The Assembly shuddered for a moment at the sight of this blood, and then hastily turned its eyes away.  In its impatience to reign alone, it had not the time to display pity.  There was, besides, between the Girondists and the Jacobins a contest for leadership, and a rivalry in going a-head of the Revolution, which made each of the two factions afraid that the other should be in advance.  Dead bodies did not make them pause, and tears shed for too long a time might have been taken for weakness.

VIII.

However, victims multiplied daily, and disasters followed disasters.  The whole empire seemed ready to fall and crush its founders.  San Domingo, the richest of the French colonies, was swimming in blood.  France was punished for its egotism.  The Constituent Assembly had proclaimed, in principle, the liberty of the blacks, but, in fact, slavery still existed.  Two hundred thousand slaves served as human cattle to some thousands of colonists.  They were bought and sold, and cut and maimed, as if they were inanimate objects.  They were kept by speculation out of the civil law, and out of the religious law.  Property, family, marriage, all was forbidden to them.  Care was taken to degrade them below men, to preserve the right of treating them as brutes.  If some unions furtive, or favoured by cupidity, were formed amongst them, the wife and children belonged to the master.  They were sold separately, without any regard to the ties of nature, all the attachments with which God has formed the chain of human sympathies were rent asunder without commiseration.

This crime en masse, this systematic brutality, had its theorists and apologists; human faculties were denied to the blacks.  They were classed as a race between the flesh and the spirit.  Thus the infamous abuse of power, which was exercised over this inert and servile race, was called necessary guardianship.  Tyrants have never wanted sophists:  on the other hand, men of right feeling towards their fellows, who had, like Gregoire, Raynal, Barnave, Brissot, Condorcet, La Fayette, embraced the cause of humanity, and formed the “Society of the Friends of the Blacks” had circulated their principles in the colonies, like a vengeance rather than as justice.  These principles had burst forth without preparation, and unanticipated in colonial society, where truth had no organ but insurrection.  Philosophy proclaims principles; politics administer them; the friends of the blacks were contented with proclaiming them.  France had not had courage to dispossess and indemnify her colonists:  she had acquired liberty for herself alone:  she adjourned, as she still adjourns at the moment I write these lines, the reparation for the crime of slavery in her colonies:  could she be astonished that slavery should seek to avenge herself, and that liberty, warmly proclaimed in Paris, should not become an insurrection at San Domingo?  Every iniquity that a free society allows to subsist for the profit of the oppressor, is a sword with which she herself arms the oppressed.  Right is the most dangerous of weapons; woe to him who leaves it to his enemies!