the acts of retaliation resorted to by the Haytians in _imitation_ of
what the enlightened French had taught them. In two daily papers of this
city there were published, a year since, a series of articles entitled
the "Massacres of Santo Domingo."

The "massacres" are not attributable to emancipation, for we have proved
otherwise in regard to the first of them. The other occurred in 1804,
twelve years after the slaves had disenthralled themselves. Fearful as
the latter may have been, it did not equal the atrocities previously
committed on the Haytians by the French. And the massacre was restricted
to the white French inhabitants, whom Dessalines, the Robespierre of the
island, suspected of an attempt to bring back slavery, with the aid of a
French force yet hovering in the neighborhood.

And if we search for the cause of this massacre, we may trace it to the
following source: Nations which are pleased to term themselves civilized
have one sort of faith which they hold to one another, and another sort
which they entertain towards people less advanced in refinement. The
faith which they entertain towards the latter is, very often, treachery,
in the vocabulary of the civilized. It was treachery towards Toussaint
that caused the massacre of Santo Domingo; it was treachery towards
Osceola that brought bloodhounds into Florida!

General Rochambeau, with the remnant of the French army, having been
reduced to the dread necessity of striving "to appease the calls of
hunger by feeding on horses, mules, and the very dogs that had been
employed in hunting down and devouring the Negroes," evacuated the
island in the autumn of 1803, and Hayti thenceforward became an
independent State.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have now laid before you a concise view of the
revolutions of Hayti in the relation of cause and effect; and I trust
you will now think, that, so far from being scenes of indiscriminate
massacre from which we should turn our eyes in horror, these revolutions
constitute an epoch worthy of the anxious study of every American
citizen.

Among the many lessons that may be drawn from this portion of history is
one not unconnected with the present occasion. From causes to which I
need not give a name, there is gradually creeping into our otherwise
prosperous state the incongruous and undermining influence of _caste_.
One of the local manifestations of this unrepublican sentiment is, that
while 800 children, chiefly of foreign pare