Let these instances suffice. The pen will not penetrate into the sorrows which befell the slave concubine and mother. The form of woman was never so mutilated and dishonored, the decencies of fetichism and savageism were never so outraged, as by these slaveholding idolaters of the Virgin and the Mother of God. The special cruelties, together with the names of the perpetrators, which have been remembered and recorded, would form an appalling catalogue for the largest slaveholding community in the world. But this recorded cruelty, justly representative of similar acts which never came to the ears of men, was committed by only forty thousand whites of both sexes and all ages upon an area little larger than the State of Maine. There was agony enough racking the bosoms of that half-million of slaves to sate a hemisphere of slaveholding tyrants. But the public opinion of the little coterie of villains was never startled. It is literally true that not a single person was ever condemned to the penalties of the _Code Noir_ for the commission of one of the crimes above mentioned. One would think that the close recurrence, in time and space, of these acts of crime would have beaten through even this Creole temperament into some soft spot that belonged to the mother-country of God, if not of France. Occasionally a tender heart went back to Paris to record its sense of the necessity of some amelioration of these colonial ferocities; but the words of humanity were still spoken in the interest of slavery. It was for the sake of economy, and to secure a natural local increase of the slave population, that these vague reports of cruelty were suggested to the government. The planting interest procured the suppression of one of the mildest and most judicious of the books thus written, and had the author cast into prison. When the crack of the planter's lash sounded in the purlieus of the Tuileries itself, humanity had to wait till the Revolution had cleared out the Palace, the Church, and the Courts, before its clear protest could reverberate against the system of the colony. Then Grégoire, Lameth, Condorcet, Brissot, Lafayette, and others, assailed the planting interest, and uttered the bold generalization that either the colonies or the crimes must be abandoned; for the restraining provisions of the _Code Noir_ were too feeble for the sugar exigency, and had long ago become obsolete. There was no police except for slaves, no inspectors of cultivation above the agents and the overseers. He was considered a _bon blanc_, and a person of benignity, whose slaves were seldom whipped to death. There could be neither opinion nor economy to check these things, when "_La côte d'Afrique est une bonne mère_" was the planter's daily consolation at the loss of an expensive negro.