Such slavery could not be improved; it might be abolished by law or drowned in blood. There is a crowd of pamphlets that have come down to us shrieking with the ineptitude of this period. It was popular to accuse the society of the _Amis des Noirs_ of having ruined the colony by inspiring among the slaves a vague restlessness which blossomed into a desire for vengeance and liberty. But it is a sad fact that neither of those great impulses was stirring in those black forms, monoliths of scars and slave-brands. Not till their eyes had grown red at the sight of blood shed at other suggestions, and their ears had devoured the crackling of the canes and country-seats of their masters, did the guiding spirit of Liberty emerge from the havoc, and respond with Toussaint to the call of French humanity, by fighting for the Republic and the Rights of Man. Suicide was the only insurrection that ever seemed to the slave to promise liberty; for during the space of a hundred years nothing more formidable than the two risings of Padre Jean and Makandal had thrilled the consciences of the planters. If the latter had preserved the unity of sentiment that belonged to the atrocious unity of their interest, and had waived their pride for their safety, they might have proclaimed decrees of emancipation with every morning's peal of the plantation-bell, and the negroes would have replied every morning, "_Vous maître_." There is but one other folly to match the accusation that the sentiment of French Abolitionism excited the slaves to rise: that is, the sentiment that a slave ought not to be excited to rise against such "Horrors of San Domingo" as we have just recorded. The men who are guilty of that sentimentality, while they smugly enjoy personal immunity and the dear delights of home, deserve to be sold to a Caradeux or a Legree. Let them be stretched upon the _quatre-piquet_ of a great people in a war-humor, whose fathers once rose against the enemies that would have bled only their purses, and hamstrung only their material growth.