Haiti. Dumesle warns against reproducing in Haiti the scenes of France in 1793.

“Modern times present us with numerous and sublime examples of the creation of institutions suited to the needs of present civilization and to the ideas of progress that distinguish our age. As principles belong to the universal domain, let us take from these institutions what is compatible with our manners, our origin, the influence of our climate and the productions of our soil; but let us strive to give the national character a physiognomy of its own; let us make the social field fruitful so that it may yield the happy fruit of public felicity. Let us above all beware, in our debates, of letting this Assembly degenerate into an arena of the Convention and of reproducing in Haiti the scenes of the France of 1793. A defender of liberty and of equality in the days when all-powerful despotism bent the proudest courage, in the days when the fear of shame no longer preserved men from baseness, may I be permitted to invoke memories and to question with you that past so full of instruction; it will tell you: the thirst for domination, ill-founded fears, the exaggeration of opinions in political matters present dangers greater, more immense, than despotism itself. For they deliver society up to continual disturbances, to those undulations that produce weariness and bring peoples to sigh for repose, and rob them of the advantages of those revolutions that seemed made for the glory and the happiness of humanity.

“It will remind us that most minds see equality only in that confusion which results from the struggle and jostling of powers, in that rivalry of pretensions which sets all intelligences on the same level, and which, no longer founding social distinctions on common utility, aspire to that unbounded competition whose limit and chaos set fermenting the leaven of hatred, those jealousies, that overflowing of passions which floods every road of Society and retards its march instead of making it advance.(s)

“Called by the free vote of this Assembly to preside over its deliberations, my first duty, in testifying to it my gratitude for this high mark of esteem, was no doubt to speak to it briefly of the duty with which it is imbued; but there remains for me another obligation to fulfill: to remind it of that union and that concord which make brothers of republicans even in the midst of the warmest discussions and of their differences of opinion, because, having ever in view only the good of his country, the Republican is more keenly struck than other men by the light of evidence. Freedom of discussion and of inquiry, that moral attribute, that privilege of man in the social state, is not for him a source of contention and of quarrels from which good faith is banished; nor is it that sort of opposition by trade and by posture which excludes every rational idea; that devouring eagerness to discredit what is the object of public homage and veneration; nor, finally, is it that need to stir up the most deplorable passions in order to exploit circumstances; but it is the search for truth and the sense of justice, it is the summing up of facts, the application of the material and intellectual faculties of man, of his views and of his tendency toward civilization and progress, it is the unceasing desire for that social harmony which, born of opinion, reproduces without cease the celestial concert of order.

“I therefore dare to foretell the successes of this Assembly, since it has for its guide the love of liberty and of the fatherland, the desire for the good and the will to accomplish it.”

The spirit of moderation that reigns in this speech is not often met in the words that the fiery and tireless tribune used to utter under the Government he had done most to overthrow. But then Dumesle Hérard was a demolisher, and today he is in fact one of those who govern, though he is only a counselor of the Provisional Government, his cousin Rivière is the principal candidate for the presidency, and he is not unaware that the strongest passions already exist against the latter, both in the Assembly and in the country. He wishes the Constitution that is to be voted to be liberal, no doubt, but granting the executive power broad attributions. It is the contrary that will be done.