice. These principles had burst forth
without preparation, and unanticipated in colonial society, where truth
had no organ but insurrection. Philosophy proclaims principles; politics
administer them; the friends of the blacks were contented with
proclaiming the