ey are incited more by money than
any attachment. After all we love those best, and are most happy
in the intercourse of those, with whom we can be the most
familiar and unconstrained. These girls, therefore, only affect a
fondness for the whites; their hearts are with men of their own
colour.

They are, however, not wanting in discernment, penetration,
finesse; in this light they are superior to many of the white
girls in the lower classes of society, girls so impenetrably
dull, that like that of Balsac's village, they are too stupid to
be deceived by a man of breeding, gallantry and wit.

OBSERVATIONS ON THE NEGRO SLAVE

We come now to the class of negro slaves, the most numerous but
least fortunate of all. The negro Creoles of the country, or born
in some other European colony, and sent hither, are the most
active, the most intelligent, and the least subject to chronic
distempers; but they are also the most indolent, vicious and
debauched.

Those who come from Guinea are less expert in domestic service,
and the mechanical arts, less intelligent, and oftener victims of
violent sickness or grief (particularly in the early part of
their transportation) but more robust, more laborious, more
adapted to the labours of the field, less deceitful and libertine
than the others. Such are the discriminative characteristics of
each, and as to the rest, there is a strong relation between
their moral and physical character.

Negroes are a species of beings whom nature seems to have
intended for slavery; their pliancy of temper, patience under
injury, and innate passiveness, all concur to justify this
position; unlike the savages or aborigines of America, who could
never be brought to servile controul.

This colony of Louisiana, offers a philosophic and instructive
spectacle on this subject, from which I shall make a number of
deductions. If nature had imparted the same instinct to negroes
that she has to savages, it is certain that, instead of
subjecting themselves mechanically to the eternal labours of the
field, and the discipline of an imperious task-master, they
would abandon those places (to which they are not chained), and
gaining the woods, encamp themselves in the interior of the
country; in this imitating the savages, or abori