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 of mankind in their own country.[21] Of general precepts he never tired; one series of them followed another. To us many of them may seem commonplace; but we should reflect that the election of representatives was an amazing novelty in France, and Condorcet knew men well enough to be aware of the hazards of political inexperience. Beware of choosing a clever knave, he said, because he will follow his own interest and not yours; but at the same time beware of choosing a man for no better reason than that he is honest, because you need ability quite as much as you need probity. Do not choose a man who has ever taken sides against the liberty of any portion of mankind; nor one whose principles were never known until he found out that he wanted your votes. Be careful not to mistake heat of head for heat of soul; because what you want is not heat but force, not violence but steadfastness. Be careful, too, to separate a man's actions from the accidents of his life; for one may be the enemy or the victim of a tyrant without being the friend of liberty. Do not be carried away by a candidate's solicitations; but at the same time, make allowance for the existing effervescence of spirits. Prefer those who have decided opinions to those who are always inventing plans of conciliation; those who are zealous for the rights of man to those who only profess pity for the misfortunes of the people; those who speak of justice and reason, to those who speak of political interests and of the prosperity of commerce. Distrust those who appeal to sentiment in matters that can be