Tyrants have never wanted sophists: on the other hand, men of right feeling towards their fellows, who had, like Gregoire, Raynal, Barnave, Brissot, Condorcet, La Fayette, embraced the cause of humanity, and formed the "_Society of the Friends of the Blacks_" had circulated their principles in the colonies, like a vengeance rather than as justice.

These principles had burst forth without preparation, and unanticipated in colonial society, where truth had no organ but insurrection.

Philosophy proclaims principles; politics administer them; the friends of the blacks were contented with proclaiming them.

France had not had courage to dispossess and indemnify her colonists: she had acquired liberty for herself alone: she adjourned, as she still adjourns at the moment I write these lines, the reparation for the crime of slavery in her colonies: could she be astonished that slavery should seek to avenge herself, and that liberty, warmly proclaimed in Paris, should not become an insurrection at San Domingo?
Every iniquity that a free society allows to subsist for the profit of the oppressor, is a sword with which she herself arms the oppressed.

Right is the most dangerous of weapons; woe to him who leaves it to his enemies! IX.
San Domingo proved this.