. To-day, the victories of Christian
emancipation have come, to contrast with the catastrophes provoked by
impenitent despotism.

The English Colonies bear a striking analogy to the Southern States of
the Union. The blacks there are numerous, more numerous even in
proportion to the whites than in the Carolinas or Florida. The climate
is even more scorching, and the cultures demand still more imperiously
the labor of the blacks. As to the prejudices of the masters, I dare
affirm that the planters of the Continent and those of the Antilles have
not long had any thing with which to reproach each other.
Notwithstanding, what has happened in the Antilles? Not only has liberty
been proclaimed--this was the act of the metropolis--but the coexistence
of races has subsisted. It is to this point that I claim attention.
They, the whites and the blacks, alike free, invested with the same
privileges, exercising the same rights, encountering each other in the
ranks of the militia, in the magistracy, and even in the seats of the
colonial assemblies, admirably accept this life in common. And the
whites there, observe, are Anglo-Saxons; that is, they belong to that
race which is declared incapable of enduring free blacks in its
neighborhood.

It is necessary to appeal sometimes from those axioms so boldly laid
down, which serve us to make inflexible laws for that which must be
subject in an infinite measure to the mobility of circumstances and
influences. The influence of the Gospel, especially, is a fact, the
scope of which is never sufficiently measured. It has created in the
Antilles a negro population which maintains its equality face to face
with the whites, yet which does not entirely reject their patronage; a
dependent population which is also a free population, free in the most
absolute sense of the word. The blacks of the Antilles labor on the
plantations, and secure the success of large plantations; but, at the
same time, they themselves become landholders, forming by degrees one of
the happiest and most remarkable classes of peasants that ever existed.
Their little fields, their pretty villages, manifest real prosperity;
and there is something among them that is worth more than prosperity,
there is moral progress, the development of intellect, and the elevation
of souls.

It will be demanded of us if, in the midst of so much progress, the
production of sugar has not suffered. I answer that, on the contrary, it
has increas