one's property, or from the scanty return of nominal wages.

As to food, clothing, residences, and the amount and character of the labor required, the working classes of Britain compare unfavorably with many slaveholding countries. The earnings of the agricultural peasant will barely furnish a support, when he is in health and employment. When out of employment or diseased, he becomes necessarily a pauper. The parliamentary reports give a view of wretchedness, destitution, ignorance and cruelty, in connection with the men, women, and children, engaged in the English mines, which from any less reliable source would be incredible.

From the same reliable evidence we are informed of degradation, poverty, and cruel oppression under which the poor laborers, of every age and sex, groan and exist in the factories and workshops of the United Kingdom. The use of the lash is no uncommon resort of the bosses, and the fear of starvation bars up the door of justice.

The menial and liveried servants of Britain share a fate not much superior. Actual, corporal cruelty is not so frequent, and detection and punishment more certain; yet, the abject submission required, and the contemptuous treatment received, break the spirit of the slave, and give food to the insolence of the master.

A prominent evil to which the poor of Britain are subjected, is their miserable homes. Crowded into a single

1

Says M. De Beaumont, “J'ai vu l'Indien dans ses forêts; j'ai vu le noir dans l'esclavage, mais je n'ai vu aucune misère qui puisse être comparée à celle de l'Irlandais." Quoted by M. Levavasseur, who adds, "Nous avons vu à Dublin même des hommes qu'on eut pris pour des spectres, et à leur approche nous détournions involontairement les regards, car ils avaient l'aspect du cadavre." Esclavage de la race noire, pp. 40, 41. Carlyle compares the condition of the Saxon slave with the modern peasant; and, after showing its preferableness, concludes, Liberty, I am told, is a divine thing. Liberty, when it becomes the liberty to die by starvation, is not so divine." Past and Present, Bk. III, ch. xiii.

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room, of all sexes and ages, filth, disease, vice, and crime, are the inevitable consequences. To this, add a degree of ignorance appalling, in so old and civilized a nation, and the result is not astonishing that so many of the children should be thieves, and the women prostitutes, and the men paupers.'

The Parliament of Great Britain, at the instance of great and good men, have not been backward in striving, by legislation, to stay the oppressor's hand; to give air and light, and food and clothing to the caged children; to encourage all improvement in the lodging-houses for the poor; in fact, to remedy every evil within the reach of their legislation, without giving too violent a shock to the great agricultural, mechanical, and commercial interests. Nor has the philanthropy of England been exclusively extended abroad. Private and associated charity have done much to relieve suffering humanity. Yet after all that charity enlightened by religion, and legislation guided by humanity, can do, the picture we have drawn is not overcolored, when applied to the actual condition of many of their poor. How these evils shall be remedied is a problem yet unsolved, and to-day taxing the thoughts and burdening the hearts of the wise and good of the land.

1 In addition to the Reports to Parliament, I have relied upon the following authorities: Mayhew's London Labor and London Poor; Cobden's White Slaves of England; Dickens's Household Words, ix, 398; Silliman's Second Visit to Europe, i, 31; Dr. Durbin's Observations in Europe, ii, 120, 170, 171, ch. xii, at large; The Glory and Shame of England; Prime's Travels in Europe and the East, i, 149, 173, 182; Chartism, by Thomas Carlyle.

CHAPTER IX.

NEGRO SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE-TRADE.

WE cannot go back to the origin of negro slavery.1 We have seen that the earliest authentic histories and monuments exhibit the negro in a state of bondage. From that time to the present he has in greater or less numbers ever been a slave. Whether this condition is the curse on Canaan, the son of Ham, as many religiously believe, and plausibly argue, it is not our province to decide. The investigation would lead us into tempting but too extensive fields for our purpose. The fact exists undeniably, be the cause what it may. Nor is it our purpose to describe the oppressive slavery to which the negro is subjected in his own land and at the hand of his fellows. Both master and slave being barbarians, we could expect to find only the most savage and cruel forms of slavery. The ingenuity of an enlightened intellect could scarcely, by effort, devise the numerous and skilful and horrid cruelties of these barbarian masters.3

1

Herodotus, the oldest Greek historian, commemorates the traffic in slaves, Lib. IV, c. clxxxi.

