“This Cape is very different from what we thought.  Its surface is not above six or eight square leagues; its population is very numerous, and by no means in proportion with the part of this peninsula, proper for cultivation, which is not above one-third of its surface.  Another third serves for pasture for the flocks of the blacks; and the other part is too much vulcanised, too full of rocks, to afford any hope of advantage in an agricultural view.  But its military position is admirable; all seems to concur to render it impregnable, and it would even be easy to insulate it entirely from the Continent, and to form upon it several ports, which nature seems to have already prepared.”

This letter likewise speaks of the advantages offered by the environs of Rufisque, which are so well known, that we may dispense with speaking of them here.  We shall only mention as among the principal points to be occupied, with the mornes of Cape Rouge, Portudal, Joal, and Cahone, this last on the river Salum near the Gambia; they are large villages, the environs of which are covered with magnificent forests, and the soil of which is perhaps the most fertile of any in Africa.  For more ample accounts of these countries, we refer to the excellent works of Messrs. Durand and Geoffroy de Villeneuve, who have examined them like enlightened observers, and perfectly well described them in their travels, only that they have too much exaggerated the agricultural advantages of Cape Verd.

We shall not have the presumption to lay down plans, to propose systems, to enforce such or such means for putting them in execution.  We shall merely terminate our task by some general considerations calculated to confirm what numerous and able observers have already thought, of the importance of the establishments in Africa, and of the necessity of adopting some general plan of colonisation for these countries.

However pride, prejudice and personal interest, may deceive themselves respecting the re-establishment of our Western Colonies, nobody will be able longer to dissemble the inutility of attempts to persevere in a false route.  Calculation will at length triumph over blind obstinacy and false reasonings.  There is already a certain number of incontestable data, the consequences of which must be one day admitted.  And first, though some persons who fancy that, like them the whole world have been asleep for these twenty-five or thirty years, still dream of the submission of St. Domingo, reasonably persons now acknowledge, that even were the final success of such an enterprise possible, its real result would be, to have expended, in order to conquer a desert, and ruins drenched in blood, ten times more men and money than would be sufficient to colonise Africa.  It is well known, also, that the soil of Martinique is exhausted, and that its productions will diminish more and more; that the small extent of Guadaloupe confines its culture to a very