Gazette_ for the description
of her social state. There is, notwithstanding, this difference between
the iniquities of slavery and our own: the first are almost always
unpunished, while the second are repressed by the courts. An institution
which permits evil, creates it in a great measure: in saying that men
are things, it necessarily engenders more crimes, more acts of violence,
more cowardly deeds, than the imagination of romancers will ever invent.
When a class has neither the right to complain, nor to defend itself,
nor to testify in law; when it cannot make its voice heard in any
manner, we may be excused for not taking in earnest the idyls chanted on
its felicity. We must be ignorant at once of the heart of man and of
history to preserve the slightest doubt on this point. I add that those
who, like me, have had in their hands the documents of our colonial
slavery, have become terribly suspicious, and are likely to look with a
skeptical eye on these Arcadian descriptions, the worth of which they
can appreciate.

Once more, I do not contest the humanity of many masters, but I remember
that there were humane masters too in Martinique, Guadeloupe, and
Bourbon; yet this did not prevent the discovery, on a rigid scrutiny,
sometimes of excesses, as fearful as inevitable, of the discretionary
power; at others, of a systematic depravation, and this to such a point
that in one of our colonies the custom of regular unions had become
absolutely unknown to the slaves.

I cannot help believing that man is the same everywhere. Never, in any
time or in any latitude, has it been given him to possess his fellow,
without fearful misfortunes having resulted to both. Have we not heard
celebrated the delightful mildness of Spanish slavery in Cuba?
Travellers entertained by the Creoles usually return enchanted with it.
Yet, notwithstanding, it is found that on quitting the cities and
penetrating into the plantations, the most barbarous system of labor is
discovered that exists in the entire world. Cuba devours her black
population so rapidly that she is unceasingly obliged to purchase
negroes from abroad; and these, being once on the island, have not
before them an average life exceeding ten years! In the United States,
the planters of the extreme South are also obliged to renew their supply
of negroes; but, as they have recourse to the domestic instead of the
African trade, and as the domestic trade furnishes slaves at an
excessivel