2 “ We have effigies of negroes, drawn by six different nations of antiquity: Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans, from about the eighteenth century before Christ, to the first centuries of our own era." See Indigenous Races of Man, 190.

To those disposed to pursue this inquiry, the following works will give most ample information: Travels of Park, Clapperton, Saunders, and others, passim ; Capt. Canot, or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver; Bayard Taylor's Journey into Central Africa; Buxton's Slave-Trade and its Remedy, Pt. I, ch. iv; Edwards's West Indies, vol. ii, ch. xvii.

In the ecclesiastical annals of Ortiz de Zuniga it is mentioned, that a traffic in negro slaves to the city of Seville existed as early as A.D. 1399. There certainly were large numbers in Seville at the time he wrote (1474); but the former statement seems doubtful. In 1442, some Moors who had been captured by the Portuguese, proposed to purchase their liberty by a ransom of negro slaves. Prince Henry of Portugal instructed Gonsalvez to accept the ransom, for whatever negroes he should get "he would gain souls, because they might be converted to the faith, which could not be managed with the Moors." Ten negro slaves were obtained; and around this nucleus, thus commenced, either from true or pretended religious zeal, was gathered that immense trade, for which Spain, Portugal, and England, for centuries, contended, and which has since been branded as piracy by almost every civilized nation of the world.

The horrors of the trade seem to have commenced with its beginning, and there were generous hearts to weep over them then, as there were in after years. The good chronicler, Azurara, thus opens his description of a division of captive slaves, in the year 1444: "O thou heavenly Father! I implore thee that my tears may not condemn my conscience, for not its law but our common humanity constrains my humanity to lament piteously the sufferings of these people." The good man, after describing the scene, thus concludes, "And I, who have made this history, have seen in the town of Lagos, young men and young women, the sons and grandsons of those very captives born in this land, as good and as true Christians as if they had lineally descended since the commencement of the law of Christ, from those who were first baptized."2

'The Conquerors of the New World and their Bondsmen, i, 28, 29; Edwards's West Indies, ii, c. xv. La traite et son origine, par M.

Schoelcher.

2 The Conquerors, &c. i, 33, 36.

The success of the first expeditions encouraged the Portuguese, and they sent out, in successive years, numerous expeditions, each with instructions "to convert the natives to the faith." This, and discovery, were the paramount objects with the early Portuguese expeditions. The slaves obtained by them, were in exchange for merchandise with slave-dealers, who brought them from the interior; and until the discovery and colonization of America, there was no market for the slaves sufficient to excite the covetousness and other evil passions of men.1

The discovery of America in 1492 was an event, the effect of which upon the civilized world can never be calculated, and perhaps is seldom fully apprehended. Upon the subject we are now considering, it was both the forcing-bed, and yet the broad field. It stimulated enterprise and discovery. It furnished a receptacle for the innumerable slaves which the African petty kings offered in exchange for the manufacture and gaudy trinkets of Europe. The demand necessarily increased the supply, and of course gave stimulus to the petty wars and marauding expeditions by which that supply was effected; and thus we might travel from cause to effect almost ad infinitum.

The same religious fervor which governed and controlled the action of the Portuguese, in their early conduct towards the negro slaves, seems to have been the ruling passion with the Spaniards in their discoveries in the New World. Hence, we find the pious Herrera chronicling the death of the first baptized Indian, as the pioneer of that nation in his entry into heaven. The

2

But

'Ibid. 37 to 75. Expedition of Ca da Mosta, Astley's Voyages, i, 574. He places the exportation at seven to eight hundred per annum. this was evidently more than the truth.

2 Dec. I, Lib. II, cap. 5. The proclamation made by the voyagers to the Indians, is a curious picture of the notions of those times. After telling them of the creation of the world, it traced title thereto to