disposed to obedience did not find either motive or influence to lift their natures into a higher life.  An average slave-character, not difficult to govern, but without instinct to improve, filled the colony.  A colonist would hardly suspect the fiery Africa whose sun ripened the ancestors of his slaves, unless he caught them by accident in the midst of their voluptuous Calenda, or watched behind some tree the midnight orgy of magic and Fetichism.  A slave-climate gnawed at the bold edges of their characters and wore them down, as the weather rusted out more rapidly than anywhere else all the iron tools and implements of the colony.  The gentler traits of the African character, mirth and jollity, affectionateness, domestic love, regard and even reverence for considerate masters, were the least impaired; for these, with a powerful religiosity, are indigenous, like the baobab and palm, and give a great accent to the name of Africa.  What other safeguard had a planter with his wife and children, who lived with thirty slaves or more, up to six hundred, upon solitary plantations that were seldom visited by the marechaussee, or rural police?  The root of such a domination was less in the white man’s superiority than in the docile ability of those who ought to have been his natural enemies. “Totidem esse hostes quot servos” said Seneca; but he was thinking of the Scythian and Germanic tribes.  A North-American Indian, or a Carib, though less pagan than a native African, could never become so subdued.  Marooning occurred every day, and cases of poisoning, perpetrated generally by Ardra negroes, who were addicted to serpent-worship, were not infrequent; but they poisoned a rival or an enemy of their own race as often as a white man.  The “Affiches Americaines,” which was published weekly at Port-au-Prince, had always a column or two describing fugitive negroes; but local disturbances or insurrectionary attempts were very rare:  a half-dozen cannot be counted since the Jolofs of Diego Columbus frightened Spaniards from the colony.  If this be so in an island whose slaves were continually reinforced by native Africans, bringing Paganism to be confirmed by a corrupt Catholicism, where every influence was wanton and debased, and the plantation-cruelties, as we shall shortly see, outheroded everything that slave-holding annals can reveal, how much less likely is it that we shall find the slave insurrectionary in the United States, whence the slave-trade has been excluded for nearly two generations, and where the African, modified by climate, and by religious exercises of his own which are in harmony with his native disposition and enjoin him not to be of a stout mind, waits prayerfully till liberty shall be proclaimed!  If the slaveholder ever lived in dread, it was not so much from what he expected as from what he knew that he deserved.  But the African is more merciful than the conscience of a slaveholder.  Blessed are these meek ones:  they shall yet inherit earth in America!