The Island suffered much from the loss of its original inhabitants; and the want of laborers to till the soil and to work in the mines, first suggested the idea of importing slaves from the coast of Africa. The slave-trade was soon commenced and carried on with great rapidity. Before the Africans were shipped, the name of the owner and the plantation on which they were to toil was stamped on their shoulders with a burning iron. For a number of years St. Domingo opened its markets annually to more than twenty thousand newly-imported slaves. With the advance of commerce and agriculture, opulence spread in every direction. The great tide of immigration from France and Spain, and the vast number of Africans imported every year, so increased the population that at the commencement of the French Revolution, in 1789, there were nine hundred thousand souls on the Island. Of these, seven hundred thousand were Africans, sixty thousand mixed blood, and the remainder were whites and Caribbeans. Like the involuntary servitude in our own Southern States, slavery in St. Domingo kept morality at a low stand. Owing to the amalgamation between masters and slaves, there arose the mulatto population, which eventually proved to be the worst enemies of their fathers. Many of the planters sent their mulatto sons to France to be educated. When these young men returned to the Island, they were greatly dissatisfied at the proscription which met them wherever they appeared. White enough to make them hopeful and aspiring, many of the mulattoes possessed wealth enough to make them influential. Aware, by their education, of the principles of freedom that were being advocated in Europe and the United States, they were ever on the watch to seize opportunities to better their social and political condition. In the French part of the Island alone, twenty thousand whites lived in the midst of thirty thousand free mulattoes and five hundred thousand slaves. In the Spanish portion, the odds were still greater in favor of the slaves. Thus the advantage of numbers and physical strength was on the side of the oppressed. Right is the most dangerous of weapons--woe to him who leaves it to his enemies! The efforts of Wilberforce, Sharp, Buxton, and Clarkson, to abolish the African slave-trade, and their advocacy of the equality of the races, were well understood by the men of color. They had also learned their own strength in the Island, and that they had the sympathy of all Europe with them. The news of the oath of the Tennis Court, and the taking of the Bastile at Paris, was received with the wildest enthusiasm by the people of St. Domingo.