PLANTER AND MERCHANT AT 
(to distinguish it from the smallpox, la petite vérole), 
was a scourge for which no remedy had then been found. 
Every slave was branded with a hot iron on the breast, 
with both the name of his master and that of the parish 
to which he belonged, but notwithstanding such pre- 
cautions desertions were far from uncommon. 
The Santo Domingan blacks were put to work in 
the morning with a crack of the arceau, a short-handled 
whip, delivered on their backs or shoulders, and so ac- 
customed had they become to the regularity of this 
stimulus that they could hardly be set in motion with- 
out it. How to manage the true bossal, as distinguished 
from the African creole, with humanity and success was 
a problem to which many considerate planters must 
have addressed themselves in vain, if, as this one de- 
clared, the black’s ruling passion was to do nothing, and 
he was by nature a thief, to whom indulgence was weak- 
ness and injustice a defect of judgment that excited 
both his hatred and his contempt. 
Stanilaus further observed that the soil of Santo 
Domingo was then already becoming exhausted, and he 
believed that the day of rapid fortunes for the planter 
had passed. “Calculate now,” said he, “the privations 
of every kind, the commercial vicissitudes, the perpetual 
apprehensions, the disgusting details, inseparable from 
the nature of slavery; the state of languor or anxiety 
in which he vegetates between a burning sky, and a soil 
always ready to swallow him up, and you will allow 
with me that there is no peasant, no day-labourer in 
Europe, whose condition is not preferable to that of a 
planter of San Domingo.” “I never met,” he adds, 
“9 West Indian in France who did not enumerate to 
me with more emphasis than accuracy, the charms of a 
residence at Saint Domingo; since I have been here, I 
