Turgot, had been carried away by the unkind gods, before their eyes had
seen the restoration of their natural rights to men, and the reign of
justice on the earth. The gods after all were kinder than he knew, for
they veiled from the sight of the enthusiast of '89 the spectres of '93.
History might possibly miss most of its striking episodes, if every
actor could know the work to which he was putting his hand; and even
Condorcet's faith might have wavered if he had known that between him
and the fulfilment of his desires there was to intrude a long and
deplorable period of despotism and corruption. Still, the vision which
then presented itself to the eyes of good men was sublime; and just as,
when some noble and devoted character has been taken away from us, it is
a consolation to remember that we had the happiness of his friendship,
so too when a generation awakes from one of these inspiring social
dreams, the wreck of the aspiration is not total nor unrecompensed. The
next best thing to the achievement of high and generous aims is to have
sought them.

During the winter of '88 and '89, while all France was astir with
elections and preparation for elections for that meeting of the
States-General, which was looked to as the nearing dawn after a long
night of blackness and misery, Condorcet thought he could best serve
the movement by calling the minds of the electors to certain sides of
their duty which they might be in some danger of overlooking. One of the
subjects, for example, on which he felt most strongly, but on which his
countrymen have not shown any particular sensibility, was slavery and
the slave trade.[20] With a terseness and force not always
characteristic of his writings, he appealed to the electors, while they
were reclaiming their own rights in the name of justice, not to forget
the half-million blacks, whose rights had been still more shamefully
torn away from them, and whose need of justice was more urgent than
their own. In the same spirit he published a vehement and ingenious
protest against the admission of representatives from the St. Domingo
plantations to the National Assembly, showing how grossly inconsistent
it was with every idea of a free and popular chamber that men should sit
as representatives of others who had never chosen them, and that they
should invoke natural rights in their own favour, when at the same
instant they were violating the most elementary and undisputed natural
rights o