m. France had not had courage to dispossess and indemnify
her colonists: she had acquired liberty for herself alone: she
adjourned, as she still adjourns at the moment I write these lines, the
reparation for the crime of slavery in her colonies: could she be
astonished that slavery should seek to avenge herself, and that liberty,
warmly proclaimed in Paris, should not become an insurrection at San
Domingo? Every iniquity that a free society allows to subsist for the
profit of the oppressor, is a sword with which she herself arms the
oppressed. Right is the most dangerous of weapons; woe to him who leaves
it to his enemies!

IX.

San Domingo proved this. Fifty thousand black slaves rose in one night
at the instigation, and under the command, of the mulattoes, or men of
colour. The men of colour, the intermediary race, springing from white
colonists and black slaves, were not slaves, neither were they citizens.
They were a kind of freedmen, with the defects and virtues of the two
races; the pride of the whites, the degradation of the blacks: a
fluctuating race who, by turning sometimes to the side of the slaves,
sometimes to that of the masters, inevitably produced those terrible
oscillations which inevitably superinduce the overthrow of society.

The mulattoes, who themselves possessed slaves, had begun by making
common cause with the colonists, and by opposing the emancipation of the
blacks more obstinately than even the whites themselves. The nearer they
were to slavery, the more doggedly did they defend their share in
tyranny. Man is thus made: none is more ready to abuse his right than he
who, with difficulty, has acquired it; there are no tyrants worse than
slaves, and no men prouder than _parvenus_.

The men of colour had all the vices of _parvenus_ of liberty. But when
they perceived that the whites despised them as a mingled race, that the
Revolution had not effaced the tinge of their skin, and the injurious
prejudices which were attached to their colour; when they in vain
claimed for themselves the exercise of civil rights, which the colonists
opposed, they passed with the impetuosity and levity of their conduct
from one passion to another, from one party to the other, and made
common cause with the oppressed race. Their habits of command, fortune,
intelligence, energy, boldness, naturally pointed them out as the
leaders of the blacks. They fraternised with them, they became popular
amongst the blacks, fro