In 1703 there were only one hundred and fifty freed persons in San Domingo.  In 1711 a colonial ordinance proscribed every enfranchisement which did not have the approbation of the colonial government.  The King sanctioned this ordinance in 1713, and declared that all masters who neglected the formality should lose their slaves by confiscation.

In 1736 the number of freed slaves, black and mulatto, was two thousand.  The Government, alarmed at the increase, imposed a sum upon the master for each act of enfranchisement, in the hope to check his license.  But the master evaded this and every other salutary provision; the place and climate, so distant from the Custom of Paris, where men dishonored only complexions like their own, lent occasion and immunity.  Colonial Nature was more potent than paper restrictions.  In 1750 there were four thousand freed persons.

But the desire of enfranchising children was so great that the colonists evaded all the regulations, which multiplied yearly, by taking their slaves to France, where they became free as soon as their feet pressed the soil.  The only measure which the Government could devise to meet this evasion was to forbid all men of color to contract marriages in France.

In 1787 the free persons of color in San Domingo numbered 19,632.  In 1790 their numbers were 25,000.

In 1681 the white inhabitants of San Domingo numbered four thousand; but in 1790, notwithstanding a constant tide of emigration from Europe, they numbered only thirty thousand.

The number of slaves at the same time was about four hundred thousand, a number which represents the violent removal of several millions of black men from Africa:  some writers not anti-slavery reckon this tremendous crime of the white man at ten millions!

What a climate, and what a system, in which only the mulatto thrives!

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Thus far we have traced the causes and elements, of Nature, race, and policy, the passions and peculiarities of many kinds of men, which culminated at length, in no fair forms of humanity nor beneficent institutions, but in the foremost sugar-plantation of the world, whose cane-rows were planted and nourished by the first of crimes, whose juice was expressed by over-hasty avarice and petulant ambition that could not be satisfied unless the crime preserved features as colossal as the passion of the hour.

We are now in a condition to perceive that the Horrors of San Domingo were those of suicide.  Bloody licentiousness lays violent hands upon its life.  Its weaknesses were full of fatal vigor, lust poisoned the humanity which it inspired, the soil of the buccaneer could raise nothing which was not exuberant with vengeance.  Slave-Insurrection was a mere accidental episode in the closing scenes of this bad and blundering career.

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A LONDON SUBURB.