The world-wide struggle between the primary races of mankind - the "conflict of color," as it has been happily termed - bids fair to be the fundamental problem of the twentieth century, and great communities like the United States of America, the South African Confederation, and Australasia regard the "color question" as perhaps the gravest problem of the future. To our age, therefore, the French Revolution in San Domingo - the first great shock between the ideals of white supremacy and race equality, which erased the finest of European colonies from the map of the white world and initiated that most noted attempt at negro self-government, the black republic of Haiti - cannot but be of peculiar interest.<br><br>Strangely enough, the real story of this tremendous racial and social cataclysm has never been told, and it is to fill this gap in the history of modern times that this book has been written. For, be it noted, in this field, the race question, important though it be, is not the sole noteworthy element. San Domingo in 1789 was the most striking example of French colonial genius, and the struggle of the colony's formative ideals with the new political, oconomic, and social conceptions of the French Revolution is of great importance to the history of European colonization.