hdrawing from the rule of the
mother-country? Has not this the appearance of a vast plan combined by
treason?"

The repugnance of the friends of the blacks, numerous in the Assembly,
to take energetic measures in favour of the colonists, the distance from
the scene of action, which weakens pity, and then the interior movement
which attracted into its sphere minds and things, soon effaced these
impressions, and allowed the spirit of independence amongst the blacks
to form and expand at San Domingo, which showed itself in the distance
in the form of a poor old slave--Toussaint-Louverture.

XIII.

The internal disorder multiplied at every point of the empire. Religious
liberty, which was desire of the Constituent Assembly, and the most
important conquest of the Revolution, could not be established without
this struggle in face of a displaced worship, and a schism which spread
far and wide amongst the people. The counter-revolutionary party was
allied every where with the clergy. They had the same enemies, and
conspired against the same cause. The nonjuring priests had assumed the
character of victims, and the interest of a portion of the people,
especially in the country, attached to them. Persecution is so odious to
the public feeling that its very appearance raises generous indignation
against it. The human mind has an inclination to believe that justice is
on the side of the proscribed. The priests were not as yet persecuted,
but from the moment that they were no longer paramount they believed
themselves humiliated. The ill-repressed irritation of the clergy has
been more injurious to the Revolution than all the conspiracies of the
emigrated aristocracy. Conscience is man's most sensitive point. A
superstition attacked, or a faith disturbed in the mind of a people, is
the fellest of conspiracies. It was by the hand of God, invisible in the
hand of the priesthood, that the aristocracy roused La Vendee. Frequent
and bloody symptoms already betrayed themselves in the west, and in
Normandy, that concealed focus of religious war.

The most fearful of these symptoms burst out at Caen. The Abbe Fauchet
was constitutional bishop of Calvados. The celebrity of his name, the
elevated patriotism of his opinions, the _eclat_ of his revolutionary
renown, his eloquence, and his writings, disseminated widely in his
diocese, were the causes of greater excitement throughout Calvados than
elsewhere.

Fauchet, whose conformity of o