the basest calculations, to the most guilty passions.

He who desires the end, desires the means of attaining it. The end at
present, should be to prepare every thing beforehand, and rather sooner
than later, in order to repair in Africa the past losses and disasters,
which irremediable events have caused in the Western Colonies, and to
substitute for their riches their prosperity, the progressive decline of
which is henceforward inevitable, new elements of wealth and prosperity:
the means will be to carry into these countries, so long desolated by our
relentless avarice, knowledge, cultivation, and industry. By these means we
shall see in that vast continent numerous colonies arise, which will
restore to the mother country all the splendour, all the advantages of her
ancient commerce, and repay her with interest for the sacrifices she may
have made in the new world. But to effect this, let there be no more secret
enterprises; no more connivance at fraudulent traffic, no more unhappy
negroes snatched away from their families; no more tears shed on that sad
African soil, so long the witness of so many afflictions; no more human
victims, dragged to the altars of the shameful, and insatiable divinities,
which have already devoured such numbers: consequently, let there be no
more grounds for hearing in the English Parliament, voices boldly
impeaching our good faith, attacking the national honour, and positively
asserting that France maintains in her African possessions, the system of
the slave trade in the same manner as she did before she consented to its
abolition.

Africa offers to our speculators, to the enterprises of our industry, a
virgin soil, and an inexhaustible population peculiarly fitted to render it
productive. It must be our business to form them according to our views, by
associating them in these by a common interest. In conquering them by
benefits, instead of subjugating them by crimes, or degrading them by
corruption, let us lead them to social order and to happiness, by our moral
superiority, instead of dragging them under scourges and chains to misery
and death, we shall then have accomplished a useful and a glorious
enterprise; we shall have raised our commercial prosperity on the greatest
interest of those who have been the voluntary instruments of it, and above
all, we shall have expiated, by an immense benefit, this immense crime of
the outrages, with which we so long afflicted humanity.

_IN