AND   REPUBLIC   OF   HAYTI.                 [165
xviii. and assuring him he was without any feeling of
animosity or prejudice against France.*
Thus the long sufferings of the Haytians, the cru-
elties they had sustained from the French, all, all was
unable to make the slightest impression on Pétion's
heart, he was without any feeling of animosity or preju-
dice* against a nation which had, not above twelve
years since, burned, hung, drowned and torn in pieces by
blood hounds, his brethren and his countrymen. The
commerce of 1789, slavery and the slave trade,
constituted, according to him, the welfare of both coun-
tries ; and he had at the same time Malouet's secret
instructions in his pocket; he knew the French cabinet
desired the re-establishment of slavery, and dared
even to avow it. I ask then every impartial observer
whether there can be any person more decidedly a
Frenchman, or more thoroughly a traitor, than this
Pétion was ?
After this open consummation of his guilt in the
eyes of the people, and deceiving the generals and ma-
gistrates of the republic, he gave Dauxion Lavaysse his
secret instructions, in which he pointed out to the
French government the means to be adopted for the
subjugation of the Haytians, as we shall find in the
•sequel. He rewarded his accomplice with some thou-
sand dollars, and sent him away in a Haytian schooner.
Was the crime pf high treason ever more glaring,
or more fully proved ? Was it ever attended with cir-
cumstances so abominable and disgraceful ?
From the arrival of Dauxion Lavaysse at Port-au-
Prince, to his first opening, one could see the thread of
this perfidious conspiracy which was to knit itself by
those combinations of words and those ambiguous modes
of expression by which our tyrants reckon upon de-
* Appendix B. No. 7, page xxix.