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reflect, that nations who possess advantages calculated 
to raise them, in point of moral excellence, to the 
highest pitch of human greatness, should, in their 
intercourse with those, inferior to them in these 
respects, convert their superiority into the means of 
oppression and robbery; and instead of imparting to 
them those useful branches of knowledge, which 
would correct the errors of their savage mode of 
life, and give full effect to the natural advantages 
they already enjoy, should basely use the influence 
they have arbitrarily acquired, in exciting them to 
acts at which humanity shudders, and the better 
judgment even of savages revolts. 
Several attempts were made by the French to in¬ 
troduce the slave-trade, both by force* and argu- 
* Many flagrant instances are recorded by their own 
writers; two or three shall suffice. 
When Captain Pronis was governor, he treacherously sold a 
great number of the natives, who had unsuspectingly engaged 
themselves in the service of the colony, to Yander Mester, the 
Dutch governor of the Mauritius. On another occasion, a party 
of free natives had volunteered to serve under the French in the 
East Indies, during a war there, and were conveyed thither by 
two French ships, under the command of Bourdonnais and 
Laly. At the close of the contest, the French governor in the 
East was so well satisfied with their valuable services, that he 
would by no means part with them, but rewarded them by 
reducing them to slavery. 
The last instance we shall mention is unparelleled, except in 
the history of the slave-trade. At the beginning of the 18th 
century, the crew of a French ship that lay off the coast of 
Madagascar, invited a great number of the natives to an enter? 
